You are right, but I can assure you that things are far far worse than you can possibly imagine. I am a career IT guy (I am American by the way) but I have plenty of friends who are lawyers and they've taught me a lot about how the US justice system really works. Imagine the following scenario which could happen. Just suppose some friend or neighbor or acquaintance gets angry with you and sues you over something that is complete bs, but they are trying to ruin you financially. You hire lawyer and fight them and win but it cleans out your bank account completely. And the whole case was bs and just an attempt to ruin you, which they sort of accomplished by wiping out your bank account. I've yet to meet a single lawyer or judge who doesn't think that the system worked perfectly when person gets wiped financially from lawyer fees when winning against an unjust lawsuit. And you should know that the entire law enforcement and legal system is designed to make sure that lawyers will get paid if nobody else does. If you win a judgement in court and your opponent has to pay you something and they just refuse, good luck getting a local law enforcement person to help you collect. Maybe you will. Maybe you won't. But if a lawyer is owed money, law enforcement will leave no stone unturned to make sure that the lawyer will get paid.
In one of the most horrific cases I personally know of where the system abused someone, I have a friend whose wife filed for divorce a few years ago. Basically she got mad that he looked at porn online and she flipped out and filed for divorce. She is bi-polar, which may have played a role in this. She quit her job as a nurse deliberately and claimed she couldn't be employed again because of her mental problems. No lawyer advised her to do this. She just did it on her own. So she went to her town's most successful divorce lawyer who specialized in representing women and that lawyer took on the case knowing that the wife had no funds at all with which to pay the lawyer. None. My friend unfortunately did not take this very seriously and hired the cheapest lawyer he could find. My friend got his rear end handed to him in court. The wife's lawyer ran up huge bills and then at the end of the case sued the husband for the full amount. So my friend had to liquidate his 401K fund to pay his now ex-wife's lawyer's costs to divorce him. The ex-wife won half the 401K in the divorce, but it's completely gone now because all that 401K money went to her lawyer. Keep in mind that her lawyer took the case deliberately knowing that her client couldn't pay her at all and they would just go after the husband for the money. And it worked. I asked a lawyer friend for thoughts about it and he told me this kind of thing happens all the time. So yeah, our system of justice is completely broke and the lawyers and judges and cops like it just fine exactly like it is.
I would join you in the boycott... if I bought anything from Pepsi in the first place. I don't drink soda, or lipton; I almost never eat fast food, so me boycotting KFC and TacoBell, and any other Pepsi owned chains over this won't help.
Pepsi hasn't owned KFC, Taco Bell or Pizza Hut (you forgot them) since 1997. I can't get mod points very often here, yet people have thrown you enough to get you up to a score of 5 for basically being ignorant of history. So that's what it takes to get modded up around here. Very interesting.
Given he's now a proven flight risk I suspect his chances of bail while all this drags on through the appeals courts (which has taken years in other high profile cases) are pretty slim, so even if he ultimately prevails and avoids extradition it's likely to be quite some time before he's getting out of custody.
In the USA, yes, he would probably be denied bail or subject to very stringent monitoring with an electronic ankle bracelet. In Sweden? I don't know. I'm hearing that people in Norway are apparently already feeling sorry for their biggest mass murderer in history who might, maybe, have to stay locked up for 25 years. Norway is not Sweden but it's probably not all that different either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Swedes granted bail and Assange found a way to sneak into Russia.
We have millions of Americans who still cannot afford to go to the doctor, who cannot afford education, who cannot afford housing, and this asshat thinks we need to send people to the moon to do what, exactly?
I can barely get mod points and I have none at present to vote you down with, but apparently all you have to do is cut and paste this from a similar post that always gets made the last time Slashdot talked about going to the moon or Mars and you'll get 5 points. I've got news for you pal - in your lifetime I don't think we'll ever have people in the USA who can all afford to go to the doctor (health insurance issues are likely to get worse over time, not better because nobody has a workable plan to fix the problems), who all can afford education (guess you mean college as public schools are free by the way - you missed that) and yes, housing issues are also likely to just worse over time, but that's a problem everywhere. If your criteria are what we have to solve to go outside earth, then barring a Star Trek like economic change where scarcity is eliminated and money doesn't really exist, we're never going to go. Certainly we're not going in your lifetime.
This is to prevent discourse on his attempts to maintain power beyond his constitutional term, whether by the Belarus union option or other means.
He'll have to replace Lukashenko to do that. There's no way Lukashenko will ever agree to a true union with Russia. Plus, there will be even more sanctions on Russia if he knocks off Lukashenko or invades Belarus. Lukashenko is no threat or problem for Russia, so an easier way would be to simply change the constitution or to let Medvedev serve another caretaker term as president. I'm guessing that they'll just change the constitution.
What is the first step of any server migration? Take a backup. Worst case you can go back to where you started with no data loss. Failing that they don't have a backup from yesterday? Or last week? No large scale operation like this could ever operate without backups.
No...this data was intentionally wiped.
While I agree that it was likely wiped for one of the many good reasons others have provided, as an IT veteran I sure wouldn't say "no large scale operation like this could ever operate without backups." I can totally believe that some companies would do that. Look at how many posters said "I didn't even know Myspace was still around". Me too. I also didn't know, but I never used it. I knew about it, but just wasn't interested in it at the time. Such a company probably isn't hiring the best people to work for its IT department and they probably don't have oodles of cash to spend on fault tolerance.
Also, I could certainly believe that they did have backups of the whole thing going back 12+ years and that they didn't ever bother to test them and the backups failed to restore the data. That happens a lot in the industry that small, stupidly run companies won't test disaster recovery at all and then when a disaster hits, they find that they weren't prepared for it. I seem to recall some small companies we've had articles about that had similar stories and they went out of business. They had some kind of hardware failure and the backups failed and they were out of business. So while right now I lean towards it being a deliberate action, I'm not ready to rule out good old fashioned incompetence.
If he has an account with Wells Fargo then one of the things he had to agree to was mandatory arbitration.
Ah, a non-lawyer posts how the law works. It's a valid point you raise, but it may not matter. I've got friends who are lawyers and I have learned a lot about how the law really works from them. I can assure you that it still may be possible to sue Wells Fargo even if the customer agreed to arbitration. The arbitration clause may not cover this kind of conduct. Also, even when people agree to clauses like this, it's still possible to argue that the customer was coerced into signing it. We'll see what happens in court.
I still have what they call a "land line" although it is actually a VOIP line that I get from AT&T via their Uverse service. Other cable TV providers offer similar lines. I have it set up at the cheapest cost possible and my call minutes per month are limited. I don't remember but the limit may be 300 minutes. That's fine because I only have one person in my life who ever calls me on that number. It's an old friend who lives in a distant part of my state and once or twice a month he might call for a brief 10-15 minutes to say hi and stay in touch.
So why do I still have the land line? Simple. I can give it out to anybody who demands a phone number. I use the Nomorobo service (it's free on land lines) to stop spam calls and it works really well. So now I have a phone number that I can give out to anybody who wants it and it can't receive text messages and spam calls almost never get through. For businesses that demand a mobile phone number, I usually just don't do business with them. If you have to be able to send me a text message for me to buy your stuff, then I will probably go elsewhere. Fortunately that rarely happens. It did mean that I couldn't join the diners reward program at Chilis though. I had a conversation with a waiter there about how I wasn't interested in joining because I wasn't willing to give up my mobile phone number so they could text me and he told me that other customers had told him the same thing. Getting a first text from them is a required part of activating the program so using my land line number won't work.
So I have to wonder, why is Toyota so adverse to EVs when they were once industry leaders? Does it have to do with some legal declaration they made long ago in order to be "allowed" to continue to make and sell hybrids? It's almost insane how they are staying away from EVs.
It's probably due to the fact that in general (there are certainly exceptions though) Japanese companies tend to be somewhat risk averse. That's one of the reason for some of the incredible diversification you'll see where a company might do something like run a chain of ramen restaurants, make motorcycle helmets and make parachutes. I am not at all an expert on Toyota cars having never owned one and barely having driven them as rentals, but it's not hard for me to speculate that maybe they saw that all the previous attempts to do fully electric cars failed for whatever reasons and they decided that it was something unlikely to ever be successful so they would stay out. A lot of the incentives for consumers to buy electric vehicles in the USA have either disappeared or will disappear soon and Toyota's management may be scared that just as they ramp up production to make all electric vehicles that the market is going to turn against the vehicles. There are a lot of really crazy vehicle purchases in the USA right now, for those who don't know. Trucks are very popular, which just amazes me given the incredibly high prices for what I think are the most popular models. SUVs are also selling by the boatload as consumers forget that fuel prices could possibly go up again. There has been a big push by Ford to get out of the business of making traditional cars because too many consumers only want trucks and SUVs. So I could see that Toyota's management might have some fear that just as soon as they get big time into making pure electric vehicles that nobody wants to buy them. I'm not saying that I agree with that, but I can understand how they might conclude that. I get that America isn't Toyota's only market, but it's maybe their biggest one and a lot of the purchasing decisions don't make a lot of sense right now. People who can't really afford to spend $40,000 and up on a new vehicle are doing so and they are just adding more years to the loan. I think I read recently that 6 and a half year car loans are very common in the USA now. Toyota does make trucks and SUVs so they are already available to those who only want to buy those types of vehicles and I can understand reluctance to fully commit to electric vehicles. Maybe if there is a huge demand in Japan and other countries for them they will change their mind.
It's fair to say the American nation isn't the envy of the World it once used to be, but the fact the Chinese can sue in American courts with a decent chance to win still says a lot about the differences between the two juggernaut nations.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have several friends who are. I'm American by the way. Let's just say I think Huawei's chance of winning is a lot lower than you do.
Why the fuck is an adult (well, legally anyways) getting all this attention for doing something that adults are expected to do? I just filed my taxes, where's my standing ovation?
Lucky you I don't have mod points to vote your ignorant posting down. Last time I did that though, I didn't get any mod points for a very long time. I'd still risk it here. OK, here's the explanation. There's no requirement for an adult to get vaccinated. So adults aren't "expected to do" this because most adults already did this as kids. He's getting attention because he's standing up to his ignorant parents (seems like this is all mother driven though - dad doesn't seem to care one way or another and seems to just be giving in to his wife because this is just THE BIGGEST DEAL EVER to her) and the media is hoping that stupid anti-vax people might rethink their position if one of their own did this on his own. Of course, no anti-vax person is going to change their mind because as another post pointed out, proving people wrong with facts just makes them even more determined than ever that they are right.
I think that's a great idea. I don't know if they are still doing it, but maybe 2-3 years ago Nissan announced a deal where they provided Nissan Leafs to Orlando rental car companies. Disney added a bunch of chargers on their properties and was involved in the deal. I had a Nissan Leaf on lease for 3 years to fill a need for a daily commune to work car while an older car I had was wearing down due to age and the stop and go traffic demands of my work commute. I loved the Leaf. My friends loved the Leaf. My girlfriend at the time loved the Leaf. Quite a few of my friends were impressed with it after riding in it. And for anybody who doesn't know, the Leaf is a lot less fancy than any Tesla model. I really believe if people tried electric cars, they'd become interested in the technology. It was costing me about $1 a day in electricity to charge the Leaf overnight for the next day. At current gasoline prices I'm probably paying about $6 a day in gasoline to drive to my job and back home. I really miss how cheap it was to charge the Leaf.
If instead, a similar amount of money were invested in helping countries instead of threatening them, we would be loved and wouldn't need a military. If some of that money was invested in helping our own citizens instead of threatening them with Big Brother, we could empty our jails and many hospital emergency rooms. If we put some money into parental guidance and education and a proactive health care system, we could have a model society.
Unfortunately, what you propose doesn't work either. It's been tried.
In the case of helping countries, the big problem you overlook is that the countries that need the most help are the most messed up politically. Poverty tends to go hand in hand with dictatorships. Sure, there are exceptions where dictatorships or single party rule happens in countries that are successfully economically, but if you find a list of the countries that need the most help, you'll see it is in places that don't have functioning democracies. So that means that when you try to help them, you have the problem of the people in charge skimming some/most of the money. Then when the government collapses and somebody else takes over, they like to remind a now angry and empowered population how your country supported the bad guys. China will inevitably face this problem in Africa at some point. China likes to say how it doesn't judge when it helps, but it's inevitable that some of these noxious governments they are giving money to will be replaced and the new people in charge are going to look for scapegoats who helped the old regime. This has happened to the USA in the past. It will happen again.
You can't put money into parental guidance. Hos is that even possible? You could put some into education and some into health care, but here in the USA our health care costs are astronomical and nobody has a solution to get that under control. Some sources say the money simply doesn't exist right now to just put everybody under Medicare.
Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that's for sure, but it has its pros and cons
This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions. Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic.
I agree with you and have no mod points so I have to comment instead of modding you up. I like Musk but he does say stuff off the top of his head at times that is dubious, like he believed that the odds were really good that this life of ours is just a simulation in a giant computer somewhere. Anybody interested in the subject can look up online and find some really good refutations of that idea.
Many of us here probably know people who convinced that a cure for all cancers already exists, but somebody big (the government, pharma, maybe both) doesn't want it out because the revenue stream from current expensive treatments will dry up. This just feeds into their arguments that big business is against us all.
Good news. The hub-and-spoke model needs to die a quick death. If that means taking impressive planes like the A380 with it, so be it. You haven't known anxiety unless you have been subjected to the experience of running around the airport with your handbag trying to catch the second leg of your flight (after the first leg has been delayed) because the flight after the one you are about to miss is scheduled for tomorrow at 6:30AM.
Sorry, but that's not going to happen. While in some unusual circumstances you might see something like a Des Moines to Reno flight come out of nowhere, you aren't realistically going to see Des Moines suddenly get flights to places the hubs service like, say, Santa Fe, New Mexico. This will have almost no impact on the hub system. International travel and smaller, less popular US destinations will still have to use the hub and spoke model. And by the way, under the old system some of the flights were kind of crazy and sure weren't direct. For example, if you wanted to get from Tampa to Des Moines, maybe you had to hop from Tampa - Atlanta - Chicago - Des Moines as an example. The hub and spoke system got used and survives because it makes sense. And to be clear, I picked Des Moines as a random location as a somewhat important US city with minimal current connecting flights because it fits my examples really well.
To a low tax state that respects your right to innovate.
Lots of other great US states have fast internet and low tax.
Low power costs and an educated workforce that's ready.
I would just mod you up if I had any points, but I don't. One of the great truths in life that I learned a long time ago is that the rich (including corporations) are really good at protecting their money. This is why things like the "Fair Tax" movement in the USA will fail if it ever gets enacted. The rich have ways to buy things in ways that will avoid them paying tax. Similarly, there are limits to how much California can tax their high earning companies unless they are willing to watch them leave.
What was illegal about it? He purchased crypto with USD, then was going to sell it in CAD. That's perfectly legal and is a method used in buying/selling foreign stocks.
If you export certain amounts of money out of the USA, the law requires you to report it to the US government. He was way past the limit with his over $400,000. The limit is, I think, $10000 USD. Canada may have laws that if you import certain amounts of money, this must be reported to their government, but as I'm not Canadian I can't speak to what their limits may be. He was trying to be clever and get around any reporting requirements so that his money just magically changed from US to Canadian dollars and he was probably also trying to avoid paying any surcharges on what would normally be an exchange. By the way, it is actually completely believable that a Chinese guy would save so much money in 7 years. There are reasons why Chinese people do that, but it's a long discussion to go into that.
Anyway, put me down for not believing that the guy running Quadriga is really dead unless a body was shipped from India and there's a US or Canadian death certificate certifying he's dead. I suspect in 5-10 years after everybody involved has moved on with their lives that the exchange will mysteriously and slowly empty itself of cryptocurrency and the "dead" founder will be laughing that everybody let him get away with it.
Besides, despite reports of "Solo" making a loss, I'm pretty sure that the revenue from the Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar franchises (amongst others) that are under the Disney umbrella is more than enough to make up for any loss in revenue they might have from early versions of classic Disney characters - it's not like they sell much (any?) merchandise based around the "Steamboat Willie" version of Mickey, is it?
Maybe not much, but they do actually still sell some merchandise based on Steamboat WIllie's version of Mickey. Particularly now since it's the 90th anniversary year of Mickey Mouse. I've got such an item in my house.
My suggestion to fix copyright extension is to allow it to be extended but at a price. Giving it away like the Bono Act did is pure insanity. If these copyrights are so valuable then why aren't they costing the owners to extend? My suggestion is to keep the current law and allow extensions after it in blocks of 10 years at a time but the holder has to pay a graduating fee for each renewal.
First 10 year extension - $100,000
Second 10 year extension - $1 million
Third 10 year extension - $10 million
Fourth 10 year extension - $100 million
Fifth 10 year extension - $1 billion
and so on. Maybe after the 6th extension you charge 10 trillion or something like that. Eventually people will stop renewing the copyrights because of cost, but allowing them the option of doing so means if they are so valuable to keep then people can pay to do so. My solution doesn't require the Bono Act to be done away with. Just start charging for renewals. And if people don't pay in time, too bad, so sad. Stuff fell into the public domain in the past because people forgot to renew. The real problems with the Bono Act are the automatic renewals and not charging for them.
We already don't need the Senate, and there are already proposals on the table to push a constitutional amendment dissolving the senate.
Oh, yes, we most certainly do. Although the senate's one-state-two-votes rule is something of an anachronism, the primary purpose for the senate is very much still valid — putting the brakes on a fickle electorate by ensuring that no more than one third of that house can change in a single election cycle.
We need the Senate. If anything, it's the House we don't need. A lot of money could be saved and things could be streamlined big time in a unicameral legislature. Nebraska only has a state senate. The Senate isn't perfect, but to a certain extent it has always been somewhat less polarized than the House and occasionally members will work with members of the other party. But I can also point out that the Senate rule, which they could change, to require 60 votes to stop debate is a relic of a long gone time and 51 votes should be enough. If you barely have a majority, then too bad to the other side.
This shutdown is just a diversion tactic to get attention away from his really big problems.
I actually think it's not a diversion tactic. I think it's a miscalculation. A lot of what Trump does is done impulsively. His number one apologist, Scott Adams, says that in business you need to make decisions quickly because the quicker you act, the quicker you can fix it if you made a mistake. He gave out a big tax cut to the corporations when other changes he had made seemed to be making the economy stronger. That I blame on impulse - do everything now, not later. I think this whole wall thing is really just red meat for his supporters, most of whom are if anything even more deeply committed to him than ever before. My closest friends are, unfortunately, pretty conservative and deeply committed to Trump. One of them seems to believe that at least 60% of Americans, maybe more, are head over heels in love with Trump like he is. So what the shutdown is, for Trump supporters it's a sign that he's still in charge despite the November loss of the House. I think it's probably a little early for this kind of tactic as the 2020 presidential election is almost 2 years away, but he's just solidifying his base with this. I cal it a miscalculation because by the time of the 2020 election, nobody who isn't already behind Trump is going to be very enthused about this and if he had done it next year it might have had some effect on moving some voters his way if he wins the fight. By Nov. 2020, however it ends up won't be an issue any more. I think he needs to solidify his base next year, not this year, but he does everything impulsively, so here we are.
When snopes.com has been around since the days of dial-up internet, I find this excuse rather lame. It's not hard to teach someone to use something like Snopes. Perhaps we should start with teaching that young employee hired to validate Facebook articles, preferably before they are made public on the platform. You know, instead of wasting time on No-Shit-Sherlock grade studies that essentially provide the public with a precisely targeted punching bag group of people to make fun of. (and here I thought the anti-bullying mentality was actually popular).
I guess you don't know this, but at least since 2016 (I remember that year because of the US presidential election) American right wingers have been saying that Snopes itself isn't trustworthy and is a liberal front for the Democratic Party whose goal is to knock down conservatives and the Republican Party.
I grew up in a small town where lots of people i went to school with are now very conservative Republicans. I've seen them blast Snopes as being unreliable when someone, usually on the left, usually Snopes to point out that some article they shared on Facebook is false. This seems to be based on one story that was some kind of joke that Snopes fell for and called a hoax when it was actually just a joke and pretty obvious to everybody not at Snopes that it was just a joke. So some devious conservatives realized that the best way to fight Snopes is to accuse them of lying and being Democratic shills because conservatives will believe it. There's a lot more dishonesty in the US right now from the right than the left, so a large part of what Snopes debunks is lies from the right and conservatives just use that as "proof" that Snopes is a front for the Democratic Party and can't be trusted either.
We'll see if their students really get any good at Mandarin in large enough numbers to be meaningful. English became a world language in large part because spelling aside, and there are reasons (sometimes dumb one though) for English spelling being what it is, English is just not all that difficult of a language to learn.
Pros of English:
No grammatical cases (except for a few pronouns).
Roman alphabet widely known in the world.
No gender for words. Nouns aren't masculine, feminine or neuter.
Cons of English:
Spelling, but again, there are real reasons for why some/many words are spelled strangely.
Verbs can be ridiculously complicated. I know of no other language where you can say "All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life." and have it make complete sense and be accurate. In fact, if you're a native speaker and you hear this said, it's a lot easier to understand that reading it.
I'm wondering if in the end, this will just be a lot like people in non-English speaking countries in Asia (not Singapore though) who have mandatory English classes, but in reality the students aren't very good at it. Like in Japan, for example. There are some very real downsides to learning Mandarin though.
Pros of Mandarin:
Grammar is ridiculously easy. Verbs don't conjugate. They use adverbs to indicate past or future tense, not verb changes.
I think i read that there are only something like 400 possible syllables in Mandarin where as English has over 15,000.
Cons of Mandarin:
Chinese characters are far more numerous than an alphabet and take a very long time to learn. This is why even in China schools teach little kids Mandarin via pinyin (this is Mandarin written in the Roman alphabet in a way to indicate the tones). I doubt that more than 1 student in 100 who studies Chinese in Kenya will ever get close to fluency in Chinese characters. This makes them essentially illiterate, although the same problem exists with Japanese learners, for example.
Tones. If Kenyans speak an African language with tones, this may not be a big deal, but as a native English speaker who knows a tiny bit of Mandarin and Cantonese I can tell you that getting used to tones is a gigantic problem for many foreign students and probably most will never get very good at it.
If all Kenya does is produce a bunch of students who can read and write pinyin but not really anything else, we'll see how this goes.
If a licensed driver kills another motorist on the road, is the government held liable for provisioning the murderer a license?
I fail to see the logic this court used.
I know this is going to sound like Europe bashing and it's really not. I've been to Europe a lot. Used to work for a European company. I'm really not anti-Europe. But I'm going to tell you how this kind of thing happens and I'm probably not going to get voted up enough to get noticed, but here goes.
1) European countries don't have freedom of speech similar to the USA. So this means that while freedom of speech in the USA can cover a variety of legal matters that aren't really "speech" as such, it can't happen in Europe. In fact, you can actually go to jail for years for saying stuff in Europe that they don't like. Not for doing bad things. For saying things they don't like.
2) EU justice (outside of maybe the departing UK and France) is pretty bogus. Really bad, horrible things that might get you locked up forever in the USA get sentences of say, 10 years, which to a European seems to be an insanely long time to punish someone. Remember that guy in Norway who shot over 70 people? If he lives a normal lifespan he'll probably have 2 more chances in his life to break his own record after getting released because locking up a killer for life is evil according to most of the EU and apparently Norway simply can't keep him locked up more than 25 years for mass murder.
3) So the fact that the EU doesn't have free speech and they feel sorry for criminals has led to another situation where once you get out of jail for your heinous crimes, you can petition legally for the criminal record to be wiped. It's like you never dd it.
So yes, a society that doesn't value victims at all and feels sorry for criminals and doesn't respect free speech might just have some really interesting ideas about internet piracy and who is actually liable.
My sister had my dad tested since although we're stereotypically Asian, our family's eyes are slightly rounder. She thought we might have a European ancestor somewhere in our genealogy. The test results came back 50% Hungarian, 40% Scandinavian. The biggest Asian component was 0.6% Japanese. Our best guess is the sample was contaminated, or they accidentally swapped with someone else's sample. But the company insisted they were accurate and that they never made mistakes.
You ever heard of Chang and Eng Bunker? They died in 1874. They are where the term "Siamese twins" comes from. Look them up on Wikipedia if you don't know about them. They lived in North Carolina and married a couple of white ladies. Some of their descendants still look Asian almost 150 years later. Most don't. But some do look very Asian. And that's despite years of breeding with white people. I suppose it could really be true what the genetic test said based on that.
Slashdot Mirror
Something is broken with our system of "justice".
You are right, but I can assure you that things are far far worse than you can possibly imagine. I am a career IT guy (I am American by the way) but I have plenty of friends who are lawyers and they've taught me a lot about how the US justice system really works. Imagine the following scenario which could happen. Just suppose some friend or neighbor or acquaintance gets angry with you and sues you over something that is complete bs, but they are trying to ruin you financially. You hire lawyer and fight them and win but it cleans out your bank account completely. And the whole case was bs and just an attempt to ruin you, which they sort of accomplished by wiping out your bank account. I've yet to meet a single lawyer or judge who doesn't think that the system worked perfectly when person gets wiped financially from lawyer fees when winning against an unjust lawsuit. And you should know that the entire law enforcement and legal system is designed to make sure that lawyers will get paid if nobody else does. If you win a judgement in court and your opponent has to pay you something and they just refuse, good luck getting a local law enforcement person to help you collect. Maybe you will. Maybe you won't. But if a lawyer is owed money, law enforcement will leave no stone unturned to make sure that the lawyer will get paid.
In one of the most horrific cases I personally know of where the system abused someone, I have a friend whose wife filed for divorce a few years ago. Basically she got mad that he looked at porn online and she flipped out and filed for divorce. She is bi-polar, which may have played a role in this. She quit her job as a nurse deliberately and claimed she couldn't be employed again because of her mental problems. No lawyer advised her to do this. She just did it on her own. So she went to her town's most successful divorce lawyer who specialized in representing women and that lawyer took on the case knowing that the wife had no funds at all with which to pay the lawyer. None. My friend unfortunately did not take this very seriously and hired the cheapest lawyer he could find. My friend got his rear end handed to him in court. The wife's lawyer ran up huge bills and then at the end of the case sued the husband for the full amount. So my friend had to liquidate his 401K fund to pay his now ex-wife's lawyer's costs to divorce him. The ex-wife won half the 401K in the divorce, but it's completely gone now because all that 401K money went to her lawyer. Keep in mind that her lawyer took the case deliberately knowing that her client couldn't pay her at all and they would just go after the husband for the money. And it worked. I asked a lawyer friend for thoughts about it and he told me this kind of thing happens all the time. So yeah, our system of justice is completely broke and the lawyers and judges and cops like it just fine exactly like it is.
I would join you in the boycott... if I bought anything from Pepsi in the first place. I don't drink soda, or lipton; I almost never eat fast food, so me boycotting KFC and TacoBell, and any other Pepsi owned chains over this won't help.
Pepsi hasn't owned KFC, Taco Bell or Pizza Hut (you forgot them) since 1997. I can't get mod points very often here, yet people have thrown you enough to get you up to a score of 5 for basically being ignorant of history. So that's what it takes to get modded up around here. Very interesting.
Given he's now a proven flight risk I suspect his chances of bail while all this drags on through the appeals courts (which has taken years in other high profile cases) are pretty slim, so even if he ultimately prevails and avoids extradition it's likely to be quite some time before he's getting out of custody.
In the USA, yes, he would probably be denied bail or subject to very stringent monitoring with an electronic ankle bracelet. In Sweden? I don't know. I'm hearing that people in Norway are apparently already feeling sorry for their biggest mass murderer in history who might, maybe, have to stay locked up for 25 years. Norway is not Sweden but it's probably not all that different either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Swedes granted bail and Assange found a way to sneak into Russia.
We have millions of Americans who still cannot afford to go to the doctor, who cannot afford education, who cannot afford housing, and this asshat thinks we need to send people to the moon to do what, exactly?
I can barely get mod points and I have none at present to vote you down with, but apparently all you have to do is cut and paste this from a similar post that always gets made the last time Slashdot talked about going to the moon or Mars and you'll get 5 points. I've got news for you pal - in your lifetime I don't think we'll ever have people in the USA who can all afford to go to the doctor (health insurance issues are likely to get worse over time, not better because nobody has a workable plan to fix the problems), who all can afford education (guess you mean college as public schools are free by the way - you missed that) and yes, housing issues are also likely to just worse over time, but that's a problem everywhere. If your criteria are what we have to solve to go outside earth, then barring a Star Trek like economic change where scarcity is eliminated and money doesn't really exist, we're never going to go. Certainly we're not going in your lifetime.
This is to prevent discourse on his attempts to maintain power beyond his constitutional term, whether by the Belarus union option or other means.
He'll have to replace Lukashenko to do that. There's no way Lukashenko will ever agree to a true union with Russia. Plus, there will be even more sanctions on Russia if he knocks off Lukashenko or invades Belarus. Lukashenko is no threat or problem for Russia, so an easier way would be to simply change the constitution or to let Medvedev serve another caretaker term as president. I'm guessing that they'll just change the constitution.
What is the first step of any server migration? Take a backup. Worst case you can go back to where you started with no data loss. Failing that they don't have a backup from yesterday? Or last week? No large scale operation like this could ever operate without backups.
No...this data was intentionally wiped.
While I agree that it was likely wiped for one of the many good reasons others have provided, as an IT veteran I sure wouldn't say "no large scale operation like this could ever operate without backups." I can totally believe that some companies would do that. Look at how many posters said "I didn't even know Myspace was still around". Me too. I also didn't know, but I never used it. I knew about it, but just wasn't interested in it at the time. Such a company probably isn't hiring the best people to work for its IT department and they probably don't have oodles of cash to spend on fault tolerance.
Also, I could certainly believe that they did have backups of the whole thing going back 12+ years and that they didn't ever bother to test them and the backups failed to restore the data. That happens a lot in the industry that small, stupidly run companies won't test disaster recovery at all and then when a disaster hits, they find that they weren't prepared for it. I seem to recall some small companies we've had articles about that had similar stories and they went out of business. They had some kind of hardware failure and the backups failed and they were out of business. So while right now I lean towards it being a deliberate action, I'm not ready to rule out good old fashioned incompetence.
If he has an account with Wells Fargo then one of the things he had to agree to was mandatory arbitration.
Ah, a non-lawyer posts how the law works. It's a valid point you raise, but it may not matter. I've got friends who are lawyers and I have learned a lot about how the law really works from them. I can assure you that it still may be possible to sue Wells Fargo even if the customer agreed to arbitration. The arbitration clause may not cover this kind of conduct. Also, even when people agree to clauses like this, it's still possible to argue that the customer was coerced into signing it. We'll see what happens in court.
I still have what they call a "land line" although it is actually a VOIP line that I get from AT&T via their Uverse service. Other cable TV providers offer similar lines. I have it set up at the cheapest cost possible and my call minutes per month are limited. I don't remember but the limit may be 300 minutes. That's fine because I only have one person in my life who ever calls me on that number. It's an old friend who lives in a distant part of my state and once or twice a month he might call for a brief 10-15 minutes to say hi and stay in touch.
So why do I still have the land line? Simple. I can give it out to anybody who demands a phone number. I use the Nomorobo service (it's free on land lines) to stop spam calls and it works really well. So now I have a phone number that I can give out to anybody who wants it and it can't receive text messages and spam calls almost never get through. For businesses that demand a mobile phone number, I usually just don't do business with them. If you have to be able to send me a text message for me to buy your stuff, then I will probably go elsewhere. Fortunately that rarely happens. It did mean that I couldn't join the diners reward program at Chilis though. I had a conversation with a waiter there about how I wasn't interested in joining because I wasn't willing to give up my mobile phone number so they could text me and he told me that other customers had told him the same thing. Getting a first text from them is a required part of activating the program so using my land line number won't work.
So I have to wonder, why is Toyota so adverse to EVs when they were once industry leaders? Does it have to do with some legal declaration they made long ago in order to be "allowed" to continue to make and sell hybrids? It's almost insane how they are staying away from EVs.
It's probably due to the fact that in general (there are certainly exceptions though) Japanese companies tend to be somewhat risk averse. That's one of the reason for some of the incredible diversification you'll see where a company might do something like run a chain of ramen restaurants, make motorcycle helmets and make parachutes. I am not at all an expert on Toyota cars having never owned one and barely having driven them as rentals, but it's not hard for me to speculate that maybe they saw that all the previous attempts to do fully electric cars failed for whatever reasons and they decided that it was something unlikely to ever be successful so they would stay out. A lot of the incentives for consumers to buy electric vehicles in the USA have either disappeared or will disappear soon and Toyota's management may be scared that just as they ramp up production to make all electric vehicles that the market is going to turn against the vehicles. There are a lot of really crazy vehicle purchases in the USA right now, for those who don't know. Trucks are very popular, which just amazes me given the incredibly high prices for what I think are the most popular models. SUVs are also selling by the boatload as consumers forget that fuel prices could possibly go up again. There has been a big push by Ford to get out of the business of making traditional cars because too many consumers only want trucks and SUVs. So I could see that Toyota's management might have some fear that just as soon as they get big time into making pure electric vehicles that nobody wants to buy them. I'm not saying that I agree with that, but I can understand how they might conclude that. I get that America isn't Toyota's only market, but it's maybe their biggest one and a lot of the purchasing decisions don't make a lot of sense right now. People who can't really afford to spend $40,000 and up on a new vehicle are doing so and they are just adding more years to the loan. I think I read recently that 6 and a half year car loans are very common in the USA now. Toyota does make trucks and SUVs so they are already available to those who only want to buy those types of vehicles and I can understand reluctance to fully commit to electric vehicles. Maybe if there is a huge demand in Japan and other countries for them they will change their mind.
It's fair to say the American nation isn't the envy of the World it once used to be, but the fact the Chinese can sue in American courts with a decent chance to win still says a lot about the differences between the two juggernaut nations.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have several friends who are. I'm American by the way. Let's just say I think Huawei's chance of winning is a lot lower than you do.
Why the fuck is an adult (well, legally anyways) getting all this attention for doing something that adults are expected to do? I just filed my taxes, where's my standing ovation?
Lucky you I don't have mod points to vote your ignorant posting down. Last time I did that though, I didn't get any mod points for a very long time. I'd still risk it here. OK, here's the explanation. There's no requirement for an adult to get vaccinated. So adults aren't "expected to do" this because most adults already did this as kids. He's getting attention because he's standing up to his ignorant parents (seems like this is all mother driven though - dad doesn't seem to care one way or another and seems to just be giving in to his wife because this is just THE BIGGEST DEAL EVER to her) and the media is hoping that stupid anti-vax people might rethink their position if one of their own did this on his own. Of course, no anti-vax person is going to change their mind because as another post pointed out, proving people wrong with facts just makes them even more determined than ever that they are right.
I think that's a great idea. I don't know if they are still doing it, but maybe 2-3 years ago Nissan announced a deal where they provided Nissan Leafs to Orlando rental car companies. Disney added a bunch of chargers on their properties and was involved in the deal. I had a Nissan Leaf on lease for 3 years to fill a need for a daily commune to work car while an older car I had was wearing down due to age and the stop and go traffic demands of my work commute. I loved the Leaf. My friends loved the Leaf. My girlfriend at the time loved the Leaf. Quite a few of my friends were impressed with it after riding in it. And for anybody who doesn't know, the Leaf is a lot less fancy than any Tesla model. I really believe if people tried electric cars, they'd become interested in the technology. It was costing me about $1 a day in electricity to charge the Leaf overnight for the next day. At current gasoline prices I'm probably paying about $6 a day in gasoline to drive to my job and back home. I really miss how cheap it was to charge the Leaf.
If instead, a similar amount of money were invested in helping countries instead of threatening them, we would be loved and wouldn't need a military. If some of that money was invested in helping our own citizens instead of threatening them with Big Brother, we could empty our jails and many hospital emergency rooms. If we put some money into parental guidance and education and a proactive health care system, we could have a model society.
Unfortunately, what you propose doesn't work either. It's been tried.
In the case of helping countries, the big problem you overlook is that the countries that need the most help are the most messed up politically. Poverty tends to go hand in hand with dictatorships. Sure, there are exceptions where dictatorships or single party rule happens in countries that are successfully economically, but if you find a list of the countries that need the most help, you'll see it is in places that don't have functioning democracies. So that means that when you try to help them, you have the problem of the people in charge skimming some/most of the money. Then when the government collapses and somebody else takes over, they like to remind a now angry and empowered population how your country supported the bad guys. China will inevitably face this problem in Africa at some point. China likes to say how it doesn't judge when it helps, but it's inevitable that some of these noxious governments they are giving money to will be replaced and the new people in charge are going to look for scapegoats who helped the old regime. This has happened to the USA in the past. It will happen again.
You can't put money into parental guidance. Hos is that even possible? You could put some into education and some into health care, but here in the USA our health care costs are astronomical and nobody has a solution to get that under control. Some sources say the money simply doesn't exist right now to just put everybody under Medicare.
Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that's for sure, but it has its pros and cons
This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions. Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic.
I agree with you and have no mod points so I have to comment instead of modding you up. I like Musk but he does say stuff off the top of his head at times that is dubious, like he believed that the odds were really good that this life of ours is just a simulation in a giant computer somewhere. Anybody interested in the subject can look up online and find some really good refutations of that idea.
Many of us here probably know people who convinced that a cure for all cancers already exists, but somebody big (the government, pharma, maybe both) doesn't want it out because the revenue stream from current expensive treatments will dry up. This just feeds into their arguments that big business is against us all.
Good news. The hub-and-spoke model needs to die a quick death. If that means taking impressive planes like the A380 with it, so be it. You haven't known anxiety unless you have been subjected to the experience of running around the airport with your handbag trying to catch the second leg of your flight (after the first leg has been delayed) because the flight after the one you are about to miss is scheduled for tomorrow at 6:30AM.
Sorry, but that's not going to happen. While in some unusual circumstances you might see something like a Des Moines to Reno flight come out of nowhere, you aren't realistically going to see Des Moines suddenly get flights to places the hubs service like, say, Santa Fe, New Mexico. This will have almost no impact on the hub system. International travel and smaller, less popular US destinations will still have to use the hub and spoke model. And by the way, under the old system some of the flights were kind of crazy and sure weren't direct. For example, if you wanted to get from Tampa to Des Moines, maybe you had to hop from Tampa - Atlanta - Chicago - Des Moines as an example. The hub and spoke system got used and survives because it makes sense. And to be clear, I picked Des Moines as a random location as a somewhat important US city with minimal current connecting flights because it fits my examples really well.
To a low tax state that respects your right to innovate.
Lots of other great US states have fast internet and low tax.
Low power costs and an educated workforce that's ready.
I would just mod you up if I had any points, but I don't. One of the great truths in life that I learned a long time ago is that the rich (including corporations) are really good at protecting their money. This is why things like the "Fair Tax" movement in the USA will fail if it ever gets enacted. The rich have ways to buy things in ways that will avoid them paying tax. Similarly, there are limits to how much California can tax their high earning companies unless they are willing to watch them leave.
What was illegal about it? He purchased crypto with USD, then was going to sell it in CAD. That's perfectly legal and is a method used in buying/selling foreign stocks.
If you export certain amounts of money out of the USA, the law requires you to report it to the US government. He was way past the limit with his over $400,000. The limit is, I think, $10000 USD. Canada may have laws that if you import certain amounts of money, this must be reported to their government, but as I'm not Canadian I can't speak to what their limits may be. He was trying to be clever and get around any reporting requirements so that his money just magically changed from US to Canadian dollars and he was probably also trying to avoid paying any surcharges on what would normally be an exchange. By the way, it is actually completely believable that a Chinese guy would save so much money in 7 years. There are reasons why Chinese people do that, but it's a long discussion to go into that.
Anyway, put me down for not believing that the guy running Quadriga is really dead unless a body was shipped from India and there's a US or Canadian death certificate certifying he's dead. I suspect in 5-10 years after everybody involved has moved on with their lives that the exchange will mysteriously and slowly empty itself of cryptocurrency and the "dead" founder will be laughing that everybody let him get away with it.
Besides, despite reports of "Solo" making a loss, I'm pretty sure that the revenue from the Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar franchises (amongst others) that are under the Disney umbrella is more than enough to make up for any loss in revenue they might have from early versions of classic Disney characters - it's not like they sell much (any?) merchandise based around the "Steamboat Willie" version of Mickey, is it?
Maybe not much, but they do actually still sell some merchandise based on Steamboat WIllie's version of Mickey. Particularly now since it's the 90th anniversary year of Mickey Mouse. I've got such an item in my house.
My suggestion to fix copyright extension is to allow it to be extended but at a price. Giving it away like the Bono Act did is pure insanity. If these copyrights are so valuable then why aren't they costing the owners to extend? My suggestion is to keep the current law and allow extensions after it in blocks of 10 years at a time but the holder has to pay a graduating fee for each renewal.
First 10 year extension - $100,000
Second 10 year extension - $1 million
Third 10 year extension - $10 million
Fourth 10 year extension - $100 million
Fifth 10 year extension - $1 billion
and so on. Maybe after the 6th extension you charge 10 trillion or something like that. Eventually people will stop renewing the copyrights because of cost, but allowing them the option of doing so means if they are so valuable to keep then people can pay to do so. My solution doesn't require the Bono Act to be done away with. Just start charging for renewals. And if people don't pay in time, too bad, so sad. Stuff fell into the public domain in the past because people forgot to renew. The real problems with the Bono Act are the automatic renewals and not charging for them.
Oh, yes, we most certainly do. Although the senate's one-state-two-votes rule is something of an anachronism, the primary purpose for the senate is very much still valid — putting the brakes on a fickle electorate by ensuring that no more than one third of that house can change in a single election cycle.
We need the Senate. If anything, it's the House we don't need. A lot of money could be saved and things could be streamlined big time in a unicameral legislature. Nebraska only has a state senate. The Senate isn't perfect, but to a certain extent it has always been somewhat less polarized than the House and occasionally members will work with members of the other party. But I can also point out that the Senate rule, which they could change, to require 60 votes to stop debate is a relic of a long gone time and 51 votes should be enough. If you barely have a majority, then too bad to the other side.
This shutdown is just a diversion tactic to get attention away from his really big problems.
I actually think it's not a diversion tactic. I think it's a miscalculation. A lot of what Trump does is done impulsively. His number one apologist, Scott Adams, says that in business you need to make decisions quickly because the quicker you act, the quicker you can fix it if you made a mistake. He gave out a big tax cut to the corporations when other changes he had made seemed to be making the economy stronger. That I blame on impulse - do everything now, not later. I think this whole wall thing is really just red meat for his supporters, most of whom are if anything even more deeply committed to him than ever before. My closest friends are, unfortunately, pretty conservative and deeply committed to Trump. One of them seems to believe that at least 60% of Americans, maybe more, are head over heels in love with Trump like he is. So what the shutdown is, for Trump supporters it's a sign that he's still in charge despite the November loss of the House. I think it's probably a little early for this kind of tactic as the 2020 presidential election is almost 2 years away, but he's just solidifying his base with this. I cal it a miscalculation because by the time of the 2020 election, nobody who isn't already behind Trump is going to be very enthused about this and if he had done it next year it might have had some effect on moving some voters his way if he wins the fight. By Nov. 2020, however it ends up won't be an issue any more. I think he needs to solidify his base next year, not this year, but he does everything impulsively, so here we are.
When snopes.com has been around since the days of dial-up internet, I find this excuse rather lame. It's not hard to teach someone to use something like Snopes. Perhaps we should start with teaching that young employee hired to validate Facebook articles, preferably before they are made public on the platform. You know, instead of wasting time on No-Shit-Sherlock grade studies that essentially provide the public with a precisely targeted punching bag group of people to make fun of. (and here I thought the anti-bullying mentality was actually popular).
I guess you don't know this, but at least since 2016 (I remember that year because of the US presidential election) American right wingers have been saying that Snopes itself isn't trustworthy and is a liberal front for the Democratic Party whose goal is to knock down conservatives and the Republican Party.
I grew up in a small town where lots of people i went to school with are now very conservative Republicans. I've seen them blast Snopes as being unreliable when someone, usually on the left, usually Snopes to point out that some article they shared on Facebook is false. This seems to be based on one story that was some kind of joke that Snopes fell for and called a hoax when it was actually just a joke and pretty obvious to everybody not at Snopes that it was just a joke. So some devious conservatives realized that the best way to fight Snopes is to accuse them of lying and being Democratic shills because conservatives will believe it. There's a lot more dishonesty in the US right now from the right than the left, so a large part of what Snopes debunks is lies from the right and conservatives just use that as "proof" that Snopes is a front for the Democratic Party and can't be trusted either.
We'll see if their students really get any good at Mandarin in large enough numbers to be meaningful. English became a world language in large part because spelling aside, and there are reasons (sometimes dumb one though) for English spelling being what it is, English is just not all that difficult of a language to learn.
Pros of English:
No grammatical cases (except for a few pronouns).
Roman alphabet widely known in the world.
No gender for words. Nouns aren't masculine, feminine or neuter.
Cons of English:
Spelling, but again, there are real reasons for why some/many words are spelled strangely.
Verbs can be ridiculously complicated. I know of no other language where you can say "All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life." and have it make complete sense and be accurate. In fact, if you're a native speaker and you hear this said, it's a lot easier to understand that reading it.
I'm wondering if in the end, this will just be a lot like people in non-English speaking countries in Asia (not Singapore though) who have mandatory English classes, but in reality the students aren't very good at it. Like in Japan, for example. There are some very real downsides to learning Mandarin though.
Pros of Mandarin:
Grammar is ridiculously easy. Verbs don't conjugate. They use adverbs to indicate past or future tense, not verb changes.
I think i read that there are only something like 400 possible syllables in Mandarin where as English has over 15,000.
Cons of Mandarin:
Chinese characters are far more numerous than an alphabet and take a very long time to learn. This is why even in China schools teach little kids Mandarin via pinyin (this is Mandarin written in the Roman alphabet in a way to indicate the tones). I doubt that more than 1 student in 100 who studies Chinese in Kenya will ever get close to fluency in Chinese characters. This makes them essentially illiterate, although the same problem exists with Japanese learners, for example.
Tones. If Kenyans speak an African language with tones, this may not be a big deal, but as a native English speaker who knows a tiny bit of Mandarin and Cantonese I can tell you that getting used to tones is a gigantic problem for many foreign students and probably most will never get very good at it.
If all Kenya does is produce a bunch of students who can read and write pinyin but not really anything else, we'll see how this goes.
If a licensed driver kills another motorist on the road, is the government held liable for provisioning the murderer a license?
I fail to see the logic this court used.
I know this is going to sound like Europe bashing and it's really not. I've been to Europe a lot. Used to work for a European company. I'm really not anti-Europe. But I'm going to tell you how this kind of thing happens and I'm probably not going to get voted up enough to get noticed, but here goes.
1) European countries don't have freedom of speech similar to the USA. So this means that while freedom of speech in the USA can cover a variety of legal matters that aren't really "speech" as such, it can't happen in Europe. In fact, you can actually go to jail for years for saying stuff in Europe that they don't like. Not for doing bad things. For saying things they don't like.
2) EU justice (outside of maybe the departing UK and France) is pretty bogus. Really bad, horrible things that might get you locked up forever in the USA get sentences of say, 10 years, which to a European seems to be an insanely long time to punish someone. Remember that guy in Norway who shot over 70 people? If he lives a normal lifespan he'll probably have 2 more chances in his life to break his own record after getting released because locking up a killer for life is evil according to most of the EU and apparently Norway simply can't keep him locked up more than 25 years for mass murder.
3) So the fact that the EU doesn't have free speech and they feel sorry for criminals has led to another situation where once you get out of jail for your heinous crimes, you can petition legally for the criminal record to be wiped. It's like you never dd it.
So yes, a society that doesn't value victims at all and feels sorry for criminals and doesn't respect free speech might just have some really interesting ideas about internet piracy and who is actually liable.
My sister had my dad tested since although we're stereotypically Asian, our family's eyes are slightly rounder. She thought we might have a European ancestor somewhere in our genealogy. The test results came back 50% Hungarian, 40% Scandinavian. The biggest Asian component was 0.6% Japanese. Our best guess is the sample was contaminated, or they accidentally swapped with someone else's sample. But the company insisted they were accurate and that they never made mistakes.
You ever heard of Chang and Eng Bunker? They died in 1874. They are where the term "Siamese twins" comes from. Look them up on Wikipedia if you don't know about them. They lived in North Carolina and married a couple of white ladies. Some of their descendants still look Asian almost 150 years later. Most don't. But some do look very Asian. And that's despite years of breeding with white people. I suppose it could really be true what the genetic test said based on that.