While the subject line is a bit sensational, I do think it's worth warning potentially naive people that they can lose everything in a move, even if unlikely. As a child my family hired a reputable moving company to move almost all of our belongings about 700 miles from a northern US state to a southern one. It was near the end of the year, so unbeknown to us, the driver actually drove the van north to spend New Year's with his family and abandoned it in a shopping center where it was robbed. What they didn't take, the robbers dumped in the snow to get ruined. We lost everything we didn't take with us in the car, including irreplaceable family photos of me and my brother as young children. The moving company fought us in court and in the end since my family was not rich and could not afford a protracted lawsuit, we had to settle for a price that probably didn't truly cover our losses but got most of them. I remember some years ago in school encountering another student with a similar story, but events like this are rare. People just need to understand that while it is probably unlikely that the OP will lose everything, the odds are probably a lot higher than he likely realizes and it's not a "1 in a million" event.
I think you are 100% correct, but it's not just politicians who are small minded. Here's an example. I work in IT as a Linux System Administrator. One of my colleagues is not only extremely smart and one of the most knowledgeable IT guys I've ever worked with (he is like a living set of man pages), he is into sci fi. He feels very strongly that we have more pressing needs at home in the USA than to spend almost any money on NASA. I mean, he is the exact kind of guy who I would expect to be in favor of building a moon base. When guys like him won't even back NASA, there's really no hope for the USA to ever do anything useful in space in our lifetime unless it becomes a national security concern. But in direct response to your suggestion, I want to see a moon base first and a manned expedition to Mars before we try something massive like this. It's a "walk before you run" kind of thing.
Geez. To me this is kind of like in the movie "The Jerk" when the crazy guy is trying to kill Steve Martin's character by shooting him from across the road with a rifle and Martin concludes that the guy has a problem with cans and he's actually attacking the cans, which just happen to also be everywhere Steve is.
Scandinavian people are more blue eyed than most ethnic groups and it's been known for years that blue eyed people may be more sensitive to vision problems caused by sunlight. It could also be that for some reason (ozone depletion?) that Scandinavia gets stronger sunlight than other regions. If they want to convince me that there is something to do this, show me a study in Brazil where there aren't very many blue eyed people and they drink a lot of coffee too.
Dear Nokia,
I guess you don't watch a lot of American movies or TV shows, but when you sell your soul to Satan in exchange for something, there's always a catch. For example, the guy who got eternal youth had to "enjoy" it in prison while facing a life sentence. If it makes you feel any better, nobody will probably like Microsoft's own branded phones any more than they do yours, but that's not much consolation as all you'll have left is being the king of the garbage section of the industry that makes "phones that are only phones". Nice knowing you.
I've been on a jury, and you'd be amazed at how easy it is for the entire jury to fall in line behind someone who seems to know what he's talking about, especially if the trial involves something few people have experience in (such as patent law). If the rest of the jury trusted him as the resident expert on the issue at hand, they would likely go along with whatever he said.
Of course. One of the reasons for this is that juries will almost always have a few fairly stupid people on them. There's a joke that says something along the lines of juries are made up of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty and there's some truth to that. I have severed twice and the most recent was 7 years ago in a criminal case. I remember one morning waiting in the jury room before we went to court to hear testimony and 3 of the guys on the jury got into an argument where each of them argued that he was more technologically incompetent than the other 2. Really. No exaggeration. So when these are examples of your jury you can understand why they might be swayed by someone who seems to know what he is doing, especially if he is a foreman, because they will have no idea about such a complex subject and will defer to anyone who seems to be an expert. Also, some people just want to get out ASAP and will go along with any majority that develops.
Most of my friends and relatives are non-techie people. A lot of non-techie people have the perception that AMD is cheap junk. Amongst my techie friends, a lot of us use AMD. It's all I buy because I feel very strongly that somebody should support it and I'm willing to be that somebody. I've been able to convince my brother (non-techie) that AMD is OK to buy, but I also know non-techie people who will pay more for Intel merely in the perception that it's "better" somehow. Intel used to advertise on TV and AMD never did. Maybe AMD could use some ads to at least give the perception that they are a player. And some wins where a big player uses them would really help.
Good job, wierd_w. I think your post is not only accurate but objective. martypantsROK should understand that if he lives in a large metro area in the USA that he'll have much better results than in a rural area. In rural areas you probably have to use Verizon. I live in a large metro area and I used T-Mobile for years and was happy with them, but I did not use them much for data. My work required me to get a new subsidized phone and I was not able to stay with T-Mobile as for reasons unknown to me, they are the only one of the four major US carriers that my company does not have an agreement with. martypantsROK is likely to be very unimpressed with US mobile and internet service after having lived in South Korea, but that's just how it is.
You are correct, but missing the point as a lot of people are. Electric cars are important for reasons that have nothing to do with CO2 emissions. US electricity production is 100% produced from domestic sources, none of it from imported sources. Gasoline requires the US to pay various loathsome countries who don't have our best interests at heart. Anything that reduces US dependency on foreign oil and shifts it towards domestic electricity is a huge plus. We can worry about producing cars, even electrics, in a more environmentally friendly way after we break the dependency on foreign oil, or at least reduce it to an amount we can get only from trustworthy, friendly nations (ie. Mexico, Canada, Norway).
I have long ago given up the hope that any sanity could be restored to copyright in the USA. The Capitol Records vs. Naxos case was unbelievably far reaching, with the court that heard the case ruling basically that every recording ever made in the USA, yes even back to Thomas Edison, was still under copyright. They essentially made up the law in their ruling, but as Naxos was clearly in the wrong (they knowingly violated a valid copyright on an old recording from the 1930s) Naxos didn't want to appeal and spend more money on a case they couldn't win, even though an appeal might have knocked down some of the more insane parts of the original court ruling.
What really gets me is that in this current age of declining government budgets that nobody sees the biggest flaw of the Bono Copyright law - namely that it allows automatic renewal of copyrights for free . I'm not in favor of perpetual copyrights, but as others have argued, at least make the people that want them have to pay for them. If they are so valuable then charge for them. I cannot believe the US government is willingly passing by possible copyright fees by allowing automatic free renewals. At least if renewals cost money, some people would refuse to pay it and some things would fall back into the public domain and those who really consider renewals to be valuable would at least have to pay for it. A sliding scale where the renewal costs began to get more costly over time could also finally cause things to go back into the public domain.
I do agree with your point that this is mostly to get future Bradley Manning copy cats who may cooperate in the future with Wikileaks or something similar. However, I do disagree that the US has a problem with Assange. I think that if we could secretly talk with the upper levels of the US government, while they are not at all thrilled with Assange, I suspect that they are resigned to the fact that he is just a journalist of sorts who got the story of a lifetime dumped in his lap and he printed it. The real problem is with Manning.
For many years now, the US has had spies like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen who got people killed. The US government ended up looking powerless to give them the death penalty when they basically made a deal that in exchange for the government leaving their families alone and not asking any more questions that they would go into explicit detail about what they had done. I think the real issue that the US government doesn't really have a clear cut legal case against Manning. Oh I am sure that he will be convicted of something, but he will probably top out at 20 years behind bars and possibly get 10 or even as few as 5. That is the real issue here. I think that the US government wants to be sure that the next Manning will face the death penalty. Of course some people will not be stopped from spying or turning over secrets because of various reasons, but I have felt for years that until the US actually executes someone for this that they really look impotent and powerless to stop this in the future.
A release of Windows not being ready has never stopped Microsoft from releasing it. Nor has it stopped the fools who jump on every beta they put out. I participate on a video forum at another site and every beta that comes out, we have members who jump on it and then bitch about how various things don't work. That doesn't ever stop from them doing the same thing over and over every time a new beta comes out. And the market has never punished Microsoft for any of its mistakes so even if Win 8 is as big of a disaster as I think it will be, it won't matter.
Unfortunately, the USA doesn't care about inconveniences like sovereignty of a foreign nation.
I'm American and I'm honest enough to admit that such comments are deserved. However, let's not pretend here that only the USA does this. Various EU countries have had court rulings that try to impose domestic laws across international boundaries. France and Italy come to mind as having has various court rulings that essentially try to impose local laws on US businesses in every country in the planet just because those business happen to also operate in France and Italy. Those attempts by those countries have only been successful locally by the way, but that hasn't stopped their judges one bit from arguing that national laws need to apply to every country where foreign owned business operate, just because they happen to have offices in France and Italy. I'm sure that there are other countries that similar claims can be made for. Let's also mention how China is aggressively pursuing rather dubious territorial claims in southeast Asia right now that push their sea boundary almost up to the beaches of a rather large number of sovereign countries in the region. Speaking of China, a Chinese consulate
in the USA recently appealed to a US mayor to get a mural removed that was legally painted on private property in Portland, Oregon and expresses a pro-Tibet sentiment. The mayor was not amused. So complaints are certainly fair, but please spare me the hypocritical argument that only the US does this.
I work for a (mostly) US based Fortune 500 company who for various reasons I would prefer not to name. Short story - if you are a big enough company that external auditors come to visit you (we are) and your Dev people install code, even in test environments, you may fail an audit in the USA. Trust me, it is bad for business to fail this kind of audit. I'm in a system admin type job and a bit isolated from the workings of our Dev group, but it's my understanding that we run Agile or some variation of it and we absolutely do not allow Devs to ever install code in test or production environments.
I'm not a lawyer. But lucky for me my best friend is. He has taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA. Most lay people have the mistaken belief that all rights are absolute. For example, they think that the right to free speech means you cannot have that restricted. That is simply not true as there is another thread on Slashdot just below this one about a guy who is now in jail facing a one million dollar bail request to get out for exercising his "rights to free speech" on an ESPN website. Your "right to free speech" does not trump copyright law is another example. You can't threaten to kill or harm people and then say "Free speech!" or "I was just kidding" and necessarily get away with it. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled against gun restrictions but they have also been clear to state that such rulings should not be interpreted to mean that there can't be any restrictions on guns.
There is no "country of Gilbraltar" as the anonymous coward who posted the article suggests. It is a British overseas territory. It's something akin to Guam or American Samoa which are territories of the USA and nobody thinks they are countries.
In my opinion Nokia was the perfect partner for this but they no longer are the perfect partner. Nokia got burned badly by the Win 7 phones and they bet the company on this partnership. I am afraid that in the first world too many people will view the Win 8 phone as another potential compatibility nightmare (for those that know about the previous Nokia Win 7 phones) or they'll see them as "not an iPhone or an Android and therefore a loser platform that won't survive". Nokia just reminds me of too many IT companies that can't admit that the market changed and they weren't prepared and can't play catchup any more. They've got the garbage section of the mobile phone industry covered. If you want low featured "I just want a phone that's a phone" type devices, then they are your company, especially if you live in a less developed country where you either can't afford or can't get an Android or iPhone. But I think that it's too late for them to get taken seriously in developed parts of AustralAsia, Europe and North America that basically want tiny computers that masquerade as phones.
I've read in the past about her case and this is what I remember being her main problems.
1) She had bottom of the barrel lawyers in all of her trials. If I remember correctly at one of the later trials she was actually represented by law school students who prior to the trial basically bragged that this case was going to be "easy" to win. Practicing law for real may just be a little tougher than it seems in class, boys.
2) She has been perceived extremely negatively by juries, which has definitely led to the size of the judgements against her.
3) She's been her own worst enemy when testifying, but that relates to #1 in large part. She lacks a credible excuse for her behavior and seemed to jurors to be a liar and trying to cover up what she did. That has worked heavily against her in reaching a verdict.
4) She has consistently displayed an outsized ego and an erroneous belief that she can beat the charges by going to court when in fact she has probably had the weakest case of anyone to ever challenge the RIAA. I would call her delusional.
In summary, she's got a terrible case and she's tried to win it on the cheap and the outcomes are predictable.
You make some good points, but you lose me on the "Romney has nothing to hide" argument. I admit it could be true, but it seems unlikely. Even members of the Republican Party in the media have said as much. He has decided to take body shots from Obama on the issue. Since it could theoretically cost him the election, it seems unlikely that he would do so on a matter of principle. In fact, I would argue that if he really has nothing to hide and he is doing this on principle alone, his judgement is so flawed that he is unqualified to be president. Imagine the following hypothetical statement from an upcoming debate:
Obama:... So certainly we need to pay attention very carefully to what China is doing in regards to their continuous military buildups, which seem to be at odds for a nation that claims to be acting only in peaceful interests. And you know, we need a president who has the strength of character to stand up to the Chinese. I have that strength of character and I showed it by releasing 10 years of tax returns, whereas my opponent clearly has something to hide by refusing to release anything but the last 2 years. I know that a man with something to hide from the American people isn't the guy I want handling China.
It seems logical to conclude that whatever Romeny is hiding, it is so very bad that he and his staff are convinced that he cannot win the election if it becomes known. He would rather suffer innuendoes over it as long as it remains a secret. It's kind of like a boxer who insists that he doesn't have a glass jaw but he takes body shot after body shot while he covers up his jaw.
A better option would have been to avoid publishing misleading ads...
You are quite right, but as a former Nokia shareholder (got out earlier this year at a big loss) I can assure you that Nokia got into its current woeful state by running out of "better options" some years ago.
I took a look at the first and last pages (as I write this) of the link in the article called "BitFloor needs their help". Wow. What a delusional bunch of people. There are discussions of ways for suckers (cough cough), sorry, I mean "investors" to pump more money into BitFloor. On page 17 (last page now, but won't be for long) one guy proudly proclaims that he now has even more faith in Mt. Gox and BitFloor (assuming BitFloor ever comes back online) because since they've already been hacked, then surely they must have secured those problems and they are now apparently impervious to any future attack. It seems to me that BitCoin exchanges have security policies founded on the idea that people will simply leave them alone and not look for ways to steal what they have. That hasn't worked so far.
I think you are 100% correct. I still remember from some years ago where RIM went to court rather than settle with some infamous patent troll and they got hit with a staggering judgement in a jury trial. I think it was at least 5 times what the troll wanted to settle out of court. Being an American and having served on juries, I can tell you that most people on juries are pretty dumb and incapable of understanding the issues they are presented with. You really don't want to risk that some crazy jury will award 10x or more in damages what it will cost you to settle. RIM thought they could win too and that the patent would be invalid but they lost. To me, that was when things began to go wrong for them. They shrugged it off, but I see their downward slide beginning at that very moment. Nobody wants to go to court and roll the dice with the chance that a company killing judgement might be the outcome.
This happened to a good friend of mine as well. He was actually using music from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and he was using a CC licensed version. I'm not suggesting you should do this, but you do have an option to pay some kind of fee ($10?) and "license" the music from those numbskulls at YouTube and get legal. They have partnered with some company whose name I do not remember but that company "licenses" music to make videos on YouTube legal. My friend refused to do it on principle so he just removed all of his videos from YouTube and he now uses one of the other video services, but I don't remember which one. He had the same objections as you. There was not really anyone to complain to and tell that he was using a CC licensed copy. Tchaikovsky's music has long been in the public domain so it's only specific performances that can be copyrighted. The publishing is all free and clear of copyright. My view is that this is all likely some recording industry scam where the licensing company gets most of the money but a percentage probably goes to the RIAA and YouTube itself. It just seemed to me that they really don't care about false positives because they can make money by giving people a choice to either pay to get legal or take down their videos. Some people simply cannot live without their videos being on YouTube so they probably make good money with this scam.
"virii" is not a word. The correct plural of "virus" is simply "viruses".
In current usage that is probably right. But at least give some acknowledgement to classical Latin, in which virii would, indeed, be the plural of virus. I've never figured out why we use the Latin word but refuse to use its Latin plural.
Do you actually know anything about Latin declensions? If you don't know what "declensions" means then you do NOT. This article disagrees with you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in_-us#Treating_v.C4.ABrus_as_2nd_declension_masculine
I know how inflected languages work having studied Russian, but as I have not studied Latin I can only point to this article and speculate that you're another person with no training in the subject who's trying to pass himself off as an expert.
I'm an IT support guy and not a programmer, so it's interesting for me to read this as I'm sure this will become the next "magic bullet" that gets proposed as the "solution to all of our problems" after Agile and hybrid-Agile begins to lose steam. What amazes me is that every few years some new programming methodology gets proposed and it goes something like this...
Outside Observer: But 5 years ago you guys told us that ______________ was the answer to all of our programming needs. And before that it was ____________. And before that it was ____________. Each time your swore that this new methodology would solve all of our problems and each time it was eventually rejected in favor of yet another new approach. So why should I expect this to be any different?
True Believer: Because this time we finally have the right idea!
OO: But that's exactly what you said the last time.
TB: (cough! cough!) Sorry I can't stay and talk more about this. Have an important meeting to go to....
The best defenses against scams are still the same:
1. Knowing your right to due process, and
2. Knowing proper spelling and grammar in your native language.
I'm continually dismayed that large numbers of people (possessing enough intelligence to use a web browser) don't realize that the FBI using email or popups to demand summary payment of "fines" without due process is implausible and illegal.
As an American, I will shamefully explain why this kind of thing would work here. First of all, I have noticed a big uptick in the number of people with conservative political affiliations who have an irrational distrust and hatred for governments in general and the US government in particular. Such people do not know anything about due process and they believe every negative story they hear about "big government". They'll easily believe that the FBI would contact people this way.
Second, just from reading Slashdot it's become clear to me to that the educational system in every English speaking country, yes every one of them, has completely failed its students and nobody anywhere in the English speaking world learns spelling and grammar any more. People think that "prolly" is a real word. People now think that anytime something puzzles you, you just need to add a question mark to it (ie. "I have no idea why the soap was on sale in the store for 25 cents?"). If anything I'm actually a little encouraged that only 3% or so of "victims" are falling for this. I would probably have guessed it would be at least 10%.
Slashdot Mirror
While the subject line is a bit sensational, I do think it's worth warning potentially naive people that they can lose everything in a move, even if unlikely. As a child my family hired a reputable moving company to move almost all of our belongings about 700 miles from a northern US state to a southern one. It was near the end of the year, so unbeknown to us, the driver actually drove the van north to spend New Year's with his family and abandoned it in a shopping center where it was robbed. What they didn't take, the robbers dumped in the snow to get ruined. We lost everything we didn't take with us in the car, including irreplaceable family photos of me and my brother as young children. The moving company fought us in court and in the end since my family was not rich and could not afford a protracted lawsuit, we had to settle for a price that probably didn't truly cover our losses but got most of them. I remember some years ago in school encountering another student with a similar story, but events like this are rare. People just need to understand that while it is probably unlikely that the OP will lose everything, the odds are probably a lot higher than he likely realizes and it's not a "1 in a million" event.
I think you are 100% correct, but it's not just politicians who are small minded. Here's an example. I work in IT as a Linux System Administrator. One of my colleagues is not only extremely smart and one of the most knowledgeable IT guys I've ever worked with (he is like a living set of man pages), he is into sci fi. He feels very strongly that we have more pressing needs at home in the USA than to spend almost any money on NASA. I mean, he is the exact kind of guy who I would expect to be in favor of building a moon base. When guys like him won't even back NASA, there's really no hope for the USA to ever do anything useful in space in our lifetime unless it becomes a national security concern. But in direct response to your suggestion, I want to see a moon base first and a manned expedition to Mars before we try something massive like this. It's a "walk before you run" kind of thing.
Geez. To me this is kind of like in the movie "The Jerk" when the crazy guy is trying to kill Steve Martin's character by shooting him from across the road with a rifle and Martin concludes that the guy has a problem with cans and he's actually attacking the cans, which just happen to also be everywhere Steve is.
Scandinavian people are more blue eyed than most ethnic groups and it's been known for years that blue eyed people may be more sensitive to vision problems caused by sunlight. It could also be that for some reason (ozone depletion?) that Scandinavia gets stronger sunlight than other regions. If they want to convince me that there is something to do this, show me a study in Brazil where there aren't very many blue eyed people and they drink a lot of coffee too.
Dear Nokia,
I guess you don't watch a lot of American movies or TV shows, but when you sell your soul to Satan in exchange for something, there's always a catch. For example, the guy who got eternal youth had to "enjoy" it in prison while facing a life sentence. If it makes you feel any better, nobody will probably like Microsoft's own branded phones any more than they do yours, but that's not much consolation as all you'll have left is being the king of the garbage section of the industry that makes "phones that are only phones". Nice knowing you.
I've been on a jury, and you'd be amazed at how easy it is for the entire jury to fall in line behind someone who seems to know what he's talking about, especially if the trial involves something few people have experience in (such as patent law). If the rest of the jury trusted him as the resident expert on the issue at hand, they would likely go along with whatever he said.
Of course. One of the reasons for this is that juries will almost always have a few fairly stupid people on them. There's a joke that says something along the lines of juries are made up of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty and there's some truth to that. I have severed twice and the most recent was 7 years ago in a criminal case. I remember one morning waiting in the jury room before we went to court to hear testimony and 3 of the guys on the jury got into an argument where each of them argued that he was more technologically incompetent than the other 2. Really. No exaggeration. So when these are examples of your jury you can understand why they might be swayed by someone who seems to know what he is doing, especially if he is a foreman, because they will have no idea about such a complex subject and will defer to anyone who seems to be an expert. Also, some people just want to get out ASAP and will go along with any majority that develops.
Most of my friends and relatives are non-techie people. A lot of non-techie people have the perception that AMD is cheap junk. Amongst my techie friends, a lot of us use AMD. It's all I buy because I feel very strongly that somebody should support it and I'm willing to be that somebody. I've been able to convince my brother (non-techie) that AMD is OK to buy, but I also know non-techie people who will pay more for Intel merely in the perception that it's "better" somehow. Intel used to advertise on TV and AMD never did. Maybe AMD could use some ads to at least give the perception that they are a player. And some wins where a big player uses them would really help.
Good job, wierd_w. I think your post is not only accurate but objective. martypantsROK should understand that if he lives in a large metro area in the USA that he'll have much better results than in a rural area. In rural areas you probably have to use Verizon. I live in a large metro area and I used T-Mobile for years and was happy with them, but I did not use them much for data. My work required me to get a new subsidized phone and I was not able to stay with T-Mobile as for reasons unknown to me, they are the only one of the four major US carriers that my company does not have an agreement with. martypantsROK is likely to be very unimpressed with US mobile and internet service after having lived in South Korea, but that's just how it is.
You are correct, but missing the point as a lot of people are. Electric cars are important for reasons that have nothing to do with CO2 emissions. US electricity production is 100% produced from domestic sources, none of it from imported sources. Gasoline requires the US to pay various loathsome countries who don't have our best interests at heart. Anything that reduces US dependency on foreign oil and shifts it towards domestic electricity is a huge plus. We can worry about producing cars, even electrics, in a more environmentally friendly way after we break the dependency on foreign oil, or at least reduce it to an amount we can get only from trustworthy, friendly nations (ie. Mexico, Canada, Norway).
I have long ago given up the hope that any sanity could be restored to copyright in the USA. The Capitol Records vs. Naxos case was unbelievably far reaching, with the court that heard the case ruling basically that every recording ever made in the USA, yes even back to Thomas Edison, was still under copyright. They essentially made up the law in their ruling, but as Naxos was clearly in the wrong (they knowingly violated a valid copyright on an old recording from the 1930s) Naxos didn't want to appeal and spend more money on a case they couldn't win, even though an appeal might have knocked down some of the more insane parts of the original court ruling.
What really gets me is that in this current age of declining government budgets that nobody sees the biggest flaw of the Bono Copyright law - namely that it allows automatic renewal of copyrights for free . I'm not in favor of perpetual copyrights, but as others have argued, at least make the people that want them have to pay for them. If they are so valuable then charge for them. I cannot believe the US government is willingly passing by possible copyright fees by allowing automatic free renewals. At least if renewals cost money, some people would refuse to pay it and some things would fall back into the public domain and those who really consider renewals to be valuable would at least have to pay for it. A sliding scale where the renewal costs began to get more costly over time could also finally cause things to go back into the public domain.
I do agree with your point that this is mostly to get future Bradley Manning copy cats who may cooperate in the future with Wikileaks or something similar. However, I do disagree that the US has a problem with Assange. I think that if we could secretly talk with the upper levels of the US government, while they are not at all thrilled with Assange, I suspect that they are resigned to the fact that he is just a journalist of sorts who got the story of a lifetime dumped in his lap and he printed it. The real problem is with Manning.
For many years now, the US has had spies like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen who got people killed. The US government ended up looking powerless to give them the death penalty when they basically made a deal that in exchange for the government leaving their families alone and not asking any more questions that they would go into explicit detail about what they had done. I think the real issue that the US government doesn't really have a clear cut legal case against Manning. Oh I am sure that he will be convicted of something, but he will probably top out at 20 years behind bars and possibly get 10 or even as few as 5. That is the real issue here. I think that the US government wants to be sure that the next Manning will face the death penalty. Of course some people will not be stopped from spying or turning over secrets because of various reasons, but I have felt for years that until the US actually executes someone for this that they really look impotent and powerless to stop this in the future.
A release of Windows not being ready has never stopped Microsoft from releasing it. Nor has it stopped the fools who jump on every beta they put out. I participate on a video forum at another site and every beta that comes out, we have members who jump on it and then bitch about how various things don't work. That doesn't ever stop from them doing the same thing over and over every time a new beta comes out. And the market has never punished Microsoft for any of its mistakes so even if Win 8 is as big of a disaster as I think it will be, it won't matter.
Unfortunately, the USA doesn't care about inconveniences like sovereignty of a foreign nation.
I'm American and I'm honest enough to admit that such comments are deserved. However, let's not pretend here that only the USA does this. Various EU countries have had court rulings that try to impose domestic laws across international boundaries. France and Italy come to mind as having has various court rulings that essentially try to impose local laws on US businesses in every country in the planet just because those business happen to also operate in France and Italy. Those attempts by those countries have only been successful locally by the way, but that hasn't stopped their judges one bit from arguing that national laws need to apply to every country where foreign owned business operate, just because they happen to have offices in France and Italy. I'm sure that there are other countries that similar claims can be made for. Let's also mention how China is aggressively pursuing rather dubious territorial claims in southeast Asia right now that push their sea boundary almost up to the beaches of a rather large number of sovereign countries in the region. Speaking of China, a Chinese consulate in the USA recently appealed to a US mayor to get a mural removed that was legally painted on private property in Portland, Oregon and expresses a pro-Tibet sentiment. The mayor was not amused. So complaints are certainly fair, but please spare me the hypocritical argument that only the US does this.
I work for a (mostly) US based Fortune 500 company who for various reasons I would prefer not to name. Short story - if you are a big enough company that external auditors come to visit you (we are) and your Dev people install code, even in test environments, you may fail an audit in the USA. Trust me, it is bad for business to fail this kind of audit. I'm in a system admin type job and a bit isolated from the workings of our Dev group, but it's my understanding that we run Agile or some variation of it and we absolutely do not allow Devs to ever install code in test or production environments.
This only applies to the USA.
I'm not a lawyer. But lucky for me my best friend is. He has taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA. Most lay people have the mistaken belief that all rights are absolute. For example, they think that the right to free speech means you cannot have that restricted. That is simply not true as there is another thread on Slashdot just below this one about a guy who is now in jail facing a one million dollar bail request to get out for exercising his "rights to free speech" on an ESPN website. Your "right to free speech" does not trump copyright law is another example. You can't threaten to kill or harm people and then say "Free speech!" or "I was just kidding" and necessarily get away with it. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled against gun restrictions but they have also been clear to state that such rulings should not be interpreted to mean that there can't be any restrictions on guns.
There is no "country of Gilbraltar" as the anonymous coward who posted the article suggests. It is a British overseas territory. It's something akin to Guam or American Samoa which are territories of the USA and nobody thinks they are countries.
In my opinion Nokia was the perfect partner for this but they no longer are the perfect partner. Nokia got burned badly by the Win 7 phones and they bet the company on this partnership. I am afraid that in the first world too many people will view the Win 8 phone as another potential compatibility nightmare (for those that know about the previous Nokia Win 7 phones) or they'll see them as "not an iPhone or an Android and therefore a loser platform that won't survive". Nokia just reminds me of too many IT companies that can't admit that the market changed and they weren't prepared and can't play catchup any more. They've got the garbage section of the mobile phone industry covered. If you want low featured "I just want a phone that's a phone" type devices, then they are your company, especially if you live in a less developed country where you either can't afford or can't get an Android or iPhone. But I think that it's too late for them to get taken seriously in developed parts of AustralAsia, Europe and North America that basically want tiny computers that masquerade as phones.
I've read in the past about her case and this is what I remember being her main problems.
1) She had bottom of the barrel lawyers in all of her trials. If I remember correctly at one of the later trials she was actually represented by law school students who prior to the trial basically bragged that this case was going to be "easy" to win. Practicing law for real may just be a little tougher than it seems in class, boys.
2) She has been perceived extremely negatively by juries, which has definitely led to the size of the judgements against her.
3) She's been her own worst enemy when testifying, but that relates to #1 in large part. She lacks a credible excuse for her behavior and seemed to jurors to be a liar and trying to cover up what she did. That has worked heavily against her in reaching a verdict.
4) She has consistently displayed an outsized ego and an erroneous belief that she can beat the charges by going to court when in fact she has probably had the weakest case of anyone to ever challenge the RIAA. I would call her delusional.
In summary, she's got a terrible case and she's tried to win it on the cheap and the outcomes are predictable.
You make some good points, but you lose me on the "Romney has nothing to hide" argument. I admit it could be true, but it seems unlikely. Even members of the Republican Party in the media have said as much. He has decided to take body shots from Obama on the issue. Since it could theoretically cost him the election, it seems unlikely that he would do so on a matter of principle. In fact, I would argue that if he really has nothing to hide and he is doing this on principle alone, his judgement is so flawed that he is unqualified to be president. Imagine the following hypothetical statement from an upcoming debate:
... So certainly we need to pay attention very carefully to what China is doing in regards to their continuous military buildups, which seem to be at odds for a nation that claims to be acting only in peaceful interests. And you know, we need a president who has the strength of character to stand up to the Chinese. I have that strength of character and I showed it by releasing 10 years of tax returns, whereas my opponent clearly has something to hide by refusing to release anything but the last 2 years. I know that a man with something to hide from the American people isn't the guy I want handling China.
Obama:
It seems logical to conclude that whatever Romeny is hiding, it is so very bad that he and his staff are convinced that he cannot win the election if it becomes known. He would rather suffer innuendoes over it as long as it remains a secret. It's kind of like a boxer who insists that he doesn't have a glass jaw but he takes body shot after body shot while he covers up his jaw.
A better option would have been to avoid publishing misleading ads...
You are quite right, but as a former Nokia shareholder (got out earlier this year at a big loss) I can assure you that Nokia got into its current woeful state by running out of "better options" some years ago.
I took a look at the first and last pages (as I write this) of the link in the article called "BitFloor needs their help". Wow. What a delusional bunch of people. There are discussions of ways for suckers (cough cough), sorry, I mean "investors" to pump more money into BitFloor. On page 17 (last page now, but won't be for long) one guy proudly proclaims that he now has even more faith in Mt. Gox and BitFloor (assuming BitFloor ever comes back online) because since they've already been hacked, then surely they must have secured those problems and they are now apparently impervious to any future attack. It seems to me that BitCoin exchanges have security policies founded on the idea that people will simply leave them alone and not look for ways to steal what they have. That hasn't worked so far.
I think you are 100% correct. I still remember from some years ago where RIM went to court rather than settle with some infamous patent troll and they got hit with a staggering judgement in a jury trial. I think it was at least 5 times what the troll wanted to settle out of court. Being an American and having served on juries, I can tell you that most people on juries are pretty dumb and incapable of understanding the issues they are presented with. You really don't want to risk that some crazy jury will award 10x or more in damages what it will cost you to settle. RIM thought they could win too and that the patent would be invalid but they lost. To me, that was when things began to go wrong for them. They shrugged it off, but I see their downward slide beginning at that very moment. Nobody wants to go to court and roll the dice with the chance that a company killing judgement might be the outcome.
This happened to a good friend of mine as well. He was actually using music from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and he was using a CC licensed version. I'm not suggesting you should do this, but you do have an option to pay some kind of fee ($10?) and "license" the music from those numbskulls at YouTube and get legal. They have partnered with some company whose name I do not remember but that company "licenses" music to make videos on YouTube legal. My friend refused to do it on principle so he just removed all of his videos from YouTube and he now uses one of the other video services, but I don't remember which one. He had the same objections as you. There was not really anyone to complain to and tell that he was using a CC licensed copy. Tchaikovsky's music has long been in the public domain so it's only specific performances that can be copyrighted. The publishing is all free and clear of copyright. My view is that this is all likely some recording industry scam where the licensing company gets most of the money but a percentage probably goes to the RIAA and YouTube itself. It just seemed to me that they really don't care about false positives because they can make money by giving people a choice to either pay to get legal or take down their videos. Some people simply cannot live without their videos being on YouTube so they probably make good money with this scam.
"virii" is not a word. The correct plural of "virus" is simply "viruses".
In current usage that is probably right. But at least give some acknowledgement to classical Latin, in which virii would, indeed, be the plural of virus. I've never figured out why we use the Latin word but refuse to use its Latin plural.
Do you actually know anything about Latin declensions? If you don't know what "declensions" means then you do NOT. This article disagrees with you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in_-us#Treating_v.C4.ABrus_as_2nd_declension_masculine
I know how inflected languages work having studied Russian, but as I have not studied Latin I can only point to this article and speculate that you're another person with no training in the subject who's trying to pass himself off as an expert.
I'm an IT support guy and not a programmer, so it's interesting for me to read this as I'm sure this will become the next "magic bullet" that gets proposed as the "solution to all of our problems" after Agile and hybrid-Agile begins to lose steam. What amazes me is that every few years some new programming methodology gets proposed and it goes something like this...
Outside Observer: But 5 years ago you guys told us that ______________ was the answer to all of our programming needs. And before that it was ____________. And before that it was ____________. Each time your swore that this new methodology would solve all of our problems and each time it was eventually rejected in favor of yet another new approach. So why should I expect this to be any different?
True Believer: Because this time we finally have the right idea!
OO: But that's exactly what you said the last time.
TB: (cough! cough!) Sorry I can't stay and talk more about this. Have an important meeting to go to....
The best defenses against scams are still the same: 1. Knowing your right to due process, and 2. Knowing proper spelling and grammar in your native language.
I'm continually dismayed that large numbers of people (possessing enough intelligence to use a web browser) don't realize that the FBI using email or popups to demand summary payment of "fines" without due process is implausible and illegal.
As an American, I will shamefully explain why this kind of thing would work here. First of all, I have noticed a big uptick in the number of people with conservative political affiliations who have an irrational distrust and hatred for governments in general and the US government in particular. Such people do not know anything about due process and they believe every negative story they hear about "big government". They'll easily believe that the FBI would contact people this way.
Second, just from reading Slashdot it's become clear to me to that the educational system in every English speaking country, yes every one of them, has completely failed its students and nobody anywhere in the English speaking world learns spelling and grammar any more. People think that "prolly" is a real word. People now think that anytime something puzzles you, you just need to add a question mark to it (ie. "I have no idea why the soap was on sale in the store for 25 cents?"). If anything I'm actually a little encouraged that only 3% or so of "victims" are falling for this. I would probably have guessed it would be at least 10%.