Don't you find it a little ridiculous that the only real option people have to get a person to represent their interests is to buy one off? Too many people have resigned themselves to "Well, that's the way it is, those are the rules of the game." Fuck that. When the game is rigged you don't play along; you flip the fucking board and walk away from the cheating little shit that's rigging the game.
We need serious campaign reform to include barring direct financial contribution to any candidate and mandating that all elections be publicly funded equally to all qualifying candidates regardless of party affiliation. Everything short of that is just spinning our wheels and playing the rigged game with the cheaters.
This sounds great, but I don't think it's possible. First of all, the American public is too stupid so anything that requires them to be smart enough with regards to voting will never work. A few weeks ago I saw a pole where something like 76% of the public wanted to "vote everybody in Congress out" but something like 56% of those same people said "Everybody but my Congressman needs to go". This is why nothing changes. Secondly, like it or not the US Supreme Court in recent years has had a good deal of decisions that could be described as "We're not saying that this is a good idea, but as we do not believe in legislating from the bench we are forced to reach a decision on the merits alone of the law and that may not be a good thing". McCain-Feingold got struck down as a free speech issue. That was probably our last best chance to to try to level the field financially for elections. I am skeptical that future legislation could be written in a way that would pass a Supreme Court challenge related to free speech.
I believe that the American political system can't be reformed because Americans are too stupid. I read a recent poll that said that something like 76% of voters want all incumbents out of Congress, but something like 56% actually say "All but my Congressman". That sums up the problem in this country. Everybody wants everybody else to sacrifice so they don't have to. When nobody will sacrifice, nothing will change. It pains me to say it, but we get the government we deserve because of our own stupidity.
Whois says that the domain was created on Aug. 20, 2003. Newt's had 8 years to take care of this and as someone else pointed out, he may have the law on his side if he wants to argue that it's cybersquatting and he should be given it. It wouldn't surprise me at all for such a case to result in him getting control of the domain for free. But I can't feel sorry for him as he could have dealt with this years ago.
I take issue with you saying that Sheila Jackson Lee is the dumbest of the dumb, that title clearly goes to Representative Hank Johnson (the Congressman who was concerned that deploying too many troops to Guam might cause the island to capsize).
To be fair - Johnson was elected to Congress in 2006 because he seemed (and arguably still is, stupid or not) a better alternative than self-serving and race baiting Cynthia McKinney, who he defeated in the Democratic primary. Johnson's district is majority black so it's going to remain in Democratic hands for some time. I'm of the opinion that he's still better than the alternative (McKinney) given that the district can't mount a realistic challenge from a Republican candidate. Personally, I think McKinney is quite possibly insane or at the very best has such a twisted and warped viewpoint that to put her back in Congress would be a gigantic mistake and not even come close to serving the needs of the district's voters. Johnson may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he seems pretty benign to me and at least he seems interested in doing what a Congressman is supposed to do to represent his district instead of trying to pour gasoline on as many fires as possible like McKinney did.
To be fair, I understand his thoughts, as wrong as they turned out to be. I work in the US for a Fortune 300 company who I do not wish to name. I'm an IT guy in the office where I work. For many years, Blackberry was the only corporate approved phone solution if you wanted to read work email. Two things changed this.
1) As much as I'd love to believe that my company "saw the light", the fact is that it took people in the very top parts of management in my company who demanded that iphones be approved for reading email before it was finally placed on the approved devices list. Had those people been Crackberry addicts instead, I would not have an iphone today.
2) We are using McAfee's EMM product to read email and I would call that product "superb". It took away any technical objections to the iphone from those who didn't want to support it because they could no longer argue that with an iphone you couldn't respond to calendar invitations or that email didn't look good or wasn't readable. To be fair, those who used the Good product to do Outlook type stuff on iphone prior to EMM told me that it was terrible and if there was not a better program available (EMM) then the objections to the iphone might have carried the day. We had and still have an awful lot of Crackberry luddites in lower levels of management here who are married to their Crackberries, but iphones are the phone of choice among non-managers and apparently a large number of senior managers here.
I think Sprint opposed the deal simply because they made a lot of bad technology bets and decisions over the years and the reality is that they can't grow their market share. So as long as T-Mobile survives as an independent company, they can tell their shareholders "We're number three! We're number three! We've got a chance to be number two!" Saying to your shareholders "We're in last place among the major carriers with no chance for growth" doesn't play as well as bragging that at least you're not in last place - yet.
I have to say though that while until last month I was a long time T-Mobile customer and I loved the service, I really wonder about them. I work for a Fortune 300 company and I was ordered by management to get on a corporate phone plan as soon as possible. T-Mobile is the only mobile phone company in the USA among the Big Four that we don't have an agreement with, so they lost my business. I really don't get why they haven't worked out some kind of deal with my company, but I'm not in a position to know why that hasn't happened. But that is lost business that they seem to not care about. I know that AT&T in particular is pretty aggressive about getting business customers. Maybe one of the reasons T-Mobile can't please their Sith Lords at DT is that they don't court the business market.
I call bs on this. As an American who can actually speak more than 1 language (I speak 3 besides English to varying degrees of proficiency) and who has traveled Europe and Asia in the past decade, this is just simply not true. I have found that if you behave respectfully towards the culture of wherever you travel that people are often thrilled to meet Americans. Now lots of Americans just simply do not know how to behave when they travel. They bitch about everything - "You eat THAT ? ", " I can't believe how many people are here", "Do you take American dollars (or even worse, traveler's checks)?" and so on. I've never had any issues when traveling and many people when finding out that I'm an American have wanted to ask me various questions about life here. Then again, I don't act like a jerk, start arguments in bars, etc.
It seems clear from reading the posts that many of you really do not understand what happened here. So I will explain it to you.
1) The accused is accused of leading a DOS attack. Not participating but leading it. That's important.
2) While it is true that he is facing 15 years for this, I would think it's unlikely that he'll do get that much time. Assuming he is a first time offender and he doesn't act like a complete jerk in court and his attorney also doesn't cop an attitude, if he is convicted he'll go to jail but I would guess that it would only be maybe 2 years.
3) Note that the feds are saying that he tried to cover up his IP address and it took them a while to get him. Clearly he knew that what he was doing was not legal.
Like it or not, it seems to me that the US government is very adamant about sending a message to Anonymous that some of them will get caught and they will go to jail. Anonymous members know that what they are doing is not lawful but they think they are too smart to get caught.
Yes, it appears that an American football team, based in London, named themselves after the 76 nights of consecutive bombing.
How'd America like a European-style football (soccer) team based in NY naming itself the New York Nine Elevens? Boggles the mind.
You know that old saying "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?" It could be good old fashioned American ignorance at work here. I'm American and I can tell you that a really large number of Americans operate under the principle that "If it didn't happen here, it didn't happen". It's worth mentioning that "blitz" is an American football term for a play where the defense sends more rushers after the quarterback than normal (normal is 3 or 4 depending on the defense). Blitzing is a high risk, high reward kind of play. If it works, the quarterback may be tackled ("sacked") for a loss, throw the ball away for an incomplete pass or be intercepted on a rushed pass. If it fails and the quarterback gets off a successful pass, the receiver may get a bigger gain than normal due to few defenders being available in coverage. I suspect someone on the team thought that London Blitz sounded like a cool, footbally name for a team and was just completely ignorant of the London Blitz in WWII. After all, we're living in a country where people under 30 actually believe that "prolly" is a real word, so I certainly would tend to blame ignorance here as the main cause.
This comment only applies to the USA. It may or may not apply to other countries.
Here in the USA we basically have to pay some provider a monthly subscription fee. Yes, you can try to watch over the air (OTA) TV for free if you are lucky enough to get a good signal where you live, but the channels are very limited. So we get suckered into buying more channels than we want just to get the channels we do want. For example, you may want one particular sports channel but you have to buy 15 different ones in a package to get it and you'll never watch the other channels. TV providers fear letting customers buy channels a la carte as they know that their income would plummet. Off the top of my head I would think that most people would probably be happy with paying a lot less money for only 20-30 channels if they could pick those individual channels themselves. I have to admit that I have just about reached my limit with TV charges and another rate increase might just make me drop the whole thing and resort to cheaper alternatives to watch the shows I want to see at a later date and time. Some people argue that "Oh if you switched from cable to satellite" or vice-versa that you would "save a lot of money" but the reality is that once the introductory offers expire, the prices are pretty much the same whoever you get your TV from. What we really need in the USA is a way to drive down the costs to the consumers to subscribe in a way that doesn't take away our favorite channels. As long as the providers are able to get away with avoiding a la carte pricing, they've got us trapped.
However, I have to say that I am not at all an Apple fanboy, but I am really impressed at how Apple took mobile telephones and pads and turned them into something actually useful that were generations ahead of earlier attempts to do so. It's been rumored for some time that "Apple TV" is going to debut next year and I am curious to see if Steve Jobs figured out something on TVs that Apple can make better in a way they did for portable music players, mobile phones and pads.
As an American EU-watcher and sometimes fan of the bloc, I have to say that Italy has the worst "justice" system in the entire EU. Unfortunately I see this as more of an anomaly where they finally got one right than any sort of real progress towards having a more meaningful and useful system of justice. I'd like to point out, again, that while the American system is certainly less than perfect that we don't have the crazy limits on free speech that the EU countries seem very content with and they're a lot closer to having "thought crimes" than the US is.
I have no kids of my own, but I have nephews. The oldest is in college at a good quality state university. I had a conversation with him not terribly long ago and it went something like this:
Me: I saw you wrote "prolly" on Facebook. You do know that that is not a real word, right?
Him: What do you mean?
Me: "Prolly" is text message speak. The real word is "probably".
Him: (look of puzzlement and confusion)
Me: I'm not joking. You've never heard of "probably"?
Him: I've only seen "prolly".
When you graduate from an American high school and you are a reasonably intelligent person (he's got a B average at college) and you think "prolly" is a real word and you don't know what "probably" is, the educational system may just be broke beyond fixing.
I said this yesterday, and I'll say it again today: the problem is that the "two" parties in power now both have the same agenda. It is time for people to start voting third party.
This sounds great on the surface. But who exactly am I supposed to vote for? I am American by the way. I cannot in any way vote Libertarian. I totally reject the Libertarian Party. I truly believe that libertarianism is a fatally flawed political philosophy that cannot work. I see communism as a more rational political philosophy. That's really bad. The other parties are too small and too narrowly focused for my tastes so there is no real third party option for me.
Americans have consistently demonstrated that EVERYTHING is negotiable if the price is low enough. Certainly some people would have problems with doing business with China Telecom, but if the cost was low enough and the service was good they'd do OK in this market.
Flash and Silverlight represent the mid-1990s way of doing things with third party browser addons. Back when we needed crutches like these, they were useful. The leg has healed, though, so it's time to throw the crutches under a bus.
Content producers should just suck up and use non-DRM video streams. They should all know by now that both Flash and Silverlight video "protections" have been circumvented just like Blu-Ray, DVD, etc and that there is really no technological recourse against this.
Really? Do tell how exactly those Silverlight protections have been circumvented. Unless you are talking about a streaming media recorder which simply records the stream as it plays on your PC, I am not aware of any way to defeat Silverlight DRM. The use of separate protected streams for audio and video is fiendishly clever and I've never heard of a successful way to crack it. A video forum where I regularly participate gets posts all the time asking how to record Netflix streams and nobody has ever suggested anything but a streaming media recorder.
It's always fun on Slashdot to trash the USA. Yet here in the USA we have this pesky thing in our constitution called free speech. Funny how the USA always gets the criticism yet consider
1) In the USA you cannot get sent to jail for expressing hateful speech such as denying the holocaust.
2) In the USA you cannot get sent to jail for making racist statements.
3) In the USA I am not aware of ANY websites that are blocked by a court or government order. Even the RIAA and MPAA have not been able to accomplish that one.
I'm sorry that the UK and other European governments have decided to implement thought police, but as an American there's not really anything I can do about it.
I am an American on vacation in China and I've got a little time to kill so I'm responding to this from my hotel room in Shanghai. Obviously the GFoC is not blocking me from reading Slashdot or responding. For the curious, I have no problems to access the following:
Slashdot
CNN/SI
Yahoo including email
Gmail
Google - works but it redirects to Google Hong Kong and they make it kind of slow to connect
CNN
Fox News
Yahoo Finance
Wikipedia although it's well known that articles about certain "sensitive" events won't come up
Some article redirects don't work. Some news articles off Yahoo don't work, but I don't know if that is a Yahoo problem or not. For example I wanted to read an article about a Pakistani Taliban who got killed by a drone missile and I can't read it at all. The weirdest thing of all is that I absolutely cannot get to Facebook. Really? You're going to allow Wikipedia, CNN and Fox News but Facebook is too evil to allow? Really? Ohhhhkayyyyyy....
I do have Chinese friends and you might be surprised at how much they actually do know about the outside world and about "secret" things their government doesn't want them to know about, like the "sensitive" events I mentioned earlier. My personal feeling is that the Chinese government is playing nice with knockoffs because the US in particular just will not shut up about it. I think they've decided that there's more to gain by playing nice on the issue than turning a blind eye. I can tell you that emails are not monitored by the government unless maybe you use certain sensitive words. Maybe. One of my friends has said some very blunt things in the past to me in email about the government here and never been asked about it. You can't really monitor the emails of hundreds of millions of people in all honesty. On the subject of knockoffs, many times today I was asked if I wanted to buy a fake Rolex at places tourists go to. It got a little old. And yes, it's well known that China does hacking/espionage. However, their own citizens get victimized too. One friend said that he simply will not download anything from the internet any more because he's too afraid of computer viruses and he's actually got pretty good computer skills for a non-IT person.
It could be that as others have said it's just a cynical way for the government to pretend to give people a bigger voice but then again maybe they honestly figured "What the heck? Let's give it a shot. Maybe someone will come up with a really good idea we actually could implement."
Why the fuck is anyone listening to this doddering old fool?
I think that's a great question and I'll try to answer it. I've got a few friends who are hardcore libertarian. I've known others who were similarly minded, but I wouldn't call them personal friends although I knew them. It seems to me that theoretically libertarianism should appeal to certain individuals on the left and right but in reality it's become the last place for very hardcore right wingers to go. Some people have shifted so far to the right that they can't turn to fascism (its association with the Nazis has doomed it as a political philosophy) so they turn to libertarianism. Libertarianism basically has this core idea that "If we just destroy the government so that it is small and weak and it can't do anything at all except oversee the military and do a few things with foreign governments, then everything would be so much better if not perfect." I realized some years ago that some libertarian ideas sound great, but the whole system breaks down because it relies on human beings all playing by the rules. All you need is one guy to take advantage of it, just one, and the whole thing collapses. It's little more in my mind than a variation on anarchy. To be blunt, I think that communism, which has been thoroughly discredited, is more rational political philosophy. That's bad.
A certain percentage of the American right, I'd guess maybe 20% or so, have a hardcore hatred of government and want it destroyed or made incredibly weak if possible. Part of me wishes that they could get their wish because it would be an absolute unmitigated disaster and it would kill libertarianism forever as a political philosophy but I'd have to leave the country because I wouldn't want to be here when everything starts to go to hell. I have only met one person who was libertarian who had a rational explanation for supporting it. He's a smart guy and I bluntly asked him how he could support libertarianism when he had to be smart enough to understand that for it to work it requires everybody to play by the rules and that won't happen. He told me that he certainly understood that could never happen, but he was tired of people ducking responsibility for everything and blaming everyone else for their problems and a libertarian government would force people to become responsible for their own decisions.
I'd bet that "up and coming" really means "She's never had even a decent supporting role in any film that more than 1000 people have paid to watch, but we're sure she's about to break through to the big time any day now". I'm sure she'll eventually be identified and I also bet that when we find out who she is, everyone is going to say "Never heard of her".
You have to remember that your company has no loyalty to you.
He works for a small company, and that's not always the case.
Good intentions only go so far, even with small companies. Cases in point.
1) My current employer is a Fortune 500 company. A few years ago they bought out the company I was working for. Roughly 10 or 11 years ago, before I was working here, the company was a smallish start up. They had some money issues and they made some rather savage layoffs to save money. Sure they felt bad about it, I truly believe that, but folks were still shown the door.
2) We lost a good handful of experienced employees to a start up in the past year. The start up seemed great - at first. Then the owners decided to sell the company and they did a massive layoff to get costs down. Almost everybody they hired from my current employer was shown the door. They even told one person who had just worked their last day with us on a Friday and was going to start for them on Monday "Uh, don't bother coming in because you don't have a job here anymore." By the way, that person was not rehired by my company just because the new company laid them off over the weekend before the new job actually started.
I'm sure that some companies really do care, but the minute it's cheaper to lose you than keep you, you're gone. That's the reality of it.
I assume, then, that you never shut your computer down for the night. Or for the weekend.
It's been my experience that most IT people rarely do this. I don't. Most of the people who do this are non-IT people who fear that if they don't watch their PC every second it's in use, terrible, dire things will happen. I've yet to have anyone in this category provide some sort of sensible explanation for doing it. It NEVER has anything to do with saving electricity. It seems to be some sort of unfounded fear that if you (gasp!) leave your PC powered up overnight while you sleep that leet Russian haxors will pwn your box, yet if you only keep the PC powered up while you are using it, that simply cannot happen.
I agree with the grandparent that reboots usually don't happen because of RAM. I'm not really getting how moving to a new type of memory is going to be helpful here.
Italy has perhaps the most warped sense of justice of any EU member. Just research the Achille Lauro hijacking where Italy demanded the right to try the hijackers/terrorists and then promptly felt sorry for all of them after it convicted them. I'm not sure that Italy is qualified to judge a dispute between 2 children fighting over a seat in a classroom. This doesn't surprise me at all as a country that cannot figure out how to meet out true justice to criminals will of course be completely unable to distinguish between what is and isn't a crime.
The release of the whole batch means that any negotiation to avoid the worst criminal penalties for Assange and others has failed. These people know they are going to be seeing little but the cinderblock walls of a detention facility for many years. They're giving up.
You may be right. But I would like to suggest another hypothesis.
The release may instead mean that Assange and others believe even more strongly than they did before that they cannot be touched and see no reason to be reasonable any more. I think Assange is and has been crazy. I don't think he's rational. Given how the response to him has been fairly weak (he's not in jail and while I think he is due for a court date, he has a chance to beat the rap), I can understand how he might conclude that's he invincible. Look at Bradley Manning. Yes, he was detained under pretty harsh conditions (this is no longer true), but he's not going to face the death penalty for what he did. Until the US government asks for the death penalty for guys like Manning and actually sends in a death squad to rub out Assange, the idea will persist that there's nothing to lose here by spilling the beans. Kill someone over it and the next guy in line just might think twice before he clicks on that "send" button.
I'm not saying this was a great idea or that the execution was ideal but there is precedent. IBM long known as a hardware company shifted to software and services in a fairly short period of time and seems to be doing quite well at it. If this new CEO has a vision and a strategy behind it HP could end up better off.
You're right, but here's the problem. When IBM did this, their services and software business was very well established. The companies I have worked for, including Uncle Sam, have all employed IBM consultants for various tasks. If there was any company that could have pulled this off, it was IBM because of their size. HP isn't a big player in this field right now. With IBM's move, if it failed they still had core hardware businesses they could fall back on. With HP, the CEO has bet the company on them being able to do something they've never been able to do in the past - become a big time player in the services market. I could be wrong and HP could indeed pull it off. But I admit to being skeptical because they are going to have to win on price to get bigger in this field of business. The big players who are already there might cut prices below what HP can match just to keep customers. Or it could be that HP simply cannot compete on price with the bigger players and they'll have to hope that they can get consumers in this economy to pick them for other reasons. That's not likely. My previous job was working in the US subsidiary of a major EU telecom and our business in North America was terrible because our cost structure was too high and everybody bigger than us did what we did for less cost. So I'm kind of skeptical about this whole idea HP has as I've seen first hand how difficult it is for smaller companies to compete on cost with the bigger, established players.
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Don't you find it a little ridiculous that the only real option people have to get a person to represent their interests is to buy one off? Too many people have resigned themselves to "Well, that's the way it is, those are the rules of the game." Fuck that. When the game is rigged you don't play along; you flip the fucking board and walk away from the cheating little shit that's rigging the game.
We need serious campaign reform to include barring direct financial contribution to any candidate and mandating that all elections be publicly funded equally to all qualifying candidates regardless of party affiliation. Everything short of that is just spinning our wheels and playing the rigged game with the cheaters.
This sounds great, but I don't think it's possible. First of all, the American public is too stupid so anything that requires them to be smart enough with regards to voting will never work. A few weeks ago I saw a pole where something like 76% of the public wanted to "vote everybody in Congress out" but something like 56% of those same people said "Everybody but my Congressman needs to go". This is why nothing changes. Secondly, like it or not the US Supreme Court in recent years has had a good deal of decisions that could be described as "We're not saying that this is a good idea, but as we do not believe in legislating from the bench we are forced to reach a decision on the merits alone of the law and that may not be a good thing". McCain-Feingold got struck down as a free speech issue. That was probably our last best chance to to try to level the field financially for elections. I am skeptical that future legislation could be written in a way that would pass a Supreme Court challenge related to free speech.
I believe that the American political system can't be reformed because Americans are too stupid. I read a recent poll that said that something like 76% of voters want all incumbents out of Congress, but something like 56% actually say "All but my Congressman". That sums up the problem in this country. Everybody wants everybody else to sacrifice so they don't have to. When nobody will sacrifice, nothing will change. It pains me to say it, but we get the government we deserve because of our own stupidity.
Whois says that the domain was created on Aug. 20, 2003. Newt's had 8 years to take care of this and as someone else pointed out, he may have the law on his side if he wants to argue that it's cybersquatting and he should be given it. It wouldn't surprise me at all for such a case to result in him getting control of the domain for free. But I can't feel sorry for him as he could have dealt with this years ago.
I take issue with you saying that Sheila Jackson Lee is the dumbest of the dumb, that title clearly goes to Representative Hank Johnson (the Congressman who was concerned that deploying too many troops to Guam might cause the island to capsize).
To be fair - Johnson was elected to Congress in 2006 because he seemed (and arguably still is, stupid or not) a better alternative than self-serving and race baiting Cynthia McKinney, who he defeated in the Democratic primary. Johnson's district is majority black so it's going to remain in Democratic hands for some time. I'm of the opinion that he's still better than the alternative (McKinney) given that the district can't mount a realistic challenge from a Republican candidate. Personally, I think McKinney is quite possibly insane or at the very best has such a twisted and warped viewpoint that to put her back in Congress would be a gigantic mistake and not even come close to serving the needs of the district's voters. Johnson may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he seems pretty benign to me and at least he seems interested in doing what a Congressman is supposed to do to represent his district instead of trying to pour gasoline on as many fires as possible like McKinney did.
To be fair, I understand his thoughts, as wrong as they turned out to be. I work in the US for a Fortune 300 company who I do not wish to name. I'm an IT guy in the office where I work. For many years, Blackberry was the only corporate approved phone solution if you wanted to read work email. Two things changed this.
1) As much as I'd love to believe that my company "saw the light", the fact is that it took people in the very top parts of management in my company who demanded that iphones be approved for reading email before it was finally placed on the approved devices list. Had those people been Crackberry addicts instead, I would not have an iphone today.
2) We are using McAfee's EMM product to read email and I would call that product "superb". It took away any technical objections to the iphone from those who didn't want to support it because they could no longer argue that with an iphone you couldn't respond to calendar invitations or that email didn't look good or wasn't readable. To be fair, those who used the Good product to do Outlook type stuff on iphone prior to EMM told me that it was terrible and if there was not a better program available (EMM) then the objections to the iphone might have carried the day. We had and still have an awful lot of Crackberry luddites in lower levels of management here who are married to their Crackberries, but iphones are the phone of choice among non-managers and apparently a large number of senior managers here.
I think Sprint opposed the deal simply because they made a lot of bad technology bets and decisions over the years and the reality is that they can't grow their market share. So as long as T-Mobile survives as an independent company, they can tell their shareholders "We're number three! We're number three! We've got a chance to be number two!" Saying to your shareholders "We're in last place among the major carriers with no chance for growth" doesn't play as well as bragging that at least you're not in last place - yet.
I have to say though that while until last month I was a long time T-Mobile customer and I loved the service, I really wonder about them. I work for a Fortune 300 company and I was ordered by management to get on a corporate phone plan as soon as possible. T-Mobile is the only mobile phone company in the USA among the Big Four that we don't have an agreement with, so they lost my business. I really don't get why they haven't worked out some kind of deal with my company, but I'm not in a position to know why that hasn't happened. But that is lost business that they seem to not care about. I know that AT&T in particular is pretty aggressive about getting business customers. Maybe one of the reasons T-Mobile can't please their Sith Lords at DT is that they don't court the business market.
I call bs on this. As an American who can actually speak more than 1 language (I speak 3 besides English to varying degrees of proficiency) and who has traveled Europe and Asia in the past decade, this is just simply not true. I have found that if you behave respectfully towards the culture of wherever you travel that people are often thrilled to meet Americans. Now lots of Americans just simply do not know how to behave when they travel. They bitch about everything - "You eat THAT ? ", " I can't believe how many people are here", "Do you take American dollars (or even worse, traveler's checks)?" and so on. I've never had any issues when traveling and many people when finding out that I'm an American have wanted to ask me various questions about life here. Then again, I don't act like a jerk, start arguments in bars, etc.
It seems clear from reading the posts that many of you really do not understand what happened here. So I will explain it to you.
1) The accused is accused of leading a DOS attack. Not participating but leading it. That's important.
2) While it is true that he is facing 15 years for this, I would think it's unlikely that he'll do get that much time. Assuming he is a first time offender and he doesn't act like a complete jerk in court and his attorney also doesn't cop an attitude, if he is convicted he'll go to jail but I would guess that it would only be maybe 2 years.
3) Note that the feds are saying that he tried to cover up his IP address and it took them a while to get him. Clearly he knew that what he was doing was not legal.
Like it or not, it seems to me that the US government is very adamant about sending a message to Anonymous that some of them will get caught and they will go to jail. Anonymous members know that what they are doing is not lawful but they think they are too smart to get caught.
Further case in point, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Blitz_(American_football).
Yes, it appears that an American football team, based in London, named themselves after the 76 nights of consecutive bombing.
How'd America like a European-style football (soccer) team based in NY naming itself the New York Nine Elevens? Boggles the mind.
You know that old saying "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?" It could be good old fashioned American ignorance at work here. I'm American and I can tell you that a really large number of Americans operate under the principle that "If it didn't happen here, it didn't happen". It's worth mentioning that "blitz" is an American football term for a play where the defense sends more rushers after the quarterback than normal (normal is 3 or 4 depending on the defense). Blitzing is a high risk, high reward kind of play. If it works, the quarterback may be tackled ("sacked") for a loss, throw the ball away for an incomplete pass or be intercepted on a rushed pass. If it fails and the quarterback gets off a successful pass, the receiver may get a bigger gain than normal due to few defenders being available in coverage. I suspect someone on the team thought that London Blitz sounded like a cool, footbally name for a team and was just completely ignorant of the London Blitz in WWII. After all, we're living in a country where people under 30 actually believe that "prolly" is a real word, so I certainly would tend to blame ignorance here as the main cause.
This comment only applies to the USA. It may or may not apply to other countries.
Here in the USA we basically have to pay some provider a monthly subscription fee. Yes, you can try to watch over the air (OTA) TV for free if you are lucky enough to get a good signal where you live, but the channels are very limited. So we get suckered into buying more channels than we want just to get the channels we do want. For example, you may want one particular sports channel but you have to buy 15 different ones in a package to get it and you'll never watch the other channels. TV providers fear letting customers buy channels a la carte as they know that their income would plummet. Off the top of my head I would think that most people would probably be happy with paying a lot less money for only 20-30 channels if they could pick those individual channels themselves. I have to admit that I have just about reached my limit with TV charges and another rate increase might just make me drop the whole thing and resort to cheaper alternatives to watch the shows I want to see at a later date and time. Some people argue that "Oh if you switched from cable to satellite" or vice-versa that you would "save a lot of money" but the reality is that once the introductory offers expire, the prices are pretty much the same whoever you get your TV from. What we really need in the USA is a way to drive down the costs to the consumers to subscribe in a way that doesn't take away our favorite channels. As long as the providers are able to get away with avoiding a la carte pricing, they've got us trapped.
However, I have to say that I am not at all an Apple fanboy, but I am really impressed at how Apple took mobile telephones and pads and turned them into something actually useful that were generations ahead of earlier attempts to do so. It's been rumored for some time that "Apple TV" is going to debut next year and I am curious to see if Steve Jobs figured out something on TVs that Apple can make better in a way they did for portable music players, mobile phones and pads.
As an American EU-watcher and sometimes fan of the bloc, I have to say that Italy has the worst "justice" system in the entire EU. Unfortunately I see this as more of an anomaly where they finally got one right than any sort of real progress towards having a more meaningful and useful system of justice. I'd like to point out, again, that while the American system is certainly less than perfect that we don't have the crazy limits on free speech that the EU countries seem very content with and they're a lot closer to having "thought crimes" than the US is.
I have no kids of my own, but I have nephews. The oldest is in college at a good quality state university. I had a conversation with him not terribly long ago and it went something like this:
Me: I saw you wrote "prolly" on Facebook. You do know that that is not a real word, right?
Him: What do you mean?
Me: "Prolly" is text message speak. The real word is "probably".
Him: (look of puzzlement and confusion)
Me: I'm not joking. You've never heard of "probably"?
Him: I've only seen "prolly".
When you graduate from an American high school and you are a reasonably intelligent person (he's got a B average at college) and you think "prolly" is a real word and you don't know what "probably" is, the educational system may just be broke beyond fixing.
I said this yesterday, and I'll say it again today: the problem is that the "two" parties in power now both have the same agenda. It is time for people to start voting third party.
This sounds great on the surface. But who exactly am I supposed to vote for? I am American by the way. I cannot in any way vote Libertarian. I totally reject the Libertarian Party. I truly believe that libertarianism is a fatally flawed political philosophy that cannot work. I see communism as a more rational political philosophy. That's really bad. The other parties are too small and too narrowly focused for my tastes so there is no real third party option for me.
Americans have consistently demonstrated that EVERYTHING is negotiable if the price is low enough. Certainly some people would have problems with doing business with China Telecom, but if the cost was low enough and the service was good they'd do OK in this market.
Flash and Silverlight represent the mid-1990s way of doing things with third party browser addons. Back when we needed crutches like these, they were useful. The leg has healed, though, so it's time to throw the crutches under a bus.
Content producers should just suck up and use non-DRM video streams. They should all know by now that both Flash and Silverlight video "protections" have been circumvented just like Blu-Ray, DVD, etc and that there is really no technological recourse against this.
Really? Do tell how exactly those Silverlight protections have been circumvented. Unless you are talking about a streaming media recorder which simply records the stream as it plays on your PC, I am not aware of any way to defeat Silverlight DRM. The use of separate protected streams for audio and video is fiendishly clever and I've never heard of a successful way to crack it. A video forum where I regularly participate gets posts all the time asking how to record Netflix streams and nobody has ever suggested anything but a streaming media recorder.
It's always fun on Slashdot to trash the USA. Yet here in the USA we have this pesky thing in our constitution called free speech. Funny how the USA always gets the criticism yet consider
1) In the USA you cannot get sent to jail for expressing hateful speech such as denying the holocaust.
2) In the USA you cannot get sent to jail for making racist statements.
3) In the USA I am not aware of ANY websites that are blocked by a court or government order. Even the RIAA and MPAA have not been able to accomplish that one.
I'm sorry that the UK and other European governments have decided to implement thought police, but as an American there's not really anything I can do about it.
I am an American on vacation in China and I've got a little time to kill so I'm responding to this from my hotel room in Shanghai. Obviously the GFoC is not blocking me from reading Slashdot or responding. For the curious, I have no problems to access the following:
Slashdot
CNN/SI
Yahoo including email
Gmail
Google - works but it redirects to Google Hong Kong and they make it kind of slow to connect
CNN
Fox News
Yahoo Finance
Wikipedia although it's well known that articles about certain "sensitive" events won't come up
Some article redirects don't work. Some news articles off Yahoo don't work, but I don't know if that is a Yahoo problem or not. For example I wanted to read an article about a Pakistani Taliban who got killed by a drone missile and I can't read it at all. The weirdest thing of all is that I absolutely cannot get to Facebook. Really? You're going to allow Wikipedia, CNN and Fox News but Facebook is too evil to allow? Really? Ohhhhkayyyyyy....
I do have Chinese friends and you might be surprised at how much they actually do know about the outside world and about "secret" things their government doesn't want them to know about, like the "sensitive" events I mentioned earlier. My personal feeling is that the Chinese government is playing nice with knockoffs because the US in particular just will not shut up about it. I think they've decided that there's more to gain by playing nice on the issue than turning a blind eye. I can tell you that emails are not monitored by the government unless maybe you use certain sensitive words. Maybe. One of my friends has said some very blunt things in the past to me in email about the government here and never been asked about it. You can't really monitor the emails of hundreds of millions of people in all honesty. On the subject of knockoffs, many times today I was asked if I wanted to buy a fake Rolex at places tourists go to. It got a little old. And yes, it's well known that China does hacking/espionage. However, their own citizens get victimized too. One friend said that he simply will not download anything from the internet any more because he's too afraid of computer viruses and he's actually got pretty good computer skills for a non-IT person.
It could be that as others have said it's just a cynical way for the government to pretend to give people a bigger voice but then again maybe they honestly figured "What the heck? Let's give it a shot. Maybe someone will come up with a really good idea we actually could implement."
Why the fuck is anyone listening to this doddering old fool?
I think that's a great question and I'll try to answer it. I've got a few friends who are hardcore libertarian. I've known others who were similarly minded, but I wouldn't call them personal friends although I knew them. It seems to me that theoretically libertarianism should appeal to certain individuals on the left and right but in reality it's become the last place for very hardcore right wingers to go. Some people have shifted so far to the right that they can't turn to fascism (its association with the Nazis has doomed it as a political philosophy) so they turn to libertarianism. Libertarianism basically has this core idea that "If we just destroy the government so that it is small and weak and it can't do anything at all except oversee the military and do a few things with foreign governments, then everything would be so much better if not perfect." I realized some years ago that some libertarian ideas sound great, but the whole system breaks down because it relies on human beings all playing by the rules. All you need is one guy to take advantage of it, just one, and the whole thing collapses. It's little more in my mind than a variation on anarchy. To be blunt, I think that communism, which has been thoroughly discredited, is more rational political philosophy. That's bad.
A certain percentage of the American right, I'd guess maybe 20% or so, have a hardcore hatred of government and want it destroyed or made incredibly weak if possible. Part of me wishes that they could get their wish because it would be an absolute unmitigated disaster and it would kill libertarianism forever as a political philosophy but I'd have to leave the country because I wouldn't want to be here when everything starts to go to hell. I have only met one person who was libertarian who had a rational explanation for supporting it. He's a smart guy and I bluntly asked him how he could support libertarianism when he had to be smart enough to understand that for it to work it requires everybody to play by the rules and that won't happen. He told me that he certainly understood that could never happen, but he was tired of people ducking responsibility for everything and blaming everyone else for their problems and a libertarian government would force people to become responsible for their own decisions.
I'd bet that "up and coming" really means "She's never had even a decent supporting role in any film that more than 1000 people have paid to watch, but we're sure she's about to break through to the big time any day now". I'm sure she'll eventually be identified and I also bet that when we find out who she is, everyone is going to say "Never heard of her".
You have to remember that your company has no loyalty to you.
He works for a small company, and that's not always the case.
Good intentions only go so far, even with small companies. Cases in point.
1) My current employer is a Fortune 500 company. A few years ago they bought out the company I was working for. Roughly 10 or 11 years ago, before I was working here, the company was a smallish start up. They had some money issues and they made some rather savage layoffs to save money. Sure they felt bad about it, I truly believe that, but folks were still shown the door.
2) We lost a good handful of experienced employees to a start up in the past year. The start up seemed great - at first. Then the owners decided to sell the company and they did a massive layoff to get costs down. Almost everybody they hired from my current employer was shown the door. They even told one person who had just worked their last day with us on a Friday and was going to start for them on Monday "Uh, don't bother coming in because you don't have a job here anymore." By the way, that person was not rehired by my company just because the new company laid them off over the weekend before the new job actually started.
I'm sure that some companies really do care, but the minute it's cheaper to lose you than keep you, you're gone. That's the reality of it.
I assume, then, that you never shut your computer down for the night. Or for the weekend.
It's been my experience that most IT people rarely do this. I don't. Most of the people who do this are non-IT people who fear that if they don't watch their PC every second it's in use, terrible, dire things will happen. I've yet to have anyone in this category provide some sort of sensible explanation for doing it. It NEVER has anything to do with saving electricity. It seems to be some sort of unfounded fear that if you (gasp!) leave your PC powered up overnight while you sleep that leet Russian haxors will pwn your box, yet if you only keep the PC powered up while you are using it, that simply cannot happen.
I agree with the grandparent that reboots usually don't happen because of RAM. I'm not really getting how moving to a new type of memory is going to be helpful here.
Italy has perhaps the most warped sense of justice of any EU member. Just research the Achille Lauro hijacking where Italy demanded the right to try the hijackers/terrorists and then promptly felt sorry for all of them after it convicted them. I'm not sure that Italy is qualified to judge a dispute between 2 children fighting over a seat in a classroom. This doesn't surprise me at all as a country that cannot figure out how to meet out true justice to criminals will of course be completely unable to distinguish between what is and isn't a crime.
The release of the whole batch means that any negotiation to avoid the worst criminal penalties for Assange and others has failed. These people know they are going to be seeing little but the cinderblock walls of a detention facility for many years. They're giving up.
You may be right. But I would like to suggest another hypothesis.
The release may instead mean that Assange and others believe even more strongly than they did before that they cannot be touched and see no reason to be reasonable any more. I think Assange is and has been crazy. I don't think he's rational. Given how the response to him has been fairly weak (he's not in jail and while I think he is due for a court date, he has a chance to beat the rap), I can understand how he might conclude that's he invincible. Look at Bradley Manning. Yes, he was detained under pretty harsh conditions (this is no longer true), but he's not going to face the death penalty for what he did. Until the US government asks for the death penalty for guys like Manning and actually sends in a death squad to rub out Assange, the idea will persist that there's nothing to lose here by spilling the beans. Kill someone over it and the next guy in line just might think twice before he clicks on that "send" button.
I'm not saying this was a great idea or that the execution was ideal but there is precedent. IBM long known as a hardware company shifted to software and services in a fairly short period of time and seems to be doing quite well at it. If this new CEO has a vision and a strategy behind it HP could end up better off.
You're right, but here's the problem. When IBM did this, their services and software business was very well established. The companies I have worked for, including Uncle Sam, have all employed IBM consultants for various tasks. If there was any company that could have pulled this off, it was IBM because of their size. HP isn't a big player in this field right now. With IBM's move, if it failed they still had core hardware businesses they could fall back on. With HP, the CEO has bet the company on them being able to do something they've never been able to do in the past - become a big time player in the services market. I could be wrong and HP could indeed pull it off. But I admit to being skeptical because they are going to have to win on price to get bigger in this field of business. The big players who are already there might cut prices below what HP can match just to keep customers. Or it could be that HP simply cannot compete on price with the bigger players and they'll have to hope that they can get consumers in this economy to pick them for other reasons. That's not likely. My previous job was working in the US subsidiary of a major EU telecom and our business in North America was terrible because our cost structure was too high and everybody bigger than us did what we did for less cost. So I'm kind of skeptical about this whole idea HP has as I've seen first hand how difficult it is for smaller companies to compete on cost with the bigger, established players.