Finally, have you ever noticed how many people don't even have the basic computer skills in their job description?
I can top that. I work in IT for a US based Fortune 500 company who I should not name. Our business requires us to exchange data with customers and sometimes if there are issues with that (we can't get to them, they can't get to us, they can't open what they got, etc.) I get called in to help. I'm amazed at how many smaller companies place no value at all on their IT staff and will just hire some H1B guy who will work for peanuts but lied about his skills and he really can't do anything more complicated than install Windows programs and press Ctrl-Alt-Del if there is a problem and pray that a reboot fixes it.
I found it interesting that the article states that there is "almost no chance of losing" if you buy enough tickets, but that's not a 100% guarantee. It will just be a matter of time before someone plays the odds and that unlikely event of losing money happens.
I bet the renter is under 30 years old and I'll tell you why. I've noticed something that really concerns me about people under 30 years old. For the record, I'm over 40. I'm not saying that all under 30s are like this. I'm not sure that even most of them are like this. And there are people over 30 and even over 40 who are like this, but not so many. But one thing I consistently see from people under 30 is a belief that all internet transactions are safe and they simply cannot ever be cheated. I see this belief in a lot of the under 30 crowd that Craigslist is 100% safe and guaranteed by the folks at Craigslist but there's no need to worry because it is quite simply impossible to be cheated on it. Of course Craigslist is not at all guaranteed (the site says so) and you can easily search and find stories of Craigslist scams on the internet. So my guess is that the renter has the same delusional attitude and it never occurred to her that bad people might take advantage of the situation.
Well, with a Democrat in the White House I am finding it hard to believe that this one will happen. If it was a Republican in the White House and if the Republicans controlled Congress, it might happen, but even then I'm not so sure. Given the amount of budget cuts coming soon and the high domestic unemployment, a freebie for IT companies that won't result in any extra American jobs would seem to be political suicide, but that wouldn't stop some Tea Party supporters from thinking it's a great idea.
I truly sympathize with you. One of my friends and I were talking and only very slightly exaggerating in saying that a broken CFL is a haz-mat situation. I've got almost all the incandescent bulbs in my house replaced with (mostly) CFL and LED bulbs. I really really like the LED bulb technology, but there aren't a lot of choices. I recently replaced a kind of hard to get to circline bulb with an LED circline bulb and I could not be happier with the LED replacement. I've got one room in my house completely using LED bulbs too. I wish they would drop in price but I've been pretty happy with the quality of light from them.
Let's not kid ourselves here. The following is NOT the German plan:
Replace "deadly" nuclear energy with safe wind, solar, hydroelectric energy
The German plan is this:
Replace "deadly" nuclear energy with ANYTHING not nuclear. It's irrelevant if it's imported nuclear energy from France or coal, just so long as we don't get it from nuclear plants inside Germany.
I'm not accusing Germany of being Luddites, but Germany but for various reasons the Germans have been pretty hard core anti-nuclear for a long time. We might be less critical of there really was a plan here, but there is no plan. It's just "let's shut down our nukes and buy power elsewhere".
In the past the USSR would steal all the technology it could mostly because they lacked the money to develop their own and the Cold War denied them a good way to develop their own stuff, so they just stole it when they could due to lack of alternatives. The Chinese are flush with cash but they are just lazy. It's much quicker to steal something than to develop it yourself, even when you've got the means to do so. An entire generation of Chinese people are being put to work in their system looking for shortcuts like this. You can steal a fish today from the guy next to you who knows how to fish and thereby feed yourself, but what happens tomorrow when he doesn't come to the river and you don't know how to catch fish yourself?
Probably right != Will work 100% in all US court cases.
I've told this story before, but it's worth repeating. I last served on a jury about 6 years ago. My fellow jurors were housewives, construction workers, etc. The foreman was the only other guy on the jury with any IT skills. one morning while waiting in the jury room for court to start 3 guys on the jury got into a contest where each one of them tried to out do the others in proving that they were completely and utterly unable to use a PC for the most simplest of tasks, including email. It was a "who's stupider?" contest with 3 guys actually trying to hard to prove he was stupider than the other 2. These are the kind of people you get on juries. So while buying those might work as a "fair use" argument to a smart person, most jurors are really not all that bright or technologically adept. Those are exactly the kind of people who the RIAA wants on juries. All they have to do is wait for the lawyers to pick them because they are most of the people who show up in the jury pool.
I would say that while the US certainly helped make China the next superpower, and unwittingly helped it a lot, we need to give China credit for having leaders able to recognize an opportunity when they saw it and being able to take advantage of it. I'm not in any way suggesting that China is a perfect society though. I know people who live in China who certainly feel that things could be a lot better there in the lives of ordinary people and who feel that the government cares too much about making money.
US research could certainly be better but China for the most part is in the position of "steal and copy" rather than producing original research. I have to grudgingly admit that costs are probably a lot lower if you just let the US develop it and pay someone to spy and send you the information so you can create a knockoff later.
It's not exactly what the submission says. If you enter search data in the address bar it may redirect you to Mediacom's servers whether you opt in or not. However if you use the search bar it won't redirect you. This is considered unacceptable by the person who wrote the giant post in the "deep packet inspection..." link above. I'm not going to debate whether this is unacceptable or not, but there is a workaround - just use the search bar. As someone who does not do searches in the address bar that seems OK to me.
jddorian - I'm going to bottom line this for you. It's really quite simple.
The request to have a non-root account on a box plugged into a network managed by IT could not be more reasonable. If you have problems with this request then you have bigger issues my friend than we could possibly deal with here on Slashdot. It might be interesting to know exactly why you are opposed to this request. If you can't live with it then take you box and go home with it.
This is quite right. I read about the following scenario which did not involve a bug of any kind but simple hardware failure. Experienced IT guy sets up a 3 disk RAID array at home. Drive 1 fails. No problem. He's got replacement drives and the array can work with 2 drives. While drive 1 is replaced and rebuilding, drive 2 fails. The array is toast. All data is lost. Drives 1 and 2 were by the same manufacturer and purchased at the same time. The only thing that saved him was that he had backed up most of his data to one of those sites that offers what I guess you could call "backups in the clouds" and while he had some minor issues restoring from that, it did indeed work and he got back the stuff he copied there. He said that he never considered at setup that 2 disk drives might fail at the same time (or close enough together to take down the array like in his case), but as he thought about it after the fact, he realized that it made perfect sense given that the drives were from the same manufacturer and were originally installed at the same time. He said his plan after he got the array rebuilt was to just regularly replace drives prior to indications of failure as once he started getting the warning messages from the drives themselves, it was already too late.
Does no one here remeber the 321 Studios case? Honestly, I can't think of a single case, not one, where someone modded a big corporation's "intellectual property" and won. A couple of big DVD decryption projects were stopped dead in their tracks by similar "Here's an offer you can't refuse" tactics a few years ago. Now all the up to date DVD encryption programs are run from countries that don't respect US "intellectual property" laws. It does seem that the people crazy enough to "fight the powers" are never the ones smart enough to attract the attention of those powers to begin with. And maybe it would just end up like that crazy bitch who kept fighting the RIAA and losing because she failed to understand that simply saying "I didn't do it" when the evidence suggests you did, in fact, do it is not a very good legal strategy.
This post is hardly "insightful". China "has never claimed to be anything but repressive"? I disagree. Like all communist governments, citizens are guaranteed theoretical "rights" that do not exist in reality - the right to say whatever they want, the right to worship, the right to petition the government for redress, etc. I read just yesterday about how China arrested a bunch of Christians in Beijing because they refused to register their churches with the government.
And then we have the old bugaboo about how the "evil" US represses people - yada yada yada. Consider the following, oh great know it all.
1) A citizen sells Nazi memorabilia. He may not in any way be a Nazi sympathizer, but simply a dealer in artifacts looking to make some money.
2) A citizen expresses his "freedom of speech" in making the vile statements that the Holocaust never existed.
3) A citizen expresses his 'freedom of speech" by picketing and protesting at funerals for soldiers.
Care to enlighten me as to how many US citizens are under arrest for those three "crimes"? The answer is - wait for it - ZERO. Care to tell me how many European citizens have been imprisoned, yes, thrown in freakin' jail, for the first 2 on that list?
More than 10 years ago I worked for a US office of a multinational, but foreign company. One of the testers in our department was complaining that the PCs he was given for testing were too underpowered and old to be of any use. Our manager agreed but since the PCs were still working, they couldn't be replaced. However, if they, oh I don't know, suddenly developed severe hardware problems that prevented them from booting, then they could be replaced (wink wink, nudge nudge). I still remember seeing the tester working in a back test lab room to short out the motherboards of some PCs so they could be replaced. When the tester reported that his test PCs wouldn't boot, our manager did approve buying replacements. Bureaucracy sometimes requires creative solutions.
Minoxidil (aka Rogaine in some countries) was originally a medicine designed to treat high blood pressure. After giving it to various patients, it was discovered that it caused some of them to regrow hair. I'm not sure that it's used much these days to treat high blood pressure.
think the code was probably meant for his eyes only, which means he probably constructed it using abbreviations and codewords that only he himself would understand. Without knowing those, well...good luck.
I think you're really onto something here. Information about Ricky is hard to get from a quick look on the internet. The unpleasant possibility occurs to me that he may have had an excellent memory and yet been some kind of impaired person, perhaps like a Rain Man. It may turn out that even if they crack the notes they may say completely useless things like "Really didn't like that episode of Friends last night".
Interesting story and well worth sharing. I'm not sure it would have made any difference though. Even if accepted into art school he would have still been in Vienna and he formed his anti-Semitic views there while not in art school. Serving in WWI had a huge negative influence on him and got him into politics eventually. He might have served in the army anyway even if he had become a successful artist. I think the general consensus is that Hitler was a pretty mediocre artist so worrying about what would have happened is kind of like arguing that if George W. Bush had played major league baseball he probably wouldn't have been president while overlooking the fact that playing major league baseball wasn't even an option for him due to lack of talent. What little I could find of Hitler's art career suggests that he didn't go to art school because they flat out rejected him as a no talent hack, so what Grim remembered may not be correct. There really may have been no chance at all that Hitler was going to be picked anyway.
There really is no excuse for this at all. We're all entitled to a fair trial and the best legal defense available to us. This signifies that Paypal doesn't support the constitution or the rule of law. Shameful.
Wrong. You have the right to legal defense - period. Not "the best legal defense available". Big difference. PayPal has no legal or even moral obligation to collect funds for this defendant's defense. And there are other means available. Someone could set up a bank account for the purpose. But since you are writing in support of a traitor I suppose I should not expect you to actually understand how the law really works.
... is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
How many times on Slashdot have we seen the following scenario?
1) Hacker finds security hole.
2) Hacker uses security hole to login to system. He may or may not do questionable things there.
3) Hacker gets caught and there's proof he was on the system and he wasn't authorized to be there.
4) Hacker looks at a trial and possible jail time.
5) Hacker claims innocence, saying that he was "just trying to help get the problem fixed".
Really, if you haven't learned by now that logging into systems where you don't belong may get you into deep trouble, there is no hope for you.
I strongly agree. Everywhere I've ever worked had a few sys admins with root access. The original post just sounds to me like another company with the "our employees are our enemies" attitude.
Let me tell you how this would work in neighboring Ukraine. I'd bet it's the same in Russian and Belarus.
Assuming you can get someone like Interpol to contact the local police, then you'll have a rather corrupt and slothful police organization to deal with. I can assure you that they do not care one whit about an American security problem as they view all people in NATO countries as rich people who deserve it when bad things happen to them. If you can get the police to actually try to contact someone, the only reason they'll go at all is to tell the crooks that if they were to pay a "fine" directly to the police, the police can forget all about the case. Or if the US government somehow makes enough of a stink that it actually has to be prosecuted, the judge can always be bought off. And keep in mind that this in Ukraine where in general the population actually likes the USA as does the government. The US government is not liked in Belarus.
And I'll say it again. If Slashdot was to go back in time and report on serial killer Ted Bundy's trial and conviction that led to his eventual execution, the post would talk about how he was going to be executed for daring to defend himself instead of hiring an attorney to do it and that was the only reason he got the death penalty. For those who don't know, Bundy was a rather infamous serial killer of women in the USA. He killed at least 20 women, possibly more. His convictions were never in doubt. We know he did it. He even admitted to it (finally). He spent the last days of his life in desperation trying to trade more confessions and information on other killings for life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, but failed. Yet I have no doubt that if Slashdot reported this, all they would conclude is that he was "wrongfully" executed to make him an example to others about how you'll be punished if you act as your own attorney in court.
I think the argument for having the government (police, courts, and in some cases even government employees) do this to help businesses works like this:
We're losing revenue by this illegal stuff going on. If you (the government) don't stop it, we'll pay less in taxes because we have less money coming in. And to cut costs to make up for the losses, we'll ship American jobs overseas. Basically these crooks aren't stealing from us. They're stealing your tax revenues.
Now of course this overlooks the fact that the companies will still ship jobs overseas anyway and that they probably don't pay their fair share of taxes either thanks to various loopholes, but the government believes this argument and acts accordingly. It explains why the US is so actively involved in protecting the RIAA and MPAA from "piracy".
This is specific to sound recordings in the USA, but it appears that EVERY recording EVER made and sold in the USA is STILL under copyright. I know it sounds incredible, but the upshot of Capitol Records vs. Naxos in 2005 is to affirm perpetual common law copyrights on sound recordings prior to 1972. According to some legal experts, no sound recordings in the USA will enter the public domain until around 2060 at the earliest.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, have you ever noticed how many people don't even have the basic computer skills in their job description?
I can top that. I work in IT for a US based Fortune 500 company who I should not name. Our business requires us to exchange data with customers and sometimes if there are issues with that (we can't get to them, they can't get to us, they can't open what they got, etc.) I get called in to help. I'm amazed at how many smaller companies place no value at all on their IT staff and will just hire some H1B guy who will work for peanuts but lied about his skills and he really can't do anything more complicated than install Windows programs and press Ctrl-Alt-Del if there is a problem and pray that a reboot fixes it.
I found it interesting that the article states that there is "almost no chance of losing" if you buy enough tickets, but that's not a 100% guarantee. It will just be a matter of time before someone plays the odds and that unlikely event of losing money happens.
I bet the renter is under 30 years old and I'll tell you why. I've noticed something that really concerns me about people under 30 years old. For the record, I'm over 40. I'm not saying that all under 30s are like this. I'm not sure that even most of them are like this. And there are people over 30 and even over 40 who are like this, but not so many. But one thing I consistently see from people under 30 is a belief that all internet transactions are safe and they simply cannot ever be cheated. I see this belief in a lot of the under 30 crowd that Craigslist is 100% safe and guaranteed by the folks at Craigslist but there's no need to worry because it is quite simply impossible to be cheated on it. Of course Craigslist is not at all guaranteed (the site says so) and you can easily search and find stories of Craigslist scams on the internet. So my guess is that the renter has the same delusional attitude and it never occurred to her that bad people might take advantage of the situation.
Well, with a Democrat in the White House I am finding it hard to believe that this one will happen. If it was a Republican in the White House and if the Republicans controlled Congress, it might happen, but even then I'm not so sure. Given the amount of budget cuts coming soon and the high domestic unemployment, a freebie for IT companies that won't result in any extra American jobs would seem to be political suicide, but that wouldn't stop some Tea Party supporters from thinking it's a great idea.
I truly sympathize with you. One of my friends and I were talking and only very slightly exaggerating in saying that a broken CFL is a haz-mat situation. I've got almost all the incandescent bulbs in my house replaced with (mostly) CFL and LED bulbs. I really really like the LED bulb technology, but there aren't a lot of choices. I recently replaced a kind of hard to get to circline bulb with an LED circline bulb and I could not be happier with the LED replacement. I've got one room in my house completely using LED bulbs too. I wish they would drop in price but I've been pretty happy with the quality of light from them.
Let's not kid ourselves here. The following is NOT the German plan:
Replace "deadly" nuclear energy with safe wind, solar, hydroelectric energy
The German plan is this:
Replace "deadly" nuclear energy with ANYTHING not nuclear. It's irrelevant if it's imported nuclear energy from France or coal, just so long as we don't get it from nuclear plants inside Germany.
I'm not accusing Germany of being Luddites, but Germany but for various reasons the Germans have been pretty hard core anti-nuclear for a long time. We might be less critical of there really was a plan here, but there is no plan. It's just "let's shut down our nukes and buy power elsewhere".
In the past the USSR would steal all the technology it could mostly because they lacked the money to develop their own and the Cold War denied them a good way to develop their own stuff, so they just stole it when they could due to lack of alternatives. The Chinese are flush with cash but they are just lazy. It's much quicker to steal something than to develop it yourself, even when you've got the means to do so. An entire generation of Chinese people are being put to work in their system looking for shortcuts like this. You can steal a fish today from the guy next to you who knows how to fish and thereby feed yourself, but what happens tomorrow when he doesn't come to the river and you don't know how to catch fish yourself?
Probably right != Will work 100% in all US court cases.
I've told this story before, but it's worth repeating. I last served on a jury about 6 years ago. My fellow jurors were housewives, construction workers, etc. The foreman was the only other guy on the jury with any IT skills. one morning while waiting in the jury room for court to start 3 guys on the jury got into a contest where each one of them tried to out do the others in proving that they were completely and utterly unable to use a PC for the most simplest of tasks, including email. It was a "who's stupider?" contest with 3 guys actually trying to hard to prove he was stupider than the other 2. These are the kind of people you get on juries. So while buying those might work as a "fair use" argument to a smart person, most jurors are really not all that bright or technologically adept. Those are exactly the kind of people who the RIAA wants on juries. All they have to do is wait for the lawyers to pick them because they are most of the people who show up in the jury pool.
I would say that while the US certainly helped make China the next superpower, and unwittingly helped it a lot, we need to give China credit for having leaders able to recognize an opportunity when they saw it and being able to take advantage of it. I'm not in any way suggesting that China is a perfect society though. I know people who live in China who certainly feel that things could be a lot better there in the lives of ordinary people and who feel that the government cares too much about making money.
US research could certainly be better but China for the most part is in the position of "steal and copy" rather than producing original research. I have to grudgingly admit that costs are probably a lot lower if you just let the US develop it and pay someone to spy and send you the information so you can create a knockoff later.
It's not exactly what the submission says. If you enter search data in the address bar it may redirect you to Mediacom's servers whether you opt in or not. However if you use the search bar it won't redirect you. This is considered unacceptable by the person who wrote the giant post in the "deep packet inspection..." link above. I'm not going to debate whether this is unacceptable or not, but there is a workaround - just use the search bar. As someone who does not do searches in the address bar that seems OK to me.
jddorian - I'm going to bottom line this for you. It's really quite simple.
The request to have a non-root account on a box plugged into a network managed by IT could not be more reasonable. If you have problems with this request then you have bigger issues my friend than we could possibly deal with here on Slashdot. It might be interesting to know exactly why you are opposed to this request. If you can't live with it then take you box and go home with it.
This is quite right. I read about the following scenario which did not involve a bug of any kind but simple hardware failure. Experienced IT guy sets up a 3 disk RAID array at home. Drive 1 fails. No problem. He's got replacement drives and the array can work with 2 drives. While drive 1 is replaced and rebuilding, drive 2 fails. The array is toast. All data is lost. Drives 1 and 2 were by the same manufacturer and purchased at the same time. The only thing that saved him was that he had backed up most of his data to one of those sites that offers what I guess you could call "backups in the clouds" and while he had some minor issues restoring from that, it did indeed work and he got back the stuff he copied there. He said that he never considered at setup that 2 disk drives might fail at the same time (or close enough together to take down the array like in his case), but as he thought about it after the fact, he realized that it made perfect sense given that the drives were from the same manufacturer and were originally installed at the same time. He said his plan after he got the array rebuilt was to just regularly replace drives prior to indications of failure as once he started getting the warning messages from the drives themselves, it was already too late.
Does no one here remeber the 321 Studios case? Honestly, I can't think of a single case, not one, where someone modded a big corporation's "intellectual property" and won. A couple of big DVD decryption projects were stopped dead in their tracks by similar "Here's an offer you can't refuse" tactics a few years ago. Now all the up to date DVD encryption programs are run from countries that don't respect US "intellectual property" laws. It does seem that the people crazy enough to "fight the powers" are never the ones smart enough to attract the attention of those powers to begin with. And maybe it would just end up like that crazy bitch who kept fighting the RIAA and losing because she failed to understand that simply saying "I didn't do it" when the evidence suggests you did, in fact, do it is not a very good legal strategy.
This post is hardly "insightful". China "has never claimed to be anything but repressive"? I disagree. Like all communist governments, citizens are guaranteed theoretical "rights" that do not exist in reality - the right to say whatever they want, the right to worship, the right to petition the government for redress, etc. I read just yesterday about how China arrested a bunch of Christians in Beijing because they refused to register their churches with the government.
And then we have the old bugaboo about how the "evil" US represses people - yada yada yada. Consider the following, oh great know it all.
1) A citizen sells Nazi memorabilia. He may not in any way be a Nazi sympathizer, but simply a dealer in artifacts looking to make some money.
2) A citizen expresses his "freedom of speech" in making the vile statements that the Holocaust never existed.
3) A citizen expresses his 'freedom of speech" by picketing and protesting at funerals for soldiers.
Care to enlighten me as to how many US citizens are under arrest for those three "crimes"? The answer is - wait for it - ZERO. Care to tell me how many European citizens have been imprisoned, yes, thrown in freakin' jail, for the first 2 on that list?
More than 10 years ago I worked for a US office of a multinational, but foreign company. One of the testers in our department was complaining that the PCs he was given for testing were too underpowered and old to be of any use. Our manager agreed but since the PCs were still working, they couldn't be replaced. However, if they, oh I don't know, suddenly developed severe hardware problems that prevented them from booting, then they could be replaced (wink wink, nudge nudge). I still remember seeing the tester working in a back test lab room to short out the motherboards of some PCs so they could be replaced. When the tester reported that his test PCs wouldn't boot, our manager did approve buying replacements. Bureaucracy sometimes requires creative solutions.
Minoxidil (aka Rogaine in some countries) was originally a medicine designed to treat high blood pressure. After giving it to various patients, it was discovered that it caused some of them to regrow hair. I'm not sure that it's used much these days to treat high blood pressure.
think the code was probably meant for his eyes only, which means he probably constructed it using abbreviations and codewords that only he himself would understand. Without knowing those, well...good luck.
I think you're really onto something here. Information about Ricky is hard to get from a quick look on the internet. The unpleasant possibility occurs to me that he may have had an excellent memory and yet been some kind of impaired person, perhaps like a Rain Man. It may turn out that even if they crack the notes they may say completely useless things like "Really didn't like that episode of Friends last night".
Interesting story and well worth sharing. I'm not sure it would have made any difference though. Even if accepted into art school he would have still been in Vienna and he formed his anti-Semitic views there while not in art school. Serving in WWI had a huge negative influence on him and got him into politics eventually. He might have served in the army anyway even if he had become a successful artist. I think the general consensus is that Hitler was a pretty mediocre artist so worrying about what would have happened is kind of like arguing that if George W. Bush had played major league baseball he probably wouldn't have been president while overlooking the fact that playing major league baseball wasn't even an option for him due to lack of talent. What little I could find of Hitler's art career suggests that he didn't go to art school because they flat out rejected him as a no talent hack, so what Grim remembered may not be correct. There really may have been no chance at all that Hitler was going to be picked anyway.
There really is no excuse for this at all. We're all entitled to a fair trial and the best legal defense available to us. This signifies that Paypal doesn't support the constitution or the rule of law. Shameful.
Wrong. You have the right to legal defense - period. Not "the best legal defense available". Big difference. PayPal has no legal or even moral obligation to collect funds for this defendant's defense. And there are other means available. Someone could set up a bank account for the purpose. But since you are writing in support of a traitor I suppose I should not expect you to actually understand how the law really works.
... is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
How many times on Slashdot have we seen the following scenario?
1) Hacker finds security hole.
2) Hacker uses security hole to login to system. He may or may not do questionable things there.
3) Hacker gets caught and there's proof he was on the system and he wasn't authorized to be there.
4) Hacker looks at a trial and possible jail time.
5) Hacker claims innocence, saying that he was "just trying to help get the problem fixed".
Really, if you haven't learned by now that logging into systems where you don't belong may get you into deep trouble, there is no hope for you.
I strongly agree. Everywhere I've ever worked had a few sys admins with root access. The original post just sounds to me like another company with the "our employees are our enemies" attitude.
Let me tell you how this would work in neighboring Ukraine. I'd bet it's the same in Russian and Belarus.
Assuming you can get someone like Interpol to contact the local police, then you'll have a rather corrupt and slothful police organization to deal with. I can assure you that they do not care one whit about an American security problem as they view all people in NATO countries as rich people who deserve it when bad things happen to them. If you can get the police to actually try to contact someone, the only reason they'll go at all is to tell the crooks that if they were to pay a "fine" directly to the police, the police can forget all about the case. Or if the US government somehow makes enough of a stink that it actually has to be prosecuted, the judge can always be bought off. And keep in mind that this in Ukraine where in general the population actually likes the USA as does the government. The US government is not liked in Belarus.
And I'll say it again. If Slashdot was to go back in time and report on serial killer Ted Bundy's trial and conviction that led to his eventual execution, the post would talk about how he was going to be executed for daring to defend himself instead of hiring an attorney to do it and that was the only reason he got the death penalty. For those who don't know, Bundy was a rather infamous serial killer of women in the USA. He killed at least 20 women, possibly more. His convictions were never in doubt. We know he did it. He even admitted to it (finally). He spent the last days of his life in desperation trying to trade more confessions and information on other killings for life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, but failed. Yet I have no doubt that if Slashdot reported this, all they would conclude is that he was "wrongfully" executed to make him an example to others about how you'll be punished if you act as your own attorney in court.
I think the argument for having the government (police, courts, and in some cases even government employees) do this to help businesses works like this:
We're losing revenue by this illegal stuff going on. If you (the government) don't stop it, we'll pay less in taxes because we have less money coming in. And to cut costs to make up for the losses, we'll ship American jobs overseas. Basically these crooks aren't stealing from us. They're stealing your tax revenues.
Now of course this overlooks the fact that the companies will still ship jobs overseas anyway and that they probably don't pay their fair share of taxes either thanks to various loopholes, but the government believes this argument and acts accordingly. It explains why the US is so actively involved in protecting the RIAA and MPAA from "piracy".
This is specific to sound recordings in the USA, but it appears that EVERY recording EVER made and sold in the USA is STILL under copyright. I know it sounds incredible, but the upshot of Capitol Records vs. Naxos in 2005 is to affirm perpetual common law copyrights on sound recordings prior to 1972. According to some legal experts, no sound recordings in the USA will enter the public domain until around 2060 at the earliest.
GrokLaw has an old article on this for the curious. http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050412225604578