In some sense these Men's Rights Activists play an useful role. They openly state what many bigots believe without saying it loud. That gives the other side a chance to rebut the claims, question the assumptions etc. So to that extent they are useful. But calling for a boycott of some sequel of some B grade movie? One wonders if it is some sort of publicity stunt for the movie.
To make supersonic flight possible over sea or over land, the cost must come down. Without reducing the cost it makes no sense to worry about sonic boom, or figuring out ways to show the pilot where it hits the ground and its intensity.
Also the sonic boom issue was more FUD by Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed than the real issue. Back in the 80s, before the oil crisis, these companies wanted to stop British Aerospace and Aerospatiale from establishing a bridgehead at the luxury travel sector using Corcorde and its derivatives. But thankfully the Arab oil shock stopped Concorde.
Think about it, the total energy of all the shock and sonic boom is equal to amount of jet fuel burnt. During cruise at Mach 2.05 each Olympus 593 was producing around 10,000 lb of thrust, equivalent to 36,000 horsepower per engine.[18] Two engines, 72000 HP. Or 54 kilowatt, or 54,0000 joules/sec. If all of it ends up as sonic boom, (neglecting skin friction) you are going to spread 54,0000 joules every second over several square miles. Compare this to peak solar radiation 1000 joules per square meter. OK that is purely thermal but this is mechanical. So let us take 10 mph wind. 16kmph. 4.44 m/s. Over 1 sq m cross section, mass flow rate is 4.44 * density of air/second. Air is 1 Kg/m^3. So it is 4.44 kg. 4.44 m/s velocity. Works out to kinetic power (power, not energy because we are using mass flow rate, not mass) of 0.5*mdot*v^2 = 22 joules/sec. This is per square meter. or 22 watts per square meter. 22 million watts per square kilometer. Let us round it up to a nice 100 million watts for several square kilometers. Compare that to 54 kilowatt, total maximum possible power output of those two turbojet engines. 100,000 kW for 10 mph wind vs 54 kW for Concorde. Our eardrums and instruments are sensitive enough to pick up the sonic boom over 10mph wind, but thats about it. Barely detectable. Sonic booms deafening people, cracking buildings and killing birds are all FUD.
But cost... That is no mean thing to solve. In supersonic flight the energy needed to overcome the drag created by the shock wave is so high, there is no easy way to reduce the energy consumption. Only way to bring down the cost is to bring down the cost of fuel. The only way to make fuel cheaper is for the world to switch to non-fossil fules in such a large scale the oil industry collapses and oil falls to something like 5 dollar a barrel ( 2015 dollar not 1978 dollar).
I am not going to buy these gizmos now. Next year they are going to add 3D printer to the food machines that will build your dish layer by layer, dot by voxel dot. I will look foolish owning last generation food gizmos.
Look at some one proud of keeping whole beans in a paper bag. Probably buys pre-roasted beans from some chain coffee shop. You got to roast your own bean buddy. And what about the bean? Some standard bean off some shrub? Won't cut it for the coffee connoisseur. It must be the beans recovered from the poop of a particular weasel. To be sure you raise your own weasel in a cage, grow your own coffee in the backyard, feed it the berries and collect the beans. That, mon ami, is the true coffee epicure. Others... might as well be drinking Folgers crystals.
I have Ipass with auto-reload, wondering if they are safe. I used to have only gift cards in amazon. Then got a little lazy and added a credit card. Then my friend told me about how it was very difficult to deal with Amazon when his account got hacked somehow. He caught a 4000$ order before shipment and tried to get it cancelled. He said he found Amazon very difficult to deal with. He traced the ship-to address to some warehouse on the west coast which acts as proxy customers to people outside USA needing a shipping address in USA. Still it was tough to make Amazon cancel the order. After that I removed credit card from Amazon. If and when I place an order I enter the card data and then remove it immediately.
They are not planning to do anything to reduce frustration of customers. They will train more low wage workers to bear the brunt of frustration. They will spend all this money to desensitize them to verbal abuse and angry calls. But they would not think, "mmm, our customers are frustrated. Let us find out why and make them happy".
Sooner or later these phone line workers are going to initiate a class action law suit for permanently damaging their emotional selves and making them insensitive to anger they have cause to their relatives outside. Such a law suit might not have any merit, but it is the fear of the law suit alone that reigns in the corporations, for now. Once they complete their purchase of all the three branches of the government, they would have nothing to fear.
Some 15 or 20 years ago India introduced "Call Taxi" service. Before that all taxis (and autorickshaws) are the roaming type, or they wait in cab ranks. You luck varies with the driver and there was no reliable repeat-customer relationship to build. Once the cell phones became ubiquitous, this Call Taxi service started. You call the number, either from landline or a mobile and they dispatch the cab for you, it has a meter and you the meter fare. It is a big deal to be able to pay the meter fare and walk way. Invariably you get into argument with the cab driver over the "tips" in a non-call taxi. In USA this looks like a no-brainer, but it came to India only after the cell phone explosion that allowed the drivers to stay in touch with their dispatch centers economically.
This service is quite popular, since the companies want repeat customers, they enforce the rules of behavior with their drivers and things are pretty good in call taxi business. The only thing Uber is bringing in new is allowing part time drivers and casual drivers to work as taxi drivers. To become a "call taxi" driver, they pay a deposit to the cab company, paint the company livery at their own cost, maintain insurance etc. What can uber do differently? Other than relaxing the rules, deposits and lowering the bar on entry?
One thing people in the West do not understand is what is expected of the cab driver in India. They are expected to load the suitcases and baggage from the kerb to the cab and if they reach a residence, often expected to assist in unloading. People who have spare and and a spare car might like to moonlight as jitney drivers. But I personally know many who tried it and gave up. People who own cars find it infra-dig, beneath their status and station to load/unload baggage in cars as a menial manual laborer.
There is an untapped resource, but it is of questionable legality. Many Indians employ car drivers, who drive their bosses to work and sit idle all day in their cars while the bosses are at work. They might be willing to come in or their bosses may allow them to become uber drivers to pick some money. Other than that I don't see how uber changes/improves the call taxi system.
How many 50K$/ seat software is given away like you say? This software is not bought for personal use. Legitimate corporations and businesses with good reputation will go through *all* the hassles, sign non disclosure agreements, go through rigorous evaluation process. The only ones pirating these software are those who would/could never pay for legitimate licenses.
I agree with you DRM for music/video does not work, and most people would pay for hassle free legal access and those who pirate would never buy legitimate access. It is probably true for mass marketed apps too. But when it gets to complex software costing upwards of 25k a seat, it is all bought by corporations worried about being sued for piracy etc. They will and they do jump through all the hoops and evaluate it, and pay good price for it.
Yes, English really mistreated the Irish during the famine. Shockingly population of Ireland has still not recovered to pre famine levels. But England was equal opportunity abusers. They mistreated colonies in east Indies, west indies, Americas, Africa etc. They ill treated their own poor. They dumped so much raw sewage in Thames, there was a period in Brit Parliament history known as The Great Stink. I think Benjamin Disraeli was the PM at that time. Even their Royalty was drinking the same shit from the Thames.
That company was offering free trial with tech support and free training. Free university versions. Why would you pay real money to a hacker when you can legitimately get the same uncracked software with tech support? The company was small, user base was small some 2000 seats or so, but the price was not. It was selling the software at 50K$ a seat. Upgrades and support went at 15% of the list price, even if the first sale was discounted.
A great news to many is that old unsecure plugin interfaces are not supported at all: VML, VBScript, Toolbars, BHOs, and ActiveX are all nuked from the orbit
This looks like what the dev team presented to the upper management about what it wants to do. It will undergo several iterations. Some powerful customer will demand some interface to be supported or else... Some managers will insist on some form of backward compatibility mode. Some bing! advertisement people would ask for "special" interfaces to their team to let them "leverage" & "synergy" and other buzzword bingo stuff. There will be compromises. Some managers will insist with straight face, "yes, yes, this scripting interface is supported, but we say very clearly in the documentation it is not to be used for fresh code and it is to be used only for backward compatibility reasons, so it is not a security threat".
Finally they will be wondering why security was compromised, and blame it on the open source zealots and prejudice among the uninformed and marketing by competitors and assure themselves "it is not our fault, we did not do anything wrong".
I know of one small software company that used some home grown licensing method. The software will check out licenses for features at run time. Some features would appear to be legitimate, something that is going to be released soon. But those features were never sold, and if the license manager approves those features the product knows the license manager is probably cracked. It won't report any "ha! you are using a cracked license manager", it would quietly chug along for a while and crash randomly. The pirates who crack software would think they have cracked it and sell it as warez. The buyers will get some unreliable software, possibly reducing the "trust" on the warez hacker and sowing discord among the pirates and their customers.
P.S: company eventually got sold to a bigger player and the home grown license manager was retired for industry standard "FlexLm". Soon after, ALL software using Flex were cracked and sold on the warez sites. Pirates could have easily cracked the license manager of that small company, but it is too small to be worth the effort.
Moral of the story: Monoculture is bad, both for Irish potato farmers of the 18th century and license/password managers of the 21st century.
India is just one example I am familiar with. Indians and other people with spotty grid will pay for the systems. They form the market and provide the profit motive. Who is going to win the market? It might not be Indians. It could be Chinese making the systems, US/Japan doing R&D, Africa/SouthAmerica supplying minerals and raw materials. Curiously India is the leader in Uninterruptible power supply, or used to be.
Very USA centric view. In India most middle class homes now have a truck battery that charges off the grid to power a few ceiling fans, a few lights (and one TV) for about four hours. I am not talking about rich well to do folks. Ordinary middle class folks, who make about 5000 USDollars per year (exchange rate, not PPP rate). Do you know how many of them are there? 400 million! larger than the entire population of USA. Just in India.
My friend who returned to Bangalore and built a half a million dollar home (at exchange rate, not the PPP rate) has eight, count them, eight truck batteries in his garage, saying that stupid lead-acid crap is more reliable and maintainable than installing a Honda gasoline generator or Cummins diesel generator. In India you would find air conditioners that could run off "inverter".
The quality of AC out of the inverter is so poor most motors would burn. They are designing A/C to take that shit. There is this huge market out there. The free market will serve them.
Installing enough batteries to go off the grid is not cost effective... in the USA. In some parts of the world, there isn't a reliable enough grid to compare the costs. They are the ones who will pay through their noses for the R&D needed to develop the batteries, the financial vehicles to pay for them and the infrastructure to manufacture them. Once the fixed costs start being paid off, they will come with a vengence into the developed established good quality grid market.
Media center started with XP. But at the time of Vista design spec stage, the fight was for the entertainment market. Apple was reading the riot act to the *AA demanding the albums be unbundled and sold at buck a track, without any DRM. Microsoft took the *AA's side and wanted to deliver a "piracy proof" platform and establish itself as the entertainment OS. Look at the infrastructure built into Media center to collect and consolidate "licenses" for media, the DRM support built into it etc.
Residential and distributed solar is going against well established utility companies that have operated for a century without viable competition. Mildly regulated by utility commissionaires elected in low turn out elections, with lots of backroom dealings, revolving doors and outright bribes. They will use every instrument in their arsenal: FUD, litigation, bought out legislators, everything.
Cost reductions would eventually usher in utility-scale solar. But to get residential and distributed solar, public awareness and education is needed. But there are places in the world where the grid is very unreliable or non existent. Those places also have very rich individuals and groups. Collectively rich folks in third world without reliable grid have as much purchasing power as all of the middle class of developed countries. They will fund and underwrite the cost of R&D, and deployment and financing of residential/distributed solar. So there is some chance that technology will break the barriers and enter developed countries. There was a time when my Indian relatives all had better cell phones than my circle in USA. Because Indian land lines sucked and US mobile phones had to outdo the landlines. Same thing could happen to the grid.
One of the most ambitious projects Microsoft undertook was to thwart the "audio-video pirates". Its logic was this: "If we deliver a platform where it is impossible to pirate audio and video content delivered to the users, MPAA and RIAA will line up behind us, all the songs/videos will be released for our platform and we will be rolling in dough".
The high fidelity way to steal content was to write an audio/video driver that installs itself between the code and the device forming a T. Then silently record the stream before delivering it to the audio/video cards. So they went ahead and created the "protected audio/video path" concepts, signed drivers, accepted possible incompatibility with all the existing devices as the price to pay. ??AA did not like Apple's dominance and being forced sell tracks dollar a pop with Apple getting 30 cents commission. iTunes was allowing people who bought songs to make CDs (yes, CDs were quite dominant at that time) etc. So the logic of Microsoft was quite sound, and it makes sense among the suits.
But they forgot the crucial "IF" that formed the foundation of the logic. Can anyone thwart the alleged pirates? Even if the protected signed drivers stopped this method, there was always the analog hole. One can record with reasonable fidelity audio out. Similarly, with more difficulty, the video out too.
The entire concept of Vista was to take command of the living room entertainment center the way MS-Office took command of the corporate desktops.
They could not deliver ??AA what they wanted and were promised: a piracy-proof entertainment platform. But it complicated the OS to such an extent it was very unstable. This on top the par-for-the-course bungling of MS suits. Certifying under powered machines as vista capable to play favorites with intel over AMD, that sort of thing.
The damage lingers on to this day. There is a service that runs on all Windows platform that watches all the code crashes and pop up the dialog "I saw something crash? Do you want to try it in WinXP compatibility mode?" That service collects data all day and phones home at night. Our company consolidated three locations into one new building. Some 1500 computers phoned home using the same gateway at the same time. Random crashes on machines that used to run for weeks without rebooting. Traced it to this damned thing. Somehow 500 phone-homes per gateway was ok, at 1500 it crashed randomly. There are hundreds of such things buried deep inside OS due to Vista fiasco.
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In some sense these Men's Rights Activists play an useful role. They openly state what many bigots believe without saying it loud. That gives the other side a chance to rebut the claims, question the assumptions etc. So to that extent they are useful. But calling for a boycott of some sequel of some B grade movie? One wonders if it is some sort of publicity stunt for the movie.
Also the sonic boom issue was more FUD by Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed than the real issue. Back in the 80s, before the oil crisis, these companies wanted to stop British Aerospace and Aerospatiale from establishing a bridgehead at the luxury travel sector using Corcorde and its derivatives. But thankfully the Arab oil shock stopped Concorde.
Think about it, the total energy of all the shock and sonic boom is equal to amount of jet fuel burnt. During cruise at Mach 2.05 each Olympus 593 was producing around 10,000 lb of thrust, equivalent to 36,000 horsepower per engine.[18] Two engines, 72000 HP. Or 54 kilowatt, or 54,0000 joules/sec. If all of it ends up as sonic boom, (neglecting skin friction) you are going to spread 54,0000 joules every second over several square miles. Compare this to peak solar radiation 1000 joules per square meter. OK that is purely thermal but this is mechanical. So let us take 10 mph wind. 16kmph. 4.44 m/s. Over 1 sq m cross section, mass flow rate is 4.44 * density of air/second. Air is 1 Kg/m^3. So it is 4.44 kg. 4.44 m/s velocity. Works out to kinetic power (power, not energy because we are using mass flow rate, not mass) of 0.5*mdot*v^2 = 22 joules/sec. This is per square meter. or 22 watts per square meter. 22 million watts per square kilometer. Let us round it up to a nice 100 million watts for several square kilometers. Compare that to 54 kilowatt, total maximum possible power output of those two turbojet engines. 100,000 kW for 10 mph wind vs 54 kW for Concorde. Our eardrums and instruments are sensitive enough to pick up the sonic boom over 10mph wind, but thats about it. Barely detectable. Sonic booms deafening people, cracking buildings and killing birds are all FUD.
But cost... That is no mean thing to solve. In supersonic flight the energy needed to overcome the drag created by the shock wave is so high, there is no easy way to reduce the energy consumption. Only way to bring down the cost is to bring down the cost of fuel. The only way to make fuel cheaper is for the world to switch to non-fossil fules in such a large scale the oil industry collapses and oil falls to something like 5 dollar a barrel ( 2015 dollar not 1978 dollar).
This is what space ships look like in the real universe.
I am not going to buy these gizmos now. Next year they are going to add 3D printer to the food machines that will build your dish layer by layer, dot by voxel dot. I will look foolish owning last generation food gizmos.
Look at some one proud of keeping whole beans in a paper bag. Probably buys pre-roasted beans from some chain coffee shop. You got to roast your own bean buddy. And what about the bean? Some standard bean off some shrub? Won't cut it for the coffee connoisseur. It must be the beans recovered from the poop of a particular weasel. To be sure you raise your own weasel in a cage, grow your own coffee in the backyard, feed it the berries and collect the beans. That, mon ami, is the true coffee epicure. Others... might as well be drinking Folgers crystals.
I have Ipass with auto-reload, wondering if they are safe. I used to have only gift cards in amazon. Then got a little lazy and added a credit card. Then my friend told me about how it was very difficult to deal with Amazon when his account got hacked somehow. He caught a 4000$ order before shipment and tried to get it cancelled. He said he found Amazon very difficult to deal with. He traced the ship-to address to some warehouse on the west coast which acts as proxy customers to people outside USA needing a shipping address in USA. Still it was tough to make Amazon cancel the order. After that I removed credit card from Amazon. If and when I place an order I enter the card data and then remove it immediately.
Sooner or later these phone line workers are going to initiate a class action law suit for permanently damaging their emotional selves and making them insensitive to anger they have cause to their relatives outside. Such a law suit might not have any merit, but it is the fear of the law suit alone that reigns in the corporations, for now. Once they complete their purchase of all the three branches of the government, they would have nothing to fear.
This service is quite popular, since the companies want repeat customers, they enforce the rules of behavior with their drivers and things are pretty good in call taxi business. The only thing Uber is bringing in new is allowing part time drivers and casual drivers to work as taxi drivers. To become a "call taxi" driver, they pay a deposit to the cab company, paint the company livery at their own cost, maintain insurance etc. What can uber do differently? Other than relaxing the rules, deposits and lowering the bar on entry?
One thing people in the West do not understand is what is expected of the cab driver in India. They are expected to load the suitcases and baggage from the kerb to the cab and if they reach a residence, often expected to assist in unloading. People who have spare and and a spare car might like to moonlight as jitney drivers. But I personally know many who tried it and gave up. People who own cars find it infra-dig, beneath their status and station to load/unload baggage in cars as a menial manual laborer.
There is an untapped resource, but it is of questionable legality. Many Indians employ car drivers, who drive their bosses to work and sit idle all day in their cars while the bosses are at work. They might be willing to come in or their bosses may allow them to become uber drivers to pick some money. Other than that I don't see how uber changes/improves the call taxi system.
I agree with you DRM for music/video does not work, and most people would pay for hassle free legal access and those who pirate would never buy legitimate access. It is probably true for mass marketed apps too. But when it gets to complex software costing upwards of 25k a seat, it is all bought by corporations worried about being sued for piracy etc. They will and they do jump through all the hoops and evaluate it, and pay good price for it.
Yes, English really mistreated the Irish during the famine. Shockingly population of Ireland has still not recovered to pre famine levels. But England was equal opportunity abusers. They mistreated colonies in east Indies, west indies, Americas, Africa etc. They ill treated their own poor. They dumped so much raw sewage in Thames, there was a period in Brit Parliament history known as The Great Stink. I think Benjamin Disraeli was the PM at that time. Even their Royalty was drinking the same shit from the Thames.
That company was offering free trial with tech support and free training. Free university versions. Why would you pay real money to a hacker when you can legitimately get the same uncracked software with tech support? The company was small, user base was small some 2000 seats or so, but the price was not. It was selling the software at 50K$ a seat. Upgrades and support went at 15% of the list price, even if the first sale was discounted.
A great news to many is that old unsecure plugin interfaces are not supported at all: VML, VBScript, Toolbars, BHOs, and ActiveX are all nuked from the orbit
This looks like what the dev team presented to the upper management about what it wants to do. It will undergo several iterations. Some powerful customer will demand some interface to be supported or else... Some managers will insist on some form of backward compatibility mode. Some bing! advertisement people would ask for "special" interfaces to their team to let them "leverage" & "synergy" and other buzzword bingo stuff. There will be compromises. Some managers will insist with straight face, "yes, yes, this scripting interface is supported, but we say very clearly in the documentation it is not to be used for fresh code and it is to be used only for backward compatibility reasons, so it is not a security threat".
Finally they will be wondering why security was compromised, and blame it on the open source zealots and prejudice among the uninformed and marketing by competitors and assure themselves "it is not our fault, we did not do anything wrong".
P.S: company eventually got sold to a bigger player and the home grown license manager was retired for industry standard "FlexLm". Soon after, ALL software using Flex were cracked and sold on the warez sites. Pirates could have easily cracked the license manager of that small company, but it is too small to be worth the effort.
Moral of the story: Monoculture is bad, both for Irish potato farmers of the 18th century and license/password managers of the 21st century.
Slashdot itself died in 2010. You only think you are posting beyond your grave!
India is just one example I am familiar with. Indians and other people with spotty grid will pay for the systems. They form the market and provide the profit motive. Who is going to win the market? It might not be Indians. It could be Chinese making the systems, US/Japan doing R&D, Africa/SouthAmerica supplying minerals and raw materials. Curiously India is the leader in Uninterruptible power supply, or used to be.
May be so. Still there is a service "microsoft user experience" or some such name that phones home every night in Win7 prof. Why?
Thanks, I did not know abou HVDC systems before.
Of all the doctors and nurses who treated the ebola patients?
My friend who returned to Bangalore and built a half a million dollar home (at exchange rate, not the PPP rate) has eight, count them, eight truck batteries in his garage, saying that stupid lead-acid crap is more reliable and maintainable than installing a Honda gasoline generator or Cummins diesel generator. In India you would find air conditioners that could run off "inverter".
The quality of AC out of the inverter is so poor most motors would burn. They are designing A/C to take that shit. There is this huge market out there. The free market will serve them.
Installing enough batteries to go off the grid is not cost effective ... in the USA. In some parts of the world, there isn't a reliable enough grid to compare the costs. They are the ones who will pay through their noses for the R&D needed to develop the batteries, the financial vehicles to pay for them and the infrastructure to manufacture them. Once the fixed costs start being paid off, they will come with a vengence into the developed established good quality grid market.
Media center started with XP. But at the time of Vista design spec stage, the fight was for the entertainment market. Apple was reading the riot act to the *AA demanding the albums be unbundled and sold at buck a track, without any DRM. Microsoft took the *AA's side and wanted to deliver a "piracy proof" platform and establish itself as the entertainment OS. Look at the infrastructure built into Media center to collect and consolidate "licenses" for media, the DRM support built into it etc.
Cost reductions would eventually usher in utility-scale solar. But to get residential and distributed solar, public awareness and education is needed. But there are places in the world where the grid is very unreliable or non existent. Those places also have very rich individuals and groups. Collectively rich folks in third world without reliable grid have as much purchasing power as all of the middle class of developed countries. They will fund and underwrite the cost of R&D, and deployment and financing of residential/distributed solar. So there is some chance that technology will break the barriers and enter developed countries. There was a time when my Indian relatives all had better cell phones than my circle in USA. Because Indian land lines sucked and US mobile phones had to outdo the landlines. Same thing could happen to the grid.
The high fidelity way to steal content was to write an audio/video driver that installs itself between the code and the device forming a T. Then silently record the stream before delivering it to the audio/video cards. So they went ahead and created the "protected audio/video path" concepts, signed drivers, accepted possible incompatibility with all the existing devices as the price to pay. ??AA did not like Apple's dominance and being forced sell tracks dollar a pop with Apple getting 30 cents commission. iTunes was allowing people who bought songs to make CDs (yes, CDs were quite dominant at that time) etc. So the logic of Microsoft was quite sound, and it makes sense among the suits.
But they forgot the crucial "IF" that formed the foundation of the logic. Can anyone thwart the alleged pirates? Even if the protected signed drivers stopped this method, there was always the analog hole. One can record with reasonable fidelity audio out. Similarly, with more difficulty, the video out too.
The entire concept of Vista was to take command of the living room entertainment center the way MS-Office took command of the corporate desktops. They could not deliver ??AA what they wanted and were promised: a piracy-proof entertainment platform. But it complicated the OS to such an extent it was very unstable. This on top the par-for-the-course bungling of MS suits. Certifying under powered machines as vista capable to play favorites with intel over AMD, that sort of thing.
The damage lingers on to this day. There is a service that runs on all Windows platform that watches all the code crashes and pop up the dialog "I saw something crash? Do you want to try it in WinXP compatibility mode?" That service collects data all day and phones home at night. Our company consolidated three locations into one new building. Some 1500 computers phoned home using the same gateway at the same time. Random crashes on machines that used to run for weeks without rebooting. Traced it to this damned thing. Somehow 500 phone-homes per gateway was ok, at 1500 it crashed randomly. There are hundreds of such things buried deep inside OS due to Vista fiasco.
You seem to think there is a difference between banker and a criminal. How quaint 20th century notions persist after 2008 I can't imagine.
This 28 year old is the fall guy. This chump stayed within jurisdiction and got arrested. The real thieves are safe and away.
They would buy a PC, they pay once. You lose that sale.