Well, this is understood, but how do you do that?

This guys was forging documents from his circuit agreements and things. You can't call Verizon to ask about someone else's account. You have to rely on the documentation the colo gives you.

I would bet that at least one of those 300 customers had asked for proof of current accounts and things like that and was provided such (fradulently) by the colo owner.

It's too bad they had to be pulled in. It seems to me that the FBI could have made an effort to clone the systems and at least return some of it.

The CPU/RAM/Motherboard of the systems in question is NOT of value to the investigation, other than for leverage and fear and financial detriment.

The companies who had their systems taken would probably have not balked at all if the servers had been returned in a week, without drives. I'd wager they may even pay the costs of having the drives forensically duplicated so they could get their stuff back online. That is much cheaper than the business loss that was a result.

Of course, everyone should do backups, etc. It just seems rather strong-arm to take that much equipment, including power strips, cabinets, rack mounting gear, third party documentation and the like.

It is old news, yes. But tell that to the 300 OTHER businesses who had their equipment siezed, 100 of which subsequently went out of business, likely at least partially as a result of this FBI action.

Seizing the power strips and cabinets and even the books full of system documentation from OTHER COMPANIES not involved in the fraud, other than to be physically located near the suspected fraud.

That's the news, if you ask me.

Yeah, good reason to use only "insured" services like PayPal or government/bank cheques for online transactions.

I will be royally pissed if this idiot turd makes the banks change their rules to wait for 2 weeks after the posting of a check.

Understand? There's two options.

1) Post checks rather quickly, assuming that most are good, and letting you take a bit of the risk

2) Hold on to all checks for 2-4 weeks before releasing the funds, royally screwing people like landlords, or any other business or individual who collects checks and then needs to use those checks to pay other expenses.

Your idea is terrible. You can't have you cake and eat it too.

The problem is that they had expectations from the old "Stargate" fans. the bad guys would be unspeakably evil and have minions of bald dark skinned servants and giant gold head dresses and names like "Aphophis". And the hero is ALWAYS captured by the bad guy half way through the episode and it ALWAYS looks hopeless, but they are ALWAYS rescued in the last 3 minutes through some absurdly improbably confluence of events with absolutely no casualties.

This is what they expected, and didn't get, therefore this show is "emo and too dramatic". It's "too dark".

I agree, its the only show I still watch on regular TV. Now I can cancel my cable and save $50/mo. Sweet.

I'm curious which characters you find "whiny"?

I'm not sure if you've ever experienced being forcibly removed from your own life for a period of months, but I know a few people who have and those real people make these characters on the show seem downright stoic.

To me it seems pretty realistic, though people who have never suffered much in their life might find it a bit corny to witness exactly how much that upsets people.

LOL. "Adult" has nothign to do with sex. Steamy sex scenes in a scifi drama screams "teenage boys, come watch!!!".

The concepts of intractable moral dillemmas is what makes good fiction. The decision between two evils is powerful.

SG-1, Star Trek, etc gets out of this by always finding "magical third answer that saves everyone with no casualties" but that's so trite as to be almost funny sometimes.

Having some character flaws is valuable to a good story.

Well, if you look at what is replacing SGU in the lineup, I might have to agree this time.

Yet another "ghost hunter" show and increased "WWE" coverage.

SRSLY?

He's a colonel you turd, and the whole POINT of the show is looking at the mistakes people make when put in a tough situation.

The drivel in most SciFi is the fact that everyone always responds by formula, rather than acting as flawed people that humans essentially are. The faulty assumption is that some high technology automatically improves the people behind it too.

Do you think people find "Apocalypse Now" hackneyed and fake because they often fucked up in the face of difficult situations? Or do people watch it and say "wow, people are messed up sometimes." and understand its a great story with messed up characters?

Sheesh. I'm so tired of the clinical "he's a general, therefor he is always perfect" and "he's an evil doer, so whatever he does is insanely evil" style of sterilized scifi. It's just painful to watch.

See, there is the problem.

SGU was the antithesis of SG-1. SG-1 was scifi kitch, almost to the max. Aliens pretending to be gods, everyone has big grandious sounding Latin names, regardless of what planet they are from.

SGU was a subdued psychological sci-fi.

Personally, I ALMOST didn't watch SGU at all because SG-1 and SGA were terrible. But I really like SGU.

Never been much of a fan of the cardboard "fire moon from hell" sets and "all teh super-villains wear gigantic gold headdress and have uuber transparent names like 'Anubis' and parade around speaking like some Marvel comic bad guy"

"haha! Now I have the power of the [insert ancient race here], with which my minions will crush your puny planet. But first, I must imprision the same four people in my lava-filled prison planet and chain you up with fake looking vines and give you three hours to escape. Ha Ha! Bow before me."

After the tenth episode of that, I was just about done, and then they introduced uhm "Merlin". Yeah, srsly?

At least SGU has some class.

While I disagree with the US and French movements in the direction of freedom, I do feel compelled to point out a factual error, and/or ask for clarification.

France GDP per capita is only 75% of the US. While it has climbed somewhat since the 1960s when it was only 60% of the US per capita, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "higher cut of GDP".

That wouldn't be because they cover the elderly, who account for a massive majority of the required care, would it?

Medicare is far more efficient, on a "per capita expenditures vs services paid" and "overhead introduced to the system" basis than most private health care.

I'm not the GP, but uhm. I'd like to point out something here.

Everybody dies. I know your mom forgot to tell you, but it's a fact.

And very very few people die catastrophically and instantly so that they require no health care whatsoever.

So, "going through life without having anything ever happen to them".

No, that's actually, undeniably, impossible.

Blood or not, Microsoft does not allow third parties to audit their kernel or core system stacks. It just doesn't happen.