If you think an influx of money will magically fix a country which has a limited infrastructure and widespread poverty you're foolish and naive.

Maybe in the long run it will improve things.

In the short run I predict it will create a shitstorm which will be to the detriment of the Cubans.

You can't go from being embargoed to not embargoed overnight and expect that to work well at all. It simply doesn't work that way.

Until they can build up their infrastructure, and make some systemic changes to their economy, a sudden influx of Americans looking for McDonald's and five star resorts will not have good outcomes for Cuba.

I think it's long overdue to get rid of the embargo, but there's no way in hell I believe opening the floodgates to American tourists will have anything but a disruptive and negative effect for the immediate future.

the Cuban Tourist Ministry, estimates that if Americans were free to travel to Cuba today, the number of visitors would increase by two million the first year

I've been to Cuba 5 times in the last 8 years or so, and while I really like Cuba and the Cubans, I've also seen a considerable decline over that time.

The quality of the service has gone down. The resort staff are much less interested in good service and are now expecting tips. They doubled the size of the airport, but their internal stuff couldn't scale, so there can be days where it takes hours to check in for your flight.

Cuba has a lot of older resorts. It's still a really poor country with some shady infrastructure.

If you start throwing millions of Americans into that mix, I firmly believe the systems won't be able to handle it.

The last two times I was there the airport devolved into madness and chaos, because they had more passengers and aircraft than they could handle.

And there's going to be a lot of disappointed Americans as they discover that the effects of the embargo is a country which is impoverished and can't give them the kind of experience they want.

Honestly, for me, Florida is becoming more attractive than Cuba. The same weather, all the first world amenities, and none of the tourist stomach ailments.

I just don't think Cuba will weather a sudden influx of more tourists who are expecting first world luxuries. Cuba is beautiful and charming, but it's also small and poor.

I think that question says "are you embarking on legal proceeding against me, or are you just flapping your gums?".

If the officer isn't detaining you, he's not doing anything other than speaking to you and you can walk away from him, or just stand there.

That, of course, assumes the police officer knows or cares what that is supposed to mean ... just like the officer obviously neither knows nor cares about the fact that you can legally film him in the first place.

The problem becomes when police don't give a fuck about the law, attempt to illegally detain you, and then when you say "what the hell are you doing?" they charge you with resisting arrest, despite that you weren't being arrested.

In theory this says "unless you are arresting me, this is a voluntary interaction which I am ending".

In practice, I'm not convinced all the police know or care about these things, because they believe they can do whatever they wish.

And it's those police officers who are causing us to say "fuck it, I can't tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones, so put a body camera on them at all times and stop trusting them at their word". And I'm sorry to the good police who feel all butt hurt over this, but too damned bad.

Remember, Freddie Gray was stopped by police, who later killed him just for eyeballing them.

If you want to play on-the-spot eyewitness news reporter with your cell phone, you should try your best to have white skin.

I mean, look -- there were a bunch of recent stories with suspects getting killed or beate...n

Well, I think ONE thing is pretty clear.

Don't RUN from the cops. The one common denominator from most of the recently publicized cop shootings of citizens, is that the citizen generally ran from the officer.

But one thing to do for sure...don't act like an ass, if you are (and you should) exerting your rights, do so in a calm, non-threatening fashion. Don't shout. Don't curse, use clear concise language. The "Am I free to go" statement is a very simple and very powerful thing to say and get an answer to.

If you don't give them a reason to beat you...99.999% of the time they are not. Yes, there are bad apples, but I don't think that is the majority. If you do not fight, resist, run or act an ass, chances are you are not going to be arrested or hurt. And if they DO arrest you....just face it, you are going to jail...don't resist, doing so give the cops a LOT of leeway in how they manhandle you.

Don't give them a reason to do abuse you, but also, you should always know and assert your rights.

Why didn't you give us a link to that quote? Just curious.

And maybe the waiting periods for those hip replacements in Canada (for some reason, these articles always cite hip replacements) should be weighed against the people in the US who are simply denied hip replacement surgery by their insurance companies or cannot afford the out-of-pocket.

You see, waiting periods can be very misleading. You have to compare outcomes.

Honestly, for some of us "hack" means anywhere from "an inelegant but necessary workaround", to "a really awesome and unexpected use of something", to "defeating system security", or a clueless person bashing away at something they don't understand, or "something I just whipped up".

GP is absolutely correct ... for many of us, "hack" is a very generic term.

Yeah, but is this a legally binding NDA ... or is it some sorority mumbo-jumbo which amounts to "I swear on the holy training bra, as a testament to the paddling of the swollen ass, that I am beholden to the sorority, ack ack a-dack".

Maybe, just maybe, the oaths and rituals which take place in sororities and fraternities doesn't meed the legal threshold of a binding NDA?

I'm sorry, but people are talking about trademarking secret handshakes, which sounds idiotic to someone who only ever saw the fraternity system in bad movies.

So, just keep hearing Patrick Stewart saying "And now, the paddling of the swollen ass", and ask yourself ... does this crap merit legal protection?

Sure, but by which point you're doing much more involved forensics and hunting this down.

In many companies, a misbehaving computer is just re-imaged.

We used to have a receptionist who put so much crap on her PC that every couple of months when she decided she'd broken it enough, they'd just re-image it.

Why nobody ever told her to stop putting that crap on in the first place I'll never understand.

In that kind of scenario, nobody would even know she had any specific malware or what it did.

Carbon Dioxide. It's got what plants crave.

Now if we could just raise the level of electrolytes in the atmosphere, we'll have a veritable paradise.

Honestly though, a borked Windows box often just gets re-imaged because people aren't all that surprised by one which has gone flaky.

So, you know your machine is having problems, but that doesn't mean you know you have malware.

And, as TFA says:

The code replacing the MBR makes the machine print out a message mocking attempts to analyse it.

Restoring a PC with its MBR deleted involves reinstalling Windows, which could mean important data is lost.

Basically it sounds like there's not much left to look at.

Or, alternately ... why would I rely on someone else in the first place? Why would I waste time and bandwidth copying my files around the internet?

I'm probably in the minority, but I still buy CDs, rip them to MP3, and then put them on whatever the hell I like.

I don't have ads either. I also don't have DRM, annual fees, or any of the other crap associated with keeping my stuff in the cloud.

Yes. They are going to learn very quickly that there is no such thing as "outside of U.S. jurisdiction".

Of course not, the US government has become the enforcement arm for the multinational copyright cartels.

Which is why industry groups write the text of trade agreements and then tell the US government to go implement it and pressure other countries to adopt it.

I think there is some kind of law that says all reports must be written in in passive voice

But, honestly, anybody old enough (by which I mean over around 30) who had a decent enough education had passive voice hammered into us for many many things.

Pretty much anything which was intended to be a factual reporting of something is supposed to be in passive voice.

So much so that when Microsoft introduced their annoying grammar checker it would give me warnings that I was writing in passive voice. Unfortunately I was writing technical stuff, and had no intention of writing "and then I'm all like pew pew, take that sucker".

By the time you're talking about anything written within the FBI, you're going to have this be even more pervasive.

I'd bet some of the Feds found Spot the Fed humorous...

Don't they surgically remove the sense of humor?

Honesty, just don't use max power.

Everybody takes a microwave, sets it to max power, and presses start.

You have 9 other power settings besides "incinerate".

Show some restraint, Grasshopper.