...a pinch of oregano, 'cause you know a little goes a long way.

Does anyone -seriously- think that if Assange were locked up / killed / whatever, that this sort of thing would stop?

While he's more than "just a public face" in this issue, it isn't like Wikileaks would die with him, or that some successor wouldn't be spawned.

In short, dogs made man, what he is today.

What, not able to use commas properly?

Is the gene variant they've found in him that has never been found in any other vertebrate.

Ok, maybe not more important, be definately more interesting.

RABBIT SEASON!

I don't quite understand how anyone can stay a Christian after reading the Bible. It's badly written Jesus fan-fic, co-authored by Abraham Z. Brite and Moses Pacione. I'd call it slash-fic, except there isn't enough sex in it.

This.

It's not like Israel is the only country / group / whatever in the world who doesn't like Iran.

I know that if I were writing something that targetted a group, I'd add in at least a few things that pointed to "someone other than me", if only to confuse the matter / feed the conspiracy theorists.

Like, if I were targetting Israel with something, I'd have to slap in something about Mel Gibson being the source.

To keep the Germans from taking over France. Duh. :)

Where I am, is a lot less on the "secret agent" / James Bond side of things, and a lot more on social engineering.

Two vectors were talked about.

Vector 1: Middle East. Some guys decided they wanted to be insurgents, but didn't have explosives experience and really didn't want to be shot at. So instead, they loaded up viruses on a bunch of hardware (external drives, thumb drives, etc) and sold it to soldiers. Said soldiers then turned around and used these drives on not only their personal computers, but also on Unclass and Classified systems, where it quickly spread because of bad IS/IA policies.

Vector 2: Pentagon area. Similar situation, but instead of selling pre-infected items, some foreign power just left a lot of pre-infected thumb drives around various coffee shops, etc. While some were turned in to lost and found, others were picked up by people who said, "Hey! Free thumb drive!" and proceeded to use them at work and at home. And when work was in a government office that, again had poor IS/IA policies, suddenly you've got computers opening holes in firewalls and transmitting data out.

Hence the big change in policy, to ban thumb drives, turn off auto-run, etc.

It depends on the nature of the treaties between the two governments.

Just because the US Government wants something from another government doesn't mean they're going to automatically get it, even when a treaty is involved. National laws may carve out exceptions, and sometimes the government in question will just say "no", regardless of the treaties that are in place.

True, but the government often sets purchasing rules where they get the same deal as the best customer.

That is, if some of the customers get 10% off, some get 15% off, and some get 20% off, then the government gets the 20% off deal.

It isn't retroactive, mind you. If the best deal the corporation had was 15% off when the government bought X amount of gear, and then goes to 20% off six weeks later, the government doesn't get the extra 5% back. But they would get that on any new purchases made while that applied.

Add to that government purchase requirements involving small / minority / women owned businesses, vendor rotation requirements, minimum/maximum purchase, etc, and it can be extremely hard to keep up with it all.

Of course it's a slow news day.

Everyone is off playing Starcraft 2.

It's a 750 dollar minimum with, as I recall, a few criteria that can allow for triple damages, such as willfull infringement.

So really, that is, by law, the miminum he could have been hit for.

Ultimately, if the RIAA decides to go back on the "sue-em-all" bandwagon, they'll just start raising the number of songs. Instead of going after someone for 24 songs, they'll instead go after them for 100 songs.