Nothing he did seemed unreasonable to me from a security standpoint to prevent tampering except for one thing: he did not provide any way for someone else to take responsibility for the network if he was unable (like death or termination of employment.) It shouldn't have been necessary to get passwords out of him when he was fired. Based on all accounts, I am actually pretty impressed with what he set up except for that (supremely important) detail.

That's not necessarily true. I am privy to certain information where I work that directly affects other groups inside the company and is administered by another group. If my boss changes what I am delegated to do, he has to notify someone else to get access changed, he doesn't have the authority just to take my authentication information and use it or give it to someone. I'm not saying that's applicable in the Childs case, but just that task delegation doesn't automatically mean he can administer those rights.

The city said and did a lot of things that were fishy and didn't make sense either. You seem to be having trouble with the concept that without all the facts people can legitimately disagree on what the correct outcome should be.

My opinion was influenced by knowing good and well that many companies/managers will screw you over to cover up their own incompetence, which does seem to have been a component of this despite his guilt on one count out of four.

It's pretty damn important to think "what scenarios might have occurred that would indicate this person isn't guilty?" because that's how REASONABLE DOUBT is established instead of "his story is fishy, OBVIOUSLY GUILTY."

He was completely silent on the issue while he was in the Senate and Goldman-Sachs was his largest contributor, and before he was in the Senate he sued Citibank for not giving out enough shitty derivative-laced subprime loans to risky borrowers.

Libel is against the law. I don't know if someone can say being a Muslim is damaging to their reputation, though. The issue here is that there are things in which facts are in dispute even among reasonable people, so there is a hesitance to push the issue.

I don't know what else to say other than you are wrong. You're just wrong. If you demonstrate that a theory is not viable, you are not obligated to keep trying to tweak the broken theory in absence of a competing one. That's closer to how astrology works.

If you find a sufficiently serious methodological flaw in a theory after it is presented (such as bad data for instance,) it is no longer a valid theory.

No, they don't have to have a competing theory. They have to demonstrate that the anthropogenic global warming theory has axiomatic, logic, data or interpretation flaws sufficient to undermine findings, or that it is an unfalsifiable theory. That is sufficient to disregard the theory.

I am not saying this is the case with AGW, just that you do NOT need a competing theory before you can disregard another.

Because lying itself isn't against the law. Lying under certain circumstances, such as under oath in a court or fraudulently representing yourself in a business deal, is. The specific court case OP is referring to had to do with whistleblower status of two local Fox affiliate reporters who were fired for refusing to voluntarily redact claims made in an expose on rGBH hormones in cow milk. A replacement report was run that countered their claims.

link

The court found that the reporters were not eligible to be protected under whistleblower status because it is not against the law to lie on television and therefore they were not whistleblowing any crime.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that protection of the freedom of the press is taken very seriously in the USA. A law that created metrics for "truth" of reporting would be abused to silence reporters by government via self-censorship. The other reason the court didn't find the other way is because courts in the USA cannot find someone guilty ex-post-facto to established law, so even if this case made a point about lying on television, the court can't just up and make up a ruling and find Fox guilty. The court case was not about the legality of lying per-se.

This case was a terrible side-effect of legitimate concern for freedom of press in my opinion. Maybe there should be some sort of requirement for truth in reporting, I haven't thought about all the possible side effects or benefits of such legislation, so I'm not saying I think news organizations should be "allowed to lie" or anything like that.

He may not have been right about suspecting being spied on because of battery discharge, but the government can in fact remotely activate some cell phones and eavesdrop on nearby conversations with them:

FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool

No kidding, that collection is for babby. I've got old SGIs laying around, stacks of ZIP drives, spare scanners (3) in case I need them, about eight laptops, eight different kinds of Macs, including a working SE with SCSI network adapter(!) I've got two RS-6000's that are too expensive to run. About ten towers of various builds. I've got a Windows NT4-Alpha machine for kicks.

My friends bring their friends over to stare in awe at the fruits of a life wasted on old junk, and that's not even to speak of the video game collection :-)

Yeah, actually that was it. It was Serenity. You need modded up.

It's gonna be awful hard to get it viral if it can't be embedded.

A few years ago, I don't remember what movie it was, but about five minutes from the movie was released onto the Internet as a promotion. I thought about how innovative this was, and wished other movies would do this too. This functions as a "demo" of a movie more than a preview does. I think it's comparable and good.

Crytek is acting like interactivity isn't a major factor in games. I can't truly evaluate a game without playing it for a little while. In particular this is a big deal because, unlike other things, I can't seem to return a game because it sucked.

Actually, tests have been done that check for exactly this. Young children consistently will identify with the an illustration of a person the same skin color of them over someone who has a similar body shape to them/their parents. "Race" is artificial but ethnicity is not. It comes down to kinship, if a person has a different skin color than you, they are very likely not related, and therefore a higher risk. This appears to be built-in.

I always put the baby seat in the backseat facing backward, but it's helpful to remember that for many years in the USA there were not switches to disable the front seat passenger airbag, and in fact was illegal in many places to do so. It took petitioning the government for years before such a switch was finally allowed to be put in new vehicles.