The phrase "hoist by his own petard" (note: "by", not "on") comes from Hamlet. A petard wasn't some sort of pole or hook that you hang things on; it was an explosive device used by French sappers to blow walls open. In modern English the phrase means "blown into the air by his own bomb."
The complaint also highlights a number of other design flaws that exacerbated these vulnerabilities, including the fact that the company set – and allowed consumers to retain – the same default login credentials on every router: username “admin” and password “admin”.
This is one of the things I like about WordPress. It actually allows me to set my login name to something different from the name displayed as the author of the posts I write. I run WordFence (a security plugin) and it gives me periodic reports on failed login attempts. People try stuff like "admin" and my author name all the time, but never once have I seen an attempt to log in with my actual login name.
Re: Re: Re: Truest Me, I know What's Best For All Of You
We're seeing low population growth and even decline because the largest segment of the population (the Baby Boom generation) is aging and moving beyond childbearing years. We're seeing it in developed nations throughout the world because the Baby Boom was a worldwide event, with a distinct, worldwide cause--soldiers returning home after the end of WWII--and developed nations contributed the most to the war effort.
Health care and modern technology (or vaccines, for that matter) have little-to-nothing to do with it.
What he doesn't seem to recognize is that the only real way to protect against [cyberattacks] is encryption.
Not really. Encryption does very little to protect against cyberattacks; fixing the security holes in your code protects against cyberattacks. What encryption does is helps minimize the damage when you screwed up on your code and someone attacked and got through and copied all your data.
Mallinckrodt is probably the sleaziest pharma company you've never heard of. They aren't anywhere near as well-known as Pfizer or Bayer, but they're a major player in one important sector of the market: opioid painkillers. They make dangerous, highly-addictive pain medication and push doctors and dentists (often without proper training in the mechanics of addiction) to prescribe it to patients.
A non-trivial percentage of those patients end up hooked, and eventually the well-meaning, reasonably ethical doctor realizes what's going on and refuses to write more prescriptions for them, not wanting to enable addicts. Unfortunately, this leaves the patient addicted to opioids and without a legitimate way to get their fix, and all too often they turn to heroin.
Eventually, if their addiction doesn't kill them, (or if they're smart enough to skip the heroin step and get help right away,) they end up in treatment. You treat heroin addiction with a medicine called Methadone, which can calm the symptoms of opioid addiction without producing the same highs as heroin or pain meds. It's not perfect, and it's not cheap, as Methadone treatment is quite a long-term solution, but people can and do get clean from it.
Guess who principal manufacturer of Methadone in the USA is? That's right: Mallinckrodt. It's quite the profitable racket they've got going on, when you think about it...
I ... honestly had no idea that one was supposed to make legal decisions based on whether or not one had "the guts." I had always assumed that this was the kind of thing that you need for bar brawls, rather than legal fights. But perhaps things are different down under.
Anyone else read this and immediately think of those silly "how to speak Australian" beer commercials from a few years back?
Google itself, when it showed up entered a very crowded market and was laughed at for being such a small player in a market dominated by established companies.
Who laughed? I remember the very early days of Google, and right from the start everyone I knew who was using it was basically saying "wow, this Google thing is soooo much better than [insert other search engine here]!" and "you've got to try Google; they've actually figured out how to get relevant search results right!" That was the general mood: all those other search engines are obsolete now, because someone just showed up who actually accomplishes what they've been trying and failing to do for all these years. There might have been people laughing, but I don't recall a single one.
Well, the constitution says for a limited time. While retroactive extensions may technically still be for a limited time, hence following the letter of the law, they certainly violate the spirit of the law.
Those are two separate things. The Constitution says that congress MAY create copyright laws for limited times, but it also says that Congress MUST NOT create any retroactive law (on any subject, including copyright). So how does retroactive term extension survive even the most cursory judicial review?
No, the only difference is that the one is a subset of the other, because drug abuse does cause a great deal of harm to people other than the user. (If you don't believe me, talk with someone who grew up with parents who abused alcohol or other harmful drugs.)
Which do you think people are going to want to buy from more, some random guy they meet who may or may not be offering a pure product, or a company that is required by law to have their product checked for quality to make sure it's as safe as it can be?
Which company do you think will have an easier time getting production up to speed? Lilywhite Pharmaceuticals, who is new to the business, or Cartel Inc., with their decades of pre-existing experience in growing, harvesting, refining and distributing the stuff?
There's also the matter of scale, what costs an individual dealer a significant amount to make a company can make much cheaper, which means they can undercut individual dealers in price, leading to yet another reason for people to buy from them.
Sure, this might drive street-level dealers out of business, but they're by no means the entirety of the drug distribution problem. Most of them don't even make the product they sell; they get it from someone bigger, who gets it from someone bigger, who gets it from the massive cartels who would laugh all the way to the bank if legalization actually happened.
With regards to real world examples of how the legal status of something affects the criminal element, I'd say you'd need look no further than the US Prohibition period.
Alcohol is made from sugar and yeast, and in a pinch you can literally make yeast out of thin air, so anyone could make booze in their basement. Stuff like cocaine and heroin are a completely different story on the production side, so no, that's not a good comparison at all.
Like all prohibitionists, you are conflating addiction (chemical and emotional dependency) with the actual substances themselves.
And what's wrong with that? They're called addictive substances for a reason: Causing addiction is an inherent property of "the actual substances themselves."
If we don’t have dominion over our own bodies, then we have no rights that matter.
More libertarian nonsense. That line sounds good at first sight, until you realize it can be used to legitimize essentially any crime at all: It's my body; am I not inherently free to use it to [insert horrible thing here]? The answer, of course, is no, you are not, not when it causes harm to others! And there are few things that cause as much widespread harm as drug abuse.
Cognitive dissonance? You're the one using the R-word here.
Recreation is harmless fun. Watching a movie, going out dancing with friends, or hanging out and playing video games... that's recreation. Drug use is not harmless, and it's not "only harmful to the user" and therefore the next best thing to harmless. It does massive, widespread harm to all of society, because no man is an island.
My beliefs are completely consistent. Yes, I'd like to see liquor stores vanish from the face of the earth just as much as I'd like to get rid of any other class of drug dealers, but I know that attempting to do so is not politically feasible, due to alcohol being legal. But that doesn't mean I have to accept that it's desirable, or even acceptable, to make the problem worse.
Simply because it's not politically feasible to roll back the serious legal drug problem we already have doesn't mean that we ought to be actively making it worse. If you can't understand something as simple as that, please go away and let the adults talk here.
So just to clarify, because I've got to be reading that wrong(or at least I hope I am), are you saying that drug dealers should be allowed to be shot on sight? Something that we don't allow for any other crime?
Not exactly. I'm saying that if we're not willing to take it that far, we need to stop claiming that such a thing as "the war on drugs" exists, because it does not.
We have laws in place that can put people behind bars for life for drug use or even possession, and people still use them.
Where did I ever say we need to punish users? Why are you trying to attack me on that point? That makes exactly as much sense as locking up mugging victims for assault, and I agree it needs to be changed. What I said is that dealers are the worst kind of scum, and that what they do is worse than violence or even murder, because it is.
Legalization pulls the rug out from under organized crime, drastically reducing their power and crime rates
Don't be ridiculous. Legalization legitimizes them. Suddenly you have a bunch of experts with experience in producing and distributing harmful drugs that no one else has; who do you think is going to take the lead in the newly-opened legitimate markets? Russia had a similar problem with the fall of the Soviet Union. When capitalism and free markets were suddenly legitimized, the only people with experience in free markets were shady black market types, hardened criminals who very quickly took over the economy and have been causing widespread financial oppression and corruption in Russia ever since. (Not that free markets are like drugs; just that this is a real example in the modern world of what happens when you take something that only criminals have experience with and legitimize it: the experienced criminals go legit and take over, but they're still criminals at heart.)
Rehabilitation allows you to wean those that are addicted off of drugs, and combined with legalization people who would otherwise have kept silent for fear of being incarcerated will likely be willing to step forward to get the help they need.
Or we could stop incarcerating drug victims without throwing the baby out with the bathwater by legalizing drug dealing and thereby creating millions of new drug victims. Just a thought.
From what I've read, Portugal's policy is about helping the victims of drug dealers be able to find safe and effective treatment more easily, which I'm all for. There's nothing about that that's incompatible with thinking that drug dealers are scum that need to be eradicated.
Why the sarcasm? We already have a precedent in alcohol: a highly addictive, harmful drug that's fully legalized in just the same way the libertarian morons want to do with other drugs.
Just look how our culture treats it: drinking is a right of passage. Everyone knows what it means that "you're legal" on your 21st birthday, and for millions of kids, having a drink literally on the first day they become legal is considered an important tradition. And the drug dealers (breweries, wineries, and so forth) make billions of dollars off their backs, and meanwhile we lose about 15,000 people, and rack up tens of billions in societal costs, every single year, from drunk driving alone. (source: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) Plus all the other damages, in the form of drunken violence, non-traffic accidents due to intoxication, deterioration of health, and deterioration of quality of life, caused by alcohol.
You really think we should extend that pattern any further?
On the post: House Speaker Paul Ryan Demands TPP Be Renegotiated; Neglects To Mention It Was His Bill That Makes That Impossible
Pedantic note
The phrase "hoist by his own petard" (note: "by", not "on") comes from Hamlet. A petard wasn't some sort of pole or hook that you hang things on; it was an explosive device used by French sappers to blow walls open. In modern English the phrase means "blown into the air by his own bomb."
On the post: FTC Dings ASUS For Selling 'Secure' Routers That Shipped With Default Admin/Admin Login (And Other Flaws)
This is one of the things I like about WordPress. It actually allows me to set my login name to something different from the name displayed as the author of the posts I write. I run WordFence (a security plugin) and it gives me periodic reports on failed login attempts. People try stuff like "admin" and my author name all the time, but never once have I seen an attempt to log in with my actual login name.
On the post: FTC Dings ASUS For Selling 'Secure' Routers That Shipped With Default Admin/Admin Login (And Other Flaws)
Re: "Cloud"
On the post: Bill Gates Is Confused About Apple FBI Fight, Makes Everyone More Confused
Re: Re: Re: Truest Me, I know What's Best For All Of You
Health care and modern technology (or vaccines, for that matter) have little-to-nothing to do with it.
On the post: Lawmakers Speak Out On Apple Being Forced To Create Backdoors; Some Wisely, Some Ignorantly
Not really. Encryption does very little to protect against cyberattacks; fixing the security holes in your code protects against cyberattacks. What encryption does is helps minimize the damage when you screwed up on your code and someone attacked and got through and copied all your data.
On the post: After Failing To Use Copyright & Trademark Law To Stop Printer Ink Resellers, Lexmark Finally Scores A Victory With Patent Law
Mallinckrodt is probably the sleaziest pharma company you've never heard of. They aren't anywhere near as well-known as Pfizer or Bayer, but they're a major player in one important sector of the market: opioid painkillers. They make dangerous, highly-addictive pain medication and push doctors and dentists (often without proper training in the mechanics of addiction) to prescribe it to patients.
A non-trivial percentage of those patients end up hooked, and eventually the well-meaning, reasonably ethical doctor realizes what's going on and refuses to write more prescriptions for them, not wanting to enable addicts. Unfortunately, this leaves the patient addicted to opioids and without a legitimate way to get their fix, and all too often they turn to heroin.
Eventually, if their addiction doesn't kill them, (or if they're smart enough to skip the heroin step and get help right away,) they end up in treatment. You treat heroin addiction with a medicine called Methadone, which can calm the symptoms of opioid addiction without producing the same highs as heroin or pain meds. It's not perfect, and it's not cheap, as Methadone treatment is quite a long-term solution, but people can and do get clean from it.
Guess who principal manufacturer of Methadone in the USA is? That's right: Mallinckrodt. It's quite the profitable racket they've got going on, when you think about it...
On the post: Our Further Response To Australian Lawyer Stuart Gibson, Who Continues To Threaten Us
Anyone else read this and immediately think of those silly "how to speak Australian" beer commercials from a few years back?
On the post: NYPD Has Deployed Stingrays Over 1,000 Times Without Warrants
Rape, homicide, armed robbery
On the post: How A Treasury Terror List Is Preventing Americans With 'Scary' Names From Using Online Services
Re: Re: Re: Gamasutra is poison
On the post: UK Court Tells Online Mapping Company It's Not Illegal For Google To Also Offer Online Maps
Who laughed? I remember the very early days of Google, and right from the start everyone I knew who was using it was basically saying "wow, this Google thing is soooo much better than [insert other search engine here]!" and "you've got to try Google; they've actually figured out how to get relevant search results right!" That was the general mood: all those other search engines are obsolete now, because someone just showed up who actually accomplishes what they've been trying and failing to do for all these years. There might have been people laughing, but I don't recall a single one.
On the post: Wikimedia Takes Down Diary Of Anne Frank, Uses It To Highlight Idiocy Of DMCA Rules, Copyright Terms
Re: Re:
Those are two separate things. The Constitution says that congress MAY create copyright laws for limited times, but it also says that Congress MUST NOT create any retroactive law (on any subject, including copyright). So how does retroactive term extension survive even the most cursory judicial review?
On the post: Wikimedia Takes Down Diary Of Anne Frank, Uses It To Highlight Idiocy Of DMCA Rules, Copyright Terms
I still have trouble wrapping my head around that one. Doesn't the Constitution explicitly prohibit any ex post facto (retroactive) law?
On the post: How The Dark Net Is Making Drug Purchases Safer By Eliminating Associated Violence And Improving Quality
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: How The Dark Net Is Making Drug Purchases Safer By Eliminating Associated Violence And Improving Quality
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Which company do you think will have an easier time getting production up to speed? Lilywhite Pharmaceuticals, who is new to the business, or Cartel Inc., with their decades of pre-existing experience in growing, harvesting, refining and distributing the stuff?
Sure, this might drive street-level dealers out of business, but they're by no means the entirety of the drug distribution problem. Most of them don't even make the product they sell; they get it from someone bigger, who gets it from someone bigger, who gets it from the massive cartels who would laugh all the way to the bank if legalization actually happened.
Alcohol is made from sugar and yeast, and in a pinch you can literally make yeast out of thin air, so anyone could make booze in their basement. Stuff like cocaine and heroin are a completely different story on the production side, so no, that's not a good comparison at all.
On the post: How The Dark Net Is Making Drug Purchases Safer By Eliminating Associated Violence And Improving Quality
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
And what's wrong with that? They're called addictive substances for a reason: Causing addiction is an inherent property of "the actual substances themselves."
More libertarian nonsense. That line sounds good at first sight, until you realize it can be used to legitimize essentially any crime at all: It's my body; am I not inherently free to use it to [insert horrible thing here]? The answer, of course, is no, you are not, not when it causes harm to others! And there are few things that cause as much widespread harm as drug abuse.
On the post: How The Dark Net Is Making Drug Purchases Safer By Eliminating Associated Violence And Improving Quality
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Recreation is harmless fun. Watching a movie, going out dancing with friends, or hanging out and playing video games... that's recreation. Drug use is not harmless, and it's not "only harmful to the user" and therefore the next best thing to harmless. It does massive, widespread harm to all of society, because no man is an island.
My beliefs are completely consistent. Yes, I'd like to see liquor stores vanish from the face of the earth just as much as I'd like to get rid of any other class of drug dealers, but I know that attempting to do so is not politically feasible, due to alcohol being legal. But that doesn't mean I have to accept that it's desirable, or even acceptable, to make the problem worse.
On the post: How The Dark Net Is Making Drug Purchases Safer By Eliminating Associated Violence And Improving Quality
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Simply because it's not politically feasible to roll back the serious legal drug problem we already have doesn't mean that we ought to be actively making it worse. If you can't understand something as simple as that, please go away and let the adults talk here.
On the post: How The Dark Net Is Making Drug Purchases Safer By Eliminating Associated Violence And Improving Quality
Re: Re:
Not exactly. I'm saying that if we're not willing to take it that far, we need to stop claiming that such a thing as "the war on drugs" exists, because it does not.
Where did I ever say we need to punish users? Why are you trying to attack me on that point? That makes exactly as much sense as locking up mugging victims for assault, and I agree it needs to be changed. What I said is that dealers are the worst kind of scum, and that what they do is worse than violence or even murder, because it is.
Don't be ridiculous. Legalization legitimizes them. Suddenly you have a bunch of experts with experience in producing and distributing harmful drugs that no one else has; who do you think is going to take the lead in the newly-opened legitimate markets? Russia had a similar problem with the fall of the Soviet Union. When capitalism and free markets were suddenly legitimized, the only people with experience in free markets were shady black market types, hardened criminals who very quickly took over the economy and have been causing widespread financial oppression and corruption in Russia ever since. (Not that free markets are like drugs; just that this is a real example in the modern world of what happens when you take something that only criminals have experience with and legitimize it: the experienced criminals go legit and take over, but they're still criminals at heart.)
Or we could stop incarcerating drug victims without throwing the baby out with the bathwater by legalizing drug dealing and thereby creating millions of new drug victims. Just a thought.
On the post: How The Dark Net Is Making Drug Purchases Safer By Eliminating Associated Violence And Improving Quality
Re: Re:
On the post: How The Dark Net Is Making Drug Purchases Safer By Eliminating Associated Violence And Improving Quality
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Just look how our culture treats it: drinking is a right of passage. Everyone knows what it means that "you're legal" on your 21st birthday, and for millions of kids, having a drink literally on the first day they become legal is considered an important tradition. And the drug dealers (breweries, wineries, and so forth) make billions of dollars off their backs, and meanwhile we lose about 15,000 people, and rack up tens of billions in societal costs, every single year, from drunk driving alone. (source: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) Plus all the other damages, in the form of drunken violence, non-traffic accidents due to intoxication, deterioration of health, and deterioration of quality of life, caused by alcohol.
You really think we should extend that pattern any further?
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