Like a dog shaking fleas, Microsoft seeks to concentrate on paying customers, leaving granny to fend for herself in a world full of scams and misinformation.
At a certain point all public communication will just be AIs making content for other AIs, and we can humans can assend to just talking to eachother again.
Actual murderers get out in the time that Ross served.
The concept of justice must include an element of proportionality, I would argue that Ross's sentence, for a first time non-violent criminal, was over the top. Without proportionality justice becomes arbitrary, based more on luck and your connections to power.
We punish those we can punish: the little guy. Whilst those running governments, corporations and networks that facilitate repression, hatred and genocide go scot free.
We punish people all the time for non-violent, white-collar crime; often very severely. Bernie Madoff got sent to prison for 150 years and died there and, as far as I know, he never solicited a murder for hire.
Madoff is the exception rather than the rule--and even Madoff operated his Ponzi scheme for over 40 years before being prosecuted.
Madoff's arrest and prosecution was actually pretty ineffectual in my opinion. If an amoral person can live as one of the richest men in the world for 40 years in exchange for spending the last 10 years of their life in minimum-security prison, I think a lot of amoral people would take that trade.
Bernie Ebbers and Jeff Skilling both got more than 20 years for Enron. The CEO and co-owner of NCFE got 30 years and 25 years respectively for their role in a securities and wire fraud relating to that business.
> In December 2019, Ebbers was released from Federal Medical Center, Fort Worth, due to declining health, having served 13 years of his 25-year sentence, and he died just over a month later.[1]
...living until the age of 61 as one of the richest men in the world, then spending 13 years in minimum-security prison.
> In 2013, following a further appeal, and earlier accusations that prosecutors had concealed evidence from Skilling's lawyers prior to his trial, the United States Department of Justice reached a deal with Skilling, which resulted in ten years being cut from his sentence, reducing it to 14 years. He was moved to a halfway house in 2018 and released from custody in 2019, after serving 12 years. [2]
...living until the age of 53 as one of the richest men in the world, then spending 12 years in minimum-security prison.
Re: NCFE: Lance K. Poulsen went to jail at 65, and while I wasn't able to find out his current situation, he's about due to get out of jail if the other cases are any indication[3]. Rebecca S. Parrett, 60, fled after her conviction and was arrested at age 62 in Mexico, largely due to fleeing to a country with robust US extradition (why?)[4].
If a Mafia boss never strong armed a merchant, never busted any kneecaps, and never pulled a trigger but simply paid other people to carry out various crimes, should the law give him a short sentence because he was non-violent?
I don't know what the appropriate sentence for Ulbrecht, but I think your claims about proportionality are missing the fact he didn't just direct commit a few crimes, such as trying (unsuccessfully) to hire a hitman, but he facilitated hundreds of thousands of crimes. Maybe you think selling drugs and guns to randos should not be illegal, but that is a separate question of whether or not he broke the laws as written.
As for your last point, I don't disagree that the wealthy/powerful/connected live under a different justice system than everyone else.
Wasn't silk road selling way more than just drugs ? Like, pornography and gun, worldwide. When you facilitate both sex trafficking, organized crime and potentially terrorism you can't exactly be surprised you get hit with everything.
> Carnegie Mellon University's researchers did an analysis of Silk Road gathering data on a daily basis for eight months before it was shut down. Some of their findings include:
> “‘Weed’ (i.e., marijuana) is the most popular item on Silk Road” (p.8)
> “The quantities being sold are generally rather small (e.g., a few grams of marijuana)” (p.12)
> In Table 1, we take a closer look at the top 20 categories per number of item offered. “Weed” (i.e., mari- juana) is the most popular item on Silk Road, followed by “Drugs,” which encompass any sort of narcotics or prescription medicine the seller did not want further classified. Prescription drugs, and “Benzos,” colloquial term for benzodiazepines, which include prescription medicines like Valium and other drugs used for insom- nia and anxiety treatment, are also highly popular. The four most popular categories are all linked to drugs; nine of the top ten, and sixteen out of the top twenty are drug-related. In other words, Silk Road is mostly a drug store, even though it also caters some other products. Finally, among narcotics, even though such a classification is somewhat arbitrary, Silk Road appears to have more inventory in “soft drugs” (e.g., weed, cannabis, hash, seeds) than “hard drugs” (e.g., opiates); this presumably simply reflects market demand.
> Silk Road places relatively few restrictions on the types of goods sellers can offer. From the Silk Road sellers’ guide [5],
“Do not list anything who’s (sic) purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen items or info, stolen credit cards, counterfeit currency, personal info, assassinations, and weapons of any kind. Do not list anything related to pedophilia.”
> Conspicuously absent from the list of prohibited items are prescription drugs and narcotics, as well as adult pornography and fake identification documents (e.g., counterfeit driver’s licenses). Weapons and am- munition used to be allowed until March 4, 2012, when they were transferred to a sister site called The Armory [1], which operated with an infrastructure similar to that of Silk Road. Interestingly, the Armory closed in August 2012 reportedly due to a lack of business [6].
No, silk road did not sell weapons. There was legal content like pornography and other media on there, but Ulbricht was an idealist and excluded material with "intent to harm".
Notably, as Ullbricht predicted, the Silk Road was immediately replaced by sites which did not have such ideals, and openly sold weapons and illegal pornography.
plus in North America you don't really need a darknet market to get a gun illegally. US FedGov ain't gonna get to involved in illegal gun sales in Europe.
Interesting and surprising they really had rules, thanks for the clarification. I'm ashamed to say I opened this page and read it wrong the first time by skipping the first sentence.
I once noticed (in the UK) that two people who I read news stories about in the same week got similar sentences. One for breach of copyright, one for sexually assaulting a teenager.
That said, I think Ross did knowingly enable violence?
Anyone else recently tried to search for a location, even using keyword map, and still not be shown a Google Maps link? I would much rather be shown a map, than whatever BS AI generated dogwater summary they are dishing out instead.
If Google mangement can't see the user value of putting their own useful products in search, what hope is there for the rest of the world's useful information?
People are attracted to "I climbed a ladder, and it was safe" stories, which are usually presented without the context on the societal harms of ladder use in aggregate.
However, it needs flatpak runtime. If you already have different flatpak apps, this is not an issue, it is going to be shared with them, but if this is going to be your first-and-only flatpak app, you need to add few hundreds MB.
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