Newsgroup: it.scienza.ambiente
Titolo: Re: My mom died of lung cancer

Perhaps all cash will be next.
]
*   On November 11, 1993, apparently tipped off by a friendly bank clerk who
*   thought Alvarez's redeposits looked like "structuring", the Internal
*   Revenue Service seized $88,315.76, the life savings of a hard-working
*   immigrant.
*   
*   The government, of course, had no evidence that Alvarez was using the
*   money for improper purposes, or was in any way connected with drugs or
*   drug-dealing, for the simple reason that he wasn't doing any such thing.
*   
*   In this case, under the astonishing provisions of our nation's asset
*   forfeiture laws, the mere administrative finding that Alvarez had
*    "structured" his transactions was enough to justify the seizure.
[
    We have Federal laws against terminating someone's benefits based solely
    (automatically by computer) on "computer matching" hits of possible
    ineligibility. But NOTHING to protect us from this nearly IDENTICAL
    use of computer data to terminate "benefits".
]
*   To the government, the question of whether the money had been legally
*   earned or was the product of a nefarious drug sale was of no concern.
*   
*   Maybe worse than the nebulous structuring provision is a feature of the
*   same group of laws that places the burden of proof on the victim. In
*   other words, rather than the government having to prove that Alvarez
*   had violated the statute before it seized his money, Alvarez had to
*   prove that he was innocent of any wrongdoing before he could get it
*   back. Further adding to the profound unfairness of the seizure process
*   is an incredible provision that anyone who wants to challenge an action,
*   who wants his day in court, must file a bond with the government of
*   either $5000 or 10 percent of the value of the seized property. Alvarez
*   had to borrow the money from his credit cards.
*   
*   The Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathon R. Howden, floo

bugs. The programmer can
          be faulted for not using two orders of magnitude fewer lines for
          demonstrating the error. A small fragment of code can be emailed.
 
        o If the problem is compile-time, email the relevant C/C++
          preprocessor output snippet. The comments by the programmer in the
          email transfer state THE CODE DOESN'T COMPILE ANYWAY.
 
        o Have the vendor deliver a "debug" version of their product. That
          would be a good use for email. Sun Microsystems does that with a
          C++ product for us, their customer. Email the results back.
 
        o Have the vendor visit to troubleshoot.
 
        o Requested a login via SecureID and Salomon's netblazer, supporting
          28.8 PPP (TCP/IP for windowing connectivity) for the vendor. Let
          them transfer in any tools they need to troubleshoot.
          Short-term access.
 
        o If it is truly necessary to transfer a large amount of code, such as
          Informix working to convert a large Sybase app, then take the time
          to write a shell script that (using say 'sed') scrambles the names
          of environment variables, and be sure to hand-ruin any proprietary
          algorithms.
 
    Why is transfer of Salomon proprietary source to a vendor's site the last
    step to try? Because Salomon loses control over the code. In the Informix
    /Sybase case, the vendor Informix requested (and received) another copy
    of the code "because I lost the previous copy".
 
    Two emails between the pair are enclosed.
 
[snip]
 
*********************************
:Size:      846077,   Dated:  Jul 3  17:52
:Sender:    sara@sbixxx            [sara xxxxxxxxxx XXX-NJ]
:Recipient: 
xxx...@roguewave.com
  [Dennis xxxxxxx]
:Subject:   Re: (Fwd) Re: (Fwd) rw...
**** UUencoding, Filename='rw4.tar.Z'
 
Hi Dennis