Slashdot Mirror

Colorado recently enacted (law went into effect Monday) a No-call list that is maintained by an outside company. Lots of amusing tidbits in this and this article, including that 790,000 people have signed up for the list (sign-up was available before the law took effect), and that 600 complaints were received in the first two days the law was in effect. Fines don't come into place until the third offense, but the AG has already warned some companies to stop.

The Colorado No-call list can be joined here or by calling 1-888-249-9097.

Unfortunately, if you don't already live in Colorado, most of the residents don't want you to move here (if you live here you know what I mean).

• 60 of 98 FBI Terrorism Cases were thrown out because of lack of evidence - The article even has a quote from an FBI spokesman admitting to arresting and trying to prosecute people knowing that it would never go through.
• Village Voice Analysis - It's the Village Voice, take it with a grain of salt. (I'm just adding it to this list because it is quite insightful.
• Business Week Article discussing the various infringement of civil rights
• NYTime Editorial on naming an American citizen as an illegal combatant
• Ohio State graduates threatened with expulsion/arrest if they "demonstrate or heckle" during Bush's speech - "But immediately before class members filed into the giant football stadium, an announcer instructed the crowd that all the university's speakers deserve to be treated with respect and that anyone demonstrating or heckling would be subject to expulsion and arrest. The announcer urged that Bush be greeted with a "thunderous" ovation.
• Federal Courts strike down Bush Administrations attempt to prevent people from challenging censorship laws
• Justice Department raising questions about case on John Lindh
• Another NYTimes article on illegally detaining American Citizens

So, how long until we start seeing Doom III inspired school shootings?

I read that the CO Consitution provisions for free speech is more broad than the U.S. Constitution.

Read more at the local papers:
The Denver Post
Rocky Mountain News

I think you can read more from their front pages.

Personally, I'm confused about this whole issue (I'm local). On one hand, I don't think the police can find out what you read and prosecute you on your beliefs. But the press has been reporting that the City of Thornton wants to place a suspect at the lab by proving the receipt belongs to the suspect. But some of the quotes here from the decision makes it look like Thornton went about it the wrong way.

Rocky Mountain News has a pretty decent overview of how this all got started.

"Barry Leaman-Miller, was identified as a member of the "American Friends Service Committee (criminal extremist G)." He said the Philadelphia-based Quaker group has won the Nobel Peace Prize and "acts in the best tradition of nonviolence."

At first glance, one might attribute that statement to a computer-illiterate senator or to an incompetent journalist. You may be surprised, then, to find that this quote was from Ken Thompson in 1995. Yes, one of our own - a creator of the UNIX system and the command line we use every single day - condemned the antisocial activities of malicious computer users. Which leads me to ask: why aren't we listening, and where is our moral compass?

A few years ago, it was all the media's fault: the media gave much attention to antisocial criminals who happened to use computers. Nowadays, computer crime is rarely front-page news, especially in light of the recent terrorist attacks caused by the usual suspects. So what kind of notoriety, then, are these criminally insane geeks seeking? The fact of the matter is that the open source community here on Slashdot is not only tolerating illicit behavior; it is encouraging it. We are partially responsible for every Brian West, Eric Corley, Dmitri Skylarov, Ted Felten, Randal Schwartz,, and DrinkOrDie member. We are harboring criminals because we are glorifying their acts and lauding them for "civil disobedience." We are not unlike the Arabs who cheered as they watched the Twin Towers collapse on their (banned) TV sets. And like those ungrateful Arabs, we owe our prosperity to the American government and the capitalist society that so many users here seem to despise. We have become our own enemy.

We, as a community, need to stop tolerating this behavior. Instead of encouraging people like Jon Johansen by sending money to the EFF to help them keep these ingrates' lilly white asses out of jail, we need to send a strong message that computer crime is not consistent with our ethical standards. We need to lead by example - log off of Gnutella, start paying for software (even Windows), stop cracking your DVDs and eBooks "for fun," and start acting like an upstanding citizen. It is only then that the powers that be will start taking us seriously and repeal the DMCA/SSSCA/PATRIOT legislation, and start giving us our rights back. It is crystal clear that we will not get our rights back a moment before we get out of the business of producing criminals, and the first step is to stop empathizing with them.

freebsd guy

Ever drink a cock soda?.

That's some real news, not this gay shit on slashdot.

It didn't crash in the Denver/Boulder area or in Colorado Springs (where the Air Force Academy and NORAD are located).

I think Canada must be getting some screwy news on this, one of my coworkers is from Canada and her mother called saying she had heard a plane had crashed in the town of Summit, Colorado. There is no town of Summit, Colorado, although there is a county, but nothing has happened there that I've heard about (I live and work about an hour from Summit county).

However, the "Goodbye to Mile High" football game was postponed, which, to some Coloradans, is more devastating than an airplane crash.

The local papers here are:
Rocky Mountain News
Denver Post

Neither of these have reported any airplane strikes, but feel free to look for yourself.

Sorry, had to get that horrible pun out of my system.

Seriously: while gesture controls may not be ready for prime time just yet, consider that the technology may prove useful for those who communicate best using only their hands. A 17-year-old from Colorado recently won the grand prize at the International Science and Engineering Fair for designing a glove that can interpret the movements of someone "speaking" in American Sign Language (ASL) and then output the communication as text.

So, the hard of hearing could control their computer with ASL commands, or dictate letters the same way the rest of us can with a voice-powered word processor, using beefed-up gesture control technology and, of course, hardware that can reliably interpret their hand movements. It's somewhat tangential to the story, but an intriguing concept nonetheless.

Did anyone else notice the interesting quirk? This is very similar to the study (with Barbie dolls) done that "showed" that segregation was causing racism. I don't know if that conclusion follows from that data, although I tend to accept the conclusion anyway... but it's interesting that there was another study involving black Barbie dolls.

the word here in the Denver area is that the top people in US West will stay at the top after the merge.

Fortunately that's not the case. While it was officially billed as a merger of equals, the reality is that Qwest took over USW. That's fine by me; the service couldn't get any worse.

Check out this article in the Rocky Mountain News. (Near the end it talks about it being a takeover.)

I can say that US West is by far the worst major telco out there.

Amen to that! Given that Denver is USW's headquarters, I'm continuously amazed at how bad the high-speed internet infrastructure is here. And don't even get me started on all the problems I've had with my home phone service.........

Five state senators have recently proposed legislation that would REQUIRE the prominent display of the ten commandments in public schools. There's an article about it here. The opening sentence (a product of its author, I admit) is quite humorous in an of itself:

Five Republican state lawmakers Thursday proposed posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms across Colorado as a way to make schools safer.

The Columbine shooting, though inexcusable in my opinion, taught us that the social hell faced by many students can lead to tragic results. So how do we solve the problem? By giving students yet ANOTHER way to call into question individual differences. Problem solved. NOT!

If anything, this article points to a very corrupt practice I see in our government - the tendency to tack on amendments that have *nothing* to do with the original legislation. The *national* proposal to *allow* the ten commandments to be posted in schools and other government buildings was proposed as an *amendment* to laws being considered for gun control. What does religion have to do with (illusory) gun control?

These lawmakers need to find another job. Ideas are welcome.