Slashdot Mirror
California Student Arrested For Console Hacking
jhoger writes "Matthew Crippen was arrested yesterday for hacking game consoles (for profit) in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He was released on a $5,000 bond, but faces up to 10 years in prison. This is terribly disturbing to me; a man could lose 10 years of his freedom for providing the service of altering hardware. He could well lose much of his freedom for providing a modicum of it to others. There is no piracy going on, necessarily — the games a modified console could run may simply not be signed by the vendor. It's much like jailbreaking an iPhone. But it seems because he is disabling a 'circumvention device' it is a criminal issue. Guess it's time to kick a few dollars over to the EFF."
Funnily enough 750,000 seems to be the go-to figure for jobs, either created or lost. I read "Risk" by Martin Gardener recently and I've found it's great for noticing when people use their memory of other numbers to cue-up made-up stats like these. (That will also take you to some debunkings of those numbers.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I can't understand how the freedom of a business comes before the freedom of the people.
There is a quote attributed (perhaps erroneously) to Mussolini, but he is alleged to have said "Socialism should more properly be called corporatism, because it combines the power of the business sector with the power of the state".
I do believe America is suffering now under a kind of corporatism. The term seems more accurate than capitalism. At least since we are also a democracy there may be hope.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
If you haven't realized it already the Legal system is functioning the way it is intended.
Plato states quite clearly that there is no true justice, but the appearance of it is what matters in society. The lower classes of society must believe there is justice else the upper classes may lose their power.
Don't worry however, the DHS has plenty of training manuals stating that people who question the government are possible domestic extremists. There will be a few agents on their way to send you to a re-education camp.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
The quote usually given is 'Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power,' not socialism. However as you point out, there is no evidence that he ever made that statement. However, is we presume he did, the important thing to remember is that Mussolini understood what corporatism meant. It does not mean rule by large corporations, in the modern western sense. The 'corporations' referenced by corporatism does include business groups, but also includes trade unions and guilds, military organizations, religious groups, farming lobbies, etc... The idea being that strong government power would be delegated to these groups within their own perspective field of interest, and government itself would be responsible for keeping them from each others' throats, like a pack of rabid dogs.
Good thing you made that correction...socialism is the exact opposite of corporatism. Fascism, at least the way it was implemented by Mussolini and Hitler, was very much corporatist, though. It's really kind of funny how much people scream "socialism" these days when we're so much closer to corporatism than we are to socialism. In socialism, the government controls the industry. In corporatism, the industry (the corporations) control the government. We are much closer to the latter.
And hundreds, if not thousands, of violent crime offenders go without jail time every week. I love a functining legal system.
It functions as it was built to function.
In the American federal system, violent crimes are traditionally prosecuted at the state and local level.
The federal government has no general criminal jurisdiction outside of Washington D.C., its island territories, military bases, Indian reservations, and similiar enclaves.
The Secret Service was orginally organized to fight counterfeiting - a purely economic crime with an interstate dimension. ICE is the criminal enforcement division of the customs and immigration service - and these are not guys you want to fool around with.
Violent offenders who do enter the federal system get hammered. There is little willingness to plea bargain. When the judge says twenty-five years to life, you serve twenty-five years to life.