If someone trying to start a home web design business pirates a copy of Adobe CS4 I don't really have a problem with it. (Hell, my first copy of Dreamweaver was pirated, back in college.) That's sorta the moral equivalent of homeless people jumping the subway turnstile. When people honestly cannot afford to follow the rules, as long as they aren't hurting others, we'll look the other way.
But the problem is that lot of companies don't give it the slightest thought, even long past that point, with a dozen employees and computers, with payroll in the hundreds of thousands and they're all running off some cracked copy of XP and pirated office because they're too damn cheap or lazy to pay a few thousand for software.
By the time a company has enough to rent an office, or hire a computer guy, they really have enough money to pay for their software.
And if those people actually paid for their software, software prices would be lower anyway.
There is also the possibility to educate your manager/boss about the serious risk of using unlicensed software and the potential financial consequences. This would require you to risk getting really honest with him.
As someone said above, the BSA is sociopathic.
This is a very good reason to stay as far away from them as possible, and make sure all your licenses are good.
Which, incidentally, means using commercial software as little as possible, at least in my book. My company uses Windows (legal), Office (legal) and Adobe CS4 (legal), Nortons (legal).
And we use some 'free for any use' commercial software, like Skype. We don't use shareware unless we've already paid the license. I don't think we have any out there currently, but we've bought some in the past.
And that's about it for the commercial software, or in fact non-OSS software.
Seriously people, there are probably some good reasons for not going entirely OSS. Go ahead, get Windows, get Office, get AutoCAD or whatever, and make sure it's all legal.
But there aren't good reasons for not going mostly OSS. There's no good reason to use unregistered WinZip instead of 7-zip, or pirate Nero instead of InfraRecorder.
Yes, but this guy is actively helping copyright infringement when he supports and reinstalls the software.
There really is no case that actually would be made against him, though. The BSA will show up and rape the company out of existence, but they don't bother with individual employees.
The BSA is almost as sociopathic as the Company President in the slashdot summary.
Indeed. The way to fix pirated software is not to go the BSA, it is to convince the company that the BSA is sociopathic, and will eventually show up if they don't straighten things out.
Right, the results are the same: Something running in someone's web browser that can make web requests as if it's the user of the browser. (And hence can post comments, or change passwords, or whatever.)
Although this vulnerability is easier to do, because Flash files stupidly have permission to access the domain they're hosted on, instead of the domain of the page they were called from.
Which lets people, for example, who want to break into your facebook account upload a (hard to determine it is) malicious file to facebook.com, and then embed that file inside a completely different domain's HTML file.
Whereas with javascript, it's the other way around...they'd have to make some code embedding the javascript on facebook, and then they can put the javascript anywhere on the internet.
The second sounds less secure, but is actually more, because a) Almost all forum-ish software is specifically designed so you can't put random HTML tags in it, and b) you can't do an endrun around that by uploading your own HTML file as web browsers will only show them if they have the right mime type, and that requires them having the right extension and thus being obviously filterable.
Whereas Flash ignores all that, and will happily load files with any mime type, from any domain.
I'm not entirely sure how anyone's supposed to fix it in the server. I am unaware of any magical tool we can run to make absolutely sure that what we were handed isn't possible to run as a flash file. (Except actually attempting to run it.)
A few people have suggested resizing images, but, as you point out, the example is actually a zip file.
And let's not even get into webmail.
The solution is really for Adobe to either require a.swf extension, or to require the correct mime type on the file. (Which, for all intents and purposes, would be the same thing, as web servers usually figure mime type by extension.)
In fact, I'd like to see more mime type checking in general for things loaded in web pages. Like javascript files, and css, and images. We're well past the old crappy web servers where those types could sometimes be wrong.
Via someone in another page calling it using <embed>.
Even if said page is on another domain, the flash executes in the context of the domain it's hosted on.
Which means it can interact with that domain however it wants.
I'm still slightly confused as to what the problem is supposed to be, though. Yeah, a flash object can interact with my domain if someone puts it in an avatar image or something...and?
What I say is that laws should be strictly hierarchical.
You should be able to look up what you want to do, and be able to read maybe 50 laws about that topic, and know factually that no other law can be relevant.
For example, look up 'Public property', then 'Not in a vehicle', then 'Not deliberately interacting with others', and find out what the laws on loitering or whatever are, and know that no other laws can actually apply.
That's not the best example, and those categories are dumb, but the point is, while the law is roughly hierarchical, it's not hierarchical by law, and hence some random law you've never heard of can cover the situation you're in, even if you went and looked that situation up in the actual place you should have.
I.e., legally speaking, you have to read the entire law to know if you can do anything at all, which is idiotic and, frankly, unconstitutional.
All laws, at all government levels, should be required to be posted in a way that lets you 'drill down' to the area of any actions you might be considering, and read all laws that vaguely cover it. Maybe allowing 100 'laws' total at the ultimate level. Each category clearly explaining what other categories and laws are under it.
If you can demonstrate that you looked up your behavior where a reasonable person would, and the law you're being charged with wasn't there, said charge should be thrown out, and the legislature should be informed that law won't be enforced until it gets placed in the correct place.
The same law, could, of course, end up in multiple places, which means we shouldn't use this system to enumerate the laws. We could keep using the existing system, only have one copy of each law, but require a useful index.
(If I thought it was vaguely possible, I'd instead suggest having each law 'tagged with keywords', which would be a better way to do this.)
Oh, and of course, on top of that, what you said is correct. Ignorance of the law isn't an absolute non-exception either. Laws have to be at least be in things people would expect there to be laws in.
For example, a law requiring books in bookcases to be sorted a specific way would probably not stand up in court, because absolutely no one would expect that,or anything like that, to be a law, unless the government made such a law widely known, or unless laws controlling the stacking and order of other objects were common. As no one has ever vaguely heard of any law like that, the first few people charged could probably get it thrown out on the grounds they'd have absolutely no reason to look up a law about that. (These cases, of course, would then get published in the paper, and would become common knowledge, rendering that argument moot.)
Buy that's irrelevant to the problem at hand, which is ignorance of the facts, not ignorance of the law.
It is an entirely different thing, ignorance of the facts. This is because most laws require 'intent'.
It is illegal for me to steal mail out of my neighbor's mailbox, whether I know that law or not. Not knowing that law is not going to help me.
If their mail gets put in my box, and I fail to notice that a piece of mail is addressed to them and I open it, that is tampering with mail, but it not intentionally tampering with the mail, and hence not illegal. I didn't know the fact that it was their mail.
Now, there are laws where intent is weakened, like manslaughter, where you can be charged if you didn't make an effort to learn the facts, like the fact someone was walking in front of your car while you were driving it. While doing some dangerous things, there is a minimum standard of awareness and cognitive thought that people are required to have.
But 99% of the laws require you to know what you are doing is, in fact, what you doing, and do it on purpose. It's illegal if, and only if, you know you're doing a specific action, whether or not you know if that action's illegal.
This is why a lot of laws are phrased weirdly. For example, if rearend someone in a car, you get charged with 'following too close'. You didn't intentionally run into their car, so you can't be charged with that. (That probably is an actual separate crime that almost no one gets charged with. Or just vandalism.) You were, however, intentionally driving too close to stop, or intentionally not paying attention (Which is a bit of oxymoron, but whatever.), which caused the accident.
Anyway, you have to intentionally fail to show up in court, and it can't be a crime to 'fail to check', like with manslaughter...there are tens of thousands of courts in this country, you can't be required to call them all and constantly check if you need to show up.
The judge was, in fact, wrong in this case. Failure to show in court is failure to show in court after you've been summoned to court. If you have not been notified, you have not been summoned.
I mean, where do you think the guides are getting it from, magic land? They're not getting it from the shows, shows do not write their own episode descriptions, nor do shows know when they will be run.
No, the channel knows all that. The problem is that they have that stuff in some custom proprietary database somewhere, and send it to a few specific people in some crappyass format, who have each, individually, developed tools to handle each channel's format.
And then they have to figure out what channels each and every cable station is carrying, and paste that all together into some interface.
It's a hell of a lot of work, and it's entirely fucking stupid and pointless.
Channels who want people to watch them should publish, in some standard format, what is on them. That is in their best interests, but in fact they're too damn lazy.
Cable stations are not lazy, but certainly don't have time to do all that work, which is why they get the TV Guide channel instead.
Back in the day, parent used to teach their kids that the world out there was a scary place and they'd shelter them until they were ready to handle it in small chunks.
As the other post has pointed out, you're rather backwards, but that's just because you said it wrong.
The problem isn't that we don't shelter kids today, it is that we shelter them too much from specific things, which we dump on them entirely in one go, and meanwhile totally ignore all the other stuff and let them do whatever they want. (A lot of which is, admittedly, hard to control.)
Children should be introduced to the internet and TV slowly. (People shouldn't have admin rights unless they need them, and that's not really an 'child' issue at all.)
A whitelist of sites, ideally. Starting with some children oriented sites, graduated to stuff like Wikipedia and Facebook by tweens, and at about 15 or so, they should be mature enough to actually be on the whole internet. (I'm not saying all kids that age now should be, because a hell of a lot them aren't any more mature than they were at 12. Hell, half of them won't be noticeably more mature by 18.)
Likewise, they should be introduced to managing on their own as they become mature enough for it. (Especially as, thanks to the miracle of cell phones, we can actually somewhat ensure their safety.)
There's no actual reason that any teenager, anyone who's hit 13, cannot live by themselves for several days. They know how to cook and eat food, they know how to lock the doors, they know how to call 911 in case of an emergency, etc.
I don't know what the actual law is in this regard, but I hate that it has started lumping 'lax parenting' in with 'letting kids do things on their own'. There's a difference between forcing kids to essentially manage themselves, and letting them do that when they're mature enough, and I don't really know how the law could distinguish this.
All and all, I'm glad I don't have kids to worry about this.
On the game theory track, it's well-known that people actually do not choose the "optimal" strategy -- they don't act exclusively in their own self-interest.
OTOH, it's been demonstrated that people have an inate sense of fairness in games are that presented as cooperative, not competitive.
I.e., there was a game where one person got a dollar, and another 50 cents, for both choosing the best solution, whereas they both got less when choosing something else. (I.e., it was a game where the best possible solution was always the same, and if one side picked a different one it harmed them as much as the other.)
It was discovered that the people getting a dollar would often give the other person a quarter each time to make it 'fair', even though the person making the least amount of money was not doing anything they wouldn't do anyway.
Once you change the rules of the game so that people aren't 'competing', people stop competing.
Randians usually argue around this problem with tautologies.
Indeed.
People will be nice, and cooporate 90% of the time, and compete fairly the rest, and be entirely happy doing it...if you structure the game that way.
If you just make it a 'grab everything you can' free for all, people will not only do really stupid things, half the time they won't even do things that benefit them, instead attempting to harm others, or having really poor long-term planning.
People are really bad at calculating game theory results without a specific foundation in it. Which means even the people who do have a foundation won't be able to function because everyone else is behaving irrationally.
If the people who know game theory, and psychology, design the game, though, they can easily produce a setup where people are 'duped' into doing what is best for both society and themselves.
Murder is not, in fact, common behavior. Less than a single percentage of people have ever murdered anyone.
It is also unapproved of by society. (As opposed to, say, repairing a television, also something that less than a single percentage of society has done, but society has no problem with, and even pays people to do.)
Ergo, murder is 'deviant'. It is a violation of the social norm. (Moreover, it's a violation of a near universal social norm.)
And the parent did not say anything about greed being the only force worth following. He just said it was the basis of human interaction...that everyone wants something.
You talk about 'psychopaths', but 'greed' and 'empathy' are not absolutes. Nor are they actually opposites...you can have no empathy, and not a lot of greed.
Incidentally, I think you mean 'sociopaths'...the different between the two is that sociopaths have, in fact, lost their empathy from some specific reason, like greed(1), whereas psychopaths actually have no empathy to start with, and aren't really 'greedier' than anyone else. Sociopaths will murder people for their shoes, psychopaths will murder people for fun and not care about shoes at all.
It is hard to have greed past a certain level and empathy, but almost everyone will take care of themselves and their family and friends first, even with empathy...the question is what level will they pausing in that to take care of others.
I.e., almost no one is going to make sure someone has a warm place to sleep...if they don't. They usually won't even do that if they do, but don't have a job. (Do we expect people in homeless shelters to volunteer at homeless shelters, or do we expect them to be looking for a job so they can be non-homeless?)
The question, like I said, is what level do you start placing the needs/wants of others above the needs/wants of your own group. What level does 'empathy' override 'greed'? (And greed is, in fact, entirely the wrong word here.) What level are people satisfied at their own situation so are willing to help others?
That's why Biblically, the '10% tithe' idea showed up, as a sort of guideline. Regardless of whether you think that was divinely ordained, the concept is there: If you make some money, you should be able to help others in some amount roughly proportional to how much you make.
1) An example of why 'greed' is the wrong word. Many sociopaths have lost their empathy due to having to fight on the streets for food and security. Aka, 'greed', if 'wanting to not starve to death' is 'greed'.
And why a capital gains tax at all? If I put money in the bank it earns interest - isn't investing similar?
If you earn interest in a bank it is taxed, you loon.
That's what everyone's talking about...the middle class put money in banks, at 2% interest, and pay income taxes on the interest.
In fact, the tax hurts so much we invented all sorts of tax-deferment stuff like 401K accounts and stuff for the middle class to use.
These were entirely invented to us pay the income taxes, and interest taxes, on that stuff when we get the money out, instead of every year...and when we getting the money out, we'll be retired, making less money than now, and hopefully be in a lower tax bracket so pay less.
The rich, however, put their money in stocks, get three times the return, and pay the capital gains tax rate, which is about half the income tax rate. (Or, at least, half the rate for people with enough money to store some.)
As for having 'no incomes'...losing at gambling, or the stock market (pretending that counted as 'income'), does not mean you do not need to pay taxes.
Now, if you gamble a lot, and win, you can actually deduce your loses from your winning. If you make $20,000 a year, and purchase $1000 worth of a lottery tickets in a year, and win $5000, you actually had an income of only $24,000, assuming you can actually document your purchases to the IRS.
But if you purchased $1000 worth of lottery tickets and lost every time, you had an income of $20,000. If you won $100, you had an income of $20,000, because you can only count $100 worth of tickets. Gambling losses only count towards canceling out the actual income you made gambling.
Um, I have no idea what you're smoking, but, no, there is not some magical MBR replacement that magically decrypts the drive. I don't even know what you're talking about with the 'MBR replacement' talk, except possibly a cold boot attack.
Cold boot attacks require that the computer was just running. Granted, it is possible to steal a laptop that is running.
But the entire danger can be minimized by simply having the computer not set to boot off external devices, and the BIOS password protected.
Good luck turning that running system into a system running a program of your choice without the memory expiring. You'd have to dismantle the laptop enough to reach the hard drive while it was running, and then quickly try to swap it fast enough. Or do the same with memory.
The real joke, of course, is that Ironkey is just as vulnerable to this. Oh, sure, the key isn't in memory...but the encrypted files were. In fact, with disk readahead, it's entirely possible files you didn't even open were in memory.
Hell, if you're using Ironkey on an unencrypted system, and opened files, forget memory attacks...you just put files in swap. Oh, yeah, aren't you clever. Top secret files, right there in swap space.
That doesn't matter, of course, because in actual fact, something like 99% of stolen laptops are stolen by common criminals who might attempt to boot them once to see if there's anything obvious they can steal, and maybe run a program to collect passwords from IE and Firefox. That's it. They aren't doing cold boot attacks, they aren't looking in swap, they just try to boot the system and see what's on it.
You can live in your imaginary world where people need Ironkey to hold files, and don't actually use the files on said drives except on secure government computers or whatever you're imagining happens.
Meanwhile, the solution for people with laptops that might get stolen is whole disk encryption so the loser who runs off with their laptop can't get into their stuff. This will, you know, actually solve the actual security threat those people face, not the one the Ironkey people are hoping you're imagining faces you.
Seriously, like 10000 people in the world need Ironkey. Mostly government couriers. It's not even plausible as a product except that rather delusional people buy it. The only actual security threats it protects against, vs. just having a truecrypt encrypted flash drive, are farfetched for 99.9999% of the people out there.
Everyone else here is apparently attempting to answer the question in the title, which is not the actual problem he's trying to solve.
There is an easy solution to the whole 'laptop getting stolen' problem.
It's called TrueCrypt. Encrypt your drive. Put in the password on boot. Use your browser like normal.
If someone steals your laptop, tada, no stolen passwords, because they can't boot your computer to get to them.
If you want to have a USB fob, well, sadly, keyfiles are not supported by system encryption yet in Truecrypt. But there are third party tools that will do that.
Trying to figure out what to 'store your passwords in' is silly. Store your passwords in your damn computer. And then encrypt your computer.
Incidentally, people saying 'Don't write your passwords down' are idiots living in the 1980s, where people had passwords on local files and for local networks, and that was essentially it. It was, indeed, stupid to write down a password next to a computer if the point of the password was to protect things from people physically sitting at the computer.
It's not stupid when it's your bank password or other online passwords, next to your computer at home. Because the security risk is not people breaking into your house and finding your passwords! The security risk is people you have no contact with at all guessing the passwords, and it's much safer to make it a 20 character password that's is written down than a 10 character one that isn't.
You are correct. Glenn Beck certainly has the right to refuse to speak about any crimes he has committed, or even may have committed.
He is innocent of all rapes and murders until proven guilty in a court of law, and these attempts to basis the jury pool in advance of his indictment are despicable.
Wow! You got a virtual unknown conservative candidate within 4% of winning in a district that has elected Republicans since the 1880s!
And, honestly, you would have probably succeeded this time if the voters were not still entirely rejecting the right and everything you stand for. So there's that comfort.
Maybe next year, you'll actually manage to replace a Republican or two from, say, Utah! Assuming they're still electing Republicans over there.
You're exactly what the Republicans need, people kicking them in the head from behind because they suddenly are voting exactly the way they've always voted WRT to spending. Makes them honest. Honest and unconscious.
Glenn Beck almost certainly did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990.
However, with people raising the issue, he should step forward and deny that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. I mean, the man has a TV show, a very public forum to state that he didn't raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. He could open tomorrow by saying that he didn't rape and murder a young girl in 1990.
Instead he's now suing people who say he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990! I don't think this allegation is true for a second, but seriously, people, that doesn't look good.
In case you honestly don't get the joke, this is one of the many ways that Glenn Beck operates. He will explicitly state rumors, over and over, to assert he doesn't believe in them, but the Democrat involved, usually Obama, should deny them. So someone figured out, hey, he should have a rumor of his own to deny.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone trying to start a home web design business pirates a copy of Adobe CS4 I don't really have a problem with it. (Hell, my first copy of Dreamweaver was pirated, back in college.) That's sorta the moral equivalent of homeless people jumping the subway turnstile. When people honestly cannot afford to follow the rules, as long as they aren't hurting others, we'll look the other way.
But the problem is that lot of companies don't give it the slightest thought, even long past that point, with a dozen employees and computers, with payroll in the hundreds of thousands and they're all running off some cracked copy of XP and pirated office because they're too damn cheap or lazy to pay a few thousand for software.
By the time a company has enough to rent an office, or hire a computer guy, they really have enough money to pay for their software.
And if those people actually paid for their software, software prices would be lower anyway.
There is also the possibility to educate your manager/boss about the serious risk of using unlicensed software and the potential financial consequences. This would require you to risk getting really honest with him.
As someone said above, the BSA is sociopathic.
This is a very good reason to stay as far away from them as possible, and make sure all your licenses are good.
Which, incidentally, means using commercial software as little as possible, at least in my book. My company uses Windows (legal), Office (legal) and Adobe CS4 (legal), Nortons (legal).
And we use some 'free for any use' commercial software, like Skype. We don't use shareware unless we've already paid the license. I don't think we have any out there currently, but we've bought some in the past.
And that's about it for the commercial software, or in fact non-OSS software.
Seriously people, there are probably some good reasons for not going entirely OSS. Go ahead, get Windows, get Office, get AutoCAD or whatever, and make sure it's all legal.
But there aren't good reasons for not going mostly OSS. There's no good reason to use unregistered WinZip instead of 7-zip, or pirate Nero instead of InfraRecorder.
Yes, but this guy is actively helping copyright infringement when he supports and reinstalls the software.
There really is no case that actually would be made against him, though. The BSA will show up and rape the company out of existence, but they don't bother with individual employees.
The BSA is almost as sociopathic as the Company President in the slashdot summary.
Indeed. The way to fix pirated software is not to go the BSA, it is to convince the company that the BSA is sociopathic, and will eventually show up if they don't straighten things out.
Right, the results are the same: Something running in someone's web browser that can make web requests as if it's the user of the browser. (And hence can post comments, or change passwords, or whatever.)
Although this vulnerability is easier to do, because Flash files stupidly have permission to access the domain they're hosted on, instead of the domain of the page they were called from.
Which lets people, for example, who want to break into your facebook account upload a (hard to determine it is) malicious file to facebook.com, and then embed that file inside a completely different domain's HTML file.
Whereas with javascript, it's the other way around...they'd have to make some code embedding the javascript on facebook, and then they can put the javascript anywhere on the internet.
The second sounds less secure, but is actually more, because a) Almost all forum-ish software is specifically designed so you can't put random HTML tags in it, and b) you can't do an endrun around that by uploading your own HTML file as web browsers will only show them if they have the right mime type, and that requires them having the right extension and thus being obviously filterable.
Whereas Flash ignores all that, and will happily load files with any mime type, from any domain.
I'm not entirely sure how anyone's supposed to fix it in the server. I am unaware of any magical tool we can run to make absolutely sure that what we were handed isn't possible to run as a flash file. (Except actually attempting to run it.)
A few people have suggested resizing images, but, as you point out, the example is actually a zip file.
And let's not even get into webmail.
The solution is really for Adobe to either require a .swf extension, or to require the correct mime type on the file. (Which, for all intents and purposes, would be the same thing, as web servers usually figure mime type by extension.)
In fact, I'd like to see more mime type checking in general for things loaded in web pages. Like javascript files, and css, and images. We're well past the old crappy web servers where those types could sometimes be wrong.
If people can upload avatars, they can usually post comments, and if they can post comments, they can usually post links.
Sure, it won't get everyone, but it will get enough.
Via someone in another page calling it using <embed>.
Even if said page is on another domain, the flash executes in the context of the domain it's hosted on.
Which means it can interact with that domain however it wants.
I'm still slightly confused as to what the problem is supposed to be, though. Yeah, a flash object can interact with my domain if someone puts it in an avatar image or something...and?
What I say is that laws should be strictly hierarchical.
You should be able to look up what you want to do, and be able to read maybe 50 laws about that topic, and know factually that no other law can be relevant.
For example, look up 'Public property', then 'Not in a vehicle', then 'Not deliberately interacting with others', and find out what the laws on loitering or whatever are, and know that no other laws can actually apply.
That's not the best example, and those categories are dumb, but the point is, while the law is roughly hierarchical, it's not hierarchical by law, and hence some random law you've never heard of can cover the situation you're in, even if you went and looked that situation up in the actual place you should have.
I.e., legally speaking, you have to read the entire law to know if you can do anything at all, which is idiotic and, frankly, unconstitutional.
All laws, at all government levels, should be required to be posted in a way that lets you 'drill down' to the area of any actions you might be considering, and read all laws that vaguely cover it. Maybe allowing 100 'laws' total at the ultimate level. Each category clearly explaining what other categories and laws are under it.
If you can demonstrate that you looked up your behavior where a reasonable person would, and the law you're being charged with wasn't there, said charge should be thrown out, and the legislature should be informed that law won't be enforced until it gets placed in the correct place.
The same law, could, of course, end up in multiple places, which means we shouldn't use this system to enumerate the laws. We could keep using the existing system, only have one copy of each law, but require a useful index.
(If I thought it was vaguely possible, I'd instead suggest having each law 'tagged with keywords', which would be a better way to do this.)
Oh, and of course, on top of that, what you said is correct. Ignorance of the law isn't an absolute non-exception either. Laws have to be at least be in things people would expect there to be laws in.
For example, a law requiring books in bookcases to be sorted a specific way would probably not stand up in court, because absolutely no one would expect that,or anything like that, to be a law, unless the government made such a law widely known, or unless laws controlling the stacking and order of other objects were common. As no one has ever vaguely heard of any law like that, the first few people charged could probably get it thrown out on the grounds they'd have absolutely no reason to look up a law about that. (These cases, of course, would then get published in the paper, and would become common knowledge, rendering that argument moot.)
Buy that's irrelevant to the problem at hand, which is ignorance of the facts, not ignorance of the law.
The GP's case isn't ignorance of the law at all.
It is an entirely different thing, ignorance of the facts. This is because most laws require 'intent'.
It is illegal for me to steal mail out of my neighbor's mailbox, whether I know that law or not. Not knowing that law is not going to help me.
If their mail gets put in my box, and I fail to notice that a piece of mail is addressed to them and I open it, that is tampering with mail, but it not intentionally tampering with the mail, and hence not illegal. I didn't know the fact that it was their mail.
Now, there are laws where intent is weakened, like manslaughter, where you can be charged if you didn't make an effort to learn the facts, like the fact someone was walking in front of your car while you were driving it. While doing some dangerous things, there is a minimum standard of awareness and cognitive thought that people are required to have.
But 99% of the laws require you to know what you are doing is, in fact, what you doing, and do it on purpose. It's illegal if, and only if, you know you're doing a specific action, whether or not you know if that action's illegal.
This is why a lot of laws are phrased weirdly. For example, if rearend someone in a car, you get charged with 'following too close'. You didn't intentionally run into their car, so you can't be charged with that. (That probably is an actual separate crime that almost no one gets charged with. Or just vandalism.) You were, however, intentionally driving too close to stop, or intentionally not paying attention (Which is a bit of oxymoron, but whatever.), which caused the accident.
Anyway, you have to intentionally fail to show up in court, and it can't be a crime to 'fail to check', like with manslaughter...there are tens of thousands of courts in this country, you can't be required to call them all and constantly check if you need to show up.
The judge was, in fact, wrong in this case. Failure to show in court is failure to show in court after you've been summoned to court. If you have not been notified, you have not been summoned.
Except that channels already have that stuff.
I mean, where do you think the guides are getting it from, magic land? They're not getting it from the shows, shows do not write their own episode descriptions, nor do shows know when they will be run.
No, the channel knows all that. The problem is that they have that stuff in some custom proprietary database somewhere, and send it to a few specific people in some crappyass format, who have each, individually, developed tools to handle each channel's format.
And then they have to figure out what channels each and every cable station is carrying, and paste that all together into some interface.
It's a hell of a lot of work, and it's entirely fucking stupid and pointless.
Channels who want people to watch them should publish, in some standard format, what is on them. That is in their best interests, but in fact they're too damn lazy.
Cable stations are not lazy, but certainly don't have time to do all that work, which is why they get the TV Guide channel instead.
Back in the day, parent used to teach their kids that the world out there was a scary place and they'd shelter them until they were ready to handle it in small chunks.
As the other post has pointed out, you're rather backwards, but that's just because you said it wrong.
The problem isn't that we don't shelter kids today, it is that we shelter them too much from specific things, which we dump on them entirely in one go, and meanwhile totally ignore all the other stuff and let them do whatever they want. (A lot of which is, admittedly, hard to control.)
Children should be introduced to the internet and TV slowly. (People shouldn't have admin rights unless they need them, and that's not really an 'child' issue at all.)
A whitelist of sites, ideally. Starting with some children oriented sites, graduated to stuff like Wikipedia and Facebook by tweens, and at about 15 or so, they should be mature enough to actually be on the whole internet. (I'm not saying all kids that age now should be, because a hell of a lot them aren't any more mature than they were at 12. Hell, half of them won't be noticeably more mature by 18.)
Likewise, they should be introduced to managing on their own as they become mature enough for it. (Especially as, thanks to the miracle of cell phones, we can actually somewhat ensure their safety.)
There's no actual reason that any teenager, anyone who's hit 13, cannot live by themselves for several days. They know how to cook and eat food, they know how to lock the doors, they know how to call 911 in case of an emergency, etc.
I don't know what the actual law is in this regard, but I hate that it has started lumping 'lax parenting' in with 'letting kids do things on their own'. There's a difference between forcing kids to essentially manage themselves, and letting them do that when they're mature enough, and I don't really know how the law could distinguish this.
All and all, I'm glad I don't have kids to worry about this.
On the game theory track, it's well-known that people actually do not choose the "optimal" strategy -- they don't act exclusively in their own self-interest.
OTOH, it's been demonstrated that people have an inate sense of fairness in games are that presented as cooperative, not competitive.
I.e., there was a game where one person got a dollar, and another 50 cents, for both choosing the best solution, whereas they both got less when choosing something else. (I.e., it was a game where the best possible solution was always the same, and if one side picked a different one it harmed them as much as the other.)
It was discovered that the people getting a dollar would often give the other person a quarter each time to make it 'fair', even though the person making the least amount of money was not doing anything they wouldn't do anyway.
Once you change the rules of the game so that people aren't 'competing', people stop competing.
Randians usually argue around this problem with tautologies.
Indeed.
People will be nice, and cooporate 90% of the time, and compete fairly the rest, and be entirely happy doing it...if you structure the game that way.
If you just make it a 'grab everything you can' free for all, people will not only do really stupid things, half the time they won't even do things that benefit them, instead attempting to harm others, or having really poor long-term planning.
People are really bad at calculating game theory results without a specific foundation in it. Which means even the people who do have a foundation won't be able to function because everyone else is behaving irrationally.
If the people who know game theory, and psychology, design the game, though, they can easily produce a setup where people are 'duped' into doing what is best for both society and themselves.
Murder is not, in fact, common behavior. Less than a single percentage of people have ever murdered anyone.
It is also unapproved of by society. (As opposed to, say, repairing a television, also something that less than a single percentage of society has done, but society has no problem with, and even pays people to do.)
Ergo, murder is 'deviant'. It is a violation of the social norm. (Moreover, it's a violation of a near universal social norm.)
And the parent did not say anything about greed being the only force worth following. He just said it was the basis of human interaction...that everyone wants something.
You talk about 'psychopaths', but 'greed' and 'empathy' are not absolutes. Nor are they actually opposites...you can have no empathy, and not a lot of greed.
Incidentally, I think you mean 'sociopaths'...the different between the two is that sociopaths have, in fact, lost their empathy from some specific reason, like greed(1), whereas psychopaths actually have no empathy to start with, and aren't really 'greedier' than anyone else. Sociopaths will murder people for their shoes, psychopaths will murder people for fun and not care about shoes at all.
It is hard to have greed past a certain level and empathy, but almost everyone will take care of themselves and their family and friends first, even with empathy...the question is what level will they pausing in that to take care of others.
I.e., almost no one is going to make sure someone has a warm place to sleep...if they don't. They usually won't even do that if they do, but don't have a job. (Do we expect people in homeless shelters to volunteer at homeless shelters, or do we expect them to be looking for a job so they can be non-homeless?)
The question, like I said, is what level do you start placing the needs/wants of others above the needs/wants of your own group. What level does 'empathy' override 'greed'? (And greed is, in fact, entirely the wrong word here.) What level are people satisfied at their own situation so are willing to help others?
That's why Biblically, the '10% tithe' idea showed up, as a sort of guideline. Regardless of whether you think that was divinely ordained, the concept is there: If you make some money, you should be able to help others in some amount roughly proportional to how much you make.
1) An example of why 'greed' is the wrong word. Many sociopaths have lost their empathy due to having to fight on the streets for food and security. Aka, 'greed', if 'wanting to not starve to death' is 'greed'.
And why a capital gains tax at all? If I put money in the bank it earns interest - isn't investing similar?
If you earn interest in a bank it is taxed, you loon.
That's what everyone's talking about...the middle class put money in banks, at 2% interest, and pay income taxes on the interest.
In fact, the tax hurts so much we invented all sorts of tax-deferment stuff like 401K accounts and stuff for the middle class to use.
These were entirely invented to us pay the income taxes, and interest taxes, on that stuff when we get the money out, instead of every year...and when we getting the money out, we'll be retired, making less money than now, and hopefully be in a lower tax bracket so pay less.
The rich, however, put their money in stocks, get three times the return, and pay the capital gains tax rate, which is about half the income tax rate. (Or, at least, half the rate for people with enough money to store some.)
As for having 'no incomes'...losing at gambling, or the stock market (pretending that counted as 'income'), does not mean you do not need to pay taxes.
Now, if you gamble a lot, and win, you can actually deduce your loses from your winning. If you make $20,000 a year, and purchase $1000 worth of a lottery tickets in a year, and win $5000, you actually had an income of only $24,000, assuming you can actually document your purchases to the IRS.
But if you purchased $1000 worth of lottery tickets and lost every time, you had an income of $20,000. If you won $100, you had an income of $20,000, because you can only count $100 worth of tickets. Gambling losses only count towards canceling out the actual income you made gambling.
Um, I have no idea what you're smoking, but, no, there is not some magical MBR replacement that magically decrypts the drive. I don't even know what you're talking about with the 'MBR replacement' talk, except possibly a cold boot attack.
Cold boot attacks require that the computer was just running. Granted, it is possible to steal a laptop that is running.
But the entire danger can be minimized by simply having the computer not set to boot off external devices, and the BIOS password protected.
Good luck turning that running system into a system running a program of your choice without the memory expiring. You'd have to dismantle the laptop enough to reach the hard drive while it was running, and then quickly try to swap it fast enough. Or do the same with memory.
The real joke, of course, is that Ironkey is just as vulnerable to this. Oh, sure, the key isn't in memory...but the encrypted files were. In fact, with disk readahead, it's entirely possible files you didn't even open were in memory.
Hell, if you're using Ironkey on an unencrypted system, and opened files, forget memory attacks...you just put files in swap. Oh, yeah, aren't you clever. Top secret files, right there in swap space.
That doesn't matter, of course, because in actual fact, something like 99% of stolen laptops are stolen by common criminals who might attempt to boot them once to see if there's anything obvious they can steal, and maybe run a program to collect passwords from IE and Firefox. That's it. They aren't doing cold boot attacks, they aren't looking in swap, they just try to boot the system and see what's on it.
You can live in your imaginary world where people need Ironkey to hold files, and don't actually use the files on said drives except on secure government computers or whatever you're imagining happens.
Meanwhile, the solution for people with laptops that might get stolen is whole disk encryption so the loser who runs off with their laptop can't get into their stuff. This will, you know, actually solve the actual security threat those people face, not the one the Ironkey people are hoping you're imagining faces you.
Seriously, like 10000 people in the world need Ironkey. Mostly government couriers. It's not even plausible as a product except that rather delusional people buy it. The only actual security threats it protects against, vs. just having a truecrypt encrypted flash drive, are farfetched for 99.9999% of the people out there.
Everyone else here is apparently attempting to answer the question in the title, which is not the actual problem he's trying to solve.
There is an easy solution to the whole 'laptop getting stolen' problem.
It's called TrueCrypt. Encrypt your drive. Put in the password on boot. Use your browser like normal.
If someone steals your laptop, tada, no stolen passwords, because they can't boot your computer to get to them.
If you want to have a USB fob, well, sadly, keyfiles are not supported by system encryption yet in Truecrypt. But there are third party tools that will do that.
Trying to figure out what to 'store your passwords in' is silly. Store your passwords in your damn computer. And then encrypt your computer.
Incidentally, people saying 'Don't write your passwords down' are idiots living in the 1980s, where people had passwords on local files and for local networks, and that was essentially it. It was, indeed, stupid to write down a password next to a computer if the point of the password was to protect things from people physically sitting at the computer.
It's not stupid when it's your bank password or other online passwords, next to your computer at home. Because the security risk is not people breaking into your house and finding your passwords! The security risk is people you have no contact with at all guessing the passwords, and it's much safer to make it a 20 character password that's is written down than a 10 character one that isn't.
You are correct. Glenn Beck certainly has the right to refuse to speak about any crimes he has committed, or even may have committed.
He is innocent of all rapes and murders until proven guilty in a court of law, and these attempts to basis the jury pool in advance of his indictment are despicable.
That is a good point. Why doesn't he want people asking those questions?
Wow! You got a virtual unknown conservative candidate within 4% of winning in a district that has elected Republicans since the 1880s!
And, honestly, you would have probably succeeded this time if the voters were not still entirely rejecting the right and everything you stand for. So there's that comfort.
Maybe next year, you'll actually manage to replace a Republican or two from, say, Utah! Assuming they're still electing Republicans over there.
You're exactly what the Republicans need, people kicking them in the head from behind because they suddenly are voting exactly the way they've always voted WRT to spending. Makes them honest. Honest and unconscious.
All of us here on the left are rooting for you.
Glenn Beck almost certainly did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990. However, with people raising the issue, he should step forward and deny that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. I mean, the man has a TV show, a very public forum to state that he didn't raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. He could open tomorrow by saying that he didn't rape and murder a young girl in 1990.
Instead he's now suing people who say he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990! I don't think this allegation is true for a second, but seriously, people, that doesn't look good.
In case you honestly don't get the joke, this is one of the many ways that Glenn Beck operates. He will explicitly state rumors, over and over, to assert he doesn't believe in them, but the Democrat involved, usually Obama, should deny them. So someone figured out, hey, he should have a rumor of his own to deny.
nobody seriously believes that Glenn Beck may or may not have raped and murdered a young girl in 1990.
Although he really needs to come out and deny it, or people will continue to question it. The American people need answers.
That almost never happens.
I meant 'room temperature' there in the first line.