What I don't understand is why (FTFA) they arrested him with weapons drawn like he's a dangerous thug. What, might he at any moment whip out some freaky pirate-fu and delete them, their kittens and their backups using his bluetooth remote?
This is yet one more of those things I can't quite grasp with america: The cops. I guess it all depends on which state you're living in but still, arresting a pirate at gunpoint? On behalf of the rest of the world: Wtf.
I understand that certain criminals must be approached with caution but some of these things just boggle my mind. I've even seen clips where a cop pulls a car over for speeding and approaches it with his hand on his weapon because "they might have a gun". I guess it might be a real danger considering that guns are so common in the states.
Still, we are pretty close when it comes to private gun ownership (IIRC Finland is 3rd on the list, USA being the first) and the "doctrines" of police are quite different: The police rarely draw their guns and every time someone is shot (at) by the police it's a big thing (it's always investigated - and reported in the news). Within the last year or so I can recall only one situation in which the police have opened fire.
Of course I do realize that the US has a lot more citizens than Finland does and the nature of crimes is probably different (more violent crimes) but still I can't help thinking if the cops have embraced this cowboy-like style partly on purpose.
And don't even get me started on the fact that they're seriously sending these guys to jail...
DISCLAIMER: I have nothing against americans or anything, but some of these things just seem unbelievable to an outsider.
Military "GNP" is akin to making lots of expensive goods and then putting them all on a bonfire.
Exactly. Orwell had a point about this in 1984. And since everybody in/. loves Orwell here it is:
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
Prophet or not, the man has/had a point there, although it's not directly applicable to modern societies of course.
If none is required then logically everybody involved in production of any work of (questionable) arts depicting killing, assault, robbery or any other crime should be convicted. Too bad over 80% or more of Hollywood and TV production would become illegal.
That's what I was thinking as well. Should the creators of these cartoons be convicted? And what about all those actors in movies who "killed" someone on screen? After all if it is not required that "the minor actually exists" (ie. there is no victim like you said) why should there be the need for the murder victim to "actually exist". On top of that movie actors tend to look more authentic than cartoon figures.
And it doesn't end there. In this case the man was only watching cartoons, but if that can be considered illegal imagine what it does to gaming. I have "murdered" tens of thousands of virtual characters just for the entartainment it offers, should I be held criminally resposible for that? Pure insanity.
Slippery slope they say? No, this is something more. This is a vertical freefall. It won't require many more cases like this and pretty soon people will start to accept that imagining certain things can be considered illegal and thoughtcrime becomes a reality. People should really wake up and do something to stop this sort of lunacy from happening.
However, it is real evidence, and the jury can weigh it along with everything else.
Similarly, if you find a murder weapon in someone's car, they might not have done it. Maybe they are being framed. Maybe it was stolen, used, and put back. However, that's for the jury to sort out.
Emphasis mine.
I'd just like to point out that this isn't exactly how it goes in here, since the Finnish legal system doesn't use juries. In Distric Court the cases are handled by a single district judge (in simple cases) or in more complicated cases three judges.
"Trial by jury does not exist in Finland as such. In most civil cases, there are no non-professional judges involved in the process. In criminal cases, the common sense and popular sense of justice are represented by the three (or four, in complicated matters) Lay Judges. However, they participate both in the trying of fact and of law, as well as in sentencing."
Lay judges are only used in Distict Court though, not in Court of appeal or Supreme Court.
The people who are responding by saying something about how ancient Greece/Athens was the first democracy in my oppinion missed the point of the original poster. Regardless of whether or not one consider Athens to have been a "true democracy" it has nothing to do with the actual argument on the post:
Since for some reason the cliche' in American media is that the USA are the oldest functioning democracy on the world, you may actually learn something today: Finland is.
(emphasis mine)
So whatever was going on in Athens back in the the day doesn't matter since the nation (or polis) of Athens doesn't exist anymore (modern day Greece isn't the same nation) and thus is no longer functioning.
I used to find Slahsdot delightful, but my feelings as of late are more spiteful;
My comments sarcastic
The iconoclastic Keep modding to plus five (insightful).
The death of a murderer may be less tragic, but murder is not something that can be justified by the victim being a bad person. The justice system is in place for a reason, such retaliation is bad for society.
Exactly. And that's why I think the very idea of death penalty is not only wrong, it's also counter-productive. Think about it; It basically sends people a message: "You cannot murder anyone, except if he/she is a terribly bad person, in which case we can murder* him." This enforces the image in people's minds that it's perfectly okay to kill the guy who did something terrible to you and/or your family thus perhaps even increasing the amount of killings when people begin to see revenge as a justified thing.
But the truth is that law should not and has not got anything to do with revenge. And the irreversibilty of the capital punishment alone ought to be enough to make anyone with half a brain understand how utterly broken that form of punishment is. Or is it so that the judge who sentenced an innocent man to death should be charged with murder and executed as well?
All in all I find the fact that the US, land of the free and home of the brave, still uses death penalty (along with other "free and civilized" countries like China, Iraq, Pakistan and Iran) disgusting.
* The fact that it is "approved" by a judge does not mean anything, it is a carefully planned and executed killing of a man.
What's worse is redefining "child porn" to mean "naked children".
No what is even worse is the fact that they don't even have to be children and it can still be considered child porn:
(B) such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct;
If I understand correctly it is enough if the person in the film happens to look too young and whilist I agree that intentionally trying to make a film look like child porn is a bit weird it still shouldn't be a crime if every person in the film is an adult.
Besides in my oppinion it's still preferable for somebody to watch "fake" child porn than the real stuff and having this fake stuff available legally could even cut down the number of those who want to watch real child porn.
Convenient how you failed to mention that it *WOULD* be illegal if you burned a copy of the CD for your friend.
It depends from the country. At least here in Finland it's perfectly legal to burn a copy of a cd you own to a few of your friends. You can't sell them of course nor can you make 1000 copies, but few copies (IIRC 4 or something) are not illegal.
Given that mods are pretty much dead (or at least not where they once were) it is good to see that people are still playing around with Valve's Source SDK
Anyone here in Slashdot who is interested in good source-mods should definetly check out a free mod called Dystopia. IMO it's the best multiplayer mod for the Source engine ATM. Although it is (as usual for multiplayer games) an FPS-game it's not just plain shooting, because it involves another dimension: Cyberspace, it's a sort of level-in-level thing, each level has the so called "meatspace", where the futuristic punks battle against corporation-troops, and cyberspace, where hackers must try to accomplish different objectivers like disable/enable security turrets etc.
It's a fun mod when you learn to play, which doesn't take that long (the game comes with a tutorial) and I recomend it for anyone interested in Cyberpunk-genre/good FPS-games. Dystopia has an inbuilt rank-system, and the lowest ranks at the time are above 10 000, but the mod has only a couple hundred active players so it could use more.
(DISCLAIMER: I have nothing to do with the developers/development of the game).
I think it was supposed to say: MTV: 2007 Borged the Music Industry.
"We are the RIAA. Lower your lawyers, and surrender your lawsuits. You will be assimilated. Your wealth and intellectual property will be added to our own. Resistance is futile!"
It shouldn't be the client's responsibility to make sure he really gets the product he has paid for. That responsibility belongs to the store.
Not being American, I was wondering what is the store's policy on accepting returns. I mean if this guy really has got some tiles from his box, it means someone must have returned a box full of tiles to the store without any problems. I live in Finland and I do not know of any store that would accept returns without looking trough the contents of the box first and checking that all the necessary parts are there. I know that some people can be lazy, but c'mon atleast have enough respect for the clients that you open the box and take a look inside, lasts only 10-15 seconds pretty much prevents these kind of cases from happening.
Interesting questions and interesting answers. Slashdot is nowadays my only source of tech-related news. I don't need any other sites, it's the best. However, when people are talking about the 10-year anniversary it feels odd to thing I've only read read this site for about 10 months. I really appreciate the work that you guys do to keep this running, thank you for that! Sometimes/. really resembles a pub, except that the avarage users are far more smarter than the ones in pubs. And although I'm a new member here, based on my experience I'll be more than happy to see what the next decade is like for Slashdot.
Sure it was just a TV show, but that quote has a point. It doesn't matter where it came from. I could have easily left out the source of the quote, but I decided to include it, because I happen to know many people here watch or have watched Trek.
The point of this post however, is that if you just stare the orgin of the quote, you might miss the point I'm trying to tell by using that quote.
I agree. I can see it from my yard on most cloudless nights during autumn and winter. It's truly amaizing. You will understand your place in the universe only after you have spent 3-4 hours just staring at the stars and satellites, they make our little problems seem so ridiculous.
It's kinda ironic however: While you worry about saving the darkness, I'm happy I have even ten hours of daylight during midwinter. In the most norther regions of Finland people can live many weeks in constant polar night.
Most of the flaws of the list have been mentioned, so I'm not going to repeat them. But I was amazed that not a single game from the C&C series made it to the list. They are not the best games ever, but certainly the orginal Red Alert should be in top 100. The absence of Diablo is also strange, but then again the list consist mainly of console games.
I think there are enough holes in their statements to bring it into question, but this stuff is very technical and may be difficult to explain in court, although the MPAA is trying to do the same, albeit poorly.
One could always explain it in court using the defensive strategy that never fails:
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests."
Like many have already said, the defense system itself is not a threat of any kind to Russia. This is just a little word game by Putin in order to get some more power. Besides as someone mentioned before it really doesn't matter much where the nukes are targeted 'cause the target can be change so quickly.
Anyways, here in Finland we're all safe from nukes atleast, because I doubt that Russians are not so eager to radiate themselves that they'd target any missiles here. And, as long as Finland isn't a member of NATO, Putin won't give a shit about us.
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't understand is why (FTFA) they arrested him with weapons drawn like he's a dangerous thug. What, might he at any moment whip out some freaky pirate-fu and delete them, their kittens and their backups using his bluetooth remote?
This is yet one more of those things I can't quite grasp with america: The cops. I guess it all depends on which state you're living in but still, arresting a pirate at gunpoint? On behalf of the rest of the world: Wtf.
I understand that certain criminals must be approached with caution but some of these things just boggle my mind. I've even seen clips where a cop pulls a car over for speeding and approaches it with his hand on his weapon because "they might have a gun". I guess it might be a real danger considering that guns are so common in the states.
Still, we are pretty close when it comes to private gun ownership (IIRC Finland is 3rd on the list, USA being the first) and the "doctrines" of police are quite different: The police rarely draw their guns and every time someone is shot (at) by the police it's a big thing (it's always investigated - and reported in the news). Within the last year or so I can recall only one situation in which the police have opened fire.
Of course I do realize that the US has a lot more citizens than Finland does and the nature of crimes is probably different (more violent crimes) but still I can't help thinking if the cops have embraced this cowboy-like style partly on purpose.
And don't even get me started on the fact that they're seriously sending these guys to jail...
DISCLAIMER: I have nothing against americans or anything, but some of these things just seem unbelievable to an outsider.
Military "GNP" is akin to making lots of expensive goods and then putting them all on a bonfire.
Exactly. Orwell had a point about this in 1984. And since everybody in /. loves Orwell here it is:
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
Prophet or not, the man has/had a point there, although it's not directly applicable to modern societies of course.
If none is required then logically everybody involved in production of any work of (questionable) arts depicting killing, assault, robbery or any other crime should be convicted.
Too bad over 80% or more of Hollywood and TV production would become illegal.
That's what I was thinking as well. Should the creators of these cartoons be convicted? And what about all those actors in movies who "killed" someone on screen? After all if it is not required that "the minor actually exists" (ie. there is no victim like you said) why should there be the need for the murder victim to "actually exist". On top of that movie actors tend to look more authentic than cartoon figures.
And it doesn't end there. In this case the man was only watching cartoons, but if that can be considered illegal imagine what it does to gaming. I have "murdered" tens of thousands of virtual characters just for the entartainment it offers, should I be held criminally resposible for that? Pure insanity.
Slippery slope they say? No, this is something more. This is a vertical freefall. It won't require many more cases like this and pretty soon people will start to accept that imagining certain things can be considered illegal and thoughtcrime becomes a reality. People should really wake up and do something to stop this sort of lunacy from happening.
However, it is real evidence, and the jury can weigh it along with everything else.
Similarly, if you find a murder weapon in someone's car, they might not have done it. Maybe they are being framed. Maybe it was stolen, used, and put back. However, that's for the jury to sort out.
Emphasis mine.
I'd just like to point out that this isn't exactly how it goes in here, since the Finnish legal system doesn't use juries. In Distric Court the cases are handled by a single district judge (in simple cases) or in more complicated cases three judges.
From Wikipedia:
"Trial by jury does not exist in Finland as such. In most civil cases, there are no non-professional judges involved in the process. In criminal cases, the common sense and popular sense of justice are represented by the three (or four, in complicated matters) Lay Judges. However, they participate both in the trying of fact and of law, as well as in sentencing."
Lay judges are only used in Distict Court though, not in Court of appeal or Supreme Court.
The people who are responding by saying something about how ancient Greece/Athens was the first democracy in my oppinion missed the point of the original poster. Regardless of whether or not one consider Athens to have been a "true democracy" it has nothing to do with the actual argument on the post:
Since for some reason the cliche' in American media is that the USA are the oldest functioning democracy on the world, you may actually learn something today: Finland is.
(emphasis mine)
So whatever was going on in Athens back in the the day doesn't matter since the nation (or polis) of Athens doesn't exist anymore (modern day Greece isn't the same nation) and thus is no longer functioning.
Moderation in everything you do.
This reminds me of a limerick from xkcd:
I used to find Slahsdot delightful,
but my feelings as of late are more spiteful;
My comments sarcastic
The iconoclastic
Keep modding to plus five (insightful).
This is a video worth watching if you have no idea what the LHC does.
The death of a murderer may be less tragic, but murder is not something that can be justified by the victim being a bad person. The justice system is in place for a reason, such retaliation is bad for society.
Exactly. And that's why I think the very idea of death penalty is not only wrong, it's also counter-productive. Think about it; It basically sends people a message: "You cannot murder anyone, except if he/she is a terribly bad person, in which case we can murder* him." This enforces the image in people's minds that it's perfectly okay to kill the guy who did something terrible to you and/or your family thus perhaps even increasing the amount of killings when people begin to see revenge as a justified thing.
But the truth is that law should not and has not got anything to do with revenge. And the irreversibilty of the capital punishment alone ought to be enough to make anyone with half a brain understand how utterly broken that form of punishment is. Or is it so that the judge who sentenced an innocent man to death should be charged with murder and executed as well?
All in all I find the fact that the US, land of the free and home of the brave, still uses death penalty (along with other "free and civilized" countries like China, Iraq, Pakistan and Iran) disgusting.
* The fact that it is "approved" by a judge does not mean anything, it is a carefully planned and executed killing of a man.
What's worse is redefining "child porn" to mean "naked children".
No what is even worse is the fact that they don't even have to be children and it can still be considered child porn:
(B) such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct;
If I understand correctly it is enough if the person in the film happens to look too young and whilist I agree that intentionally trying to make a film look like child porn is a bit weird it still shouldn't be a crime if every person in the film is an adult.
Besides in my oppinion it's still preferable for somebody to watch "fake" child porn than the real stuff and having this fake stuff available legally could even cut down the number of those who want to watch real child porn.
"The military intelligence
Two words combined that can't make sense" -Megadeth, Hangar 18
Anyone here in Slashdot who is interested in good source-mods should definetly check out a free mod called Dystopia. IMO it's the best multiplayer mod for the Source engine ATM. Although it is (as usual for multiplayer games) an FPS-game it's not just plain shooting, because it involves another dimension: Cyberspace, it's a sort of level-in-level thing, each level has the so called "meatspace", where the futuristic punks battle against corporation-troops, and cyberspace, where hackers must try to accomplish different objectivers like disable/enable security turrets etc.
It's a fun mod when you learn to play, which doesn't take that long (the game comes with a tutorial) and I recomend it for anyone interested in Cyberpunk-genre/good FPS-games. Dystopia has an inbuilt rank-system, and the lowest ranks at the time are above 10 000, but the mod has only a couple hundred active players so it could use more.
(DISCLAIMER: I have nothing to do with the developers/development of the game).
Sounds like some Apple product.
"I hate these motherfucking iSnakes in this motherfucking iVein."
"We are the RIAA. Lower your lawyers, and surrender your lawsuits. You will be assimilated. Your wealth and intellectual property will be added to our own. Resistance is futile!"
It shouldn't be the client's responsibility to make sure he really gets the product he has paid for. That responsibility belongs to the store.
Not being American, I was wondering what is the store's policy on accepting returns. I mean if this guy really has got some tiles from his box, it means someone must have returned a box full of tiles to the store without any problems. I live in Finland and I do not know of any store that would accept returns without looking trough the contents of the box first and checking that all the necessary parts are there. I know that some people can be lazy, but c'mon atleast have enough respect for the clients that you open the box and take a look inside, lasts only 10-15 seconds pretty much prevents these kind of cases from happening.
Interesting questions and interesting answers. Slashdot is nowadays my only source of tech-related news. I don't need any other sites, it's the best. However, when people are talking about the 10-year anniversary it feels odd to thing I've only read read this site for about 10 months. I really appreciate the work that you guys do to keep this running, thank you for that! Sometimes /. really resembles a pub, except that the avarage users are far more smarter than the ones in pubs. And although I'm a new member here, based on my experience I'll be more than happy to see what the next decade is like for Slashdot.
Live long and prosper.
...welcome our new laptop using child hacker overlords.
Sure it was just a TV show, but that quote has a point. It doesn't matter where it came from. I could have easily left out the source of the quote, but I decided to include it, because I happen to know many people here watch or have watched Trek. The point of this post however, is that if you just stare the orgin of the quote, you might miss the point I'm trying to tell by using that quote.
Many civilizations no longer exist because they were destroyed by another
"Destroying an Empire to win a war is no victory. And ending a battle to save an Empire is no defeat."
-Kahless, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
I agree. I can see it from my yard on most cloudless nights during autumn and winter. It's truly amaizing. You will understand your place in the universe only after you have spent 3-4 hours just staring at the stars and satellites, they make our little problems seem so ridiculous.
It's kinda ironic however: While you worry about saving the darkness, I'm happy I have even ten hours of daylight during midwinter. In the most norther regions of Finland people can live many weeks in constant polar night.
...are not the Plasma Balls you are looking for, move along.
Most of the flaws of the list have been mentioned, so I'm not going to repeat them. But I was amazed that not a single game from the C&C series made it to the list. They are not the best games ever, but certainly the orginal Red Alert should be in top 100. The absence of Diablo is also strange, but then again the list consist mainly of console games.
One could always explain it in court using the defensive strategy that never fails:
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests."
Like many have already said, the defense system itself is not a threat of any kind to Russia. This is just a little word game by Putin in order to get some more power. Besides as someone mentioned before it really doesn't matter much where the nukes are targeted 'cause the target can be change so quickly.
Anyways, here in Finland we're all safe from nukes atleast, because I doubt that Russians are not so eager to radiate themselves that they'd target any missiles here. And, as long as Finland isn't a member of NATO, Putin won't give a shit about us.