For instance - this summer I went on vacation with my family. (I'm 22.) My father was looking for a place to check his email, so we walked down to the public library. Lucky us, they had a computer with an internet connection. I decided the easiest way to check his email without setting up Netscape to do so, was to go to startmail.com. Doh! I typed in mailstart.com (typo) and all of a sudden, pictures of naked women are popping up all over the screen, and as soon as I close one window, another one opens. I was embarrassed, to say the least. It had never been my intent to bring up a porn site. I had simply been trying to check my email.
AUUGHH. I use that site to check my pop account from work sometimes. Talk about potential for embarrassment!
More to the point, thank you for bringing this up. I'm really sick of things like the parent post where people attack anyone's wish to have filtering software. The truth is, a lot of time it IS about protection from unintended viewing (it would be if I had kids) or it IS about giving responsibility in a safe environment instead of a dicotomy between complete supervision and complete lack of guidence. Sometimes its about wishing that you could look up a sexual orientation issue on the internet without wading through all the porn hits you get on some search engines.
There are lots of reasons the average parent would be attracted to filterware. Why do we have to assume that anyone who disagrees with us is evil and wrong? Maybe people of good consience who are equally educated can still disagree.
Spend time with your kids. Teach them right from wrong. Watch over them. Don't expect software, daycare, and babysitters (especially technological babysitters) to do those things for you.
While I understand this viewpoint, I think it puts things into a false dicotomy. If I had children I would want two things that sometimes conflict. One is to give the child a certain amount of independance and allow him/her to learn things that they might not be comfortable talking to me about yet. (sex, sexual orientation, domestic violence, breast cancer, who knows). The other is to protect said child from encountering things that they are not emotionally ready for but would be unlikely to be able to discuss with me. (eroticised violence or violent erotica, humiliation porn, pedophilia, again, who knows.)
For these two goals, the library is a good compromise. A child can find a great deal of information, but is unlikely to happen upon violent porn when looking for Our Bodies Our Selves. (my previous attempts to point out the differences between "the nudes in the library" and the fringes of porn on the internet have been largly unsuccessful, so I won't harp on it here.)
Now say I as a parent see the internet. I see the same pontential for my first goal, but not the second. But I know that the internet is not a force of nature, but a bunch of bits brought to me by my computer. Someone tells me that they can take out those bits I worry the most about, but leave the potential for exploration.
Saying yes to this, in these circumstances, is not evil, its not using the internet as a babysitter, its not bad parenting. It may be uninformed parenting, but it is persuing a legitamate goal.
On that note, I was pleased to see an agnowledgement in the main article that there is room for discussion between the programs you choose to call censorware and a completely open internet. I'd love to see some viable conversation about real options for parents without being interupted by screams of "pornographer" or "censor" from either side.
Copyright's Fair Use clause (eg. one backup copy, use a short snippet for research/study).
Does fair use entitle you to a perfect digital copy? People have stated various ways to get one or two decent copies out even with the copy protection, but say that "it would degrade for each generation". Well, so what? Fair use doesn't allow for multiple generations of copies anyway.
Is there a way to get one decent sounding copy and have that first generation copy be acceptable? If so, fair use is just fine. I don't see any consitutional right to a perfect copy, and the main need for that perfection seems to be unfair use (multiple generation copies spread to those who didn't buy the music.)
Note, I am responding only to the stated assumptions by some on this discussion that a) you can get a slightly degraded first generation copy under this system, and b) it still would infringe fair use. If one of these assumptions is incorrect, I'd apriciate knowing it, but they aren't my assumptions so don't flame me.
Just because they profited SOME doesn't mean they didn't LOSE profit because of Napster. It's pretty hard for either side to prove how Napster affected profits, although I'm (sadly) sure that the record folks have "projected statististics" and whatnot that they could reference...
Er, whats so sad about it? If they get their projected statistics from a firm which has a track record for acurate projections +/- X% and have the paper trail to show that those were the projections, it will be viable evidence.
What they will probably have is way more than that, though. They will likely show up with past and projected ratios that will blow all this sophmoric "they made more money *cough*cough*" stuff out of the water.
I can just see it: RIAA witness "I work for an independant accounting firm that was hired to examine the effect of napster on music sales overall and within various subgroups. The overall sales rates were within or slightly below projections and trends from previous years. However, while all previous years showed a consistancy of increase or decrease between demographic groups, this year there was a huge change in certain youth subgroups, which were either statisitically below the increase posted by other groups or were actually decreased from previous years. This sort of disconnect in trends between groups is largly unprecedented, and I can only note that the polling company we hired found that the decreased demographics were those with the highest Napster and file sharing usage. If these subgroups had been within even the lowest range of projected buying given the other groups numbers, the companies I represent would have made millions of dollars more this year."
Slashdotter "Hey, your sales went up, you must be full of it! Lars sucks! When is Natalie Portman coming out with a record?"
Wonder which argument will matter to a judge expereinced with copyright cases?
"Failed government program" is redundant. Can anyone think of a government program that actually worked?
Funny you should ask. Al Franken responded to the exact same bit of retoric from Rush Limbaugh by calling up a bunch of major conservatives and asking them to name non-military goverment programs that had achieved their objectives. People as conservative as George F. Will and Bob Dornan listed multiple sucessfull programs ranging from rural electification to the Federal Deposite Insurance Corporation.
The governement has done a lot and a lot (if not most) of it has worked. No, welfare has not eliminated all poverty, but no one with an ounce of sense thinks that makes it a failure, any more than the continued existance of sick people makes modern medicine a failure.
Its real easy for privileged little brats to sit and talk about how useless the govenment is. (but still expect fire departments and police to be there when they need them) but for those of us who have lived a while on the harder side of real life, its just more pathetic whining.
I did, and sorry, but it made a liar out of you. The debt is not "forever" as you claim unless you have been convicted of taking drugs three times, or selling them twice. And even then, even for selling, all you have to do is complete a drug treatment program. Basicly the prohibition looks to boil down to "we won't give you money if you have a drug problem, stay out of trouble for a few years or complete a program to demonstrate you don't have a problem anymore, and we're all set." Nothing like your orriginal claim.
The trick is, the IRS has some strict tests that you have to pass in order to be considered an independent contractor, and they go out of their way to find that you're actually a quasi-employee. They get lots of back taxes and penalties against your 'employer' that way. Consequently, many employers are gun-shy about trying to have some be an independent contractor.
I'm with the IRS on this one. Trying to pass off an employee as a contracter isn't just cheating the IRS, its often screwing the employee. One of my friends got badly bitten while working at a grooming shop. When the owner found out that the injuries could be very severe, she tried to get my friend to sign a new employment contract re-defining her as an independant contractor. Turns out that the owner not only was in flagrent OSHA violation (the lack of any first aid supplies contributed to the severity of the infection) she had been skipping on workers comp payments.
If you want to be in business for yourself as a contractor, great, but never let an employer tell you "You'll be working assigned hours and reporting to the maneger here, but you're really an independant contractor for tax purposes."
I am sad that I have no moderator points, yet happy that I didn't have to try to get this point noticed myself being so late in the discussion.
There are huge legal conflicts when you "volunteer" for a money making profit-for-profit's-sake entity that can't be rationally compared to traditional volunteer work for your school, charity of choice, political action group or community at large.
This is the same country that won't give financial aid to anyone convicted of possesing or selling drugs. The debt is forever, its simply all about making an example out of one person to keep the rest of the herd in line.
Perhaps they believe that you have shown yourself unable to handle money responsibly.:)
More seriously, are you stating that this prohibition applies only to those convicted of drug crimes, or is it more broad based against covicted criminals? Also, are you talking about grants, loans, state aid, merit based, institutional, all of the above, what?
It isn't feasible to create a jury of one's peers for a lot of people. Think about the OJ Simpson case. Who were his peers? Rich black athletes/actors? World record holders who were told as a child that they'd never be able to run again?
Or if you think purely in terms of income or social stata, is it actually good to have a jury of ones peers, especially if the crime you are accused of is against a "non-peer"? If (to steal a story idea from LA law) a bunch of rich guys are accused of sexually assaulting the entertainment at a drunken bachlors party, do we really want them tried by a jury full of rich guys who like drunken bachlors parties? Or to take it from the other direction, if a poor townie is accused of murder because he got in a fight with a preppy college kid slumming around the neighborhood, do you want a jury of poor young townies deciding how serious a crime it was?
Maybe the difference is that MS has never actually given an old lady third degree burns that left her bedridden. And been proven that they knew all along it was happening and did nothing about it...
Ok I have to comment on this. First off the lady took the lid off the cup and put it between her legs. Now you can tell me she didn't know the coffee was hot? Also state laws require food to be certain temperatures, for coffee it's a minimum of 140 degrees F.
1) if your final comment was true, they would not have recieved warnings already on burns.
2) If I'm going to be putting something in my mouth, no I don't expect it to be litterally scalding (capable of causing burns that need skin graphs in a matter of seconds)
3) you miss the overall point, which is that in mc'd case there was a measurable injury with measurable costs. The lady could say "I paid this much money in medical bills, spend this much time in pain most people never imagine and was disabled for this long." What the jury in this MS case seemed to hear was "well, if they hadn't interfered, we might have had a glorious IPO and all be multimillionares now.... or I guess we might have also flopped on our own..." Compensating for an actual injury is much easier than guessing the loss of potential revenues.
On that note, lets not forget that the "potential revenues" line is exactly what is being brought against Napster. If you mock the RIAA for talking about what their sales figures could have been, there is no reason to assume that MS owes these people anything except an apology, cause they might have sucked anyway.
In both cases, the court is full of it when they choose to believe FUD over Fact. And in both cases, we listen to the court when they choose to go with Fact over FUD.
While I may well agree with you on DMCA, be a little honest. You listen when they choose your FUD and facts over the other FUD and facts. They are "full of it" and often accused of being bought off when they happen to make a legal decision that doesn't match your FUD, or your spin on the facts.
Pretty common way of judging the "competence" of the courts.
read the review again. It is a book with a "frame story" where the story is told by or to people in another, equally fictional setting. The Princess Bride (both book and movie) is a frame story. Both Stephen King's Carrie and several Micheal Criton books are told in a frame story that sounds somewhat like this one, where police or accedemic reports on the events slip in and out of the narrative story.
Frame stories are somewhat overused in movies these days but can be an interesting addition to a solid plot.
I hate to bring it up, but this could be one application where the open source/tweakablity that Linux lovers love so much may be a liability. You could submit one build to the government, and they might say "OK this setup is acceptable." But if you get a patch or update, or someone wants to customize it differently do you have to submit the whole thing as a new OS for complience testing?
For that matter, if you get one person on the complience "panel" or whatever it is that understands how Linux works, how could they reasonably pass it knowing that what ends up on any given machine may not be the same as what they passed?
Moreover if you have an official policy of monitoring AND ALSO filtering then the company is setting itself up to NEVER send out anything that is in violation of the policy. That is, if you claim you are in compliance then you in fact HAVE TO BE in compliance and you may be exposing the company to even more trouble.
Wrong.
Lets say the magic words again, everyone : "good faith effort" Aside from the (IHMO sexist backlash of) hysterical overreaction to sexual harrassment claims, the reality is very different. You as an employer are not held responsible for everything an employee does. But you are responsible if you condone it, if you have policies which make it easier on the harrassers than the harrassed, if you don't take early complaints seriously, etc. If you have a policy, you tell people where they can complain, and you make a good faith effort to follow up, you do not have a problem.
Then again, in the real world (outside of the backlash hysteria) a lot of individuals and companies don't have a problem even when they don't do it right. (begin rant)
Real life example. A lifegaurd for a city pool sued the city because of pervasive sexual harrassment by her supervisor. The city had a sexual harrassment policy and displayed it at city hall, but the employee worked only at the pool and never saw it. When she tried to complain to her supervisors superior they lied/didn't know better and told her that there was nothing that could be done about it. One of the lower courts ruled that even though they had completely failed to do anything useful with it, the city was still protected from the complaint just because of the existance of a formulated policy. (in this case even a bad faith effort is ok, apparently). The case was under appeal when I heard about it, I don't know the final outcome.
Another real world case for those who think a flirting UPS man will lose them their business. large supermarket chain had a store manager accused of sexual harrassment bordering on attempted assualt. Their solution to the problem was to maintain his "rank" but switch him to another location where no one had heard about his past behavior. There he was given enough athority over a small enough crew that he could one night order everyone home but one woman at lockup time and rape her in his office. When she found out about his prior complaints and the way the chain had responded to them, she sued. On her last appeal, the court ruled that the chain had not acted in negligence, and she had no standing for such a claim. They did say that she could file a workers comp claim, because the "injury" arose out of normal work conditions. Wanna guess which state thinks having a known sexual predator arround is just something the company can't be expected to change? Massachusetts, home of the "liberal, activist" court.
Now I keep hearing people rant about these overeacting sexual harrassment claims, but I've never actually heard a authenticated, or even first hand report on one. Out in the real world, it looks like the companies can protect themselves just by having a policy, distributing it and sticking with it, harrassers can protect themselves by being "good enough" that their supervisors turn a blind eye or reassign when too many people complain, and the harrassed can protect themselves.... how? I don't know. make a complaint and hope anything useful happens, then go out and listen to your friends complain about the nuetered corportate culture they're imagining.
I plan to show my kids the internet, to show them where the porn is and say "If you want it, it's here. There's nothing wrong with it and nothing to be ashamed of."
Really? Are you going to show them the picture of a man shitting in a woman's mouth and say "There's nothing to be ashamed of"? Are you going to point out the ads for underaged asian girls and say "There's nothing wrong with it"? How old will your children be when you point them out the pictures of bondage and S&M with no context or explinations of consensual ways to do those things in real life and say "don't be ashamed of looking at this, why add worry to an overstressed world?"
Could we please stop pretending that there is one porn site on the internet and it contains artistic nudes, loving sexual scenes and some content slightly raunchier than PlayBoy? Its a long way from saying "we shouldn't hide sex" to giving kids access to representations of sexual violence, degradation and coercion and no ethical guidance on what real people are like.
As a mature, sexually active adult, I have come across things on line (yes, you can find porn accidentally) that made me feel mildly sick, or confused, or in some cases threatened. For a child that does not yet have any healthy sexual expereince to draw on, who may not be able to understand the levels of consensuality and pleasure in, say, BDSM, I could see such images being damaging to their development of a healthy sexuality. And even in the most perfect family, no child is going to be able to come to a parent and say "I saw a picture of a pretty woman being whipped and then I dreamed last night about whipping someone and got a woody, and it makes me feel gross that I liked that thought." They will bottle it up, and if they're lucky, sort it all out when they get older.
There is a emotionally healthy rate at which children learn about sexuality. Don't call people names because they want to preserve that learning curve instead of throwing truely adult sexual content at their 8 year old.
So, this is more political speech that is 'illegal'? So far, it has been nothing but a discussion of vote auctioning and a college paper. Amazing that the bureaucrats what to 'do something' about this, but rounding up car thieves keeps 'slipping through the cracks.
Yes and in response to the discussion, the gentleman made it clear that what was being discussed was blatently illegal and would be prosecutted. Very useful fact to insert into the discussion, don'tcha think?
And did your widdle car get stolen or are you just picking something that a legislater has nothing directly to do with and pulling an imature bait and switch.
Vote selling is a serious form of fraud. I personally have worked to apply this principle to elected officials as well as those electing them, but corruption at one level is a damn childish excuse for condoning it at another.
There is a constitutional right to the free exercise of religion, explicitly conveyed by the 1st amendment.
However, to let that exercise break religiously neutral laws would give the religious more rights than the irreligious, thus establishing religion, forbidden by same ammendment. The logical and traditional approach has been to say that no law can target a religious practice, but a neutral and justifyable law that happens to interfere with a specific religious practice will be enforced. If my building's fire code prohibits open flame, it doesn't matter if candles are on a pagan alter, a birthday cake or a menorah, the law speaks only of flame. Because the law was not passed "regarding the free exercise of religion" it is enforced evenly on all to avoid "an establishment thereof".
The first ammendment protection of religious exercise prevents congress from passing laws whose only or primary intent is to inhibit religious exercise. Considering the second, establishment clause, it cannot be taken to protect any exercise which you choose to call religious from being regulated by neutral law.
The SJC understands this ballance perfectly, it is congress that has been a little on the dense side.
Slippery slope arguments are intellectually bankrupt. Its nothing but the argument ad absurduim - "I can't find a problem with this idea, so I'll exagerate it beyond reason and find a problem with that. Then I'll pretend that its the same thing."
Legal arguments by rational people are about rational extensions of the topic at hand. If you need to make your slope slippery to show how one thing could lead to another, you are just fearmongering.
Rational extention - allowing police to stop cars based on "gut instinct" has been shown to lead to the use of racially tinted "profiles". If there was a proposal to let cops evesdrop on cell phones on the same "instinct" one could rationally worry that similar profiling trends would emerge.
Slippery Slope - Some people might like to have GPS locaters for emergencies, and similar devices could be used to enforce house arrests or restraining orders on convicted criminals. Oh no! This means that the government will track every single person at every moment of the day and criminally charge people who spend too much time with a dot not their spouse!
History has proven it's entirely unreasonable to rely on arbitrary stopping points.
Rationality shows that all stopping points can seem arbitrary. Legally enforced stop lights and speed limits are not the first step to a police trafic state where you enter where you want to go in your car and a government bot tells you exactly what route to take and how fast to go at each second along the way. Laws against rape are not the first step to a reproductive police state where people are only allowed to have sex once a year in government aproved pairing.
Slippery slopes got so slippery from all the mental masturbation people do to create them. If you want to slip on your own mental jizz, go ahead, but I prefer a rational anaylis of what is.
Obviously, a confessional has just about the highest expectation of privacy -- certainly, a higher expectation than a pesonal request not backed by strong institutional tradition.
The truth of this statement hinges on what you mean by "confessional". Are you refering to the box in a church where you sit, or the act itself? If the former, yes, there is a strong expectation of privacy, backed by the institution you are in. But the discussion was of a confessional over the phone, which has no more expectation of privacy than any other phone conversation.
The legal effect of confessionals upon wiretapping laws is and should be nill. The admissibility of such tapes should, IMHO be no different than that of phone tap records of calls to suicide hotlines, rape crisis centers or pregnancy crisis hotlines, all of which have an expectation of privacy and anonymity. To set any contact with a priest above other private contacts, and protect against even the chance of breaking "sanctity" as the original poster suggested is discrimination in favor of a religion over similar, non-religious services.
Oh, and while I am not Catholic, I have a greater expectation of privacy when I have extracted a personal promise from a friend than from a bored guy sitting in a box. Basing legal protections on "expectations" seems guarenteed to discriminate against the social minorities, especially if it is the majority's expectations that matter and not those personally invoved in the transaction.
If people didn't believe in the sanctity of the confessional, they very well might avoid confession of sins. In the eyes of the Church, this puts them at risk of damnation, which is (of course) a failure of the Church's mission. Therefore, breaking the sanctity of the confessional directly and massively impedes the practice of Roman Catholicism -- so the First Amendment (it can be argued) extends its protection across this practice.
However, the law which is seen to "interfere" with this is neutral, or we might even say orthogonal, to religion. The SJC has on several recent occasions made it clear that a religiously neutral law (one which is in no way "aimed" at a particular religion) is binding even on the religious. They have even struck down a federal law meant to say the opposite.
Example time. Horse drawn vehicles are slower, less manuverable and have a panicable animal attached to them. Therefore, traffic laws generally require them to have visible reflective hazzard signs attached if they are using the same streets as cars. In most places this only impacts on those who drive such vehicles to make money or as a hobby. In the Pennsylvania Dutch country, there are also the Amish who drive horse drawn vehicles as part of their faith, and also don't like bright shiny signs.
One could argue that forcing them to put signs on their buggies interferes with the Amish faith and should be forbidden under the 1st amendment. However, the laws are orthogonal to the amish religion. They address only a practical matter of safety, and to compromise that safety because it happens to interfere with a religious action (as opposed to belief) is to grant special legal status to a religious group, which would be the real 1st ammendment violation.
The practice of getting warrents to tap phones is orthogonal to religion. To adjust the practice because it may intefere with religious action of one particular denomination is to give special rights to Catholics. To get silly for a moment, if the Catholic church cannot survive this neutral law, it is no more the government's problem than if my theoretical church requires that I go directly to church every sunday without stopping and I keep getting trafic tickets for running red lights. As long as a law was not implemented against a particular religion, the side effects on a religion are just tough nookie.
To soften my earlier stance somewhat however, I will again grant that a preist may constituationally be granted the same status as other non-licensed counselors. I object however, to the idea that this would be done to protect the Church, rather than being done in the same spirit of personal privacy as protections for doctors, lawyers or rape crisis centers. And in the same line, such privilege should not be any more of an argument against the act of phone tapping, it just effects whether such conversations are then admissable in court. The religious right to never be heard, as opposed to a legal right of confidentiality, I remain contemptuous of.
When I talk to my priest on the telephone, I feel I can talk to him in confidence. If they were spying on either end of the telephone call, they would hear the secrets that they are not entitled to. Should they really have this right?
If they have a warrent to listen to the calls of either you or your priest, yes, they have the right to listen to your confessional. In the eyes of the law, your "confessional" with your preist should be no more significant than if I call a friend and say "I have to tell you something really really secret and this can't ever be known by another soul." It is a conversation with great significance to you, but in a religiously neutral state, its just another conversation between two people.
At the very most, I suppose we could consider the priest a counselor and extend whatever confidentiality privelege is given in that jurisdiction to rape crisis workers and other non-licensed therapists. But the "sanctity" that you and your priest have should have no more legal relevance than the special chant two childhood friends might use to establish a special secret-telling zone.
Imagine married couples who are tagged to make sure every moment of thier lives are honest and with thier partner. Imagine our social lives being enforced with the law so we will be sure we do not make mistakes.
Imagine a discussion on slashdot where the ideas were actually discussed instead of plunging into a hysterical pit of slippery slope arguments. Naw, that could never happen.
I see... you're one of those people who really loved _1984_ and was very sad when it didn't actually true. And you thought it's weird when people call the book a satire and not an instruction manual...
It seems that some people have a need to say "1984" and think that it is an argument when faced with any discussion that includes the words "tracking" or "survillance". This sad and socially damaging form of the Tourettes syndrome often appears amoung people who have not actually read the book in question, and never includes an understanding of the complexity of the world described therein. Associated behaviours include squaking out the phrases "slippery slope!" and "nanny state!", the inclusion of elipses to appear thoughtful, and spasmodic leaps from voluntary or warrented systems to survelance of every person on earth.
Unfortunately any attempt to medicate for this problem only results in an increase in the "nanny state" eruptions, rather than reducing overall squaking.
Actually, triangulation will not be allowed under this ruling. The only requirement for Cellular carriers will be to provide the location of the tower handling the call.
Its perfectly fine that it not be required of the phone company, but triangulation should be allowed and performed under certain circumstances. The most obvious is when there is a cut off 911 call and a call-back is not answered. Depending on what if any information was transmitted before the cut off, police should be able to get the location of the phone and respond.
Of course there are those who wold assume that any ability given to LEOs will lead to random harrassment of geeks, and those who would consider even the above situation to be an invasion of privacy, but what can you do?
Slashdot Mirror
AUUGHH. I use that site to check my pop account from work sometimes. Talk about potential for embarrassment!
More to the point, thank you for bringing this up. I'm really sick of things like the parent post where people attack anyone's wish to have filtering software. The truth is, a lot of time it IS about protection from unintended viewing (it would be if I had kids) or it IS about giving responsibility in a safe environment instead of a dicotomy between complete supervision and complete lack of guidence. Sometimes its about wishing that you could look up a sexual orientation issue on the internet without wading through all the porn hits you get on some search engines.
There are lots of reasons the average parent would be attracted to filterware. Why do we have to assume that anyone who disagrees with us is evil and wrong? Maybe people of good consience who are equally educated can still disagree.
-Kahuna Burger
While I understand this viewpoint, I think it puts things into a false dicotomy. If I had children I would want two things that sometimes conflict. One is to give the child a certain amount of independance and allow him/her to learn things that they might not be comfortable talking to me about yet. (sex, sexual orientation, domestic violence, breast cancer, who knows). The other is to protect said child from encountering things that they are not emotionally ready for but would be unlikely to be able to discuss with me. (eroticised violence or violent erotica, humiliation porn, pedophilia, again, who knows.)
For these two goals, the library is a good compromise. A child can find a great deal of information, but is unlikely to happen upon violent porn when looking for Our Bodies Our Selves. (my previous attempts to point out the differences between "the nudes in the library" and the fringes of porn on the internet have been largly unsuccessful, so I won't harp on it here.)
Now say I as a parent see the internet. I see the same pontential for my first goal, but not the second. But I know that the internet is not a force of nature, but a bunch of bits brought to me by my computer. Someone tells me that they can take out those bits I worry the most about, but leave the potential for exploration.
Saying yes to this, in these circumstances, is not evil, its not using the internet as a babysitter, its not bad parenting. It may be uninformed parenting, but it is persuing a legitamate goal.
On that note, I was pleased to see an agnowledgement in the main article that there is room for discussion between the programs you choose to call censorware and a completely open internet. I'd love to see some viable conversation about real options for parents without being interupted by screams of "pornographer" or "censor" from either side.
-Kahuna Burger
Does fair use entitle you to a perfect digital copy? People have stated various ways to get one or two decent copies out even with the copy protection, but say that "it would degrade for each generation". Well, so what? Fair use doesn't allow for multiple generations of copies anyway.
Is there a way to get one decent sounding copy and have that first generation copy be acceptable? If so, fair use is just fine. I don't see any consitutional right to a perfect copy, and the main need for that perfection seems to be unfair use (multiple generation copies spread to those who didn't buy the music.)
Note, I am responding only to the stated assumptions by some on this discussion that a) you can get a slightly degraded first generation copy under this system, and b) it still would infringe fair use. If one of these assumptions is incorrect, I'd apriciate knowing it, but they aren't my assumptions so don't flame me.
-Kahuna Burger
Er, whats so sad about it? If they get their projected statistics from a firm which has a track record for acurate projections +/- X% and have the paper trail to show that those were the projections, it will be viable evidence.
What they will probably have is way more than that, though. They will likely show up with past and projected ratios that will blow all this sophmoric "they made more money *cough*cough*" stuff out of the water.
I can just see it: RIAA witness "I work for an independant accounting firm that was hired to examine the effect of napster on music sales overall and within various subgroups. The overall sales rates were within or slightly below projections and trends from previous years. However, while all previous years showed a consistancy of increase or decrease between demographic groups, this year there was a huge change in certain youth subgroups, which were either statisitically below the increase posted by other groups or were actually decreased from previous years. This sort of disconnect in trends between groups is largly unprecedented, and I can only note that the polling company we hired found that the decreased demographics were those with the highest Napster and file sharing usage. If these subgroups had been within even the lowest range of projected buying given the other groups numbers, the companies I represent would have made millions of dollars more this year."
Slashdotter "Hey, your sales went up, you must be full of it! Lars sucks! When is Natalie Portman coming out with a record?"
Wonder which argument will matter to a judge expereinced with copyright cases?
-Kahuna Burger
Funny you should ask. Al Franken responded to the exact same bit of retoric from Rush Limbaugh by calling up a bunch of major conservatives and asking them to name non-military goverment programs that had achieved their objectives. People as conservative as George F. Will and Bob Dornan listed multiple sucessfull programs ranging from rural electification to the Federal Deposite Insurance Corporation.
The governement has done a lot and a lot (if not most) of it has worked. No, welfare has not eliminated all poverty, but no one with an ounce of sense thinks that makes it a failure, any more than the continued existance of sick people makes modern medicine a failure.
Its real easy for privileged little brats to sit and talk about how useless the govenment is. (but still expect fire departments and police to be there when they need them) but for those of us who have lived a while on the harder side of real life, its just more pathetic whining.
-Kahuna Burger
http://www.unm.edu/~finaid/eform01/drugconviction0 1.html
I did, and sorry, but it made a liar out of you. The debt is not "forever" as you claim unless you have been convicted of taking drugs three times, or selling them twice. And even then, even for selling, all you have to do is complete a drug treatment program. Basicly the prohibition looks to boil down to "we won't give you money if you have a drug problem, stay out of trouble for a few years or complete a program to demonstrate you don't have a problem anymore, and we're all set." Nothing like your orriginal claim.
-Kahuna Burger
I'm with the IRS on this one. Trying to pass off an employee as a contracter isn't just cheating the IRS, its often screwing the employee. One of my friends got badly bitten while working at a grooming shop. When the owner found out that the injuries could be very severe, she tried to get my friend to sign a new employment contract re-defining her as an independant contractor. Turns out that the owner not only was in flagrent OSHA violation (the lack of any first aid supplies contributed to the severity of the infection) she had been skipping on workers comp payments.
If you want to be in business for yourself as a contractor, great, but never let an employer tell you "You'll be working assigned hours and reporting to the maneger here, but you're really an independant contractor for tax purposes."
-Kahuna Burger
There are huge legal conflicts when you "volunteer" for a money making profit-for-profit's-sake entity that can't be rationally compared to traditional volunteer work for your school, charity of choice, political action group or community at large.
-Kahuna Burger
Perhaps they believe that you have shown yourself unable to handle money responsibly. :)
More seriously, are you stating that this prohibition applies only to those convicted of drug crimes, or is it more broad based against covicted criminals? Also, are you talking about grants, loans, state aid, merit based, institutional, all of the above, what?
-Kahuna Burger
Or if you think purely in terms of income or social stata, is it actually good to have a jury of ones peers, especially if the crime you are accused of is against a "non-peer"? If (to steal a story idea from LA law) a bunch of rich guys are accused of sexually assaulting the entertainment at a drunken bachlors party, do we really want them tried by a jury full of rich guys who like drunken bachlors parties? Or to take it from the other direction, if a poor townie is accused of murder because he got in a fight with a preppy college kid slumming around the neighborhood, do you want a jury of poor young townies deciding how serious a crime it was?
-Kahuna Burger
Ok I have to comment on this. First off the lady took the lid off the cup and put it between her legs. Now you can tell me she didn't know the coffee was hot? Also state laws require food to be certain temperatures, for coffee it's a minimum of 140 degrees F.
1) if your final comment was true, they would not have recieved warnings already on burns.
2) If I'm going to be putting something in my mouth, no I don't expect it to be litterally scalding (capable of causing burns that need skin graphs in a matter of seconds)
3) you miss the overall point, which is that in mc'd case there was a measurable injury with measurable costs. The lady could say "I paid this much money in medical bills, spend this much time in pain most people never imagine and was disabled for this long." What the jury in this MS case seemed to hear was "well, if they hadn't interfered, we might have had a glorious IPO and all be multimillionares now.... or I guess we might have also flopped on our own..." Compensating for an actual injury is much easier than guessing the loss of potential revenues.
On that note, lets not forget that the "potential revenues" line is exactly what is being brought against Napster. If you mock the RIAA for talking about what their sales figures could have been, there is no reason to assume that MS owes these people anything except an apology, cause they might have sucked anyway.
-Kahuna Burger
While I may well agree with you on DMCA, be a little honest. You listen when they choose your FUD and facts over the other FUD and facts. They are "full of it" and often accused of being bought off when they happen to make a legal decision that doesn't match your FUD, or your spin on the facts.
Pretty common way of judging the "competence" of the courts.
-kahuna Burger
Frame stories are somewhat overused in movies these days but can be an interesting addition to a solid plot.
-Kahuna Burger
For that matter, if you get one person on the complience "panel" or whatever it is that understands how Linux works, how could they reasonably pass it knowing that what ends up on any given machine may not be the same as what they passed?
-Kahuna Burger
Wrong.
Lets say the magic words again, everyone : "good faith effort" Aside from the (IHMO sexist backlash of) hysterical overreaction to sexual harrassment claims, the reality is very different. You as an employer are not held responsible for everything an employee does. But you are responsible if you condone it, if you have policies which make it easier on the harrassers than the harrassed, if you don't take early complaints seriously, etc. If you have a policy, you tell people where they can complain, and you make a good faith effort to follow up, you do not have a problem.
Then again, in the real world (outside of the backlash hysteria) a lot of individuals and companies don't have a problem even when they don't do it right. (begin rant)
Real life example. A lifegaurd for a city pool sued the city because of pervasive sexual harrassment by her supervisor. The city had a sexual harrassment policy and displayed it at city hall, but the employee worked only at the pool and never saw it. When she tried to complain to her supervisors superior they lied/didn't know better and told her that there was nothing that could be done about it. One of the lower courts ruled that even though they had completely failed to do anything useful with it, the city was still protected from the complaint just because of the existance of a formulated policy. (in this case even a bad faith effort is ok, apparently). The case was under appeal when I heard about it, I don't know the final outcome.
Another real world case for those who think a flirting UPS man will lose them their business. large supermarket chain had a store manager accused of sexual harrassment bordering on attempted assualt. Their solution to the problem was to maintain his "rank" but switch him to another location where no one had heard about his past behavior. There he was given enough athority over a small enough crew that he could one night order everyone home but one woman at lockup time and rape her in his office. When she found out about his prior complaints and the way the chain had responded to them, she sued. On her last appeal, the court ruled that the chain had not acted in negligence, and she had no standing for such a claim. They did say that she could file a workers comp claim, because the "injury" arose out of normal work conditions. Wanna guess which state thinks having a known sexual predator arround is just something the company can't be expected to change? Massachusetts, home of the "liberal, activist" court.
Now I keep hearing people rant about these overeacting sexual harrassment claims, but I've never actually heard a authenticated, or even first hand report on one. Out in the real world, it looks like the companies can protect themselves just by having a policy, distributing it and sticking with it, harrassers can protect themselves by being "good enough" that their supervisors turn a blind eye or reassign when too many people complain, and the harrassed can protect themselves.... how? I don't know. make a complaint and hope anything useful happens, then go out and listen to your friends complain about the nuetered corportate culture they're imagining.
Rant over, gotta go to bed.
-Kahuna Burger
Really? Are you going to show them the picture of a man shitting in a woman's mouth and say "There's nothing to be ashamed of"? Are you going to point out the ads for underaged asian girls and say "There's nothing wrong with it"? How old will your children be when you point them out the pictures of bondage and S&M with no context or explinations of consensual ways to do those things in real life and say "don't be ashamed of looking at this, why add worry to an overstressed world?"
Could we please stop pretending that there is one porn site on the internet and it contains artistic nudes, loving sexual scenes and some content slightly raunchier than PlayBoy? Its a long way from saying "we shouldn't hide sex" to giving kids access to representations of sexual violence, degradation and coercion and no ethical guidance on what real people are like.
As a mature, sexually active adult, I have come across things on line (yes, you can find porn accidentally) that made me feel mildly sick, or confused, or in some cases threatened. For a child that does not yet have any healthy sexual expereince to draw on, who may not be able to understand the levels of consensuality and pleasure in, say, BDSM, I could see such images being damaging to their development of a healthy sexuality. And even in the most perfect family, no child is going to be able to come to a parent and say "I saw a picture of a pretty woman being whipped and then I dreamed last night about whipping someone and got a woody, and it makes me feel gross that I liked that thought." They will bottle it up, and if they're lucky, sort it all out when they get older.
There is a emotionally healthy rate at which children learn about sexuality. Don't call people names because they want to preserve that learning curve instead of throwing truely adult sexual content at their 8 year old.
-Kahuna Burger
Yes and in response to the discussion, the gentleman made it clear that what was being discussed was blatently illegal and would be prosecutted. Very useful fact to insert into the discussion, don'tcha think?
And did your widdle car get stolen or are you just picking something that a legislater has nothing directly to do with and pulling an imature bait and switch.
Vote selling is a serious form of fraud. I personally have worked to apply this principle to elected officials as well as those electing them, but corruption at one level is a damn childish excuse for condoning it at another.
-Kahuna Burger
However, to let that exercise break religiously neutral laws would give the religious more rights than the irreligious, thus establishing religion, forbidden by same ammendment. The logical and traditional approach has been to say that no law can target a religious practice, but a neutral and justifyable law that happens to interfere with a specific religious practice will be enforced. If my building's fire code prohibits open flame, it doesn't matter if candles are on a pagan alter, a birthday cake or a menorah, the law speaks only of flame. Because the law was not passed "regarding the free exercise of religion" it is enforced evenly on all to avoid "an establishment thereof".
The first ammendment protection of religious exercise prevents congress from passing laws whose only or primary intent is to inhibit religious exercise. Considering the second, establishment clause, it cannot be taken to protect any exercise which you choose to call religious from being regulated by neutral law.
The SJC understands this ballance perfectly, it is congress that has been a little on the dense side.
-Kahuna Burger
Slippery slope arguments are intellectually bankrupt. Its nothing but the argument ad absurduim - "I can't find a problem with this idea, so I'll exagerate it beyond reason and find a problem with that. Then I'll pretend that its the same thing."
Legal arguments by rational people are about rational extensions of the topic at hand. If you need to make your slope slippery to show how one thing could lead to another, you are just fearmongering.
Rational extention - allowing police to stop cars based on "gut instinct" has been shown to lead to the use of racially tinted "profiles". If there was a proposal to let cops evesdrop on cell phones on the same "instinct" one could rationally worry that similar profiling trends would emerge.
Slippery Slope - Some people might like to have GPS locaters for emergencies, and similar devices could be used to enforce house arrests or restraining orders on convicted criminals. Oh no! This means that the government will track every single person at every moment of the day and criminally charge people who spend too much time with a dot not their spouse!
History has proven it's entirely unreasonable to rely on arbitrary stopping points.
Rationality shows that all stopping points can seem arbitrary. Legally enforced stop lights and speed limits are not the first step to a police trafic state where you enter where you want to go in your car and a government bot tells you exactly what route to take and how fast to go at each second along the way. Laws against rape are not the first step to a reproductive police state where people are only allowed to have sex once a year in government aproved pairing.
Slippery slopes got so slippery from all the mental masturbation people do to create them. If you want to slip on your own mental jizz, go ahead, but I prefer a rational anaylis of what is.
-Kahuna Burger
The truth of this statement hinges on what you mean by "confessional". Are you refering to the box in a church where you sit, or the act itself? If the former, yes, there is a strong expectation of privacy, backed by the institution you are in. But the discussion was of a confessional over the phone, which has no more expectation of privacy than any other phone conversation.
The legal effect of confessionals upon wiretapping laws is and should be nill. The admissibility of such tapes should, IMHO be no different than that of phone tap records of calls to suicide hotlines, rape crisis centers or pregnancy crisis hotlines, all of which have an expectation of privacy and anonymity. To set any contact with a priest above other private contacts, and protect against even the chance of breaking "sanctity" as the original poster suggested is discrimination in favor of a religion over similar, non-religious services.
Oh, and while I am not Catholic, I have a greater expectation of privacy when I have extracted a personal promise from a friend than from a bored guy sitting in a box. Basing legal protections on "expectations" seems guarenteed to discriminate against the social minorities, especially if it is the majority's expectations that matter and not those personally invoved in the transaction.
-Kahuna Burger
However, the law which is seen to "interfere" with this is neutral, or we might even say orthogonal, to religion. The SJC has on several recent occasions made it clear that a religiously neutral law (one which is in no way "aimed" at a particular religion) is binding even on the religious. They have even struck down a federal law meant to say the opposite.
Example time. Horse drawn vehicles are slower, less manuverable and have a panicable animal attached to them. Therefore, traffic laws generally require them to have visible reflective hazzard signs attached if they are using the same streets as cars. In most places this only impacts on those who drive such vehicles to make money or as a hobby. In the Pennsylvania Dutch country, there are also the Amish who drive horse drawn vehicles as part of their faith, and also don't like bright shiny signs.
One could argue that forcing them to put signs on their buggies interferes with the Amish faith and should be forbidden under the 1st amendment. However, the laws are orthogonal to the amish religion. They address only a practical matter of safety, and to compromise that safety because it happens to interfere with a religious action (as opposed to belief) is to grant special legal status to a religious group, which would be the real 1st ammendment violation.
The practice of getting warrents to tap phones is orthogonal to religion. To adjust the practice because it may intefere with religious action of one particular denomination is to give special rights to Catholics. To get silly for a moment, if the Catholic church cannot survive this neutral law, it is no more the government's problem than if my theoretical church requires that I go directly to church every sunday without stopping and I keep getting trafic tickets for running red lights. As long as a law was not implemented against a particular religion, the side effects on a religion are just tough nookie.
To soften my earlier stance somewhat however, I will again grant that a preist may constituationally be granted the same status as other non-licensed counselors. I object however, to the idea that this would be done to protect the Church, rather than being done in the same spirit of personal privacy as protections for doctors, lawyers or rape crisis centers. And in the same line, such privilege should not be any more of an argument against the act of phone tapping, it just effects whether such conversations are then admissable in court. The religious right to never be heard, as opposed to a legal right of confidentiality, I remain contemptuous of.
-Kahuna Burger
If they have a warrent to listen to the calls of either you or your priest, yes, they have the right to listen to your confessional. In the eyes of the law, your "confessional" with your preist should be no more significant than if I call a friend and say "I have to tell you something really really secret and this can't ever be known by another soul." It is a conversation with great significance to you, but in a religiously neutral state, its just another conversation between two people.
At the very most, I suppose we could consider the priest a counselor and extend whatever confidentiality privelege is given in that jurisdiction to rape crisis workers and other non-licensed therapists. But the "sanctity" that you and your priest have should have no more legal relevance than the special chant two childhood friends might use to establish a special secret-telling zone.
-Kahuna Burger
Imagine a discussion on slashdot where the ideas were actually discussed instead of plunging into a hysterical pit of slippery slope arguments. Naw, that could never happen.
-Kahuna Burger
It seems that some people have a need to say "1984" and think that it is an argument when faced with any discussion that includes the words "tracking" or "survillance". This sad and socially damaging form of the Tourettes syndrome often appears amoung people who have not actually read the book in question, and never includes an understanding of the complexity of the world described therein. Associated behaviours include squaking out the phrases "slippery slope!" and "nanny state!", the inclusion of elipses to appear thoughtful, and spasmodic leaps from voluntary or warrented systems to survelance of every person on earth.
Unfortunately any attempt to medicate for this problem only results in an increase in the "nanny state" eruptions, rather than reducing overall squaking.
-Kahuna Burger
Its perfectly fine that it not be required of the phone company, but triangulation should be allowed and performed under certain circumstances. The most obvious is when there is a cut off 911 call and a call-back is not answered. Depending on what if any information was transmitted before the cut off, police should be able to get the location of the phone and respond.
Of course there are those who wold assume that any ability given to LEOs will lead to random harrassment of geeks, and those who would consider even the above situation to be an invasion of privacy, but what can you do?
-Kahuna Burger