Come on. Just because a job is hard, doesn't mean it's not necessary. The basic foundation to *any* industrial society is educating the population. If the children don't get the basic knowledge they need to do work on things people will buy, then the whole economy will eventually collapse, or not grow, because there won't be any valuable goods generated.
A minor addition - Public education began in america well before it could be considered a fully "industrialized" society. Public education is crucial not just to an industrial society, but perhaps even more so to a democratic one. Without an educated voter base, publc representation becomes (even more of?) a sham.
Educated voters are what we need to produce. Not employees who have been trained to show up on time and use a computer well. And while I am a product and a supporter of public education, there are serious problems in funding and alocation of resources that need to be addressed before we give everyone a laptop. Thats just as much a public relations stunt as the standardized testing craze.
However, I also believe that students need to be taught the same skills I learned growing up, especially with regards to mathematics and writing. They're not always going to have a computer in front of them (Palm Pilot notwithstanding). Sometimes, they're going to have to do something mentally, or physically, without the help of technology.
Even barring that, learning how to do the work the "long" way teaches HOW to think about numbers, and HOW to manipulate data. Very valuable skills to have.
This is an important point that I think too many people forget. If you learn to make a computer do something, you know practically nothing. If you first learn to do it yourself, then you really know whats going on. Of course, I love the fact that once you have learned the underlying theory you can then start using a computer for the tedious stuff.:)
My best example is statistics. I took a grad level course where the teacher taught us, from set theory up, how to calculate most of the common statistical measures. I have hand (ok, with a 6 to 8 function calculator so I didn't have to try to do square roots by hand) calculated 3 way ANOVAS. They Suck! But the core understanding of what exactly these tests are looking for and how was definitly worth it.
In my mind, a "normal buying decision" includes things like, oh, does this company exploit third-world child labor? Do they try to legally abuse their employees, or use the law to silence critics? Have I ever heard of them being entangled with violations of environmental laws - and if I did, was it a real violation, or some tin-pot beaureaucrat making political hay?
If these are the things you think of when making your normal buying decisions, we are in perfect agreement. However, that isn't what the person I responded to said. What I quoted was:
Make the best deal you can, for the best price that you can, and donate your 'extra' money to the charity or cause of your choice. Using the company as a social proxy is in-efficient compared to making a normal buying decision and having your personal causes a separate and distinct thing.
This was after focusing on the job of companies being to make money and nothing else. "A normal buying decision" here is defined as paying attention only to the product and the price.
Now in a shopping moment, I look at where something is made and if its a company I actually know something about already. I agree you can't be an expert on every company. If I was buying stock in a company, or planning to open a business that would be buying 100 computers, I would look more in depth.
Nutshell, I agree with you pretty much, but I don't think the person I was responding to did.
Make the best deal you can, for the best price that you can, and donate your 'extra' money to the charity or cause of your choice. Using the company as a social proxy is in-efficient compared to making a normal buying decision and having your personal causes a separate and distinct thing.
Hey, that gives me a great idea! If I started working as a pimp for underage crack whores, I would make a lot more money and could finally have enough disposable cash to donate to the Home for Little Wanderers!
Ehem. To talk about keeping your personal causes (what we sometimes call "ethics") a "seperate and distinct thing" indicates that you may not understand why the poster was asking the question. As a person who also cares about social justice, i can tell you that part of it is personally making an impact, and another just as important part is living your life in an ethical fashion. Part of that, for me, is trying not to participate in injustice.
To put it in simple terms, if a businessman was murdered right in front of you, then the murderer turned to you and said "hey, I don't really want to fence this rolex, You wanna buy it for 10 bucks?" Would you feel ethically comfortable about getting a deal under those circumstances? If not, why should someone who cares about human rights feel comfortable buying a less expensive keyboard that is cheap because of the use of slave labor?
So no, you can't always just buy whatever's cheap then use the money you save to be nice, anymore than I could run a slave brothel and give the money to charity. Everything you do is a choice, and some of us try to make ethical choices part of our daily life, not just a once a year check.
PS I consider part of the job of every human being to be acting decently. Corporate officers who can't do that part of their job won't get my money for the rest of it.
-Kahuna Burger
Re:Freedom without responsibility?
on
CFP 2000 Wrapup
·
· Score: 3
However, nothing short of providing methods to uncover the identity of all involved parties will provide/any/ responsibility. Yet, the freedom is there. As is the potential for abuse.
I disagree. Responsibility can be provided within the forum even if you cannot link it to outsiders. I consider everyone on/. to be annonymous with the exception of kisrael, who's handle I recognize as an ex-housemate. I don't know who anyone else is in "real life", I cannot impose any sactions on them outside this forum.
But, except for the anonnymous cowards, slashdotters do take responsibility within the forum. I put my handle on everything I write. If you want to come at me for saying X on one thread, when I said Y on another, I have to reconcile those or lose respect. If you challenge something I say, you will know that it's me responding. If I make a total ass of myself and you want to informally killfile me by skipping everything else I write, that is responsibility for my actions. That responsibility would exist even if I was completely untraceable back to my real life identity.
Also, responsibility (like freedom) doesn't have to be something imposed from the outside. You take responsibility for your actions, you don't just wait for someone to force it on you. I think that this may be what the original poster was most concerned about - that everyone is talking about free this or untraceable that, but no one was talking about how a person could or should use technology responsibly. Without that discussion, ethics degenerate into "just don't get caught".
Freedom and responsibility are not opposites. They have to be discussed together for either to be meaningful.
This is because they are among the (unfortunately small) number of women who have had the decency to join the ranks of the engineering (software or hardware) instead of being steered by social prejudices into "softer" fields like education or law.
This is only the most blatent example of a weird trend I see in this thread. Apparently a woman can be smart and a geek, or anything else because she's not as smart. here's a concept. Plently of people don't do "geek" things because they aren't interested. Not because they aren't smart enough, just because they don't want to. Education and law are just as challenging and worthwhile fields as computer programming. And Law certainly isn't something that women get pushed into by social prejudice.
I'm concerned with the underlying assumption I'm seeing here that women are either going to be aultra techie, conversationally agressive and interchangable with hardcore male geeks, or they are perfumed little waifs who stay home reading The Rules and never have a conversation that doesn't center on clothes, hair or men. There are intelligent, engaging women out there who couldn't care less about the inner workings of their computers.
And just to totally rant, I don't see software eng's having any room to talk about the "soft" fields. What do Computer Science, Christian Science and Creation Science all have in common? If you have to say "Science", it probably isn't. Lawyers can't write code, you can't write legal briefs, and there's no need to put one over the other in terms of difficulty unless you can do both.
The freenet info site is very enthusiastic about the idea that it is "almost impossible" to remove any information that has been posted to freenet. This, of course is supposed to be wonderful, because only evil people want info removed, and true freedom of speech means speech you "find distasteful" and all that.
So lets see....
Freenet becomes a large scale phenonenom. In addition to the predicted users, it has a fair amount of information on safe sex and abortion focused on teenagers. Prolifers attmpt to fight this by marking any information about abortion "untrustworthy", but the information still propogates.
An herbalist and naturapathic midwife posts information on how a healthy woman can safely induce abortion in the first trimester with certain herbal products taken internally and other solution used as a douche. Another naturapath who has contributed to Our Bodies Ourselves backs up the info.
Problem is, the natuarpaths don't exist. They are a single anti-abortion terrorist who figures that anyone planning on killing her baby should be hurt for it as much as possible. If you can't save the baby, give it it's revenge.
Concerned readers of all political persuasions attempt to correct the info, but all of that sort of info is "moderated down" and a number of teenagers in desperate situations try it. Some are hospitalized, one dies.
That's the hypothetical. My questions to all supporters of freenet are :
1) Technologically, what could be done in that situation?
2) Philosophically, what should be done in such a situation?
Kiddie Porn is illegal not because of the speech, but because of the ACTIONS. Its deemed to be so abhorent that videos and pictures of it are illegal as well to, ostensibly, reduce the amount of real pedophila occuring.
Actaly, it seems to me that pictures and vidoe would be illegal because 1) the production of them is a crime (since it must involve the illegal actions) making distributers an accessory if the crime's main point was to make them money. 2) Except in narrow cases, you need a person's permission to distribute their image. Children cannot legally give that permission, and any parent who would in the case of child pornography would also be giving permission to rape their child and lose custody pretty damn fast. Therefore, if it is real images of a real child, it is automatically illegal to distribute, unless said child has reached the age of consent and is now making money by distributing the tapes taken into evidence of his/her own rape.
Frankly, I'm not enough of a free speech fanatic to think that this means that child porn cartoons or text descriptions are beyond any control, but thats another subject.
Sick thought of the day - what if the RealDoll company started making child dolls? Is there anything wrong with that?
The use of freenet is not to facilitiate copyright infringment but to facilitiate free speech. Your supposed ability to circumvent copyright is not a goal but a side affect.
err, one of the responses in the article explicitly condemmed copyright as against free speech. Looks like a libetarian playground. No rights for the producers, no standards, and no attempt to audit accurancy of data. be an interesting social expereiment if nothing else.
It's true, not everyone who is unhappy is depressed. Not everyone who is creative, anti-social, or otherwise kooky has a problem. However, there are many people out there who need help, and it is not just the ones who see visions and have suicidal thoughts.
There was a pretty good movie several years ago, I think called "benny and June". It was a love story between a really kooky, creative, wacky kind of guy and a scitzophrenic (sp?) girl who was cared for by her brother. The best part of the movie was where they tried to run away together and she had a serious attack on a bus. It forced the awareness that there is a very real difference between creative and possibly eccentric people and those who suffer from truely debilitating mental illness. It was especially good to see as the movie came out after a string of films glorifying mental illness as just a unfettered creativity.
In High School I was an antisocial, pep-squad hating, all black wearing, non conformist. I was also chemically depressed. In college I got treatment and began taking anti-depressives. Guess what? I'm still considered pretty anti-social, I wear a great deal of black, still can't understand "team spirit", and don't go out of my way to conform. I didn't go out and buy a Tommy Hilfiger jacket when I went on Prozac, I just stopped wandering across streets without looking (on the assumption that I didn't have the motivation to kill myself, but occasionally decided if I died by accident no one would care.)
So to those who think medications steal our individuality, grow up! Lithium will not make 90210 worth watching, it just makes you life a little more worth living if you suffer from real mental illness.
Once again, we are labelled with something to set us apart from society.
Or to admit your own humanity and commonality with society. Frankly I don't consider discussion of mental illness to be bashing, but as a depressive, I'm biased, huh?
I live in a geek household of seven, and at the same time that I was the only one not holding a computer related job, there were only two people in the house who were not prescribed psychoactive medication for either depression, ADD or both. So anectdotally I don't see anything to get worked up about.
Look at it this way. I went to lunch with a group of 8 or so from my (non-geek) job, and was suprised to realize that no one there was left handed. Eating with geeks, you always have to arrange the left-handed ones on one side. Socializing with geeks you will sometimes get into a game of "WHAT'S MY SIDE EFFECT?" (Yeah, I had to get off Ritilan cause of the dry mouth. Really, I switched from Prozac to Celexa when I started getting panic attacks if I missed a dose...) I consider both interesting correlations, and neither an insult to other members of the group.
Wal Mart has a lot of room to talk about unfair business practices. They're the ones putting the local mom and pop stores out of business by undercutting prices, then once the competition is gone, raising prices back up to a normal level.
Yeah, they suck. I saw the same sort of thing happen in my home town, and I'm sort of glad that Boston is pretty walmart free. (sort of, because they used to be a pretty good source of US made products, putting the ethical consumer in the position of whether to symbolicly screw the american worker or their towns small business owner).
but the fact that WalMart screws small business does not make them "the one" that screws small business, and it doesn't make everything they support automaticly bad for small business. I think that from the way things are going a sales tax free internet will be bad for storefront businesses, large and small, as well as poor consumers. So I'll take the help from walmart without having to like them.
Oh yeah, and they pulled a child sized t-shirt from one of their stores that said "Someday A Woman Will be President" because they felt is was incompatible with the values of WalMart. And they were going to prevent their pharmacies from distributing emergency contraceptive kits. So yeah, they're Satan, what else is new?
Naturally the US would be hard pressed to recruit soldiers to defend an unjust cause, the US would inevitably loose the war...
Snort... Giggle... yeah...
yep, I can just see it. European troops are massing in Canada, giving us a deadline before invasion... the call goes out for soldiers to defend our borders. No one responds! Interviews in a small kentucky town yield young men and women who say "well, my gran'dad fought for us in WWII... my dad lost a leg in Vietnam and came home to protests. I always said I would be proud for my reserve troop to be called up, but with the NSA wanting to filter people's email transmissions for possible warnings of terrorism, I just can't stand in the europeans' way." Navy and Airforce pilots refuse to go into the air to prevent bombing runs over new york, boston and LA. "They're just right," they say shaking their heads. "The US is in the wrong on this one, and if they want the bombings stopped, they should just surrender and do what the EU wants. We can't stand in the way of a just war. Americans' rights to a level of computer privacy that most of them don't care about is just more important than a few thousand lives and the destruction of our cultural heritage." The US surrenders in fear and cheering crowds emerge from the bombed out ruins to greet the EU troops who have brought them freedom.
People need to learn that privacy is an important thing, until then the government will have popular support to decrease personal privacy.
You were doing so well until here. Why do "people need to learn"? What makes you think they have anything to learn? Have you ever thought that another person could be just as well informed as you, thought just as much about it, be just as intelligent, and yet come to a different conclusion than you have? Guess what, it happens a lot on all sorts of different topics.
There are worse things than losing a little "privacy". (I put privacy in quotes due to a/. tendency to claim privacy rights to the particular way they are observed in explicitly public places.) It is the judgement call of every individual based on their experiences and logic to decide how much loss of privacy balances how much gain of security. It is the conservative composite of those judgements which will guide our society's responses to law enforcement.
On the main subject, I can't help but think that we're looking at a culture that still allows genital mutilation of infants, and their next big step in human rights is gonna be protecting the obsolute privacy of your email? Lets hope there's a bit more to this proposal.
I went to the referenced website, and didn't really find any more objective info than was summarized here (ie, no spelling out of what the rules actually forbid and didn't) But, oh goody, they had a link to the actual text of the rules, and the memo that had all the departments in a tizzy.
Well, I read the backup info and I got the impression that it makes a fair amount of sense and police dept are just going to have to make a couple of minor adjustments to what they release to the press, and the press are just being whiners. Unfortunately I paid for this independant judgement with an upgrade to the headache I woke up with this morning. Why? Because the links are to scanned in copies of faxes of printouts of the decisions! And the decisions have old parts of the rulings that were removed crossed out and new material underlined, all in 10 or less point type with no spacing between lines. Its almost like they said "well, we would normally provide links to the original info we're working from, but in this case it so clearly proves we have a bias, we better provide it in a format almost no one would read more than a paragraph of without giving up."
But anyway, it all comes down to straightforward attempts to leave judgements to the jury or judge and not to the media blitz, which I think is a fairly worthy cause. There are clear allowances for reporting info on a subject at large to help aid in aprehension and protect at risk citizens. Calling it censorship is just typical/. hysteria. IMHO, and I've got the headache to prove it.
This is on the emotional level with stealing hood ornaments and such. A way to say "Look what I have!" but never really having any practical use for it.
Sounds more like stealing the Mona Lisa to me. You just don't understand the mind of a collecter. The joy is not in the showing off, or even in any use. Its just knowing that you possess this thing of value. The Hope diamond is objectively useless unless you cut it up to fence, but the kind of person who would steal the Hope diamond would never do that. They would just put it somewhere secure and know that they owned it. Its just that kind of person's way.
After all, regardless of what you want to do with them, it illegal to posess biohazards such as bacteria or virus strains without gobs of approval, etc.
While I am actually not supportive of the pure "code = speach" motif, there is a hole in your analogy. You can't possess biohazards because regardless of your good will, an average untrained citizen, his refridgerator and a glass jar do not a protected storage facility make. (note that I did not claim gov or private labs are 100% safe, simply that they have efforts at protection and security that cannot be expected from the average joe or jane.)
However, horrible science fiction aside, a piece of code that you have stored as a text document is not going to suddenly "wake up", compile itself and run through your ethernet cable to launch its world conquest. Thus the issue boils down purely to intent and the intent of those who you might pass it to.
Likewise, you can send all your friends the source code for your latest Internet worm, but if they compile and run it, they've crossed the line between communicating an idea and actually carrying it out.
Reading the book (compiling source code) and building the bomb (runing the program) Detonating it (using it to crack the DVD encryption)
Sounds like pretty much the same thing to me.
Er, I really don't think so. Even if the Anarchist Cookbook supposedly uses "common household items" those items are not part of the book. The book is instructions only. AFAIK however, the code is the instructions is the ingredients is the device. I don't see it as being that easy to claim that it is just instructions like the directions on how to biuld a bomb. It seems more like you are sending your friend a fully functional suitcase bomb with a note explaining how to press the buttons to start the timer - then claiming that it is merely a "very detailed explaination of how to build a bomb with all components painstakingly represented" that he "builds" by pressing the buttons.
Now I can think of some people who might need such a detailed "representation" of a bomb, but no one would call it instructions instead of the real thing. And I'm not claiming that source code could be the moral equivelent of a bomb. But I do think that it is essentially intellectually dishonest to claim that code is "just instructions, just like the Anarchist Cookbook." It occupies a different position than simple instructions or simple speach. What that means can be argued at length, but the difference will still be there.
These recent DOS attacks have been lanuched from third party systems that were subverted. Most of these systems suffered from poor system management and disregard for basic security.
This isn't rocket science! Basic well known measures would likely keep out most of these script kiddies. The problem is the owners and operators of thee subverted systems aren't being held even partially responsible for the DOS attack launched from their systems right under their noise.
Technical solutions are appealing to the lazy. Why change the way thing are done when someone can just come up with a magic bullet to fix it. But these solutions are usually just a mirage that often cause more problems than they fix. We see that with low tar cigarettes, airbags, fat and sugar substitutes, and a endless list of other techno-whizzy but wrong-headed solutions to largely self-inflicted problems.
I don't accept your entire list, but even if I did there is still an obvious difference here. Instead of doing it the easy way so that they won't have to change their behavior, in this case the companies are looking for an "easy way" so that they won't have to change everyone else's behavior.
Sure, companies worried about DOS attacks would probably love it if every other company on earth got its act together. But doesn't it make more sense to pursue protections for themselves today rather than hoping that eventually everyone else will solve their problems for them?
And this isn't a short term solution that precludes the ones you have suggested. There's a big difference between wanting an airbag because you think you don't have to wear your seatbelt or drive safely if you have one, and getting one because even with a seatbelt and safe driving it can give you that extra advantage if some idiot slams into you. Companies can try to reduce the severity of current DOS attacks AND work to make them less frequent in the future.
I really have to question the need for such a celebration. The whole idea reminds me of "Gay Pride Day". I'm not sure but I think there's going to be a gay march on Washington the same day.
No, thats early May (I'll be moving. damn.)
And don't worry your pretty little head about anyone connecting this event with Pride. (I believe the most recent complete title is Gay Lesbian Bisexual Trans and Allies, but I could be wrong) There's no way that a couple hundred computer types hanging arround inside swapping source will ever be mistaken for a week long event culminating with tens of thousands of people spanning every age, race and gender marching through boston for a big ass party on the Common.
Frankly, I'd call it "GeekFest" instead of a pride event, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
There is at least one veteran who thinks that if flag-burning is not allowed then flag-burning will be the appropriate way to begin protest gatherings.
Funny thing. I'm not a very idolotris person - never cared much about crosses, stars, flags or anything else except as pretty patterns. I used to ride my bike home past a buisiness out in the country where the owner flew the absolutely huge all weather flag. Never thought anything of it - until the Supreme Court struck down an anti-flag burning law as unconstitutional. That was the only day that I felt something when I rode by that flag and was moved to give it a salute. It meant something for a symbol to stand for something more important than itself.
True story. Only time a flag meant anything to me without being draped over a coffin.
What if you put a server on a ship in international waters with a radio or satelite connection (or even a cable connection for that matter), and use it for totally illegal purposes?
It might depend on what the laws are in the port it sails from, and the country where it is outfitted. IIRC, there was a similar thing going on out of Glouchester where a ship would sail people far enough out to be in international waters then open up a casino on board. Regulators were trying to shut them down because they said their only purpose was to avoid the law. Don't know how it turned out.
For example, if I tell you that there's a guy selling cocaine on your front lawn, and you don't do anything about it, then you're an accomplice.
Though this analogy doesn't go far enough, since the guy could claim that he was afraid of the seller, or had put up "no tresspassing" signs or something. Yahoo basicly set up some chairs and tables in their front yard so everyone could be comfortable, put signs around the neighborhood saying "lots of stuff for sale here" and then ignored reports of what some people were choosing to sell.
Sounds liable as all hell to me, but thats for a judge to decide.
Since they have this is in their terms of service, surely the person who posts the stuff that they are suing for are liable for it rather than Yahoo?
Surely not. The people sueing them never agreed to these terms. If the suit was by some buyers who had gotten ripped off, the ToS would matter. But a judge and/or jury is going to decide whether Yahoo has a responsibility to prevent trafficing in illegal goods over their site. They can't avoid the law by saying "oh but we said we weren't responsible, so we're not!"
To put it in other terms, if Bill Gates had included a little line in all his exclusivity and bundling contracts stating "this contract does not represent an attempt at a monopoly and is not meant to infringe on any third party's attempts at compitition" Do you think the DOJ would give a flying you know what with a rabid weasel?
Terms of service establish the relationship between the two or more parties that can read and agree to them. They mean diddly squat when an effected third party challenges the legality of one or more parties actions.
If anything, I would think that these ToS will work against Yahoo, since they seem to let buyers and sellers know that Yahoo won't be interfering with illegal sales, even if they have knowlege of them. Exactly what the plaintifs are charging.
Slashdot Mirror
A minor addition - Public education began in america well before it could be considered a fully "industrialized" society. Public education is crucial not just to an industrial society, but perhaps even more so to a democratic one. Without an educated voter base, publc representation becomes (even more of?) a sham.
Educated voters are what we need to produce. Not employees who have been trained to show up on time and use a computer well. And while I am a product and a supporter of public education, there are serious problems in funding and alocation of resources that need to be addressed before we give everyone a laptop. Thats just as much a public relations stunt as the standardized testing craze.
-Kahuna Burger
Even barring that, learning how to do the work the "long" way teaches HOW to think about numbers, and HOW to manipulate data. Very valuable skills to have.
This is an important point that I think too many people forget. If you learn to make a computer do something, you know practically nothing. If you first learn to do it yourself, then you really know whats going on. Of course, I love the fact that once you have learned the underlying theory you can then start using a computer for the tedious stuff. :)
My best example is statistics. I took a grad level course where the teacher taught us, from set theory up, how to calculate most of the common statistical measures. I have hand (ok, with a 6 to 8 function calculator so I didn't have to try to do square roots by hand) calculated 3 way ANOVAS. They Suck! But the core understanding of what exactly these tests are looking for and how was definitly worth it.
-Kahuna Burger
If these are the things you think of when making your normal buying decisions, we are in perfect agreement. However, that isn't what the person I responded to said. What I quoted was :
Make the best deal you can, for the best price that you can, and donate your 'extra' money to the charity or cause of your choice. Using the company as a social proxy is in-efficient compared to making a normal buying decision and having your personal causes a separate and distinct thing.
This was after focusing on the job of companies being to make money and nothing else. "A normal buying decision" here is defined as paying attention only to the product and the price.
Now in a shopping moment, I look at where something is made and if its a company I actually know something about already. I agree you can't be an expert on every company. If I was buying stock in a company, or planning to open a business that would be buying 100 computers, I would look more in depth.
Nutshell, I agree with you pretty much, but I don't think the person I was responding to did.
-Kahuna Burger
Hey, that gives me a great idea! If I started working as a pimp for underage crack whores, I would make a lot more money and could finally have enough disposable cash to donate to the Home for Little Wanderers!
Ehem. To talk about keeping your personal causes (what we sometimes call "ethics") a "seperate and distinct thing" indicates that you may not understand why the poster was asking the question. As a person who also cares about social justice, i can tell you that part of it is personally making an impact, and another just as important part is living your life in an ethical fashion. Part of that, for me, is trying not to participate in injustice.
To put it in simple terms, if a businessman was murdered right in front of you, then the murderer turned to you and said "hey, I don't really want to fence this rolex, You wanna buy it for 10 bucks?" Would you feel ethically comfortable about getting a deal under those circumstances? If not, why should someone who cares about human rights feel comfortable buying a less expensive keyboard that is cheap because of the use of slave labor?
So no, you can't always just buy whatever's cheap then use the money you save to be nice, anymore than I could run a slave brothel and give the money to charity. Everything you do is a choice, and some of us try to make ethical choices part of our daily life, not just a once a year check.
PS I consider part of the job of every human being to be acting decently. Corporate officers who can't do that part of their job won't get my money for the rest of it.
-Kahuna Burger
I disagree. Responsibility can be provided within the forum even if you cannot link it to outsiders. I consider everyone on /. to be annonymous with the exception of kisrael, who's handle I recognize as an ex-housemate. I don't know who anyone else is in "real life", I cannot impose any sactions on them outside this forum.
But, except for the anonnymous cowards, slashdotters do take responsibility within the forum. I put my handle on everything I write. If you want to come at me for saying X on one thread, when I said Y on another, I have to reconcile those or lose respect. If you challenge something I say, you will know that it's me responding. If I make a total ass of myself and you want to informally killfile me by skipping everything else I write, that is responsibility for my actions. That responsibility would exist even if I was completely untraceable back to my real life identity.
Also, responsibility (like freedom) doesn't have to be something imposed from the outside. You take responsibility for your actions, you don't just wait for someone to force it on you. I think that this may be what the original poster was most concerned about - that everyone is talking about free this or untraceable that, but no one was talking about how a person could or should use technology responsibly. Without that discussion, ethics degenerate into "just don't get caught".
Freedom and responsibility are not opposites. They have to be discussed together for either to be meaningful.
-Kahuna Burger
This is only the most blatent example of a weird trend I see in this thread. Apparently a woman can be smart and a geek, or anything else because she's not as smart. here's a concept. Plently of people don't do "geek" things because they aren't interested. Not because they aren't smart enough, just because they don't want to. Education and law are just as challenging and worthwhile fields as computer programming. And Law certainly isn't something that women get pushed into by social prejudice.
I'm concerned with the underlying assumption I'm seeing here that women are either going to be aultra techie, conversationally agressive and interchangable with hardcore male geeks, or they are perfumed little waifs who stay home reading The Rules and never have a conversation that doesn't center on clothes, hair or men. There are intelligent, engaging women out there who couldn't care less about the inner workings of their computers.
And just to totally rant, I don't see software eng's having any room to talk about the "soft" fields. What do Computer Science, Christian Science and Creation Science all have in common? If you have to say "Science", it probably isn't. Lawyers can't write code, you can't write legal briefs, and there's no need to put one over the other in terms of difficulty unless you can do both.
-Kahuna Burger
So lets see....
Freenet becomes a large scale phenonenom. In addition to the predicted users, it has a fair amount of information on safe sex and abortion focused on teenagers. Prolifers attmpt to fight this by marking any information about abortion "untrustworthy", but the information still propogates.
An herbalist and naturapathic midwife posts information on how a healthy woman can safely induce abortion in the first trimester with certain herbal products taken internally and other solution used as a douche. Another naturapath who has contributed to Our Bodies Ourselves backs up the info.
Problem is, the natuarpaths don't exist. They are a single anti-abortion terrorist who figures that anyone planning on killing her baby should be hurt for it as much as possible. If you can't save the baby, give it it's revenge.
Concerned readers of all political persuasions attempt to correct the info, but all of that sort of info is "moderated down" and a number of teenagers in desperate situations try it. Some are hospitalized, one dies.
That's the hypothetical. My questions to all supporters of freenet are :
1) Technologically, what could be done in that situation?
2) Philosophically, what should be done in such a situation?
-Kahuna Burger
Actaly, it seems to me that pictures and vidoe would be illegal because 1) the production of them is a crime (since it must involve the illegal actions) making distributers an accessory if the crime's main point was to make them money. 2) Except in narrow cases, you need a person's permission to distribute their image. Children cannot legally give that permission, and any parent who would in the case of child pornography would also be giving permission to rape their child and lose custody pretty damn fast. Therefore, if it is real images of a real child, it is automatically illegal to distribute, unless said child has reached the age of consent and is now making money by distributing the tapes taken into evidence of his/her own rape.
Frankly, I'm not enough of a free speech fanatic to think that this means that child porn cartoons or text descriptions are beyond any control, but thats another subject.
Sick thought of the day - what if the RealDoll company started making child dolls? Is there anything wrong with that?
-Kahuna Burger
err, one of the responses in the article explicitly condemmed copyright as against free speech. Looks like a libetarian playground. No rights for the producers, no standards, and no attempt to audit accurancy of data. be an interesting social expereiment if nothing else.
-Kahuna Burger
There was a pretty good movie several years ago, I think called "benny and June". It was a love story between a really kooky, creative, wacky kind of guy and a scitzophrenic (sp?) girl who was cared for by her brother. The best part of the movie was where they tried to run away together and she had a serious attack on a bus. It forced the awareness that there is a very real difference between creative and possibly eccentric people and those who suffer from truely debilitating mental illness. It was especially good to see as the movie came out after a string of films glorifying mental illness as just a unfettered creativity.
In High School I was an antisocial, pep-squad hating, all black wearing, non conformist. I was also chemically depressed. In college I got treatment and began taking anti-depressives. Guess what? I'm still considered pretty anti-social, I wear a great deal of black, still can't understand "team spirit", and don't go out of my way to conform. I didn't go out and buy a Tommy Hilfiger jacket when I went on Prozac, I just stopped wandering across streets without looking (on the assumption that I didn't have the motivation to kill myself, but occasionally decided if I died by accident no one would care.)
So to those who think medications steal our individuality, grow up! Lithium will not make 90210 worth watching, it just makes you life a little more worth living if you suffer from real mental illness.
-Kahuna Burger
Or to admit your own humanity and commonality with society. Frankly I don't consider discussion of mental illness to be bashing, but as a depressive, I'm biased, huh?
I live in a geek household of seven, and at the same time that I was the only one not holding a computer related job, there were only two people in the house who were not prescribed psychoactive medication for either depression, ADD or both. So anectdotally I don't see anything to get worked up about.
Look at it this way. I went to lunch with a group of 8 or so from my (non-geek) job, and was suprised to realize that no one there was left handed. Eating with geeks, you always have to arrange the left-handed ones on one side. Socializing with geeks you will sometimes get into a game of "WHAT'S MY SIDE EFFECT?" (Yeah, I had to get off Ritilan cause of the dry mouth. Really, I switched from Prozac to Celexa when I started getting panic attacks if I missed a dose...) I consider both interesting correlations, and neither an insult to other members of the group.
-Kahuna Burger
Yeah, they suck. I saw the same sort of thing happen in my home town, and I'm sort of glad that Boston is pretty walmart free. (sort of, because they used to be a pretty good source of US made products, putting the ethical consumer in the position of whether to symbolicly screw the american worker or their towns small business owner).
but the fact that WalMart screws small business does not make them "the one" that screws small business, and it doesn't make everything they support automaticly bad for small business. I think that from the way things are going a sales tax free internet will be bad for storefront businesses, large and small, as well as poor consumers. So I'll take the help from walmart without having to like them.
Oh yeah, and they pulled a child sized t-shirt from one of their stores that said "Someday A Woman Will be President" because they felt is was incompatible with the values of WalMart. And they were going to prevent their pharmacies from distributing emergency contraceptive kits. So yeah, they're Satan, what else is new?
-Kahuna Burger
Snort... Giggle... yeah...
yep, I can just see it. European troops are massing in Canada, giving us a deadline before invasion... the call goes out for soldiers to defend our borders. No one responds! Interviews in a small kentucky town yield young men and women who say "well, my gran'dad fought for us in WWII... my dad lost a leg in Vietnam and came home to protests. I always said I would be proud for my reserve troop to be called up, but with the NSA wanting to filter people's email transmissions for possible warnings of terrorism, I just can't stand in the europeans' way." Navy and Airforce pilots refuse to go into the air to prevent bombing runs over new york, boston and LA. "They're just right," they say shaking their heads. "The US is in the wrong on this one, and if they want the bombings stopped, they should just surrender and do what the EU wants. We can't stand in the way of a just war. Americans' rights to a level of computer privacy that most of them don't care about is just more important than a few thousand lives and the destruction of our cultural heritage." The US surrenders in fear and cheering crowds emerge from the bombed out ruins to greet the EU troops who have brought them freedom.
I really hope that was meant to be funny.
-Kahuna Burger
You were doing so well until here. Why do "people need to learn"? What makes you think they have anything to learn? Have you ever thought that another person could be just as well informed as you, thought just as much about it, be just as intelligent, and yet come to a different conclusion than you have? Guess what, it happens a lot on all sorts of different topics.
There are worse things than losing a little "privacy". (I put privacy in quotes due to a /. tendency to claim privacy rights to the particular way they are observed in explicitly public places.) It is the judgement call of every individual based on their experiences and logic to decide how much loss of privacy balances how much gain of security. It is the conservative composite of those judgements which will guide our society's responses to law enforcement.
On the main subject, I can't help but think that we're looking at a culture that still allows genital mutilation of infants, and their next big step in human rights is gonna be protecting the obsolute privacy of your email? Lets hope there's a bit more to this proposal.
-Kahuna Burger
And what is this BS about fair competition? Fair competition is everyone facing the same taxes, not the opposite.
-Kahuna Burger
Well, I read the backup info and I got the impression that it makes a fair amount of sense and police dept are just going to have to make a couple of minor adjustments to what they release to the press, and the press are just being whiners. Unfortunately I paid for this independant judgement with an upgrade to the headache I woke up with this morning. Why? Because the links are to scanned in copies of faxes of printouts of the decisions! And the decisions have old parts of the rulings that were removed crossed out and new material underlined, all in 10 or less point type with no spacing between lines. Its almost like they said "well, we would normally provide links to the original info we're working from, but in this case it so clearly proves we have a bias, we better provide it in a format almost no one would read more than a paragraph of without giving up."
But anyway, it all comes down to straightforward attempts to leave judgements to the jury or judge and not to the media blitz, which I think is a fairly worthy cause. There are clear allowances for reporting info on a subject at large to help aid in aprehension and protect at risk citizens. Calling it censorship is just typical /. hysteria. IMHO, and I've got the headache to prove it.
-Kahuna Burger
Sounds more like stealing the Mona Lisa to me. You just don't understand the mind of a collecter. The joy is not in the showing off, or even in any use. Its just knowing that you possess this thing of value. The Hope diamond is objectively useless unless you cut it up to fence, but the kind of person who would steal the Hope diamond would never do that. They would just put it somewhere secure and know that they owned it. Its just that kind of person's way.
-Kahuna Burger
While I am actually not supportive of the pure "code = speach" motif, there is a hole in your analogy. You can't possess biohazards because regardless of your good will, an average untrained citizen, his refridgerator and a glass jar do not a protected storage facility make. (note that I did not claim gov or private labs are 100% safe, simply that they have efforts at protection and security that cannot be expected from the average joe or jane.)
However, horrible science fiction aside, a piece of code that you have stored as a text document is not going to suddenly "wake up", compile itself and run through your ethernet cable to launch its world conquest. Thus the issue boils down purely to intent and the intent of those who you might pass it to.
-Kahuna Burger
Reading the book (compiling source code) and building the bomb (runing the program) Detonating it (using it to crack the DVD encryption)
Sounds like pretty much the same thing to me.
Er, I really don't think so. Even if the Anarchist Cookbook supposedly uses "common household items" those items are not part of the book. The book is instructions only. AFAIK however, the code is the instructions is the ingredients is the device. I don't see it as being that easy to claim that it is just instructions like the directions on how to biuld a bomb. It seems more like you are sending your friend a fully functional suitcase bomb with a note explaining how to press the buttons to start the timer - then claiming that it is merely a "very detailed explaination of how to build a bomb with all components painstakingly represented" that he "builds" by pressing the buttons.
Now I can think of some people who might need such a detailed "representation" of a bomb, but no one would call it instructions instead of the real thing. And I'm not claiming that source code could be the moral equivelent of a bomb. But I do think that it is essentially intellectually dishonest to claim that code is "just instructions, just like the Anarchist Cookbook." It occupies a different position than simple instructions or simple speach. What that means can be argued at length, but the difference will still be there.
-Kahuna Burger
This isn't rocket science! Basic well known measures would likely keep out most of these script kiddies. The problem is the owners and operators of thee subverted systems aren't being held even partially responsible for the DOS attack launched from their systems right under their noise.
Technical solutions are appealing to the lazy. Why change the way thing are done when someone can just come up with a magic bullet to fix it. But these solutions are usually just a mirage that often cause more problems than they fix. We see that with low tar cigarettes, airbags, fat and sugar substitutes, and a endless list of other techno-whizzy but wrong-headed solutions to largely self-inflicted problems.
I don't accept your entire list, but even if I did there is still an obvious difference here. Instead of doing it the easy way so that they won't have to change their behavior, in this case the companies are looking for an "easy way" so that they won't have to change everyone else's behavior.
Sure, companies worried about DOS attacks would probably love it if every other company on earth got its act together. But doesn't it make more sense to pursue protections for themselves today rather than hoping that eventually everyone else will solve their problems for them?
And this isn't a short term solution that precludes the ones you have suggested. There's a big difference between wanting an airbag because you think you don't have to wear your seatbelt or drive safely if you have one, and getting one because even with a seatbelt and safe driving it can give you that extra advantage if some idiot slams into you. Companies can try to reduce the severity of current DOS attacks AND work to make them less frequent in the future.
-Kahuna Burger
No, thats early May (I'll be moving. damn.)
And don't worry your pretty little head about anyone connecting this event with Pride. (I believe the most recent complete title is Gay Lesbian Bisexual Trans and Allies, but I could be wrong) There's no way that a couple hundred computer types hanging arround inside swapping source will ever be mistaken for a week long event culminating with tens of thousands of people spanning every age, race and gender marching through boston for a big ass party on the Common.
Frankly, I'd call it "GeekFest" instead of a pride event, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
-Kahuna Burger
Funny thing. I'm not a very idolotris person - never cared much about crosses, stars, flags or anything else except as pretty patterns. I used to ride my bike home past a buisiness out in the country where the owner flew the absolutely huge all weather flag. Never thought anything of it - until the Supreme Court struck down an anti-flag burning law as unconstitutional. That was the only day that I felt something when I rode by that flag and was moved to give it a salute. It meant something for a symbol to stand for something more important than itself.
True story. Only time a flag meant anything to me without being draped over a coffin.
-Kahuna Burger
It might depend on what the laws are in the port it sails from, and the country where it is outfitted. IIRC, there was a similar thing going on out of Glouchester where a ship would sail people far enough out to be in international waters then open up a casino on board. Regulators were trying to shut them down because they said their only purpose was to avoid the law. Don't know how it turned out.
-Kahuna Burger
Though this analogy doesn't go far enough, since the guy could claim that he was afraid of the seller, or had put up "no tresspassing" signs or something. Yahoo basicly set up some chairs and tables in their front yard so everyone could be comfortable, put signs around the neighborhood saying "lots of stuff for sale here" and then ignored reports of what some people were choosing to sell.
Sounds liable as all hell to me, but thats for a judge to decide.
-Kahuna Burger
Surely not. The people sueing them never agreed to these terms. If the suit was by some buyers who had gotten ripped off, the ToS would matter. But a judge and/or jury is going to decide whether Yahoo has a responsibility to prevent trafficing in illegal goods over their site. They can't avoid the law by saying "oh but we said we weren't responsible, so we're not!"
To put it in other terms, if Bill Gates had included a little line in all his exclusivity and bundling contracts stating "this contract does not represent an attempt at a monopoly and is not meant to infringe on any third party's attempts at compitition" Do you think the DOJ would give a flying you know what with a rabid weasel?
Terms of service establish the relationship between the two or more parties that can read and agree to them. They mean diddly squat when an effected third party challenges the legality of one or more parties actions.
If anything, I would think that these ToS will work against Yahoo, since they seem to let buyers and sellers know that Yahoo won't be interfering with illegal sales, even if they have knowlege of them. Exactly what the plaintifs are charging.
IANAL, IMHO etc.
-Kahuna Burger