Look at it from the point of view of each party. The scammer is out to defraud a (presumably fairly well off) individual of a few thousand dollars. The "victim" believes he is out to steal millions of dollars from an already desperately poor country. I'm not sure it's a particularly clear cut case for which is the worse offender.
You don't know the meaning of entrapment do you? Entrapment means *police* encourage someone to commit a crime they might otherwise not have committed. The "victims" are criminals as far as intent goes, just fairly harmless ones. Nevertheless, I agree with you. They don't need to be jailed. I think the money they lose to these scams is sufficient punishment.
"Tu quoque" is not a valid argument. The ends do not justify the means in general, and particularly with regard to torture. If even a single inmate at Guantanamo is innocent, we have committed a horrible crime (torture itself is a horrible crime, torturing the innocent is worse, but not by as much as you think). And to avoid that, the Bush administration has devised a means of finding all of them guilty, using hearsay, coerced confessions and rigged trials.
Of the hundreds of detainees, how many ever posed a threat to anything in America? How many ever launched an attack on an American civilian not serving in a military capacity? If all they've done is fight a guerrilla war against American soldiers and supporting staff, they aren't terrorists. We may not like them, they may (or may not) have done despicable things but by what right do we deny them the protections afforded prisoners of war?
You misread me. I was saying that the actual acts committed by the Bush gov't are the *same* as those committed by the Chinese. The difference is, the Bush gov't does it to a much smaller segment of the populace (and rarely to its own citizens).
I'm not making a slippery slope argument, and it takes some serious effort to come up with an interpretation of what I said that would support that claim. I'm not claiming we're on a slope, I'm saying that for a small portion of the populace, in the realm of torture, we're currently engaged in morally equivalent (and frequently factually equivalent) behaviors (e.g. waterboarding, denial of habeas corpus, rigged trials).
Your argument regarding extraordinary renditions is flawed by its own fallacy "tu quoque". Extraordinary renditions were a travesty under all administrations, Clinton is just as guilty as Bush in that regard and only the most rigid partisan would argue otherwise. Yet Bush repeated the same mistakes and compounded them with worse offenses. American soldiers are torturing prisoners who may not be guilty of a crime (or at least, not one proportionate to the punishment), period. The fact that we have no evidence that it has produced any actionable intelligence distinguishable from the inevitable false information that torture usually obtains is also bad, but the torture is itself a betrayal of everything we claim to stand for.
Now, you can argue that the tortures that cause permanent physical damage and scarring are worse than the largely psychological tortures employed at Gitmo (at least, we're told it's largely psychological, we have no way of knowing). I personally think that breaking a person's psyche can be more damaging than merely breaking their body. So my argument is that torture by the Chinese and torture by Bush are morally equivalent. The fact that the Chinese may do it to 1000x or even 100,000x times the number of people doesn't console the potentially innocent inmates (or even the guilty ones that have the same right as anyone else not to be tortured) at Guantanamo. The wrongs were just as egregious in either case. Only the scale is different.
Except they were complicit in the fraud. Obviously what we need to teach our children is that honesty and fair play is optional if you are sufficiently talented. Look how well the NBA has done with that ethos!
Now, now. Don't stoop to false dichotomy. Both China and Bush are a disgrace. Bush may not be a tyrant, but I'd argue that his offenses in the realm of human rights differ from China's primarily in scale, not in degree. Bush limits himself to a few hundred Gitmo inmates (or so we hope), China oppresses much larger segments of the population. I'm fairly sure that a human rights travesty remains a travesty even if it only affects a single person.
BTW, one thing I noticed after I posted. The *only* evidence of illegal activity they have is because he did wave Miranda and said he "may have" downloaded child pornography. Had he followed the advice from the link above about not talking to cops, all they'd have is an officer testifying that he saw legal pornography.
And even admitting "may have" isn't really an incriminating admission. *I* may have downloaded child porn at one point or another. Not because I was intending to, but because amateur porn online rarely includes information on how to verify the ages of the participants, may have been recorded in countries with different laws regarding the age, etc. Is my computer subject to seizure because I'm honest enough to say that it is *possible* I unknowingly harbor a single illegal image?
This is 5th amendment. And the use of the 5th amendment is not incriminating. Any sane individual would take the 5th under all circumstances.
After all, even if he didn't have kiddie porn, he could get nailed if he had pirated music or software, or fired if the computer had company secrets. There are a million reasons to take the 5th, even by innocent people, and people who would convict *solely* on a brief glimpse of a computer screen by a cop and a defendant taking the 5th should educate themselves about the purpose of the 5th amendment (see my previous link).
If you watch the video I linked, it gives a million reasons why volunteering information is stupid, even if you are innocent. Providing information leads to false convictions on flimsy evidence. And it's not because the cops are dirty (usually), it's because they're human, they make mistakes, and their job description doesn't include looking for ways to exonerate a suspect.
Finally, from TFA, it says the officer saw "thousands of images of adult pornography and animation depicting adult and child pornography." You note there isn't an overlap there. They saw adult pornography (legal) and animated child (and adult) pornography (legal however distasteful you may find it). So they don't even have probably cause, nothing they saw was unambiguously illegal.
The summary is misleading. If you RTFA, it makes it clear that Microsoft's association was limited to lobbying against a Google-Yahoo deal unrelated to Net Neutrality. Microsoft isn't paying them a dime for anything related to Net Neutrality as far as I can tell.
You know, while I'm generally in favor of the metric system over imperial, I've never cared nearly so much about the Celsius v. Fahrenheit debate.
Fahrenheit makes more sense in day to day contexts. 0 is very cold, 100 is very hot (both from a human experience point of view), and you have more precision on the temperatures in between. Now in this particular case it's so cold that it doesn't really matter; if I told you it was -184 C, or -300 F it wouldn't really change the fact that you can't conceive of the temperature as anything but "really, really cold".
Besides, who are you trying to chastise? The temperature was given in a quote from the article. Would you prefer Slashdot editors mangle quotes to conform to your prejudices?
Ended up calling TW. The Manhattan area service (where available) is 20/1, not 20/2, it runs $70/month, and it's only available in a small number of locations in Manhattan (not in my neighborhood for one).
Huh. I thought I'd searched fairly carefully, but I never saw anything like that advertised. I wanted higher upload capacity more than anything else, and if I'd seen a package above 768 Kbps from Time Warner I would have leapt at it.
Do you have a link for this? I'm having a hard time finding anything but forum posts on it, no actual sign up links.
Manhattan is a relatively small island with an extremely dense population. Logically, it should be even better than Japan for broadband (since Japan has to run cable to comparatively lightly populated areas like Hokkaido). The fastest affordable broadband here is:
DSL: 3 Mbps/768 Mbps (close to that in practice)
Cable: 10 Mbps/512 Mbps (less in practice)
FiOS is apparently available in a small amount of downtown, but not in most of the island, and even that was only introduced within the past year.
According to the article, average broadband speed in Japan is 63 Mbps down. So in 5-10 years when Verizon finishes wiring Manhattan, we'll be up to consumer speeds *almost* one third that of Japan's *now*.
I was referring to the other events he listed (9/11, WTC bombing). Sorry if I wasn't clear. The anthrax mailings I know too little about to give much of an opinion on.
That said, anthrax paranoia does not imply awareness of a specific threat. Remember, at one point a substantial portion of the country thought Saddam:
Had weapons of mass destruction
Was providing them to terrorists
If that was believed, it would be logical (or at least, movie logical as Bruce Schneier might put it) to take precautionary measures, even without a known imminent threat.
It assumes competence. I could see something on the level of say, an anthrax attack being possible to arrange with a minimum amount of people involved. Most of the other events you mention would require too many participants to enforce secrecy. I've worked in classified settings for the government, and not to denigrate my coworkers in the least, but secrecy within an organization is a joke. While external secrecy is fairly good, the secrets aren't morally outrageous. I somehow doubt people would take their oaths particularly seriously if they discovered the U.S. government organized any of the above events.
Now if you want to argue that it was a sin of inaction, that someone high up knew an attack was coming and chose to do nothing, that might be plausible, since less people would need to be involved. I wouldn't rule it out completely, though my faith in humanity would be shattered if it were the case. I'm not inclined to believe even that much.
Personally, I think the attacks were unexpected. The people you accuse of conspiracy did not aid them in any way, they just took obscene advantage of the situation.
According to Wikipedia, Wii Sports was shipped as a pack-in in all territories but Japan (the article on the Wii says it wasn't a pack-in in South Korea either).
Read TFA (the original article, not the sensationalist link):
Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home.
(emphasis mine)
The discovery wasn't a random home invasion, simply the result of doing their job. Much like police can bust you for murder if they see a dead body in your back seat after pulling you over for speeding, the firefighters reported a potentially unsafe violation of zoning and other laws.
Now if it turns out no laws were broken and they still destroy his property, that's screwed up.
Slashdot Mirror
Amusingly, this was posted exactly one minute *before* you submitted.
Look at it from the point of view of each party. The scammer is out to defraud a (presumably fairly well off) individual of a few thousand dollars. The "victim" believes he is out to steal millions of dollars from an already desperately poor country. I'm not sure it's a particularly clear cut case for which is the worse offender.
You don't know the meaning of entrapment do you? Entrapment means *police* encourage someone to commit a crime they might otherwise not have committed. The "victims" are criminals as far as intent goes, just fairly harmless ones. Nevertheless, I agree with you. They don't need to be jailed. I think the money they lose to these scams is sufficient punishment.
Swing and a miss. Gotta try harder for a Funny mod.
He's probably grousing about the incomplete support for certain features, like SVG animation.
"Tu quoque" is not a valid argument. The ends do not justify the means in general, and particularly with regard to torture. If even a single inmate at Guantanamo is innocent, we have committed a horrible crime (torture itself is a horrible crime, torturing the innocent is worse, but not by as much as you think). And to avoid that, the Bush administration has devised a means of finding all of them guilty, using hearsay, coerced confessions and rigged trials.
Of the hundreds of detainees, how many ever posed a threat to anything in America? How many ever launched an attack on an American civilian not serving in a military capacity? If all they've done is fight a guerrilla war against American soldiers and supporting staff, they aren't terrorists. We may not like them, they may (or may not) have done despicable things but by what right do we deny them the protections afforded prisoners of war?
You misread me. I was saying that the actual acts committed by the Bush gov't are the *same* as those committed by the Chinese. The difference is, the Bush gov't does it to a much smaller segment of the populace (and rarely to its own citizens).
I'm not making a slippery slope argument, and it takes some serious effort to come up with an interpretation of what I said that would support that claim. I'm not claiming we're on a slope, I'm saying that for a small portion of the populace, in the realm of torture, we're currently engaged in morally equivalent (and frequently factually equivalent) behaviors (e.g. waterboarding, denial of habeas corpus, rigged trials).
Your argument regarding extraordinary renditions is flawed by its own fallacy "tu quoque". Extraordinary renditions were a travesty under all administrations, Clinton is just as guilty as Bush in that regard and only the most rigid partisan would argue otherwise. Yet Bush repeated the same mistakes and compounded them with worse offenses. American soldiers are torturing prisoners who may not be guilty of a crime (or at least, not one proportionate to the punishment), period. The fact that we have no evidence that it has produced any actionable intelligence distinguishable from the inevitable false information that torture usually obtains is also bad, but the torture is itself a betrayal of everything we claim to stand for.
Now, you can argue that the tortures that cause permanent physical damage and scarring are worse than the largely psychological tortures employed at Gitmo (at least, we're told it's largely psychological, we have no way of knowing). I personally think that breaking a person's psyche can be more damaging than merely breaking their body. So my argument is that torture by the Chinese and torture by Bush are morally equivalent. The fact that the Chinese may do it to 1000x or even 100,000x times the number of people doesn't console the potentially innocent inmates (or even the guilty ones that have the same right as anyone else not to be tortured) at Guantanamo. The wrongs were just as egregious in either case. Only the scale is different.
Except they were complicit in the fraud. Obviously what we need to teach our children is that honesty and fair play is optional if you are sufficiently talented. Look how well the NBA has done with that ethos!
Now, now. Don't stoop to false dichotomy. Both China and Bush are a disgrace. Bush may not be a tyrant, but I'd argue that his offenses in the realm of human rights differ from China's primarily in scale, not in degree. Bush limits himself to a few hundred Gitmo inmates (or so we hope), China oppresses much larger segments of the population. I'm fairly sure that a human rights travesty remains a travesty even if it only affects a single person.
BTW, one thing I noticed after I posted. The *only* evidence of illegal activity they have is because he did wave Miranda and said he "may have" downloaded child pornography. Had he followed the advice from the link above about not talking to cops, all they'd have is an officer testifying that he saw legal pornography.
And even admitting "may have" isn't really an incriminating admission. *I* may have downloaded child porn at one point or another. Not because I was intending to, but because amateur porn online rarely includes information on how to verify the ages of the participants, may have been recorded in countries with different laws regarding the age, etc. Is my computer subject to seizure because I'm honest enough to say that it is *possible* I unknowingly harbor a single illegal image?
This is 5th amendment. And the use of the 5th amendment is not incriminating. Any sane individual would take the 5th under all circumstances.
After all, even if he didn't have kiddie porn, he could get nailed if he had pirated music or software, or fired if the computer had company secrets. There are a million reasons to take the 5th, even by innocent people, and people who would convict *solely* on a brief glimpse of a computer screen by a cop and a defendant taking the 5th should educate themselves about the purpose of the 5th amendment (see my previous link).
If you watch the video I linked, it gives a million reasons why volunteering information is stupid, even if you are innocent. Providing information leads to false convictions on flimsy evidence. And it's not because the cops are dirty (usually), it's because they're human, they make mistakes, and their job description doesn't include looking for ways to exonerate a suspect.
Finally, from TFA, it says the officer saw "thousands of images of adult pornography and animation depicting adult and child pornography." You note there isn't an overlap there. They saw adult pornography (legal) and animated child (and adult) pornography (legal however distasteful you may find it). So they don't even have probably cause, nothing they saw was unambiguously illegal.
For info on the new setting and how to enable it, see the Gmail blog post.
The summary is misleading. If you RTFA, it makes it clear that Microsoft's association was limited to lobbying against a Google-Yahoo deal unrelated to Net Neutrality. Microsoft isn't paying them a dime for anything related to Net Neutrality as far as I can tell.
You know, while I'm generally in favor of the metric system over imperial, I've never cared nearly so much about the Celsius v. Fahrenheit debate.
Fahrenheit makes more sense in day to day contexts. 0 is very cold, 100 is very hot (both from a human experience point of view), and you have more precision on the temperatures in between. Now in this particular case it's so cold that it doesn't really matter; if I told you it was -184 C, or -300 F it wouldn't really change the fact that you can't conceive of the temperature as anything but "really, really cold".
Besides, who are you trying to chastise? The temperature was given in a quote from the article. Would you prefer Slashdot editors mangle quotes to conform to your prejudices?
31% of Americans have no idea how the Internet works.
Stacked up against Manhunt 2 I can't see how people are saying *this* will ruin the family friendly nature of the Wii.
Oblig. Penny Arcade: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/02/
Ended up calling TW. The Manhattan area service (where available) is 20/1, not 20/2, it runs $70/month, and it's only available in a small number of locations in Manhattan (not in my neighborhood for one).
Huh. I thought I'd searched fairly carefully, but I never saw anything like that advertised. I wanted higher upload capacity more than anything else, and if I'd seen a package above 768 Kbps from Time Warner I would have leapt at it.
Do you have a link for this? I'm having a hard time finding anything but forum posts on it, no actual sign up links.
Oops. Should have been 768 Kbps and 512 Kbps. I assume people could figure that out on their own, but just in case.
Manhattan is a relatively small island with an extremely dense population. Logically, it should be even better than Japan for broadband (since Japan has to run cable to comparatively lightly populated areas like Hokkaido). The fastest affordable broadband here is:
FiOS is apparently available in a small amount of downtown, but not in most of the island, and even that was only introduced within the past year.
According to the article, average broadband speed in Japan is 63 Mbps down. So in 5-10 years when Verizon finishes wiring Manhattan, we'll be up to consumer speeds *almost* one third that of Japan's *now*.
I was referring to the other events he listed (9/11, WTC bombing). Sorry if I wasn't clear. The anthrax mailings I know too little about to give much of an opinion on.
That said, anthrax paranoia does not imply awareness of a specific threat. Remember, at one point a substantial portion of the country thought Saddam:
If that was believed, it would be logical (or at least, movie logical as Bruce Schneier might put it) to take precautionary measures, even without a known imminent threat.
It assumes competence. I could see something on the level of say, an anthrax attack being possible to arrange with a minimum amount of people involved. Most of the other events you mention would require too many participants to enforce secrecy. I've worked in classified settings for the government, and not to denigrate my coworkers in the least, but secrecy within an organization is a joke. While external secrecy is fairly good, the secrets aren't morally outrageous. I somehow doubt people would take their oaths particularly seriously if they discovered the U.S. government organized any of the above events.
Now if you want to argue that it was a sin of inaction, that someone high up knew an attack was coming and chose to do nothing, that might be plausible, since less people would need to be involved. I wouldn't rule it out completely, though my faith in humanity would be shattered if it were the case. I'm not inclined to believe even that much.
Personally, I think the attacks were unexpected. The people you accuse of conspiracy did not aid them in any way, they just took obscene advantage of the situation.
According to Wikipedia, Wii Sports was shipped as a pack-in in all territories but Japan (the article on the Wii says it wasn't a pack-in in South Korea either).
Actually, the sensationalizing was done on the blog, (the second link of three in the summary). Can't blame kdawson (directly) for this one.
Read TFA (the original article, not the sensationalist link):
Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home.
(emphasis mine)
The discovery wasn't a random home invasion, simply the result of doing their job. Much like police can bust you for murder if they see a dead body in your back seat after pulling you over for speeding, the firefighters reported a potentially unsafe violation of zoning and other laws.
Now if it turns out no laws were broken and they still destroy his property, that's screwed up.