You're mixing up morals and ethics. Morals tend to be personal. ethics is the culture to culture one.
To my way of thinking, screwing over someone in another country who are likely far far worse off in favor of people in your own who will only suffer relatively little in real terms is unethical.
In the third world those jobs could mean the difference between a family starving or not. In the first world losing those jobs means looking for work for a few months and a certain amount of financial difficulty.
Yes, the simple answer is that if he's making more than 600 a day consulting now then after he gets lots of attention over this he'll be able to charge even more.
I know a couple of people like this. The problem is that technology is so effective, it often works so well that it makes the problems it solves invisible so people don't even consider a world that has such problems.
Medical tech is the easiest place to find good examples.
To quote Professor Terry Pratchett: "If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago âoeWould you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the worldâ(TM)s music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, traveling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you donâ(TM)t have to die of dental abcesses and you donâ(TM)t have to do what the squire tells youâ theyâ(TM)d think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say âyesâ(TM). "
It's like vaccines, they work so incredibly well that people forget everything about the problems they're solving and stop using them because they have absolutely no idea whatsoever how incredibly horrible the alternatives are.
Alexander Fleming should have statues a thousand feet tall dedicated to him in every major city, penecillin has saved so many lives.
The less obvious things are a massive high tech communication network that means you can just call someone and let them know you'll be late for lunch without even thinking about it, the fabrics modern clothes are made of, the chemicals in modern washing poweders and the cheap machines for doing the work which turn doing the washing into an almost trivial task.
In it's simplest form net neutrality is just old monopoly/fair trading legislation applied to the internet.
That you shouldn't be able to use your advantage in one market to gain an advantage in another.
most of the details are fluff and anything the government actually writes will likely be nothing like that or the complete opposite. which is depressing.
As for the first question: regret it but not cripple their protests for the sake of avoiding it and in practical terms it does make the protest itself more effective.
This doesn't cover everything, there's got knows how many ways to protest issues and things which people have every right to protest about and if I came up with a simplistic definition and claimed it covered everything you'd either quickly jump in with an example of reasonable legitimate political protest which it doesn't cover or compltely insane things which it does.
But 2 ways to get easy check marks:
That they're protesting a serious political/social issue: check: a powerful government and multinational corporations putting pressure on a journalistic organisation etc.
That they're doing it with the minimal violence, though as stated earlier there can be cases where violence is justified, it's just a lot harder to justify than non-violent actions.
Why would I say "Sorry" to anyone? I didn't take part in the DDoS in any way. Last time I checked I have no obligation to appologise to people I've never harmed.
As for the meaning of Legitimate protest?It's pretty much an open debate.
My hard disk I consider private, the inside of my mailbox I consider private(and I don't like that this one has been eroded somewhat) but what I post on a social networking site is almost by definition not private.
I'm shouting it to the world or at least to a big crowd of people who have every right to keep their own copies through a third party who by design has to have a copy.
Your facebook page is not private. If you want something to stay private don't stick it on your facebook profile. It's really easy. If you're going to court don't stick comments up on facebook reading "heh! I am so conning those guys good, and the judge is guillible enough that I've got him hook line and sinker"
Just like it's not a good idea to post the same up on your local community noticeboard or on the wall of a clubhouse.
Of course protesters aim to disrupt things. That's a big aspect of effective protests.
Only a couply of years back truck drivers protested raised fuel taxes here by rolling round and around a few small sections of busy road to disrupt traffic and slow everything down with signs all over their trucks. Yet it was a legit protest.
If you disrupt people doing buisness with a protest you by nececity disrupt both the cusomers and the providers. One side effect of this is that it encourages people to go with providers who don't attract so much public outrage and hence disruption which only makes the protest more effective.
sometimes. On the other hand in the modern world it's vastly easier to demonise someone you don't like by accusing them of using violence and terror to apply political pressure rather than simply being really really annoying and obstructive.
well this case being in the UK the big one would be that most countries refuse to extradite suspects of political crimes.
If they're going to go to court it should be a UK one even if paypal or mastercard want it to be done through the US or elsewhere where it might get a longer sentence.
*any* large protest will disupt the buisnesses nearby and the people who are using the facilities suffering protests. Cars won't be able to get down the streets, people end up late for work and generally get pissed off. that's with *any* large normal protest.
specifically I'd consider them political crimes, not merely as non-violent ones: distinct from people who non-violently embezzled a load or money or hacked into servers for credit card numbers.
There's a pretty massive line between violent murderous attack and totally non-violent political protest.
comparing it to a sit-in isn't reductio ad absurdum, it's an almost 1:1 comparison on almost every point.
yet again and again and again people keep on hammering away talking about shooting this or firbombing that or blowing up something else.
it's totally non-violent political protest which I tend to view in a vastly better light even when it involves breaking the law in some way than most other crimes.(call me crazy if you like)
You provide no service and nobody cares about you.
During the civil rights movement if a buisness refused to do buisness with black people they sometimes ended up with a sitin so that nobody could do buisness with them. Was this hipocritical?
If a company uses sweatshop labour or is known for taking advantage of people in the 3rd world and people picket or hold a sit in to protest them shitting all over other peoples rights by infringing on that companies right to do buisness is that hypocritical?
and again with the idiotic violence comparisons bullshit and hyperbole.
in the context of busses it would be equivilent to horde of people sitting on the busses and refusing to get off so that for the day so lots of regular customers cannot use them, would be late and would be less inclined to rely on the bus service in future.
I'd argue that they everyone has every right to find every loophole they can, any organisation which can afford a legal team and a team of accountants will exploit every loophole they can find, should all the ordinary people lack that same right? Loopholes are after all just a euphamism for "we fucked up writing that" or worse "I don't like what you're doing". exploiting one is perfectly legal.
You speak as if you think there's significant doubt about whether the illegal wiretapping ever actually took place?
would it have been so hard to simply state that middle paragraph about the reason the amnesty was put in place rather than just being smug and getting more smug every post?
And after all that it still sounds like a damned good thing to protest about: changing the law to hide illegal activities on behalf of the government when people take the governments contractors to court for helping to violate their rights.
sure, everything except the tax on tea was removed. the tea tax was only left as a token to assert "the right of taxing the Americans" and wasn't terribly high.
Enough of the romanticism. Plenty of people at political protests cover their faces. Sometimes with good cause. The boston tea party involved people in disguise protesting a trivial tax.
If mastercard had just cut off some random website then nobody would care, when that site is a journalistic entity which one of the worlds largest governments is trying to shut down and the governmnet in question is enlisting the "voluntary" help of the company in question there's good reason to care and it's not surprising it attracted some ire.
there is so much wrong with your godawful posts but lets start with the 2 worst bits.
1: non-violent political protest, in this case sending a lot of packets to keep a server from being able to communicate=! violent armed terrorism.
2: the UDA is not "a more extreme extension of those that were originally in the IRA.". The UDA is the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist group. they are the enemies of the IRA.
"Well, no. There was no ignorance of the law. The law clearly stated that when the government or it's authorized representative request assistance, they wouldn't be liable for the assistance provided.
riiiight. They weren't breaking the law yet it still still required that they *change* the law to make it so that they weren't breaking the law.
"They provided the access and technical services they were required to by law. The government broke the law (or so it's claimed) and used the telcos and existing laws to do so. "
So they didn't break the law... yet they needed a change to the law and an amnesty to make it so that they weren't breaking the law. that's called breaking the law.
"The loophole didn't actualy exist"
ok, so this "loophole" which required an amnesty and a change to the law to close not only didn't actually mean they were breaking the law but it also didn't exist. they just changed the law and declared the amnesty for fun.
"If the government presented anything stating they had the authority, the telcos were absolved from any liability or prosecution because the law said specifically that they had to provide access and assistance to them. And the government did claim to have the authority to do it."
Still, going only on your own statements here. So they didn't do anything wrong yet they required a change to the law and an amnesty to protect them from prosecution for certainly not breaking the law due to a loophole in the law which didn't exist. great. good we've got that settled.
I'm genuinely curious now, this loophole (which didn't exist) which required a change of the law and an amnesty to protect the companies which didn't need protecting: how, exactly, did it fail to prevent people suing the telcos for helping the government to violate their constitutional rights in this case?
since when has it ever been a moral or legal right to commit a crime because someone that doesn't directly influence you committed one that didn't directly influence you?
a great deal of the civil rights movement involved people commiting acts of civil disobedience (read: crimes) to protest things involving people they'd never met doing things to other people they'd never met.
Slashdot Mirror
You're mixing up morals and ethics. Morals tend to be personal. ethics is the culture to culture one.
To my way of thinking, screwing over someone in another country who are likely far far worse off in favor of people in your own who will only suffer relatively little in real terms is unethical.
In the third world those jobs could mean the difference between a family starving or not.
In the first world losing those jobs means looking for work for a few months and a certain amount of financial difficulty.
which sounds nice yet most of the time people stop short of that last little step in favour of getting a pool table or building a swimming pool.
the strongest monopolies simply become the government or part of the government one way or another.
And the richest ones which cannot quite manage that just manipulate the government to make it shut out competition.
Yes, the simple answer is that if he's making more than 600 a day consulting now then after he gets lots of attention over this he'll be able to charge even more.
I know a couple of people like this.
The problem is that technology is so effective, it often works so well that it makes the problems it solves invisible so people don't even consider a world that has such problems.
Medical tech is the easiest place to find good examples.
To quote Professor Terry Pratchett:
"If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago âoeWould you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the worldâ(TM)s music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, traveling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you donâ(TM)t have to die of dental abcesses and you donâ(TM)t have to do what the squire tells youâ theyâ(TM)d think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say âyesâ(TM). "
It's like vaccines, they work so incredibly well that people forget everything about the problems they're solving and stop using them because they have absolutely no idea whatsoever how incredibly horrible the alternatives are.
Alexander Fleming should have statues a thousand feet tall dedicated to him in every major city, penecillin has saved so many lives.
The less obvious things are a massive high tech communication network that means you can just call someone and let them know you'll be late for lunch without even thinking about it, the fabrics modern clothes are made of, the chemicals in modern washing poweders and the cheap machines for doing the work which turn doing the washing into an almost trivial task.
In it's simplest form net neutrality is just old monopoly/fair trading legislation applied to the internet.
That you shouldn't be able to use your advantage in one market to gain an advantage in another.
most of the details are fluff and anything the government actually writes will likely be nothing like that or the complete opposite.
which is depressing.
As for the first question: regret it but not cripple their protests for the sake of avoiding it and in practical terms it does make the protest itself more effective.
This doesn't cover everything, there's got knows how many ways to protest issues and things which people have every right to protest about and if I came up with a simplistic definition and claimed it covered everything you'd either quickly jump in with an example of reasonable legitimate political protest which it doesn't cover or compltely insane things which it does.
But 2 ways to get easy check marks:
That they're protesting a serious political/social issue: check: a powerful government and multinational corporations putting pressure on a journalistic organisation etc.
That they're doing it with the minimal violence, though as stated earlier there can be cases where violence is justified, it's just a lot harder to justify than non-violent actions.
Why would I say "Sorry" to anyone?
I didn't take part in the DDoS in any way. Last time I checked I have no obligation to appologise to people I've never harmed.
As for the meaning of Legitimate protest?It's pretty much an open debate.
http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/2011/01/27/what-makes-a-protest-legitimate/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/kingsnorth-six-environmental-activists
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/okbcwf/message/5458
My hard disk I consider private, the inside of my mailbox I consider private(and I don't like that this one has been eroded somewhat) but what I post on a social networking site is almost by definition not private.
I'm shouting it to the world or at least to a big crowd of people who have every right to keep their own copies through a third party who by design has to have a copy.
Your facebook page is not private.
If you want something to stay private don't stick it on your facebook profile.
It's really easy.
If you're going to court don't stick comments up on facebook reading
"heh! I am so conning those guys good, and the judge is guillible enough that I've got him hook line and sinker"
Just like it's not a good idea to post the same up on your local community noticeboard or on the wall of a clubhouse.
Of course protesters aim to disrupt things.
That's a big aspect of effective protests.
Only a couply of years back truck drivers protested raised fuel taxes here by rolling round and around a few small sections of busy road to disrupt traffic and slow everything down with signs all over their trucks.
Yet it was a legit protest.
If you disrupt people doing buisness with a protest you by nececity disrupt both the cusomers and the providers.
One side effect of this is that it encourages people to go with providers who don't attract so much public outrage and hence disruption which only makes the protest more effective.
"Sometimes violence is appropriate."
sometimes.
On the other hand in the modern world it's vastly easier to demonise someone you don't like by accusing them of using violence and terror to apply political pressure rather than simply being really really annoying and obstructive.
well this case being in the UK the big one would be that most countries refuse to extradite suspects of political crimes.
If they're going to go to court it should be a UK one even if paypal or mastercard want it to be done through the US or elsewhere where it might get a longer sentence.
*any* large protest will disupt the buisnesses nearby and the people who are using the facilities suffering protests.
Cars won't be able to get down the streets, people end up late for work and generally get pissed off. that's with *any* large normal protest.
specifically I'd consider them political crimes, not merely as non-violent ones: distinct from people who non-violently embezzled a load or money or hacked into servers for credit card numbers.
There's a pretty massive line between violent murderous attack and totally non-violent political protest.
comparing it to a sit-in isn't reductio ad absurdum, it's an almost 1:1 comparison on almost every point.
yet again and again and again people keep on hammering away talking about shooting this or firbombing that or blowing up something else.
it's totally non-violent political protest which I tend to view in a vastly better light even when it involves breaking the law in some way than most other crimes.(call me crazy if you like)
what is this inane rambling?
You provide no service and nobody cares about you.
During the civil rights movement if a buisness refused to do buisness with black people they sometimes ended up with a sitin so that nobody could do buisness with them.
Was this hipocritical?
If a company uses sweatshop labour or is known for taking advantage of people in the 3rd world and people picket or hold a sit in to protest them shitting all over other peoples rights by infringing on that companies right to do buisness is that hypocritical?
and again with the idiotic violence comparisons bullshit and hyperbole.
in the context of busses it would be equivilent to horde of people sitting on the busses and refusing to get off so that for the day so lots of regular customers cannot use them, would be late and would be less inclined to rely on the bus service in future.
I'd argue that they everyone has every right to find every loophole they can, any organisation which can afford a legal team and a team of accountants will exploit every loophole they can find, should all the ordinary people lack that same right?
Loopholes are after all just a euphamism for "we fucked up writing that" or worse "I don't like what you're doing". exploiting one is perfectly legal.
You speak as if you think there's significant doubt about whether the illegal wiretapping ever actually took place?
would it have been so hard to simply state that middle paragraph about the reason the amnesty was put in place rather than just being smug and getting more smug every post?
And after all that it still sounds like a damned good thing to protest about: changing the law to hide illegal activities on behalf of the government when people take the governments contractors to court for helping to violate their rights.
sure, everything except the tax on tea was removed.
the tea tax was only left as a token to assert "the right of taxing the Americans" and wasn't terribly high.
Enough of the romanticism.
Plenty of people at political protests cover their faces.
Sometimes with good cause.
The boston tea party involved people in disguise protesting a trivial tax.
If mastercard had just cut off some random website then nobody would care, when that site is a journalistic entity which one of the worlds largest governments is trying to shut down and the governmnet in question is enlisting the "voluntary" help of the company in question there's good reason to care and it's not surprising it attracted some ire.
there is so much wrong with your godawful posts but lets start with the 2 worst bits.
1:
non-violent political protest, in this case sending a lot of packets to keep a server from being able to communicate=! violent armed terrorism.
2:
the UDA is not "a more extreme extension of those that were originally in the IRA.".
The UDA is the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist group. they are the enemies of the IRA.
"Well, no. There was no ignorance of the law. The law clearly stated that when the government or it's authorized representative request assistance, they wouldn't be liable for the assistance provided.
riiiight.
They weren't breaking the law yet it still still required that they *change* the law to make it so that they weren't breaking the law.
"They provided the access and technical services they were required to by law. The government broke the law (or so it's claimed) and used the telcos and existing laws to do so. "
So they didn't break the law... yet they needed a change to the law and an amnesty to make it so that they weren't breaking the law.
that's called breaking the law.
"The loophole didn't actualy exist"
ok, so this "loophole" which required an amnesty and a change to the law to close not only didn't actually mean they were breaking the law but it also didn't exist. they just changed the law and declared the amnesty for fun.
"If the government presented anything stating they had the authority, the telcos were absolved from any liability or prosecution because the law said specifically that they had to provide access and assistance to them. And the government did claim to have the authority to do it."
Still, going only on your own statements here.
So they didn't do anything wrong yet they required a change to the law and an amnesty to protect them from prosecution for certainly not breaking the law due to a loophole in the law which didn't exist.
great. good we've got that settled.
I'm genuinely curious now, this loophole (which didn't exist) which required a change of the law and an amnesty to protect the companies which didn't need protecting: how, exactly, did it fail to prevent people suing the telcos for helping the government to violate their constitutional rights in this case?
since when has it ever been a moral or legal right to commit a crime because someone that doesn't directly influence you committed one that didn't directly influence you?
a great deal of the civil rights movement involved people commiting acts of civil disobedience (read: crimes) to protest things involving people they'd never met doing things to other people they'd never met.