Many, perhaps all, states expunge a child's criminal record at age 18. That seems fair to me. I'm not sentimenmtal enough, though, to believe that children can't commit crimes.
So now we know you are or would be an incompetent parent who would put his children in the care of unknown neighbors. We also know you're a bigot who judges people by the size of their bankroll.
You're not making much sense with that realtors rant ("life sentences"??), but why should a realtor be allowed to conceal information the public owns?
Here's the point you're ignoring: Information identifying people with criminal records is publicly available information. The public owns that data. It has been available to the public for decades and decades. Making it available via the Internet changes nothing. It's just one more example of the Internet making access to data easier.
I'd trust my neighbors with my kids only if I knew my neighbors well enough to know I could trust them. But, knowing them doesn't equate to trusting them. I might decide they don't merit my trust. No way would I trust my kids with anyone I'd just met.
As for realtors, I doubt that any of them will be lining up to sell houses next to pedophiles. Nor do they line up to sell houses next to toxic waste dumps. What's the problem?
There is a huge difference between law and morality
Of course. That's why we have one law that applies to everyone. A stable and free society can't exist if we change the law based on each individual's sense of morals. Most people would simply say anything to stay out of jail.
Ultimately, what you consider moral has no bearing on what I, or anyone else, think is moral. Lot's of heinous criminals sincerely believe their actions are moral. We call them sociopaths.
We should put everyone in this registry, because you never know.
You've managed to be pompous and silly in a single sentence.
Give me a guarantee that pedophiles won't attack again and I might agree with you. Until then, it's clear you believe it's more important to protect pedophiles than to protect children.
I'm describing reality, not a situation you, or I, might wish existed. What someone feels "should be" is usually not anything at all like "what is".
We -- every country -- put people in prison to punish them and to remove them from society, where they would pose a continuing threat. The intent is to deter crime. If their "hellish" prison experience "rehabilitates" a criminal, that's fine, but the purpose of the rehabilitation is the same as the original imprisonment: to protect society from criminals.
The law is the law, whatever the age of consent happens to be in a particular location. Of course there's a difference between the two examples I gave, but in both the man was an adult. Courts might take age into account during sentencing, but authorities cannot when determining if a crime has taken place.
If 18 is the legal age of maturity, then sex between an 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl is just as illegal as it would be if they were 65 and 12, respectively. The 18-year-old has the responsibility to know the law, and the 17-year-old, by definition, cannot behave as a consenting adult.
You may think such a case would have no moral or ethical basis, but others would disagree. In any case, the law cannot permit exceptions based on the criminal's sense of ethics.
The purpose of prisons and a criminal code is to deter crime, punish criminals and ensure the safety of law-abiding people. Sending a convicted criminal to prison has nothing to due with paying dues.
No, it isn't terrible. It's simply providing greater public access to public information. Part of the penalty for being a criminal is lugging around that label for the rest of your life.
No guarantees can be offered that any given sexual predator will not strike again. While there's also no guarantee that any convicted criminal-- for example, a bank robber -- won't strike again, few of us live in a bank, but most of us live in a house with children.
Bottom line: If your children lived next door to a convicted pedophile, why wouldn't you want to know?
It was obvious the/. story was wrong. Slashdot -- which trumpets its unwilligness to use editors and do basic fct checking -- seems to be run by 12-year-olds for 12-year-olds.
Even allowing that, it isn't necessary to imagine the FBI going on a fishing expedition. Why get paranoid imagining all sorts of terrible things prompted by a bogus piece posted on a website pretending to engage in journalism?
I don't see any privacy issue here. Some guy has his laptop stolen. He reports it to the police. Police collect info about the laptap, including the fact that there's an AOL account on it. He calls AOL and tells them his laptop with a configured AOL account on it has been stolen. AOL gives him a new account, keeps the old account open but puts a flag on it. Sure enough, the thief tries to use the laptop to dial in to AOL. The flag goes up, and email is generated to some AOL security officer, and pretty soon everyone knows where the laptop is.
In fact, there's probably no need for a subpoena, but it seems to me that knowing the stolen laptop was configured for AOL does justify getting one in the unlikely event that AOL refuses to volunteer the info. The police would simply request notification if the laptop account was used and the phone number used in the attempt. It's analagous to tracking use of a stolen credit card.
It seems this guy used an AOL account already set up on one of the stolen laptops to dial in to AOL. All AOL had to do was check the records for that account to identify the telphone number used to make the call.
This is equivalent to stealing someone's credit card, using it to fund a trip to Las Vegas, and being surprised when the police knock on your hotel room.
Contrary to the Luddite tone of most reaction here, I suspect the only "hooks" the FBI had into AOL was a subpoena. I lived for several years near AOL in Loudoun County, Virginia. Law enforcement officials looking for info from AOL routinely sought subpoenas from judges in that jurisdiction. Sometimes they got them, sometime they didn't.
Of course, AOL can tell that a customer is dialing in from a computer with legitimate AOL account info and software on it. If a court tells them to, they'll record that info and release it to the people who got the subpoena. This time it was the FBI. Next time, it might be you and your lawyer chasing down someone defaming you online.
The assumption that the FBI has "hooks" into AOL is simple bush-league cynicism from the wanna-be poseurs. Why would anyone decide that it's wrong for AOL not to help capture this thief?
Re:How Do you Kow What's Right?
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 1
Nope. Mail clients -- pine, mutt, Evolution, Kmail, etc. -- transfer mail to a mail server, either a server like sendmail or postfix running locally or to your ISP's server. It's the server that transfers the mail over the net, not your client.
Re:How Do you Know What's Right?
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 1
well, obviously you're wrong. What do you mean by that cute phrase "dollar dependent outcomes"? Did you learn that from some Volvo-driving academic? Or from some paid A.N.S.W.E.R. shill?
Politicians want your vote more than your money. Or a lobbyist's money. Try voting and try politics before you waste yourself trying to be chic be wading in infantile cyncicsm.
Since you seem willing to ignore everything Madison or any of his peers said if they held one belief held wrong today, I guess we should jsy write you off, too. You've already made one mistake.
Besides, you haven't answer my question. If you think something is right, why should anyone else agree with you? Are you imagining that there are absolute moral imperatives on which everyone agrees and that that forms the basis of government? If not, how do you propose to handle conflicting views?
How Do you Kow What's Right?
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You don't have to be a business to generate spam. All you need is a single mail server.
Are you arguing that your right to operate a personal mail server trumps my right not to receive spam?
Well, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong.
So, welcome to the land of politics and the courts. That's how things work around here. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Living in a democracy obliges you to accept the outcome, or keep on fighting for what you believe in and be willing to accept the consequences.
The alternative is to anoint someone to decide what's right and wrong. I don't like that option.
As James Madison argued, the U.S. Constitution is a means to balance conflicting interests to the benefit of the most people most of the time. It isn't a means to determine moral correctness.
Judging by its need to ask for donations to stay afloat, even Mandrake doesn't seem to be able to profit from its good name.
Good name or not, Mandrake has little that distinguishes it from any other distribution. (All Linux distributions are pretty much the same, differing only in how difficult they've made their install routine.)
>>... I can make up a different email address each time I give one out - any email address I want, since it's at my own domain.
I have equivalent capability with FastMail. I own a couple domains, and use FastMail's servers in their MX records. I use different email addresses for each list is subscibe, to, etc. I point my mail client (Evolution these days) at Fastmail's IMAP servers and all is well.
This is a bit off topic, but I'm wondering what people think of the advantages/disadvantages of running a mail server at home versus using a service like FastMail or pulling mail from an ISP. Spam-wise and otherwise.
I've used all three approaches at home, and now doubt that the return from caring and feeding a mail server is worth the effort.
>> I disproved your statement that "Your reason for breaking into my house are irrelevant."
So what?? I drew the analogy to refute the whining hordes who post in repsonse to this kind of story, all of them trying to assert, in their own semi-literate fashion, that a crime isn't a crime when "no one is hurt". If that assertion is true, then breaking-and-entering is not a crime if no one is hurt. Of course, the assertions are wrong. The fact that you found one exception in NJ code (or, so you say) doesn't bear on that point.
Are you seriously proposing that laws against breaking and entering or trespass are "disproved" because you say you went to a "fire school" in which you claim someone said you could break into a house with impunity if it was on fire?
In any case, none of your posturing is relevant to the issue at hand: Believing that theft is not theft does not make the thief any less guilty.
Slashdot Mirror
Many, perhaps all, states expunge a child's criminal record at age 18. That seems fair to me. I'm not sentimenmtal enough, though, to believe that children can't commit crimes.
Adults who commit crimes are a different story.
So now we know you are or would be an incompetent parent who would put his children in the care of unknown neighbors. We also know you're a bigot who judges people by the size of their bankroll.
You're not making much sense with that realtors rant ("life sentences"??), but why should a realtor be allowed to conceal information the public owns?
Here's the point you're ignoring: Information identifying people with criminal records is publicly available information. The public owns that data. It has been available to the public for decades and decades. Making it available via the Internet changes nothing. It's just one more example of the Internet making access to data easier.
I'd trust my neighbors with my kids only if I knew my neighbors well enough to know I could trust them. But, knowing them doesn't equate to trusting them. I might decide they don't merit my trust. No way would I trust my kids with anyone I'd just met.
As for realtors, I doubt that any of them will be lining up to sell houses next to pedophiles. Nor do they line up to sell houses next to toxic waste dumps. What's the problem?
There is a huge difference between law and morality
Of course. That's why we have one law that applies to everyone. A stable and free society can't exist if we change the law based on each individual's sense of morals. Most people would simply say anything to stay out of jail.
Ultimately, what you consider moral has no bearing on what I, or anyone else, think is moral. Lot's of heinous criminals sincerely believe their actions are moral. We call them sociopaths.
We should put everyone in this registry, because you never know.
You've managed to be pompous and silly in a single sentence.
Give me a guarantee that pedophiles won't attack again and I might agree with you. Until then, it's clear you believe it's more important to protect pedophiles than to protect children.
I'm describing reality, not a situation you, or I, might wish existed. What someone feels "should be" is usually not anything at all like "what is".
We -- every country -- put people in prison to punish them and to remove them from society, where they would pose a continuing threat. The intent is to deter crime. If their "hellish" prison experience "rehabilitates" a criminal, that's fine, but the purpose of the rehabilitation is the same as the original imprisonment: to protect society from criminals.
The law is the law, whatever the age of consent happens to be in a particular location. Of course there's a difference between the two examples I gave, but in both the man was an adult. Courts might take age into account during sentencing, but authorities cannot when determining if a crime has taken place.
If 18 is the legal age of maturity, then sex between an 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl is just as illegal as it would be if they were 65 and 12, respectively. The 18-year-old has the responsibility to know the law, and the 17-year-old, by definition, cannot behave as a consenting adult.
You may think such a case would have no moral or ethical basis, but others would disagree. In any case, the law cannot permit exceptions based on the criminal's sense of ethics.
The purpose of prisons and a criminal code is to deter crime, punish criminals and ensure the safety of law-abiding people. Sending a convicted criminal to prison has nothing to due with paying dues.
No, it isn't terrible. It's simply providing greater public access to public information. Part of the penalty for being a criminal is lugging around that label for the rest of your life.
No guarantees can be offered that any given sexual predator will not strike again. While there's also no guarantee that any convicted criminal-- for example, a bank robber -- won't strike again, few of us live in a bank, but most of us live in a house with children.
Bottom line: If your children lived next door to a convicted pedophile, why wouldn't you want to know?
...at least change the headline.
This story was posted an OSNews hours ago, with the same headline.
Not the first time this has happened.
Anyone awake in there?
>> ...Slashdot is run by trolls for trolls. There's lots of banner revenue in trolling sucaks...
Exactly. Gotta keep those numbers up amd OSDN's creditors at bay.
Pity, though, that they have to demean themselves to do that.
It was obvious the /. story was wrong. Slashdot -- which trumpets its unwilligness to use editors and do basic fct checking -- seems to be run by 12-year-olds for 12-year-olds.
Even allowing that, it isn't necessary to imagine the FBI going on a fishing expedition. Why get paranoid imagining all sorts of terrible things prompted by a bogus piece posted on a website pretending to engage in journalism?
I don't see any privacy issue here. Some guy has his laptop stolen. He reports it to the police. Police collect info about the laptap, including the fact that there's an AOL account on it. He calls AOL and tells them his laptop with a configured AOL account on it has been stolen. AOL gives him a new account, keeps the old account open but puts a flag on it. Sure enough, the thief tries to use the laptop to dial in to AOL. The flag goes up, and email is generated to some AOL security officer, and pretty soon everyone knows where the laptop is.
In fact, there's probably no need for a subpoena, but it seems to me that knowing the stolen laptop was configured for AOL does justify getting one in the unlikely event that AOL refuses to volunteer the info. The police would simply request notification if the laptop account was used and the phone number used in the attempt. It's analagous to tracking use of a stolen credit card.
It seems this guy used an AOL account already set up on one of the stolen laptops to dial in to AOL. All AOL had to do was check the records for that account to identify the telphone number used to make the call.
This is equivalent to stealing someone's credit card, using it to fund a trip to Las Vegas, and being surprised when the police knock on your hotel room.
Contrary to the Luddite tone of most reaction here, I suspect the only "hooks" the FBI had into AOL was a subpoena. I lived for several years near AOL in Loudoun County, Virginia. Law enforcement officials looking for info from AOL routinely sought subpoenas from judges in that jurisdiction. Sometimes they got them, sometime they didn't.
Of course, AOL can tell that a customer is dialing in from a computer with legitimate AOL account info and software on it. If a court tells them to, they'll record that info and release it to the people who got the subpoena. This time it was the FBI. Next time, it might be you and your lawyer chasing down someone defaming you online.
The assumption that the FBI has "hooks" into AOL is simple bush-league cynicism from the wanna-be poseurs. Why would anyone decide that it's wrong for AOL not to help capture this thief?
Nope. Mail clients -- pine, mutt, Evolution, Kmail, etc. -- transfer mail to a mail server, either a server like sendmail or postfix running locally or to your ISP's server. It's the server that transfers the mail over the net, not your client.
well, obviously you're wrong. What do you mean by that cute phrase "dollar dependent outcomes"? Did you learn that from some Volvo-driving academic? Or from some paid A.N.S.W.E.R. shill?
Politicians want your vote more than your money. Or a lobbyist's money. Try voting and try politics before you waste yourself trying to be chic be wading in infantile cyncicsm.
Since you seem willing to ignore everything Madison or any of his peers said if they held one belief held wrong today, I guess we should jsy write you off, too. You've already made one mistake.
Besides, you haven't answer my question. If you think something is right, why should anyone else agree with you? Are you imagining that there are absolute moral imperatives on which everyone agrees and that that forms the basis of government? If not, how do you propose to handle conflicting views?
You don't have to be a business to generate spam. All you need is a single mail server.
Are you arguing that your right to operate a personal mail server trumps my right not to receive spam?
Well, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong.
So, welcome to the land of politics and the courts. That's how things work around here. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Living in a democracy obliges you to accept the outcome, or keep on fighting for what you believe in and be willing to accept the consequences.
The alternative is to anoint someone to decide what's right and wrong. I don't like that option.
As James Madison argued, the U.S. Constitution is a means to balance conflicting interests to the benefit of the most people most of the time. It isn't a means to determine moral correctness.
Judging by its need to ask for donations to stay afloat, even Mandrake doesn't seem to be able to profit from its good name.
Good name or not, Mandrake has little that distinguishes it from any other distribution. (All Linux distributions are pretty much the same, differing only in how difficult they've made their install routine.)
I suspect you could buy Mandrake with rather shallow coffers.
What assets can Mandrake offer? (GPL'd code isn't much of an asset.)
>> ... I can make up a different email address each time I give one out - any email address I want, since it's at my own domain.
I have equivalent capability with FastMail. I own a couple domains, and use FastMail's servers in their MX records. I use different email addresses for each list is subscibe, to, etc. I point my mail client (Evolution these days) at Fastmail's IMAP servers and all is well.
This is a bit off topic, but I'm wondering what people think of the advantages/disadvantages of running a mail server at home versus using a service like FastMail or pulling mail from an ISP. Spam-wise and otherwise.
I've used all three approaches at home, and now doubt that the return from caring and feeding a mail server is worth the effort.
People use Windows because you can buy stuff for it.
>> I disproved your statement that "Your reason for breaking into my house are irrelevant."
So what?? I drew the analogy to refute the whining hordes who post in repsonse to this kind of story, all of them trying to assert, in their own semi-literate fashion, that a crime isn't a crime when "no one is hurt". If that assertion is true, then breaking-and-entering is not a crime if no one is hurt. Of course, the assertions are wrong. The fact that you found one exception in NJ code (or, so you say) doesn't bear on that point.
No, the exception doesn't disprove the rule.
Are you seriously proposing that laws against breaking and entering or trespass are "disproved" because you say you went to a "fire school" in which you claim someone said you could break into a house with impunity if it was on fire?
In any case, none of your posturing is relevant to the issue at hand: Believing that theft is not theft does not make the thief any less guilty.