While their efforts will likely not work, and while they might be better off taking another route, their efforts are nonetheless not legislating morality (since, I repeat, it doesn't block porn), and, even if it did amount to legislating morality, would still be acceptable.
Their intent is to segregate content so that it can be blocked. If nobody thought blocking porn was desirable, this proposed law would be useless and nonsensical. Their goal is to facilitate blocking.
The reason that I agree that morality factors into things is because the segregation is absolute. Either you're on one side or the other side, and it's one government in one community that will be making this decision. Morality is, of course, "knowing" right from wrong. This would be one community forcing their morality onto others by making it easy to block sites according to where they draw the line, and making it MORE difficult to block sites according to lines other communities would draw.
This is a political solution to a technical problem. A technical problem that, I might add, has already been solved (PICS ratings).
Pragmatically, the vast majority of content is served via http and https.
I don't think this is accurate. I believe the majority of traffic nowadays is due to BitTorrent. NNTP isn't that far behind HTTP, either, so saying "vast majority" isn't right.
If your goal is to filter the Interweb, PICS labels were designed for this purpose, or if you don't want to wait on sites to label, there's lots of filtering software out there.
I can sign up for cable and use parental controls to block my kids from recording and watching content with certain ratings.
This is exactly how PICS ratings are intended to work.
I think that the ratings are not strict enough,
The advantage of PICS is that multiple ratings bureaus are implied. Each community can rate independently from the others. This lets the solution scale globally without pissing off every other community that doesn't like the rating.
most parents don't have the technology cops to set up dansguardian and squid
These parents should make it clear that the demand exists, and ISPs will offer these services.
We have the technology, why not make their lives simpler?
Exactly. Get more sites to rate with PICS ratings bureaus, do some pointy clicky in IE, and your (Interweb) problem is solved.
I think the points people are trying to make here don't involve saying that this problem doesn't exist or it isn't a "real" problem. The solution, however, is a bad one from a technical perspective. It's like the government saying we have a fuel efficiency problem, so from now on car engine blocks shall be made out of foam and plastic. Why don't we leave the technical details to the people that actually understand how the Internet works?
If you're concerned about your children getting unsolicited pornographic e-mails, you need to stop giving them unfiltered access to the Internet. Set their e-mail up to only accept messages from people they/you already know (the whitelist another poster mentioned).
It's interesting to note, though, that a port-based method for segregating HTTP traffic isn't going to solve your pornographic e-mail problem. Unless you want to extend the same logic to all Internet protocols? Look at how many spammers obey the CAN-SPAM act and see if you can come up with a reasonable estimate on how many would be willing to make their spam trivially filtered.
Technology ALREADY EXISTS to have a child-safe browsing experience. Do some research on PICS labels and ratings bureaus. Web sites label with one or more bureaus, publish their ratings through PICS, and browsers then only allow access to sites with an appropriate rating. The fact that few web sites choose to do this, and few parents choose to enable this option in IE should tell you volumes about the real-world demand for these things.
IT'S NOT THAT SIMPLE. Can't you just accept the possibility that the armies of people that do this type of thing for a living might just have a reason for saying this is impractical and dangerous? If you are not sufficiently educated and skilled in this area, it is inappropriate for you to be airing your opinion, just as it's inappropriate for legislators to be pushing for this "solution" in the first place.
For a thorough consensus discussion of why.xxx is bad, please see RFC3675.
Absolutely. I'm a little frustrated and confused that nobody (content providers, browsers OR search engines) seem to be paying any attention to this, though. IE tried, but Firefox doesn't even make a token effort, and search engines (which could make the most interesting use of these things) seem to be oblivious to them.
The parent post already covered that eventuality by suggesting (twice) the online/web-based variants of these applications. Before responding to someone's post suggesting that they "need to be educated", please make sure you've read the post you're responding to.
Except all of this costs a lot of money, and you're still never going to get to a 0.000% chance of failure. So you've cost the enterprise tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars building this redundant, distributed DHCP infrastructure, and reduced the availability of your systems by some small (but non-zero) amount. What has that bought you? A slight reduction in the amount of hours worked by your administrators? Oops, we forgot about the administrators that we'd have to hire to maintain the dozens of DHCP clusters we'd have to deploy to make this work.
I didn't skip your last paragraph, but I did only read the first sentence, sorry.
If I move DNS to a new server, or the IP gateway somewhere else, or want to change the entire IP topology of the network, DHCP makes the entire process a hell of a lot simpler. I don't have to remember which machines are using which services, and which ones are providing them.
This seems backward to me too. If you don't know which systems are running which services, how did you get the services going on those machines to begin with? How do you know which systems you need to go to in order to turn those services OFF when you move them to another system? But even so, I'll agree with you that this is fine for small scales. But once you're at large scales, this information has to be tracked anyway, so there's no benefit to trying to insulate the administrator from some of it.
You didn't acknowledge the key point I was trying to make, though, which suggests that maybe I could have been clearer in my original post. With enterprise-scale services, outages cost a lot of money. Quite a lot of time and planning goes into designing network topologies and architectures to minimize risk and minimize points of failure. Requiring that DHCP services be up and available and renewing leases in order for your mission-critical servers to discover the network is a HUGE liability. If you're an online retailer, a DHCP outage could translate to a significant revenue-impacting event that would easily outweigh the additional administrative costs of NOT having a DHCP-managed IP address scheme.
In addition, there are lots of other factors here that make DHCP unsuitable for use with enterprise servers. Network topologies are complex, with DMZs for public-facing traffic, perhaps servers spread among multiple sites, and with WAN connections that are less reliable than LAN. Large servers have multiple network interfaces, and one of them might be a management interface for emergency use. Also, enterprise services tend to be a lot more stable (configuration-wise) than a home network, so things like renumbering or moving services between hosts are events that (a) happen very infrequently; and (b) when they do happen, they need to follow a very carefully controlled plan. "Reboot and hope DHCP assigns the new IP addresses" is a completely ridiculous service migration scenario for enterprise-scale applications.
For the record, I work at a major telecommunications company with thousands of servers, and since I've been here (10 years), we've never had a need to mass renumber, and all of our service migrations were carefully orchestrated and could NOT have been done cleanly if we had to rely on coordinated DHCP changes.
But really, for me, the availability aspect is the killer. Managing IP addresses by hand is not that expensive when the costs of any event that would require an IP address change are already in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, just due to the scale/scope of the effort. On the other hand, the potential liabilities imposed by adding a point of failure in the form of DHCP servers (and the costs of making your DHCP clusters resilient to begin with) completely cancel that out.
Just because your home network works fine with DHCP does not mean this approach will scale to an enterprise level. By requiring that DHCP services be available when mission-critical servers boot up, you add a point of failure. If the DHCP server goes down, or the network between the host and the DHCP server is down when the server boots up, the server never gets an IP address and you potentially suffer an outage.
The cost of managing static IP address allocations for 1,000 hosts, and keeping those hosts configured appropriately, doesn't come close to the costs of maintaining a high-availability (and likely distributed) DHCP infrastructure.
You also can't use DHCP to solve the network topology problem. As you allocate IP netblocks to other organizations, you probably have to deal with aggregation and routing, so you're already going to have to track this stuff independently of DHCP.
I use DHCP at home too. It's great for hosts that provide no services, like my PCs or test/lab servers, but it's really inappropriate for larger scales, or for revenue-generating services. These need address stability, even when things aren't working elsewhere.
How does switching to another player fix the problem of not having a codec to play an AVI? VLC will have the same problem as Media Player. If VLC doesn't have the codec, it won't play the AVI just like Windows Media Player won't play it without the codec.
If your move to VLC is done to protest Microsoft file formats, Media Player supports lots of non-Microsoft movie formats.
Don't get me wrong, I use VLC at home too, but it's not clear to me how your move to VLC can be justified by echoing someone else's frustration at the AVI file format. Or is this just fanaticism? "Microsoft is evil!!! Use VLC!!!"?
So you can't accelerate to past the speed of light in any time frame
This would imply an absolute frame of reference where everyone (including yourself) could agree that your speed is approaching the speed of light. This absolute frame of reference does not exist. From your perspective, light is still always traveling at its unattainable speed and you haven't gained any speed on it whatsoever. Despite this, nearby stars are still getting closer to you, and the more you accelerate, the less distance you actually have to cover to get there (length contraction). So yeah, maybe I was misleading when I said you were going faster than light from your perspective on your trip to see the galaxy. If you were using charts produced on earth, and measuring your journey based on your apparent progress on the chart, you would conclude that you were traveling much faster than the speed of light. This isn't actually true in any reference frame, even though you would ultimately travel 100,000 light years (from earth's perspective) in just over a decade (from your perspective). Neither figure is correct in the opposite inertial frame, because you've had length contraction changing the galaxy from your perspective, and time dilation changing you from the galaxy's perspective.
Time dilation would prevent us from agreeing on your speed or changes in your speed. Since you're traveling at c-1mph, time is passing MUCH more slowly for you than it is for me. When you add 5mph to your speed, since we disagree about what an "h" in that "mph" is, I see a far more modest increase in your speed. From my perspective, no matter how fast you try to go, you'll always be slightly slower than the speed of light.
From your perspective, however, this isn't true. With enough energy (a hopelessly implausible amount), you could accelerate way beyond the speed of light from your perspective, and travel from one end of the galaxy to the other in 12 years, but for those back home watching you in telescopes, it would take well over 100,000 years, because you've never actually gone faster than light.
I guess you're making an assumption that the church would be the sole (obvious) sponsor of the activity, and I was making the assumption that they'd be one participant of many (perhaps the event was organized by the city itself). I would be uncomfortable attending an event if everyone thought that I was there for the church. "Look at all of those volunteers the church put together!" Um, no. And perhaps this is part of the reason you never see this happening. Churches are about the church first, and community second. If they're not going to get "credit" or new recruits, they're not going to organize for the community's benefit. This seems a little hypocritical to me.
I hate when evangelicals come to my door, because they just ask "have you accepted Jesus?" If someone asked "do you want to go work at a homeless shelter with me this weekend?" I might respect their religion a bit.
What an interesting thought. My experiences are exactly the same. Someone walks up to my door and asks me that very question. I want to tell them to fuck off and stop trying to infect others with their religion, but I'm polite about it, accept whatever they're thrusting into my hand, and drop it into the recycling bag.
But if someone came up to my door and said, instead, "We're from XYZ church down the street and we're trying to get some people to help with ABC event. The event is not associated with our church or any religion; we're just out here trying to get some people in our community together to help out," I would actually seriously consider doing it. I love the area that I live in, and spending an hour or two of my weekend improve that actually does appeal to me.
This would be an effective way of distributing the app, but does nothing to reduce the costs associated with bundling, testing and successfully getting the new version of the app installed. With a failure rate of less than 1%, an organization with 100,000 employees could still have hundreds with installation problems that likely require dispatching a tech to resolve. The complexity (cost) goes up depending on how many PC platforms your installation package has to run on.
In some situations, though, this cost is acceptable. It all depends on the nature of the app.
You only have to distribute a link once and can upgrade/patch to your heart's content without having to worry about re-testing an upgrade/installation process for your user base.
I do agree that the decision to go with a web app should be made based on the requirements of the project. Use the best tool for the task. Sometimes that can be a web app, but sometimes it should be something else.
Note to child porn enthusiasts: Move to Canada, hack into 3000 PCs, and view all of the child porn you want, stored on other peoples' hard drives! If prosecution for hacking appears imminent, turn one of them in and claim you were trying to be a good citizen by catching people downloading child porn! Your notes on where the best child porn is should then be renamed "Dossier on suspected criminal activities".
I don't disagree, I suppose. It's just that if you have a choice, between the groups that the system was designed to have you write in situations like this, and a group that is intended to be impartial, you're going to generally have better luck with the former than the latter.
Judges normally don't bring anyone up on charges. That's supposed to be the executive branch's job, though I'm not a lawyer.
I think you're missing my point (or perhaps ignoring it). Yes, you can write the judge, in the (in my opinion, misguided) hope that you can influence his decision. If you're lucky, he might read your letter, and if you're even luckier, maybe he will see the light and work out how to explain it as the proper interpretation for the law later.
Or, you can write the people that the system intends you to write: the legislature, for creating the law in the first place, and the executive branch, for enforcing and prosecuting it. The latter groups are best suited to deal with these issues. Hoping that a judge is going to be receptive because the system that intends them to be impartial isn't ideal seems like a shot in the dark.
I wasn't proposing that they follow a Star Trek-esque prime directive at all. I'm proposing that we don't know what their motives may be. It's a little difficult to predict the effects of a civilization in your vicinity when you have no idea what they may be doing there.
It may be that they're studying us, like a laboratory experiment, and don't want us to be aware that they're studying us.
Wouldn't we be able to spot either that or pick up their communications by now if it had ever happened within a reasonable distance of us?
You still make a lot of assumptions. You start of supposing FTL travel, but assume that their method of communication is going to be detectable to us? Why communicate using electromagnetic means when you can move faster?
I don't necessarily fault people for making these types of assumptions, but we need to be aware that the assumptions are being made, and it's absurd to think for a moment that humanity's current state, including our technology and motives, remotely resemble anything extraterrestrials (or our descendants) are likely to possess.
In theory, a judge should be immune from public opinion. They're there to interpret the law as written, not rationalize something just because it's what the people want.
If it turns out that these people are likely to be convicted, that's the time to start writing, but you'd want to contact your legislators or the person pressing charges, not the judge.
While I agree with you in principle, it's still an assumption that an asteroid impact will be survivable, even with a subterranean complex. There is no guarantee that the next asteroid will be the same size as the last, or that its impact will have the same strain on the ecosystem. A sufficiently large/energetic impact could effectively sterilize the surface of the planet. A modest, but healthy space colonization program might require the same resources, but it could effectively guarantee that any disaster (natural or man-made) on earth would be survivable, from the perspective of the species.
Lots of factors come into play during a mass extinction event that affects what categories of species will be at risk of extinction. Size and energy requirements tend to be the big factor. It's a whopper of an assumption that our species will "fly under the radar" of the next mass extinction event, the way that the ancestors of modern birds appeared to. The scale of potential devastation is perhaps a little difficult to comprehend, and there are no rules limiting how much damage could be caused. The next "big one" could effectively sterilize the entire surface of the earth instead of just wiping out 90% of the species.
Unless it is their goal not to disturb? A civilization sufficiently advanced that they're going around inspecting and cataloging life around the universe is almost certainly sufficiently advanced to hide their presence from the subjects they're studying.
Slashdot Mirror
Their intent is to segregate content so that it can be blocked. If nobody thought blocking porn was desirable, this proposed law would be useless and nonsensical. Their goal is to facilitate blocking.
The reason that I agree that morality factors into things is because the segregation is absolute. Either you're on one side or the other side, and it's one government in one community that will be making this decision. Morality is, of course, "knowing" right from wrong. This would be one community forcing their morality onto others by making it easy to block sites according to where they draw the line, and making it MORE difficult to block sites according to lines other communities would draw.
This is a political solution to a technical problem. A technical problem that, I might add, has already been solved (PICS ratings).
I don't think this is accurate. I believe the majority of traffic nowadays is due to BitTorrent. NNTP isn't that far behind HTTP, either, so saying "vast majority" isn't right.
If your goal is to filter the Interweb, PICS labels were designed for this purpose, or if you don't want to wait on sites to label, there's lots of filtering software out there.
This is exactly how PICS ratings are intended to work.
The advantage of PICS is that multiple ratings bureaus are implied. Each community can rate independently from the others. This lets the solution scale globally without pissing off every other community that doesn't like the rating.
These parents should make it clear that the demand exists, and ISPs will offer these services.
Exactly. Get more sites to rate with PICS ratings bureaus, do some pointy clicky in IE, and your (Interweb) problem is solved.
I think the points people are trying to make here don't involve saying that this problem doesn't exist or it isn't a "real" problem. The solution, however, is a bad one from a technical perspective. It's like the government saying we have a fuel efficiency problem, so from now on car engine blocks shall be made out of foam and plastic. Why don't we leave the technical details to the people that actually understand how the Internet works?
If you're concerned about your children getting unsolicited pornographic e-mails, you need to stop giving them unfiltered access to the Internet. Set their e-mail up to only accept messages from people they/you already know (the whitelist another poster mentioned).
It's interesting to note, though, that a port-based method for segregating HTTP traffic isn't going to solve your pornographic e-mail problem. Unless you want to extend the same logic to all Internet protocols? Look at how many spammers obey the CAN-SPAM act and see if you can come up with a reasonable estimate on how many would be willing to make their spam trivially filtered.
Technology ALREADY EXISTS to have a child-safe browsing experience. Do some research on PICS labels and ratings bureaus. Web sites label with one or more bureaus, publish their ratings through PICS, and browsers then only allow access to sites with an appropriate rating. The fact that few web sites choose to do this, and few parents choose to enable this option in IE should tell you volumes about the real-world demand for these things.
IT'S NOT THAT SIMPLE. Can't you just accept the possibility that the armies of people that do this type of thing for a living might just have a reason for saying this is impractical and dangerous? If you are not sufficiently educated and skilled in this area, it is inappropriate for you to be airing your opinion, just as it's inappropriate for legislators to be pushing for this "solution" in the first place.
.xxx is bad, please see RFC3675.
For a thorough consensus discussion of why
Absolutely. I'm a little frustrated and confused that nobody (content providers, browsers OR search engines) seem to be paying any attention to this, though. IE tried, but Firefox doesn't even make a token effort, and search engines (which could make the most interesting use of these things) seem to be oblivious to them.
The parent post already covered that eventuality by suggesting (twice) the online/web-based variants of these applications. Before responding to someone's post suggesting that they "need to be educated", please make sure you've read the post you're responding to.
Except all of this costs a lot of money, and you're still never going to get to a 0.000% chance of failure. So you've cost the enterprise tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars building this redundant, distributed DHCP infrastructure, and reduced the availability of your systems by some small (but non-zero) amount. What has that bought you? A slight reduction in the amount of hours worked by your administrators? Oops, we forgot about the administrators that we'd have to hire to maintain the dozens of DHCP clusters we'd have to deploy to make this work.
I didn't skip your last paragraph, but I did only read the first sentence, sorry.
This seems backward to me too. If you don't know which systems are running which services, how did you get the services going on those machines to begin with? How do you know which systems you need to go to in order to turn those services OFF when you move them to another system? But even so, I'll agree with you that this is fine for small scales. But once you're at large scales, this information has to be tracked anyway, so there's no benefit to trying to insulate the administrator from some of it.
You didn't acknowledge the key point I was trying to make, though, which suggests that maybe I could have been clearer in my original post. With enterprise-scale services, outages cost a lot of money. Quite a lot of time and planning goes into designing network topologies and architectures to minimize risk and minimize points of failure. Requiring that DHCP services be up and available and renewing leases in order for your mission-critical servers to discover the network is a HUGE liability. If you're an online retailer, a DHCP outage could translate to a significant revenue-impacting event that would easily outweigh the additional administrative costs of NOT having a DHCP-managed IP address scheme.
In addition, there are lots of other factors here that make DHCP unsuitable for use with enterprise servers. Network topologies are complex, with DMZs for public-facing traffic, perhaps servers spread among multiple sites, and with WAN connections that are less reliable than LAN. Large servers have multiple network interfaces, and one of them might be a management interface for emergency use. Also, enterprise services tend to be a lot more stable (configuration-wise) than a home network, so things like renumbering or moving services between hosts are events that (a) happen very infrequently; and (b) when they do happen, they need to follow a very carefully controlled plan. "Reboot and hope DHCP assigns the new IP addresses" is a completely ridiculous service migration scenario for enterprise-scale applications.
For the record, I work at a major telecommunications company with thousands of servers, and since I've been here (10 years), we've never had a need to mass renumber, and all of our service migrations were carefully orchestrated and could NOT have been done cleanly if we had to rely on coordinated DHCP changes.
But really, for me, the availability aspect is the killer. Managing IP addresses by hand is not that expensive when the costs of any event that would require an IP address change are already in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, just due to the scale/scope of the effort. On the other hand, the potential liabilities imposed by adding a point of failure in the form of DHCP servers (and the costs of making your DHCP clusters resilient to begin with) completely cancel that out.
In my opinion.
Just because your home network works fine with DHCP does not mean this approach will scale to an enterprise level. By requiring that DHCP services be available when mission-critical servers boot up, you add a point of failure. If the DHCP server goes down, or the network between the host and the DHCP server is down when the server boots up, the server never gets an IP address and you potentially suffer an outage.
The cost of managing static IP address allocations for 1,000 hosts, and keeping those hosts configured appropriately, doesn't come close to the costs of maintaining a high-availability (and likely distributed) DHCP infrastructure.
You also can't use DHCP to solve the network topology problem. As you allocate IP netblocks to other organizations, you probably have to deal with aggregation and routing, so you're already going to have to track this stuff independently of DHCP.
I use DHCP at home too. It's great for hosts that provide no services, like my PCs or test/lab servers, but it's really inappropriate for larger scales, or for revenue-generating services. These need address stability, even when things aren't working elsewhere.
How does switching to another player fix the problem of not having a codec to play an AVI? VLC will have the same problem as Media Player. If VLC doesn't have the codec, it won't play the AVI just like Windows Media Player won't play it without the codec.
If your move to VLC is done to protest Microsoft file formats, Media Player supports lots of non-Microsoft movie formats.
Don't get me wrong, I use VLC at home too, but it's not clear to me how your move to VLC can be justified by echoing someone else's frustration at the AVI file format. Or is this just fanaticism? "Microsoft is evil!!! Use VLC!!!"?
I believe many US jurisdictions will hold non-competes unenforceable if it prevents you from being able to effectively work at all.
This would imply an absolute frame of reference where everyone (including yourself) could agree that your speed is approaching the speed of light. This absolute frame of reference does not exist. From your perspective, light is still always traveling at its unattainable speed and you haven't gained any speed on it whatsoever. Despite this, nearby stars are still getting closer to you, and the more you accelerate, the less distance you actually have to cover to get there (length contraction). So yeah, maybe I was misleading when I said you were going faster than light from your perspective on your trip to see the galaxy. If you were using charts produced on earth, and measuring your journey based on your apparent progress on the chart, you would conclude that you were traveling much faster than the speed of light. This isn't actually true in any reference frame, even though you would ultimately travel 100,000 light years (from earth's perspective) in just over a decade (from your perspective). Neither figure is correct in the opposite inertial frame, because you've had length contraction changing the galaxy from your perspective, and time dilation changing you from the galaxy's perspective.
Time dilation would prevent us from agreeing on your speed or changes in your speed. Since you're traveling at c-1mph, time is passing MUCH more slowly for you than it is for me. When you add 5mph to your speed, since we disagree about what an "h" in that "mph" is, I see a far more modest increase in your speed. From my perspective, no matter how fast you try to go, you'll always be slightly slower than the speed of light.
From your perspective, however, this isn't true. With enough energy (a hopelessly implausible amount), you could accelerate way beyond the speed of light from your perspective, and travel from one end of the galaxy to the other in 12 years, but for those back home watching you in telescopes, it would take well over 100,000 years, because you've never actually gone faster than light.
I guess you're making an assumption that the church would be the sole (obvious) sponsor of the activity, and I was making the assumption that they'd be one participant of many (perhaps the event was organized by the city itself). I would be uncomfortable attending an event if everyone thought that I was there for the church. "Look at all of those volunteers the church put together!" Um, no. And perhaps this is part of the reason you never see this happening. Churches are about the church first, and community second. If they're not going to get "credit" or new recruits, they're not going to organize for the community's benefit. This seems a little hypocritical to me.
What an interesting thought. My experiences are exactly the same. Someone walks up to my door and asks me that very question. I want to tell them to fuck off and stop trying to infect others with their religion, but I'm polite about it, accept whatever they're thrusting into my hand, and drop it into the recycling bag.
But if someone came up to my door and said, instead, "We're from XYZ church down the street and we're trying to get some people to help with ABC event. The event is not associated with our church or any religion; we're just out here trying to get some people in our community together to help out," I would actually seriously consider doing it. I love the area that I live in, and spending an hour or two of my weekend improve that actually does appeal to me.
Why don't we ever see this?
This would be an effective way of distributing the app, but does nothing to reduce the costs associated with bundling, testing and successfully getting the new version of the app installed. With a failure rate of less than 1%, an organization with 100,000 employees could still have hundreds with installation problems that likely require dispatching a tech to resolve. The complexity (cost) goes up depending on how many PC platforms your installation package has to run on.
In some situations, though, this cost is acceptable. It all depends on the nature of the app.
You only have to distribute a link once and can upgrade/patch to your heart's content without having to worry about re-testing an upgrade/installation process for your user base.
I do agree that the decision to go with a web app should be made based on the requirements of the project. Use the best tool for the task. Sometimes that can be a web app, but sometimes it should be something else.
Note to child porn enthusiasts: Move to Canada, hack into 3000 PCs, and view all of the child porn you want, stored on other peoples' hard drives! If prosecution for hacking appears imminent, turn one of them in and claim you were trying to be a good citizen by catching people downloading child porn! Your notes on where the best child porn is should then be renamed "Dossier on suspected criminal activities".
I don't disagree, I suppose. It's just that if you have a choice, between the groups that the system was designed to have you write in situations like this, and a group that is intended to be impartial, you're going to generally have better luck with the former than the latter.
Judges normally don't bring anyone up on charges. That's supposed to be the executive branch's job, though I'm not a lawyer.
I think you're missing my point (or perhaps ignoring it). Yes, you can write the judge, in the (in my opinion, misguided) hope that you can influence his decision. If you're lucky, he might read your letter, and if you're even luckier, maybe he will see the light and work out how to explain it as the proper interpretation for the law later.
Or, you can write the people that the system intends you to write: the legislature, for creating the law in the first place, and the executive branch, for enforcing and prosecuting it. The latter groups are best suited to deal with these issues. Hoping that a judge is going to be receptive because the system that intends them to be impartial isn't ideal seems like a shot in the dark.
It may be that they're studying us, like a laboratory experiment, and don't want us to be aware that they're studying us.You still make a lot of assumptions. You start of supposing FTL travel, but assume that their method of communication is going to be detectable to us? Why communicate using electromagnetic means when you can move faster?
I don't necessarily fault people for making these types of assumptions, but we need to be aware that the assumptions are being made, and it's absurd to think for a moment that humanity's current state, including our technology and motives, remotely resemble anything extraterrestrials (or our descendants) are likely to possess.
In theory, a judge should be immune from public opinion. They're there to interpret the law as written, not rationalize something just because it's what the people want.
If it turns out that these people are likely to be convicted, that's the time to start writing, but you'd want to contact your legislators or the person pressing charges, not the judge.
While I agree with you in principle, it's still an assumption that an asteroid impact will be survivable, even with a subterranean complex. There is no guarantee that the next asteroid will be the same size as the last, or that its impact will have the same strain on the ecosystem. A sufficiently large/energetic impact could effectively sterilize the surface of the planet. A modest, but healthy space colonization program might require the same resources, but it could effectively guarantee that any disaster (natural or man-made) on earth would be survivable, from the perspective of the species.
I say do both.
Lots of factors come into play during a mass extinction event that affects what categories of species will be at risk of extinction. Size and energy requirements tend to be the big factor. It's a whopper of an assumption that our species will "fly under the radar" of the next mass extinction event, the way that the ancestors of modern birds appeared to. The scale of potential devastation is perhaps a little difficult to comprehend, and there are no rules limiting how much damage could be caused. The next "big one" could effectively sterilize the entire surface of the earth instead of just wiping out 90% of the species.
Unless it is their goal not to disturb? A civilization sufficiently advanced that they're going around inspecting and cataloging life around the universe is almost certainly sufficiently advanced to hide their presence from the subjects they're studying.