No, he simply said "We can't hold them liable because they would go out of business if we did."
No, this wasn't what the judge "simply said". This was what the legally-inept reporter chose to quote in the story. Read all the way to the end of the article for a better sense of the judge's rationale, but I would strongly suggest you read the actual opinion before making up your mind.
It was the parent's job to know what their child was doing and to prevent her from meeting people like this.
While I agree with the principle of what you're saying here, in reality, you could have excellent parents and still have a child come to harm. Some children are only children because the law says they are. Some of these can be just as crafty and determined as any adult you meet. It is not possible for a parent to to be perfect, any more than it is for an adult bodyguard to guarantee with 100% certainty that he will keep his charge safe.
Children can get into trouble without it being their own fault, or their parents' fault.
While I think your post is excellent, I want to point out that it implies a "reasonable care" element that not all parents or Slashdot posters would recognize or agree with. Specifically, you say this:
As time went on, they began trusting my judgement more and more.
Trust implies an assumption that you won't abuse that trust. Just because your parents were satisfied that you wouldn't do anything unsafe doesn't mean that you wouldn't. Perhaps some new avenue of abuse opened up on the Internet that they weren't aware of. Perhaps one day you got into a fight with your parents and decided to "act out" by doing something you weren't supposed to do online. Perhaps you were duped by a really convincing imposter, and lured into a relationship that your parents would have considered improper, but didn't seem improper to you. (Many children lured into these types of relationships don't realize it's wrong at first.)
My point is that this is a gray area of parenting. Some children will be abused even if the parents adopt the attitude that yours did here. Some parents will be even more strict, perhaps never allowing their children unsupervised access to the Internet. Some might not even give their kids Internet access in the first place. Fewer of these children will be abused by someone they met online.
It's not possible to be perfect in your supervision of your children, and kids are going to get hurt, either by themselves or because of something someone did to them. Many times, this happens to kids who have excellent parents.
Every approach has trade-offs. Do you want your child to develop an understanding of earned trust and responsibility at the expense of putting them at risk for additional harm? Or do you want them to be safe and secure, but naive?
No one approach is always correct, and factors such as the temperament of the parent, the security of the community, and the abilities of the child could necessitate wildly different parenting styles, even in the same household.
And why shouldn't a site be held accountable for actions it facilitates? I'm sorry, but "it would kill the internet" simply isn't enough justification for not doing so. (Besides being nonsense.)
I'm not targeting you specifically here, but I wanted to dispell this bit of confusion before it does too much more damage. This was not the judge's rationale behind his decision (though it may have been the point you were responding to in the parent posts). It was just one tiny piece of dicta the reporter chose to put in the article. People should refrain from making assumptions about the reasons the judge had for making the decision he did until they read and understand it. Do not assume that a legally-inept reporter has done this. (Since when was there "guilt" in a civil suit?)
Your analogy is flawed (as most analogies tend to be). The assault did not happen on MySpace. MySpace was simply used to network and communicate. The assault happened somewhere else.
A slightly better analogy would be to equate MySpace with a mall. A mall is owned by a company, and has a profit motive. Malls even hire security guards. But there's no one carding individuals at the door and segregating people by age group. There's no one stopping a minor from striking up a conversation with an adult in the food court. Maybe he's her father? Is it their responsibility to check?
How often do you hear about malls being successfully sued because a child met an adult there, and that relationship led to abuse?
MySpace and malls have the same goals: to attract visitors and make money off of their presence. People communicate with each other when they are in the same place. It is unreasonable to require that every operator of every public place that could result in communication to check the identity/age of all participants and monitor or prevent communication between those that might possibly be improper.
Besides, not all communication between minors and adults are wrong to begin with. Kids can be fans of bands. Kids can put up interesting content that adults want to ask questions about. I hate this presumption that any relationship between a child an adult must either be parental or abusive.
I if built a building - and allowed kids to come in and hang out, decorate, dance, whatever... Under the law I'd sure as hell be liable if a adult or older child was preying on younger children in my building - but the transport system they used to get there wouldn't be. (Check out the legal concepts of in loco parentis and attractive nusiance.) Why should MySpace be any different?
This seems to fit the definition of a mall. Kids go there to hang out, and the girls and boys get dressed up to show off for each other. They shop or talk at the food court. Same thing, right? How often do you see malls getting sued because their 13 year olds met a 19 year old there? Are you saying you'd prefer to see people carded whenever they walk into a mall, and the adults separated from the children? Maybe you should propose that at your next city council meeting. Think of the children!
Because it would establish that the owner of a space is responsible for what happens there of he can reasonably prevent it.
Fortunately, the legal standard isn't just whether the harm can be reasonably prevented. You also have to consider whether or not a duty of care exists. You have a duty to keep people away from a public nuisance (such as a fence around a swimming pool). You have a duty to keep your public space safe for public use (such as by keeping walkways free from ice). The word "reasonably" in your statement is the key term here as well. It is unreasonable to expect the operator of every public park, every mall, every stop light, bus stop, bowling alley and bingo parlor to card everyone, and monitor the behavior of the people there to ensure they aren't talking about doing something improper. If you disagree, you are more than welcome to change what's "reasonable" in your community. It's a jury that decides how these terms are applied, after all. One community's "unreasonable" may not be the same as another's. That's by design.
The mere fact that a space can be used as a place for meeting or discussion doesn't make it an attractive nuisance. You must have skipped this day in law school.
Consider the Federal highway system - anyone can acess it and go anywhere it goes as and when they will. But they may not drive on in such a fashion as to endanger the life and health of others. I can use the telephone system for a variety of purposes, entertainment or business - but I may not use telemarketing except under a fairly strict set of circumstances.
Nobody's arguing that laws or regulation aren't needed. But attacking the medium has a substantially different effect than attacking the offenders. When you attack the medium, you require the operators of the medium to do your policing, and when you hold them to high standards (such as carding everyone and isolating age groups), that may drive expenses unreasonably high.
You give the highway system and telephone systems as examples of where regulation is present and doesn't seem to hurt our freedoms. You forgot to suggest that the highway and telephone system operators be held liable for the illegal activities that occur over them. Should the US be liable for every case of drug trafficking over the highways? Should the telephone system be liable for every drug deal done over the phone? When you suggest that the operators of these systems have a duty to prevent these things, can you imagine the expense that would be necessary to achieve that? This is unreasonable.
You can't have it both ways folks
Perhaps it's a different group speaking up on either situation? You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the "Slashdot community" is perpetually in consensus.
Bear in mind that before we had MySpace, we had places like bowling alleys and the telephone for kids to meet and communicate with adults. No parent can be perfect with their oversight of their
His reasoning was fine. The quotation above was an irrelevant part of the judge's opinion. The article gives us a little more:
In the end, according to the judge, "If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace."
Judges can't just base their decision on random nonsense, fluff and personal belief. It would certainly be rejected on appeal if that were the case. Please assume that there is a little more to a judicial opinion than the bits given to you by legally-inept reporters. (Since when is there "guilt" in a civil suit?)
I've run my own recursive server that does not forward to ISPs for about 10 years, and I too do not have a "problem" with slow resolution. However, I wasn't talking about slow resolution, I was talking about slower resolution than the alternative. It might seem peppy for you either way, but some people notice fractions of a second when they're trying to pull up a web page. If the resolution speed doesn't bother you, then don't worry about it, but if it might be a factor for you, try it with and without forwarding and see what works better for you. Just because the performance hit isn't a problem for you doesn't mean it doesn't exist or won't be a problem for others.
Not necessarily. They encounter resistance/friction today, from the existing layers of the suit. If you could incorporate this INTO those layers (not add additional layers), without changing the resistance provided by those layers, then instead of losing the energy from that resistance to heat, you could convert it to more useful power.
Your DNS resolution performance will suffer, however. Unless your DNS server is resolving a ridiculous amount of names all the time, your cache is going to be mostly empty, which means every name not in the cache is going to require hitting up other servers to get it resolved. You can either forward those requests to your ISP's (nearby) DNS server, and get the benefits of their cache (which probably is resolving a ridiculous amount of names on behalf of all of its other customers), or resolve it yourself, and be forced to hit at least 2 or 3 other (distant) DNS servers.
Black holes are not magical things that suck everything into them. Its gravitational field is a property of its mass, and there is no more mass in "mini" black holes than there is put into them.
So it really depends on the game, then. I don't think the games I've played have made it very apparent.
(In the situation I mentioned, the host was an 8-year-old that specifically said he was going to boot the guy talking, and just before he did, he said my name in reference to him, and before I could speak up and correct him, poof.)
How do you know you have the right person? Am I missing something that lets me identify who it is that's speaking? I've been booted from a game because the game host got into some overboard trash talk with another player, and he thought it was me. I can only hope that he figured out his mistake when he discovered the guy was still there, but for me, at least, mute isn't very useful if I can't figure out who it is that needs to be muted.
It's intended to act as a replacement for users creating individual IDs with individual passwords on each and every web site/blog they visit. Just because some random Joe signed up to post comments on your site doesn't mean you've placed any "trust" in Joe or that Joe's name really is Joe. It's just an ID he uses to post comments. This is no different. It's a convenience for the user, not really the web site operator. No one should imply trust in any of this, and the OpenID site and specifications make this very clear in unambiguous terms. If you don't understand what OpenID is, you should not be implementing it. If you're not implementing it, you shouldn't care about any of these issues.
OpenID is not intended to establish trust or prevent comment spam. It's just there to guarantee to a participating site that the "identity" URL it's been given is indeed owned by the user (agent) presenting it. It doesn't even guarantee to a visitor that the comment they're reading was actually posted by the person it says it was posted by, because that would require that the visitor trust the participating site.
All of these FAQs and more are addressed on the OpenID site linked in the article summary.
This would depend on what state you live in. Normally your driveway is considered private property. Some states grant exceptions for those that need to use it to turn their vehicle around.
It would be unusual for it to be considered criminal trespass, however, unless there was some sign or a gate, as you say, making this clear, or if you went out and told the other guy to leave, and he didn't or he came back.
The contract is likely to have enough specifics about the deal here and the state the deal is made in so as to be useless for most everyone else. Attempting to re-use someone else's contract without running it by your own attorney wouldn't be very smart, and since he is almost certainly going to have to make changes to it, why not just let him draft it from scratch?
Or the company rightfully owns the code and the programmer here would like to make a deal to transfer ownership to him? I don't see anything sinister here. If I wrote something really slick for a former employer, and some time later I wanted to use it, I might try to deal with them to get ownership of it (or at least a license to use it).
Corporations pay income tax to the federal government, and many states have corporate income taxes (though I'm not sure if Google would have to pay this if its headquarters weren't located there). In addition, there are almost certainly property taxes Google (or whoever they lease office space from) has to pay.
I have no problem if companies want to make deals like this. No one is twisting the state's arm here. The purpose of taxation is to give money to the government so that they can do something for the public good. If some other mechanism can be used to achieve something positive for the community, what's the harm? You have to assume that the state has weighed the costs and the benefits.
Thanks for pointing that out, though I think putting a cap on the number of weeks I'd pay out is reasonable. If someone gives me two months notice, I'm not going to give them the equivalent of two months of vacation. How much longer you let the person work (or whether you just let them go that day) and how much longer you pay them depend on the nature/needs of the business and the job itself. "The rest of the week" seems short to me, but it could still be reasonable.
Slavery? No. You have the right to breach a contract, so there's no "slavery". If they were chaining you to your desk for 6 months, that would be slavery.
The details of employment law vary from state to state, so your assertions are suspicious from the get-go. It depends entirely on what state he's in and how the contract is written, and we know nothing about either.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this wasn't what the judge "simply said". This was what the legally-inept reporter chose to quote in the story. Read all the way to the end of the article for a better sense of the judge's rationale, but I would strongly suggest you read the actual opinion before making up your mind.
While I agree with the principle of what you're saying here, in reality, you could have excellent parents and still have a child come to harm. Some children are only children because the law says they are. Some of these can be just as crafty and determined as any adult you meet. It is not possible for a parent to to be perfect, any more than it is for an adult bodyguard to guarantee with 100% certainty that he will keep his charge safe.
Children can get into trouble without it being their own fault, or their parents' fault.
Trust implies an assumption that you won't abuse that trust. Just because your parents were satisfied that you wouldn't do anything unsafe doesn't mean that you wouldn't. Perhaps some new avenue of abuse opened up on the Internet that they weren't aware of. Perhaps one day you got into a fight with your parents and decided to "act out" by doing something you weren't supposed to do online. Perhaps you were duped by a really convincing imposter, and lured into a relationship that your parents would have considered improper, but didn't seem improper to you. (Many children lured into these types of relationships don't realize it's wrong at first.)
My point is that this is a gray area of parenting. Some children will be abused even if the parents adopt the attitude that yours did here. Some parents will be even more strict, perhaps never allowing their children unsupervised access to the Internet. Some might not even give their kids Internet access in the first place. Fewer of these children will be abused by someone they met online.
It's not possible to be perfect in your supervision of your children, and kids are going to get hurt, either by themselves or because of something someone did to them. Many times, this happens to kids who have excellent parents.
Every approach has trade-offs. Do you want your child to develop an understanding of earned trust and responsibility at the expense of putting them at risk for additional harm? Or do you want them to be safe and secure, but naive?
No one approach is always correct, and factors such as the temperament of the parent, the security of the community, and the abilities of the child could necessitate wildly different parenting styles, even in the same household.
I'm not targeting you specifically here, but I wanted to dispell this bit of confusion before it does too much more damage. This was not the judge's rationale behind his decision (though it may have been the point you were responding to in the parent posts). It was just one tiny piece of dicta the reporter chose to put in the article. People should refrain from making assumptions about the reasons the judge had for making the decision he did until they read and understand it. Do not assume that a legally-inept reporter has done this. (Since when was there "guilt" in a civil suit?)
Your analogy is flawed (as most analogies tend to be). The assault did not happen on MySpace. MySpace was simply used to network and communicate. The assault happened somewhere else.
A slightly better analogy would be to equate MySpace with a mall. A mall is owned by a company, and has a profit motive. Malls even hire security guards. But there's no one carding individuals at the door and segregating people by age group. There's no one stopping a minor from striking up a conversation with an adult in the food court. Maybe he's her father? Is it their responsibility to check?
How often do you hear about malls being successfully sued because a child met an adult there, and that relationship led to abuse?
MySpace and malls have the same goals: to attract visitors and make money off of their presence. People communicate with each other when they are in the same place. It is unreasonable to require that every operator of every public place that could result in communication to check the identity/age of all participants and monitor or prevent communication between those that might possibly be improper.
Besides, not all communication between minors and adults are wrong to begin with. Kids can be fans of bands. Kids can put up interesting content that adults want to ask questions about. I hate this presumption that any relationship between a child an adult must either be parental or abusive.
This seems to fit the definition of a mall. Kids go there to hang out, and the girls and boys get dressed up to show off for each other. They shop or talk at the food court. Same thing, right? How often do you see malls getting sued because their 13 year olds met a 19 year old there? Are you saying you'd prefer to see people carded whenever they walk into a mall, and the adults separated from the children? Maybe you should propose that at your next city council meeting. Think of the children!
Fortunately, the legal standard isn't just whether the harm can be reasonably prevented. You also have to consider whether or not a duty of care exists. You have a duty to keep people away from a public nuisance (such as a fence around a swimming pool). You have a duty to keep your public space safe for public use (such as by keeping walkways free from ice). The word "reasonably" in your statement is the key term here as well. It is unreasonable to expect the operator of every public park, every mall, every stop light, bus stop, bowling alley and bingo parlor to card everyone, and monitor the behavior of the people there to ensure they aren't talking about doing something improper. If you disagree, you are more than welcome to change what's "reasonable" in your community. It's a jury that decides how these terms are applied, after all. One community's "unreasonable" may not be the same as another's. That's by design.
The mere fact that a space can be used as a place for meeting or discussion doesn't make it an attractive nuisance. You must have skipped this day in law school.
Nobody's arguing that laws or regulation aren't needed. But attacking the medium has a substantially different effect than attacking the offenders. When you attack the medium, you require the operators of the medium to do your policing, and when you hold them to high standards (such as carding everyone and isolating age groups), that may drive expenses unreasonably high.
You give the highway system and telephone systems as examples of where regulation is present and doesn't seem to hurt our freedoms. You forgot to suggest that the highway and telephone system operators be held liable for the illegal activities that occur over them. Should the US be liable for every case of drug trafficking over the highways? Should the telephone system be liable for every drug deal done over the phone? When you suggest that the operators of these systems have a duty to prevent these things, can you imagine the expense that would be necessary to achieve that? This is unreasonable.
Perhaps it's a different group speaking up on either situation? You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the "Slashdot community" is perpetually in consensus.
Bear in mind that before we had MySpace, we had places like bowling alleys and the telephone for kids to meet and communicate with adults. No parent can be perfect with their oversight of their
His reasoning was fine. The quotation above was an irrelevant part of the judge's opinion. The article gives us a little more:
Judges can't just base their decision on random nonsense, fluff and personal belief. It would certainly be rejected on appeal if that were the case. Please assume that there is a little more to a judicial opinion than the bits given to you by legally-inept reporters. (Since when is there "guilt" in a civil suit?)
And now we're back where we started, with our provider's DNS servers responding with A records for non-existing domains.
I've run my own recursive server that does not forward to ISPs for about 10 years, and I too do not have a "problem" with slow resolution. However, I wasn't talking about slow resolution, I was talking about slower resolution than the alternative. It might seem peppy for you either way, but some people notice fractions of a second when they're trying to pull up a web page. If the resolution speed doesn't bother you, then don't worry about it, but if it might be a factor for you, try it with and without forwarding and see what works better for you. Just because the performance hit isn't a problem for you doesn't mean it doesn't exist or won't be a problem for others.
Not necessarily. They encounter resistance/friction today, from the existing layers of the suit. If you could incorporate this INTO those layers (not add additional layers), without changing the resistance provided by those layers, then instead of losing the energy from that resistance to heat, you could convert it to more useful power.
Your DNS resolution performance will suffer, however. Unless your DNS server is resolving a ridiculous amount of names all the time, your cache is going to be mostly empty, which means every name not in the cache is going to require hitting up other servers to get it resolved. You can either forward those requests to your ISP's (nearby) DNS server, and get the benefits of their cache (which probably is resolving a ridiculous amount of names on behalf of all of its other customers), or resolve it yourself, and be forced to hit at least 2 or 3 other (distant) DNS servers.
Black holes are not magical things that suck everything into them. Its gravitational field is a property of its mass, and there is no more mass in "mini" black holes than there is put into them.
So it really depends on the game, then. I don't think the games I've played have made it very apparent.
(In the situation I mentioned, the host was an 8-year-old that specifically said he was going to boot the guy talking, and just before he did, he said my name in reference to him, and before I could speak up and correct him, poof.)
How do you know you have the right person? Am I missing something that lets me identify who it is that's speaking? I've been booted from a game because the game host got into some overboard trash talk with another player, and he thought it was me. I can only hope that he figured out his mistake when he discovered the guy was still there, but for me, at least, mute isn't very useful if I can't figure out who it is that needs to be muted.
It's intended to act as a replacement for users creating individual IDs with individual passwords on each and every web site/blog they visit. Just because some random Joe signed up to post comments on your site doesn't mean you've placed any "trust" in Joe or that Joe's name really is Joe. It's just an ID he uses to post comments. This is no different. It's a convenience for the user, not really the web site operator. No one should imply trust in any of this, and the OpenID site and specifications make this very clear in unambiguous terms. If you don't understand what OpenID is, you should not be implementing it. If you're not implementing it, you shouldn't care about any of these issues.
OpenID is not intended to establish trust or prevent comment spam. It's just there to guarantee to a participating site that the "identity" URL it's been given is indeed owned by the user (agent) presenting it. It doesn't even guarantee to a visitor that the comment they're reading was actually posted by the person it says it was posted by, because that would require that the visitor trust the participating site.
All of these FAQs and more are addressed on the OpenID site linked in the article summary.
This would depend on what state you live in. Normally your driveway is considered private property. Some states grant exceptions for those that need to use it to turn their vehicle around.
It would be unusual for it to be considered criminal trespass, however, unless there was some sign or a gate, as you say, making this clear, or if you went out and told the other guy to leave, and he didn't or he came back.
Trademark and copyright infringement are two very different things.
If privatizing the work of NASA works, maybe the same thing could work for the military? Imagine military missions going out to the lowest bidder!
The contract is likely to have enough specifics about the deal here and the state the deal is made in so as to be useless for most everyone else. Attempting to re-use someone else's contract without running it by your own attorney wouldn't be very smart, and since he is almost certainly going to have to make changes to it, why not just let him draft it from scratch?
Or the company rightfully owns the code and the programmer here would like to make a deal to transfer ownership to him? I don't see anything sinister here. If I wrote something really slick for a former employer, and some time later I wanted to use it, I might try to deal with them to get ownership of it (or at least a license to use it).
That, or the self-described programmers posting on Slashdot really are a faddish bunch of teenagers.
Corporations pay income tax to the federal government, and many states have corporate income taxes (though I'm not sure if Google would have to pay this if its headquarters weren't located there). In addition, there are almost certainly property taxes Google (or whoever they lease office space from) has to pay.
I have no problem if companies want to make deals like this. No one is twisting the state's arm here. The purpose of taxation is to give money to the government so that they can do something for the public good. If some other mechanism can be used to achieve something positive for the community, what's the harm? You have to assume that the state has weighed the costs and the benefits.
Thanks for pointing that out, though I think putting a cap on the number of weeks I'd pay out is reasonable. If someone gives me two months notice, I'm not going to give them the equivalent of two months of vacation. How much longer you let the person work (or whether you just let them go that day) and how much longer you pay them depend on the nature/needs of the business and the job itself. "The rest of the week" seems short to me, but it could still be reasonable.
Slavery? No. You have the right to breach a contract, so there's no "slavery". If they were chaining you to your desk for 6 months, that would be slavery.
The details of employment law vary from state to state, so your assertions are suspicious from the get-go. It depends entirely on what state he's in and how the contract is written, and we know nothing about either.