Disclaimer: I don't support SOPA. I want SOPA to die in a fire three times over.
That being said, this is not blackmail or extortion; it's economics, standard world trade policy, and foreign policy. If one country disagrees with the economic policies of another (and SOPA is an economic policy), then they apply economic sanctions on the other country. This is how countries relate to each other.
It's like, if I hated Walmart policies, I wouldn't shop at Walmart. I'm not blackmailing or extorting Walmart, I'm disagreeing with them and taking my business elsewhere.
I didn't see this kind of language when the EU said they wouldn't buy oil from Iran. Jeez.
And PETA apparently never learned about "classical conditioning". When you pair one stimulus (the smell of food) with another (ringing a bell), soon the presentation of just the second stimulus (ringing the bell) will result in the effects of the first stimulus (salivating).
(I remember my textbook in college explained how the author was turned on by the smell of onions because he used to date a girl who ate a lot of onions.)
So...
When you pair one stimulus (pornography) with another (animal suffering), soon the presentation of just the second stimulus (animal suffering) will result in the effects of the first stimulus (sexual arousal).
Somehow I don't think that's what they're going for. Unless they've been trolling us all these years and this is their real plan...
...treasures of world literature, painting or music.... Video games are an industry... Industries make products. Video game products contain plenty of art, but it's product art, which is to say, kitsch art. Kitsch art is not bad art. It's commercial art. Art designed to be sold, easily and in quantity. And the bigger the audience, the kitschier it's gonna get.
It's not like there's a giant commercial industry of movie makers. Or novelists. Or painters. Or musicians. Is this guy high?
I think you're missing the part where he raped her. You don't get to make "expressions of frustration" that won't get taken seriously about killing the girl that you already raped.
Given how he talked about the makeup examine, I'd say this was probably an online exam students were allowed to complete on their own time. Which means having the questions ahead of time allows them to have the sit with the answers to the questions and just put in the correct answers. The only way that kind of exam actually determines a student's level of knowledge/ability to find answers from literature is if the student doesn't have the questions. I agree, being given a mess of questions and answers ahead of time and the professor picks a third of those for the actual examine is a good way of doing things, but that doesn't work if students have the Q&A during the test, which they obviously can if they take the test on their own time.
First, this is actually a good learning experience for you and those other students on proper citation. If any idea came from someone else, you have to cite it, otherwise it's idea theft. If you're lifting actual portions, you better be quoting, not just citing.
Second, this is hardly similar. "Advanced copy of a test" and "plagiarized small portions of a paper" are in different realms of cheating. Getting an advanced copy of a test is is very, very obviously cheating and very easy to identify. Accidental plagiarism is typically unnoticed by students and unidentifiable by professors.
Apparently you need to take a few more statistics courses. Based on scores alone, he could pull apart the two distributions (distributions of people who did not cheat, and those who did, which combine to make the bimodal distribution). Then, he can examine the pattern of questions to identify cheaters. People with the advanced partial copies will have nearly identical patterns, all getting the same difficult questions correct and the same easy questions wrong (as mentioned by an AC above) because they either had access to the question ahead of time or they didn't. Add to that the fact that the prof has the advanced partial copy and finding cheaters becomes almost trivial: whoever got all (or nearly all) the questions from the advanced partial copy and did significantly worse on questions not in the advanced partial copy is a cheater.
And a final nail in the coffin for the cheaters: they have to take a new test. After they've taken the new test, he can compare their "level of knowledge" from the first to the second. If they aced the section on subject A in the first test, then bombed it on the second test, major red flag.
The issue isn't that cheaters can't be identified. Cheaters are incredibly easy to identify. The issue is that, sometimes, people who legitimately did well can look like cheaters, which is exactly what he said: all the cheaters would be on the list, but not all the people on the list would be cheaters. But even those people will be few. In a class of 600, if he can get a.1% false positive rate, then maybe one student will be falsely accused. Given how the cheating occurred, he's likely to get an even lower false positive rate and an almost nonexistent false negative rate.
I don't think you understand what a corporation is. If a corporation is dissolved, regardless of what the executives do, the corporation has ceased to exist, i.e., died. Corporations are legal entities, and the dissolving of that legal entity is how you execute a corporation. I can't stress this point enough: a corporation is not the people who work for it.
Further, confiscating the assets, instead of giving the assets back to the shareholders, would screw more people not directly involved with the corporation than people involved in the corporation. For instance, I can own stock in Microsoft. If Microsoft dissolved, the corporation would buy it back, and I would get some of my money back (probably not a lot). You're suggesting I get none of my money back. Why? Who knows! I certainly don't think you have a rational explanation.
Yeah, except for such laws as, I don't know, wiretapping.
Pennsylvania's wiretapping law is a "two-party consent" law. Pennsylvania makes it a crime to intercept or record a telephone call or conversation unless all parties to the conversation consent. See 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. 5703 (link is to the entire code, choose Title 18, Part II, Article F, Chapter 57, Subchapter B, and then the specific provision).
The law does not cover oral communications when the speakers do not have an "expectation that such communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying such expectation." See 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. 5702 (link is to the entire code, choose Title 18, Part II, Article F, Chapter 57, Subchapter A, and then the specific provision). Therefore, you may be able to record in-person conversations occurring in a public place without consent. However, you should always get the consent of all parties before recording any conversation that common sense tells you is private.
"Home in my room" is common sense private. Sure, they didn't break any federal laws (all wiretapping laws not related to police are, to my knowledge, state), but I'm pretty sure that state crimes committed by a employees of a public institution automatically escalates the case to the federal level.
Digging deep enough, they're saying, "only the plaintiff has the right to sell merchandise bearing the Festival Trademarks at and near the Festival." They're not going after people making recordings of the festival. They're going after people illegally selling bootlegged merchandise at the festival. This is likely to happen. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to file court proceedings and get police support when there is a high likelihood of specific, known crimes being committed.
It's like seeing a bunch of suspicious looking people standing outside a jewelry store with crowbars at midnight. Sure, a crime has not been committed yet, but you're a jackass if you don't report it to police.
His illness should not be taken into account at this stage of the criminal justice process. The proper stages are approximately:
1. Investigation
2. Arrest
3. Negotiation (plea bargain)
4. Failing 3, determination of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (trial)
5. Upon 4, sentencing
6. Punishment/justice/whatever you want to call it
This is from a US point of view, but I don't think there's much difference on the UK side of things. Stages 1 through 4 are for establishing that a crime was committed and who committed it. AT NO POINT is the moral ability of the suspect relevant (except how it relates to the investigators in determining who committed the crime). Since this case is international, step 3 has gotten rather large and unwieldy, and that's where we're currently stuck. Three. When we get to step 5, we can talk about if his illness is relevant or not.
Side note: the ones who can't tell right from wrong? They ALSO have conduct disorder. Having Asperger's alone does not make you amoral. For this to even be relevant at step 5, antisocial personality disorder (the adult version of conduct disorder) would have to be proven. Even if it was, it's estimated that the majority of offenders in US prisons have APD, so it's not like we're more lenient with them.
In that specific case, the question is very clearly answered: committing a crime (any crime) across state borders (hacking, murder, etc.) OR committing a series of the same crime across multiple states is under federal jurisdiction. Since there is not a world governing body (UN doesn't count), there's less clear-cut jurisdiction over, say, someone in Canada shooting across the border and killing someone in the US. That being said, I believe the location of the victim would determine the jurisdiction of the crime.
Of course, that's not exactly analogous to this case. McKinnon actually committed two crimes: computer misuse in the UK and hacking in the US. He should be tried for both in the respective locations.
Stepping out of this specific instance for a minute, "no one but the rapist is to blame for rape," is a nice slogan to chant and everything, but if you believe that you're wearing blinders. Rapists aren't born, they're made. Whatever events are responsible for turning this guy into a rapist (and the people who caused those events, and the people who caused those people to cause those events, etc. etc.) are partially to blame for the rape.
Or, bad video game plot time: a guy captures some other guy's wife and holds her hostage. Evil guy then tells the husband he'll let everyone go if the husband goes and rapes some other random woman. Husband goes. Now, after the fact, everyone's caught by the police. You're the prosecutor. Who do you prosecute? And, even if you prosecuted that person, who would the jury convict?
We can also assign "blame" based on ways the rape could have been prevented: mother not letting the guy live there; daughter leaving the room after the first assault; police not letting scumbags like that not be in prison; scientists not developing mind-reading/future-predicting devices so we could arrest people for future-rape; government not enforcing a total police state where everyone spends the night in their own individual locked pods; etc. etc. Obviously, the amount of blame that can be spread around that doesn't fall on the perpetrator is quite small, but it's still there.
Think of it this way: if you walk down a dark alley in a sketchy neighborhood in a big city, you're an idiot, plane and simple. Sure, the guy who mugs and assaults you is a "bad person" and all that, but that doesn't make you any less idiot, and a simple choice to not go down that alley would have prevented the crime.
For children, the people responsible for idiocy are the parents.
I got sidetracked from my original point, but it's this: the parent's primary responsibility is to provide a safe environment for their children. Back to this specific instance, this mom failed that. If she's got a record showing she provided a persistent unsafe environment, this could cause her to have her daughter taken by the state. So, even legally, partial blame falls on the mother.
His criminal history was for fraud. Even if the mother had run a background check, if she had assumed he was likely to rape her daughter she'd be accused of being a man-hating harpy. He, being a horrible human being, raped a 12 year old girl...
The first person the daughter wanted here was her mother, which implies the daughter trusted her mother more than anyone else (after a rape, women will only go to people they trust, and, specifically, the person they trust the most. There have been many cases where only the woman's best friend is told about the rape, and not: parents, husband, police, etc.). Since the daughter had previously woken up to find the ex-boyfriend standing in her room watching her, we know this guy had a history of unacceptable, creepy behavior. Given that we've already established the daughter trusts her mother more than anyone else, there's a high probability that the mother knew about this unacceptable, creepy behavior.
...for which hopefully they will succeed in prosecuting him for (though the odds of conviction if it goes to trial are about 40%; the best hope is a plea bargain)...
You're seriously off-base. First, trial results are skewed to begin with, since cases only go to trial when a plea bargain cannot be reached, and plea bargains are more often reached in cases where the suspect is obviously guilty than when the suspect is not (given the weight of evidence against this guy, he'll be an idiot not to take whatever plea bargain he gets). Second, I'm willing to bet your 40% figure is skewed further by rapes of adult women who did not fight back, which are notoriously difficult to prosecute, particularly in cases where the woman was drunk
You're out of the house (possibly with a new boyfriend) when your ex-boyfriend (who lives in your house) rapes your daughter. Your daughter gets a message to you, and your solution is to call the police and wait for them to deal with it. You're not going to pick her up?
Or, wait, this one's better: you're going to boot out the violent felon yourself. Yes, that's obviously the solution that won't get you killed.
Why the Hell wouldn't she pick up her daughter? When something like this happens, you don't stick around and wait for the cops to show up. You GTFO and wait for the cops to tell you the coast is clear.
Actually, it implies that the mother was not at her house (because she wasn't). The daughter was. The mother (not at home) needed to come pick up the daughter (at home).
I think you are somewhat confused about percentages, criminals, psychology, parents, and/or children, probably a combination of all of them, but especially the first two.
The CRIMINAL who ACTUAL DID THE CRIMINAL ACTS is definitely highly to blame, more than anyone else. Certainly, the mother is to blame, somewhat, for letting this guy into the house, and even the girl is to blame, slightly, for not barricading her door and getting out of there after the first (failed) attack, but neither of those excuses the guy who's actually the pedophile/rapist. The majority of the blame, and thus the future punishment, resides with him.
The girl grabbed her iPod. Not her iPhone. Not her cellphone, the home phone, the anything-phone, her iPod. Her cellphone was taken away. So everyone who's going, "Why didn't she call 911?" or "This could have easily been a text message," it couldn't. iPod. Had that been me, I'd probably have searched frantically for a phone, even venturing outside my room, and ultimately running to the payphone. It shows incredible presence of mind for her to realize she could get a message out from her iPod (via Facebook, but it could easily have been email or pretty much any other internet communication).
I think that puts it firmly in the realm of Slashdot, and the debate should be something more along the lines of, "Should police departments have Facebook/other social networking accounts for the purpose of getting crime reports similar to 911." Probably not (too much spam), but it's something to consider. Sometimes it's easier to get on the internet than to a phone.
Slashdot Mirror
You read the part where they still need germ cells from the testes, right?
Or do you not know what testes are? Did someone never have The Talk with you?
Disclaimer: I don't support SOPA. I want SOPA to die in a fire three times over.
That being said, this is not blackmail or extortion; it's economics, standard world trade policy, and foreign policy. If one country disagrees with the economic policies of another (and SOPA is an economic policy), then they apply economic sanctions on the other country. This is how countries relate to each other.
It's like, if I hated Walmart policies, I wouldn't shop at Walmart. I'm not blackmailing or extorting Walmart, I'm disagreeing with them and taking my business elsewhere.
I didn't see this kind of language when the EU said they wouldn't buy oil from Iran. Jeez.
And PETA apparently never learned about "classical conditioning". When you pair one stimulus (the smell of food) with another (ringing a bell), soon the presentation of just the second stimulus (ringing the bell) will result in the effects of the first stimulus (salivating).
(I remember my textbook in college explained how the author was turned on by the smell of onions because he used to date a girl who ate a lot of onions.)
So...
When you pair one stimulus (pornography) with another (animal suffering), soon the presentation of just the second stimulus (animal suffering) will result in the effects of the first stimulus (sexual arousal).
Somehow I don't think that's what they're going for. Unless they've been trolling us all these years and this is their real plan...
"They who give up essential privacy to obtain a little..." er...
"They who give up essential security to obtain a little..." hmmm...
"They who give up essential security to lose a little privacy, get neither security nor privacy."
...treasures of world literature, painting or music. ... Video games are an industry... Industries make products. Video game products contain plenty of art, but it's product art, which is to say, kitsch art. Kitsch art is not bad art. It's commercial art. Art designed to be sold, easily and in quantity. And the bigger the audience, the kitschier it's gonna get.
It's not like there's a giant commercial industry of movie makers. Or novelists. Or painters. Or musicians. Is this guy high?
Or, you know, so that a rapist would get put in jail. Since, you know, he raped her.
I think you're missing the part where he raped her. You don't get to make "expressions of frustration" that won't get taken seriously about killing the girl that you already raped.
I'm sorry, but you lose all right to joke about killing a girl once you've raped her.
Given how he talked about the makeup examine, I'd say this was probably an online exam students were allowed to complete on their own time. Which means having the questions ahead of time allows them to have the sit with the answers to the questions and just put in the correct answers. The only way that kind of exam actually determines a student's level of knowledge/ability to find answers from literature is if the student doesn't have the questions. I agree, being given a mess of questions and answers ahead of time and the professor picks a third of those for the actual examine is a good way of doing things, but that doesn't work if students have the Q&A during the test, which they obviously can if they take the test on their own time.
First, this is actually a good learning experience for you and those other students on proper citation. If any idea came from someone else, you have to cite it, otherwise it's idea theft. If you're lifting actual portions, you better be quoting, not just citing.
Second, this is hardly similar. "Advanced copy of a test" and "plagiarized small portions of a paper" are in different realms of cheating. Getting an advanced copy of a test is is very, very obviously cheating and very easy to identify. Accidental plagiarism is typically unnoticed by students and unidentifiable by professors.
Apparently you need to take a few more statistics courses. Based on scores alone, he could pull apart the two distributions (distributions of people who did not cheat, and those who did, which combine to make the bimodal distribution). Then, he can examine the pattern of questions to identify cheaters. People with the advanced partial copies will have nearly identical patterns, all getting the same difficult questions correct and the same easy questions wrong (as mentioned by an AC above) because they either had access to the question ahead of time or they didn't. Add to that the fact that the prof has the advanced partial copy and finding cheaters becomes almost trivial: whoever got all (or nearly all) the questions from the advanced partial copy and did significantly worse on questions not in the advanced partial copy is a cheater.
And a final nail in the coffin for the cheaters: they have to take a new test. After they've taken the new test, he can compare their "level of knowledge" from the first to the second. If they aced the section on subject A in the first test, then bombed it on the second test, major red flag.
The issue isn't that cheaters can't be identified. Cheaters are incredibly easy to identify. The issue is that, sometimes, people who legitimately did well can look like cheaters, which is exactly what he said: all the cheaters would be on the list, but not all the people on the list would be cheaters. But even those people will be few. In a class of 600, if he can get a .1% false positive rate, then maybe one student will be falsely accused. Given how the cheating occurred, he's likely to get an even lower false positive rate and an almost nonexistent false negative rate.
I don't think you understand what a corporation is. If a corporation is dissolved, regardless of what the executives do, the corporation has ceased to exist, i.e., died. Corporations are legal entities, and the dissolving of that legal entity is how you execute a corporation. I can't stress this point enough: a corporation is not the people who work for it.
Further, confiscating the assets, instead of giving the assets back to the shareholders, would screw more people not directly involved with the corporation than people involved in the corporation. For instance, I can own stock in Microsoft. If Microsoft dissolved, the corporation would buy it back, and I would get some of my money back (probably not a lot). You're suggesting I get none of my money back. Why? Who knows! I certainly don't think you have a rational explanation.
Pennsylvania's wiretapping law is a "two-party consent" law. Pennsylvania makes it a crime to intercept or record a telephone call or conversation unless all parties to the conversation consent. See 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. 5703 (link is to the entire code, choose Title 18, Part II, Article F, Chapter 57, Subchapter B, and then the specific provision).
The law does not cover oral communications when the speakers do not have an "expectation that such communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying such expectation." See 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. 5702 (link is to the entire code, choose Title 18, Part II, Article F, Chapter 57, Subchapter A, and then the specific provision). Therefore, you may be able to record in-person conversations occurring in a public place without consent. However, you should always get the consent of all parties before recording any conversation that common sense tells you is private.
"Home in my room" is common sense private. Sure, they didn't break any federal laws (all wiretapping laws not related to police are, to my knowledge, state), but I'm pretty sure that state crimes committed by a employees of a public institution automatically escalates the case to the federal level.
Digging deep enough, they're saying, "only the plaintiff has the right to sell merchandise bearing the Festival Trademarks at and near the Festival." They're not going after people making recordings of the festival. They're going after people illegally selling bootlegged merchandise at the festival. This is likely to happen. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to file court proceedings and get police support when there is a high likelihood of specific, known crimes being committed.
It's like seeing a bunch of suspicious looking people standing outside a jewelry store with crowbars at midnight. Sure, a crime has not been committed yet, but you're a jackass if you don't report it to police.
Worked for Goo... wait, what? Oh, nevermind.
Yeah, that was my first thought.
His illness should not be taken into account at this stage of the criminal justice process. The proper stages are approximately:
1. Investigation
2. Arrest
3. Negotiation (plea bargain)
4. Failing 3, determination of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (trial)
5. Upon 4, sentencing
6. Punishment/justice/whatever you want to call it
This is from a US point of view, but I don't think there's much difference on the UK side of things. Stages 1 through 4 are for establishing that a crime was committed and who committed it. AT NO POINT is the moral ability of the suspect relevant (except how it relates to the investigators in determining who committed the crime). Since this case is international, step 3 has gotten rather large and unwieldy, and that's where we're currently stuck. Three. When we get to step 5, we can talk about if his illness is relevant or not.
Side note: the ones who can't tell right from wrong? They ALSO have conduct disorder. Having Asperger's alone does not make you amoral. For this to even be relevant at step 5, antisocial personality disorder (the adult version of conduct disorder) would have to be proven. Even if it was, it's estimated that the majority of offenders in US prisons have APD, so it's not like we're more lenient with them.
In that specific case, the question is very clearly answered: committing a crime (any crime) across state borders (hacking, murder, etc.) OR committing a series of the same crime across multiple states is under federal jurisdiction. Since there is not a world governing body (UN doesn't count), there's less clear-cut jurisdiction over, say, someone in Canada shooting across the border and killing someone in the US. That being said, I believe the location of the victim would determine the jurisdiction of the crime.
Of course, that's not exactly analogous to this case. McKinnon actually committed two crimes: computer misuse in the UK and hacking in the US. He should be tried for both in the respective locations.
So don't have premarital sex in Saudi Arabia then run back to Mississippi.
No one but the rapist is to blame for rape.
Stepping out of this specific instance for a minute, "no one but the rapist is to blame for rape," is a nice slogan to chant and everything, but if you believe that you're wearing blinders. Rapists aren't born, they're made. Whatever events are responsible for turning this guy into a rapist (and the people who caused those events, and the people who caused those people to cause those events, etc. etc.) are partially to blame for the rape.
Or, bad video game plot time: a guy captures some other guy's wife and holds her hostage. Evil guy then tells the husband he'll let everyone go if the husband goes and rapes some other random woman. Husband goes. Now, after the fact, everyone's caught by the police. You're the prosecutor. Who do you prosecute? And, even if you prosecuted that person, who would the jury convict?
We can also assign "blame" based on ways the rape could have been prevented: mother not letting the guy live there; daughter leaving the room after the first assault; police not letting scumbags like that not be in prison; scientists not developing mind-reading/future-predicting devices so we could arrest people for future-rape; government not enforcing a total police state where everyone spends the night in their own individual locked pods; etc. etc. Obviously, the amount of blame that can be spread around that doesn't fall on the perpetrator is quite small, but it's still there.
Think of it this way: if you walk down a dark alley in a sketchy neighborhood in a big city, you're an idiot, plane and simple. Sure, the guy who mugs and assaults you is a "bad person" and all that, but that doesn't make you any less idiot, and a simple choice to not go down that alley would have prevented the crime.
For children, the people responsible for idiocy are the parents.
I got sidetracked from my original point, but it's this: the parent's primary responsibility is to provide a safe environment for their children. Back to this specific instance, this mom failed that. If she's got a record showing she provided a persistent unsafe environment, this could cause her to have her daughter taken by the state. So, even legally, partial blame falls on the mother.
His criminal history was for fraud. Even if the mother had run a background check, if she had assumed he was likely to rape her daughter she'd be accused of being a man-hating harpy. He, being a horrible human being, raped a 12 year old girl...
The first person the daughter wanted here was her mother, which implies the daughter trusted her mother more than anyone else (after a rape, women will only go to people they trust, and, specifically, the person they trust the most. There have been many cases where only the woman's best friend is told about the rape, and not: parents, husband, police, etc.). Since the daughter had previously woken up to find the ex-boyfriend standing in her room watching her, we know this guy had a history of unacceptable, creepy behavior. Given that we've already established the daughter trusts her mother more than anyone else, there's a high probability that the mother knew about this unacceptable, creepy behavior.
...for which hopefully they will succeed in prosecuting him for (though the odds of conviction if it goes to trial are about 40%; the best hope is a plea bargain)...
You're seriously off-base. First, trial results are skewed to begin with, since cases only go to trial when a plea bargain cannot be reached, and plea bargains are more often reached in cases where the suspect is obviously guilty than when the suspect is not (given the weight of evidence against this guy, he'll be an idiot not to take whatever plea bargain he gets). Second, I'm willing to bet your 40% figure is skewed further by rapes of adult women who did not fight back, which are notoriously difficult to prosecute, particularly in cases where the woman was drunk
So, let me get this straight:
You're out of the house (possibly with a new boyfriend) when your ex-boyfriend (who lives in your house) rapes your daughter. Your daughter gets a message to you, and your solution is to call the police and wait for them to deal with it. You're not going to pick her up?
Or, wait, this one's better: you're going to boot out the violent felon yourself. Yes, that's obviously the solution that won't get you killed.
Why the Hell wouldn't she pick up her daughter? When something like this happens, you don't stick around and wait for the cops to show up. You GTFO and wait for the cops to tell you the coast is clear.
Actually, it implies that the mother was not at her house (because she wasn't). The daughter was. The mother (not at home) needed to come pick up the daughter (at home).
Did you not read the article?
I think you are somewhat confused about percentages, criminals, psychology, parents, and/or children, probably a combination of all of them, but especially the first two.
The CRIMINAL who ACTUAL DID THE CRIMINAL ACTS is definitely highly to blame, more than anyone else. Certainly, the mother is to blame, somewhat, for letting this guy into the house, and even the girl is to blame, slightly, for not barricading her door and getting out of there after the first (failed) attack, but neither of those excuses the guy who's actually the pedophile/rapist. The majority of the blame, and thus the future punishment, resides with him.
It says the mother was out of the house, but it doesn't say why. New boyfriend, perhaps?
iPOD. Not a phone. NOT A PHONE. Pay attention.
The girl grabbed her iPod. Not her iPhone. Not her cellphone, the home phone, the anything-phone, her iPod. Her cellphone was taken away. So everyone who's going, "Why didn't she call 911?" or "This could have easily been a text message," it couldn't. iPod. Had that been me, I'd probably have searched frantically for a phone, even venturing outside my room, and ultimately running to the payphone. It shows incredible presence of mind for her to realize she could get a message out from her iPod (via Facebook, but it could easily have been email or pretty much any other internet communication).
I think that puts it firmly in the realm of Slashdot, and the debate should be something more along the lines of, "Should police departments have Facebook/other social networking accounts for the purpose of getting crime reports similar to 911." Probably not (too much spam), but it's something to consider. Sometimes it's easier to get on the internet than to a phone.