Who the heck do these judges think they are to judge people? Seriously, if they want to be judging what's right and wrong, and judging if people are guilty or innocent, and judging how much punishment people deserve for a crime, they should find another line of work.
RNC 2008: "Because Judges Seem to Think They're Some Sort of Arbiters"
The data was encrypted. According to Ameritrade (my broker), special hardware is required to read the information, even if the tape was found.
Yeah, but that could just be marketing-speak for "you need a $2,000 tape drive to read the tape". Of course you need special equipment, the question still remains as to whether or not the data was encrypted on the fly during backup, or if it is stored as such and backed up in the same state. I would NOT consider it acceptable for a financial services company to ship around huge volumes of unencrypted customer data via third parties.
All that said, this is about the only recent customer data loss that in theory I find "acceptable", just because there are not a lot of practical ways to move backups to the opposite coast, and Fedex is a pretty typical choice. Fedex losing a package is rare, but it does happen -- not a lot Ameritrade can do about it.
Yes, I am an Ameritrade customer, but haven't received a letter so I assume (!) that means I wasn't on that backup tape.
Yeah, that's great -- and would apply if you were talking about physically organizing a meeting at a public rest stop.
But the WiFi network is not being set up to sell candy or safely allow drivers to take a piss, it is being set up for the exclusive purpose of providing access to the internet, which has already been determined by the SC to be a public forum for speech, deserving of the highest scrutiny.
If you want to argue that providing access to the internet is not providing access to a public forum, you'll have to sell it somewhere else.
OK, here's the quick version, if you want more, read the on-content google results or hire a paralegal.
Widmar v. Vincent -- "The Constitution forbids a State to enforce certain exclusions from a forum generally open to the public, even if it was not required to create the forum in the first place."
and to clarify any issues you may have with the applicability of above:
Perry Education Association v. Perry Local Educators' Association et al. (where they defined different kinds of public spaces) -- "A second category consists of public property which the State has opened for use by the public as a place for expressive activity.... Although a State is not required to indefinitely retain the open character of the facility, as long as it does so it is bound by the same standards as apply in a traditional public forum. Reasonable time, place, and manner regulations are permissible, and a content-based prohibition must be narrowly drawn to effectuate a compelling state interest."
Mainstream Loudoun, et al. v. Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library -- the internet filtering at a library is decalred unconstitutional because it is overly broad and does not allow adults to access the internet without filters.
and a few years later...
United States, et al. v. American Library Association -- The Supreme Court upheld the Children's Internet Protection Act, specifically because the Congress mandated that adults be allowed to bypass the internet content filters.
As evidenced by the language of the CIPA, the Congress is well aware of the standards applied to filtering of speech, even over publically funded access to that speech.
You can argue the ideology or theory of free speech with someone else, all I'm saying is what the Supreme court has said in every decision they've handed down on the subject: the state is under no obligation to support speech, but if it does, it has to be content neutral (barring practical factors which REQUIRE limiting access, of which "think of the children!!!" is not one).
Do yourself a favor, take a break from slashdot, and google "supreme court content neutral ruling" and spend some time reading the hundred cases you'll find on the subject, rather than arguing about a topic on which you have no legal knowledge.
You're absolutely right, but that's not what's happening here. The state of Texas is under no obligation whatsoever to provide you with free access to porn.
Of course it isn't, that's not what people are saying the state is required to do. What the state is required to do is provide whatever access it DOES provide (to adults) in a content-neutral manner.
Let me ask you this...would it be better if they just turned all the WiFi hotspots off? Because that's certianly constitutional.
It would be completely legal, and well within the realm of the state legislature to decide.
"Better" is not a question that matters when the topic is free speech -- I think it would be better if the KKK didn't march down main street, but neither I nor the state government gets to make that call, even though the KKK will use public resources to make their private speech.
Yeah, but I think the catch here is that state-provided Internet service is considered more of a utility than a newspaper. Texas will probably state that this is analagous to providing cable TV at rest areas, and the state would have the right to block the porn channels, right?
I think the courts will side with Texas on this one...
Look, this case has already been decided in the context of library internet access and it wasn't even close. The state can make any argument it likes, but at the end of the day, the courts don't allow the state to prevent adults from accessing adult materials under the guise of "protecting the children". If the state can figure out a way to filter access only to those under 18 at the rest stops, they'll be A-OK.
Cable TV costs money per channel, and there are limits on how many channels can be squeezed through a cable. That is more akin to library books -- only so many shelves, and each book costs money.
None of that is true for Internet access -- you don't pay extra to get more web sites (obviously nobody is suggesting that the State of Texas be required to provide access to pay sites), and there is no limit to the number of websites that can be transmitted over a WiFi link. There is no financial or physical constraint that the state needs to limit the sites available, therefore they are simly picking and choosing which sites they find "acceptable", and that is not Constitutional.
I would think that filtering would just be providing less of a service (eg not full internet access).
You would be wrong, from a constitutional point of view. The state can certainly provide less of a service, if they like -- they can throttle bandwidth, allow only 2 connections to any hotspot, provide only 2 hotspots in the entire state, heack, they can cancel the whole project and buy bigger monitors. All of those would be perfectly OK.
The ONLY thing they can't do is build a system with taxpayer dollars and then limit access to speech (for adults) based on the content of the speech.
They can limit it in any way they like, so long as the limits are content-neutral. WiFi access is no different than parade permits -- you don't have to provide either, but if you do, everyone has to be treated equally.
The US constitution is not relevant here. State issue. Stay out.
If the issue is free speech, the US Constitution trumps all. The question is whether limiting publicly-provided internet access based on content is an abridgement of speech. It's pretty much a no-brainer, the Supreme Court has already said in a hundred different variations that municipalities (be they federal, state or local) can't restrict speech by and to adults solely on content.
I don't know how they could make the XBox any more portable. I took mine with me everywhere -- heck, I kept it in the trunk of my car all winter since it gave me improved traction on ice and snow!
I already get emails from half the groups I'm signed up for saying "Your group has no organizer, would you like to volunteer?". Up until now, I didn't volunteer because I wasn't sure I'd have the time -- now that I get to volunteer AND PAY $20 FOR THE PRIVILEGE, I'll get right on it!
I'm sure local meetup groups will really take off now! Next month maybe they'll finally add the "pay $5 and get kicked in the nuts" service we've all been clamoring for!
Am I the only person bothered by the inability of the New York Times -- the "Paper of Record" -- to accurately report the name of a written piece on which they are reporting?
I could consider it merely being (overly) sensitive if they quoted it as "Bow, N*gg*r", as is a common practice for "bad" words. You would at least know what word they were referring to.
But to completely leave out the second word of a two-word title, and say only "a racial epithet" is not only journalistic cowardice, it is downright unhelpful. If I didn't already know the title of the article referred to, I could think of a dozen "racial epithet"s, and there is no context with which to guess which is correct.
All of which completely ignores the fact that the title is *supposed* to be inflammatory.
Re:Gaming is the only real reason to stay away...
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
Yeah, we don't get as many hot-off-the-press releases (I admit I got Half-Life 2 the day it was out and played it on my PC for 3 straight days), but the important ones are there. Between WoW and Rise of Nations, I'm happy.
Why not? They did almost the exact same thing in the US Antitrust trial -- completely broke Windows when told to remove IE, even though others with access to the source code had managed to do it successfully without major problems.
I mean, geez, they deliberately falsified video evidence in a federal court and barely got a stern talking-to -- why would they ever bother to do what they're told to? It's not like anybody ever penalizes them.
I'm all for bolstering self-confidence in new computer users, but if your technical skills aren't enough to encompass moving the windows swap file, I had better not overhear your asinine arguments with the Best Buy guy when I have to run in and buy something.
the basic user has sufficient rights to take over the machine
Not really. You'd have to enter your password a dozen times to really have any malicious script do much other than delete user data, even if you're the administrative user.
But seeing how anyone can grow it, and how most people can sell and smoke under the radar as it is, there's no gauruntee that the government would still be able to keep a hand in on it.
Huh? It's not difficult to grow tobacco, or to make alcohol, but most people don't waste their time and effort since they can just buy it at the store for a nominal fee, and get a product with consistent, predictable quality.
If you could buy MJ at the 7-11 with regular cigarettes, it would be pretty rare for someone to go to all the trouble of growing and/or selling their own just to save the taxes.
I've got to say, Slashdot and torrents go together like peas and carrots. By the time I finished clicking on the 4th torrent link and closed the window, I'd already finished downloading the first file.
And that lousy security is part of why i left the Mac around OS 8 (went to NT, 2k, and BSD) and came back at 10.2:)
I do have a couple of scripts that delete stuff automatically, and of course have been bitten by the inadvertant wrongly-placed rm-r, so when I came (back) to the Mac I was happy to be able to mv ~/.trash in all my automated (and contextual) scripts.
Yet. How long will it be before there's a addition to the next version of IE for Macs? Welcome to the world of Windows issues. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is that the language hasn't generated enough followers for it to be worth someone's while to abuse it.
Even if there were such web-enabled support, it would all still be limited by the BSD permissions. Windows runs the default user as root. Not only does OSX have root completely disabled by default, you'll be asked for the administrator password anytime something wants to write to any of the system directories.
It's no different than writing a malicious script for a Linux system (except that it's a lot less likey on the Mac that the person has superuser access).
Dell has been doing this for a long, long time. It hasn't been a big secret that about 90% of the time, you're best off (financially) buying things through the Small Business side of dell.com.
High-end LCD monitors last year were seeing 25%-50% discounts on the Small Business pages. For the individual user, it makes sense (as usual) to shop around. Institutional customers are usually stuck with whatever prices their contracts are for -- the US Govt can't buy through small business, and your academic customers can't either.
Not in the sense of VBScript or similar Windows issues. Applescripts don't run automatically, you can't email them to somebody and have it delete their home directory without their participation, or put it on a web page and use an IE exploit to get root-level access to the system.
But yes, it's a powerful scripting language, so it can do all the bad stuff your user account can do. OSX is so flexible on language that you can pretty much use anything you can think of (AppleScript, perl, python, [ba|c]sh, etc) in a single script, so all the stuff you can do with those languages and shells are possible in a script.
There was a debate over on MacOSXhints.com a week or two ago debating whether Apple should somehow try to "protect" people from malicious scripts, but there doesn't seem to be any sensible way to have a functional scripting language that isn't capable of doing damage when used improperly.
Slashdot Mirror
Who the heck do these judges think they are to judge people? Seriously, if they want to be judging what's right and wrong, and judging if people are guilty or innocent, and judging how much punishment people deserve for a crime, they should find another line of work.
RNC 2008: "Because Judges Seem to Think They're Some Sort of Arbiters"
The data was encrypted. According to Ameritrade (my broker), special hardware is required to read the information, even if the tape was found.
Yeah, but that could just be marketing-speak for "you need a $2,000 tape drive to read the tape". Of course you need special equipment, the question still remains as to whether or not the data was encrypted on the fly during backup, or if it is stored as such and backed up in the same state. I would NOT consider it acceptable for a financial services company to ship around huge volumes of unencrypted customer data via third parties.
All that said, this is about the only recent customer data loss that in theory I find "acceptable", just because there are not a lot of practical ways to move backups to the opposite coast, and Fedex is a pretty typical choice. Fedex losing a package is rare, but it does happen -- not a lot Ameritrade can do about it.
Yes, I am an Ameritrade customer, but haven't received a letter so I assume (!) that means I wasn't on that backup tape.
Yeah, that's great -- and would apply if you were talking about physically organizing a meeting at a public rest stop.
But the WiFi network is not being set up to sell candy or safely allow drivers to take a piss, it is being set up for the exclusive purpose of providing access to the internet, which has already been determined by the SC to be a public forum for speech, deserving of the highest scrutiny.
If you want to argue that providing access to the internet is not providing access to a public forum, you'll have to sell it somewhere else.
OK, here's the quick version, if you want more, read the on-content google results or hire a paralegal.
Widmar v. Vincent -- "The Constitution forbids a State to enforce certain exclusions from a forum generally open to the public, even if it was not required to create the forum in the first place."
and to clarify any issues you may have with the applicability of above:
Perry Education Association v. Perry Local Educators' Association et al. (where they defined different kinds of public spaces) -- "A second category consists of public property which the State has opened for use by the public as a place for expressive activity.... Although a State is not required to indefinitely retain the open character of the facility, as long as it does so it is bound by the same standards as apply in a traditional public forum. Reasonable time, place, and manner regulations are permissible, and a content-based prohibition must be narrowly drawn to effectuate a compelling state interest."
Mainstream Loudoun, et al. v. Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library -- the internet filtering at a library is decalred unconstitutional because it is overly broad and does not allow adults to access the internet without filters.
and a few years later...
United States, et al. v. American Library Association -- The Supreme Court upheld the Children's Internet Protection Act, specifically because the Congress mandated that adults be allowed to bypass the internet content filters.
As evidenced by the language of the CIPA, the Congress is well aware of the standards applied to filtering of speech, even over publically funded access to that speech.
You can argue the ideology or theory of free speech with someone else, all I'm saying is what the Supreme court has said in every decision they've handed down on the subject: the state is under no obligation to support speech, but if it does, it has to be content neutral (barring practical factors which REQUIRE limiting access, of which "think of the children!!!" is not one).
Do yourself a favor, take a break from slashdot, and google "supreme court content neutral ruling" and spend some time reading the hundred cases you'll find on the subject, rather than arguing about a topic on which you have no legal knowledge.
Even if the Constitution were still operative in BushMerika, Amendment I only applies to the Congress. Read the damn thing.
Did your constitutional law class stop in 1868?
The 14th amendment settled this issue about a century before we were born. Read the damn thing.
You're absolutely right, but that's not what's happening here. The state of Texas is under no obligation whatsoever to provide you with free access to porn.
Of course it isn't, that's not what people are saying the state is required to do. What the state is required to do is provide whatever access it DOES provide (to adults) in a content-neutral manner.
Let me ask you this...would it be better if they just turned all the WiFi hotspots off? Because that's certianly constitutional.
It would be completely legal, and well within the realm of the state legislature to decide.
"Better" is not a question that matters when the topic is free speech -- I think it would be better if the KKK didn't march down main street, but neither I nor the state government gets to make that call, even though the KKK will use public resources to make their private speech.
Yeah, but I think the catch here is that state-provided Internet service is considered more of a utility than a newspaper. Texas will probably state that this is analagous to providing cable TV at rest areas, and the state would have the right to block the porn channels, right?
I think the courts will side with Texas on this one...
Look, this case has already been decided in the context of library internet access and it wasn't even close. The state can make any argument it likes, but at the end of the day, the courts don't allow the state to prevent adults from accessing adult materials under the guise of "protecting the children". If the state can figure out a way to filter access only to those under 18 at the rest stops, they'll be A-OK.
Cable TV costs money per channel, and there are limits on how many channels can be squeezed through a cable. That is more akin to library books -- only so many shelves, and each book costs money.
None of that is true for Internet access -- you don't pay extra to get more web sites (obviously nobody is suggesting that the State of Texas be required to provide access to pay sites), and there is no limit to the number of websites that can be transmitted over a WiFi link. There is no financial or physical constraint that the state needs to limit the sites available, therefore they are simly picking and choosing which sites they find "acceptable", and that is not Constitutional.
I would think that filtering would just be providing less of a service (eg not full internet access).
You would be wrong, from a constitutional point of view. The state can certainly provide less of a service, if they like -- they can throttle bandwidth, allow only 2 connections to any hotspot, provide only 2 hotspots in the entire state, heack, they can cancel the whole project and buy bigger monitors. All of those would be perfectly OK.
The ONLY thing they can't do is build a system with taxpayer dollars and then limit access to speech (for adults) based on the content of the speech.
They can limit it in any way they like, so long as the limits are content-neutral. WiFi access is no different than parade permits -- you don't have to provide either, but if you do, everyone has to be treated equally.
The US constitution is not relevant here. State issue. Stay out.
If the issue is free speech, the US Constitution trumps all. The question is whether limiting publicly-provided internet access based on content is an abridgement of speech. It's pretty much a no-brainer, the Supreme Court has already said in a hundred different variations that municipalities (be they federal, state or local) can't restrict speech by and to adults solely on content.
I don't know how they could make the XBox any more portable. I took mine with me everywhere -- heck, I kept it in the trunk of my car all winter since it gave me improved traction on ice and snow!
This is pure genius!
I already get emails from half the groups I'm signed up for saying "Your group has no organizer, would you like to volunteer?". Up until now, I didn't volunteer because I wasn't sure I'd have the time -- now that I get to volunteer AND PAY $20 FOR THE PRIVILEGE, I'll get right on it!
I'm sure local meetup groups will really take off now! Next month maybe they'll finally add the "pay $5 and get kicked in the nuts" service we've all been clamoring for!
Am I the only person bothered by the inability of the New York Times -- the "Paper of Record" -- to accurately report the name of a written piece on which they are reporting?
I could consider it merely being (overly) sensitive if they quoted it as "Bow, N*gg*r", as is a common practice for "bad" words. You would at least know what word they were referring to.
But to completely leave out the second word of a two-word title, and say only "a racial epithet" is not only journalistic cowardice, it is downright unhelpful. If I didn't already know the title of the article referred to, I could think of a dozen "racial epithet"s, and there is no context with which to guess which is correct.
All of which completely ignores the fact that the title is *supposed* to be inflammatory.
Yeah, we don't get as many hot-off-the-press releases (I admit I got Half-Life 2 the day it was out and played it on my PC for 3 straight days), but the important ones are there. Between WoW and Rise of Nations, I'm happy.
7o7!
I dont think they would intentionally pull this.
Why not? They did almost the exact same thing in the US Antitrust trial -- completely broke Windows when told to remove IE, even though others with access to the source code had managed to do it successfully without major problems.
I mean, geez, they deliberately falsified video evidence in a federal court and barely got a stern talking-to -- why would they ever bother to do what they're told to? It's not like anybody ever penalizes them.
I'm all for bolstering self-confidence in new computer users, but if your technical skills aren't enough to encompass moving the windows swap file, I had better not overhear your asinine arguments with the Best Buy guy when I have to run in and buy something.
the basic user has sufficient rights to take over the machine
Not really. You'd have to enter your password a dozen times to really have any malicious script do much other than delete user data, even if you're the administrative user.
But seeing how anyone can grow it, and how most people can sell and smoke under the radar as it is, there's no gauruntee that the government would still be able to keep a hand in on it.
Huh? It's not difficult to grow tobacco, or to make alcohol, but most people don't waste their time and effort since they can just buy it at the store for a nominal fee, and get a product with consistent, predictable quality.
If you could buy MJ at the 7-11 with regular cigarettes, it would be pretty rare for someone to go to all the trouble of growing and/or selling their own just to save the taxes.
It's so bright, we can't even look at slashdot to see if it's been mentioned already!
I've got to say, Slashdot and torrents go together like peas and carrots. By the time I finished clicking on the 4th torrent link and closed the window, I'd already finished downloading the first file.
And that lousy security is part of why i left the Mac around OS 8 (went to NT, 2k, and BSD) and came back at 10.2 :)
I do have a couple of scripts that delete stuff automatically, and of course have been bitten by the inadvertant wrongly-placed rm-r, so when I came (back) to the Mac I was happy to be able to mv ~/.trash in all my automated (and contextual) scripts.
Yet. How long will it be before there's a addition to the next version of IE for Macs? Welcome to the world of Windows issues. The only reason it hasn't been done yet is that the language hasn't generated enough followers for it to be worth someone's while to abuse it.
Even if there were such web-enabled support, it would all still be limited by the BSD permissions. Windows runs the default user as root. Not only does OSX have root completely disabled by default, you'll be asked for the administrator password anytime something wants to write to any of the system directories.
It's no different than writing a malicious script for a Linux system (except that it's a lot less likey on the Mac that the person has superuser access).
Dell has been doing this for a long, long time. It hasn't been a big secret that about 90% of the time, you're best off (financially) buying things through the Small Business side of dell.com.
High-end LCD monitors last year were seeing 25%-50% discounts on the Small Business pages. For the individual user, it makes sense (as usual) to shop around. Institutional customers are usually stuck with whatever prices their contracts are for -- the US Govt can't buy through small business, and your academic customers can't either.
Not in the sense of VBScript or similar Windows issues. Applescripts don't run automatically, you can't email them to somebody and have it delete their home directory without their participation, or put it on a web page and use an IE exploit to get root-level access to the system.
But yes, it's a powerful scripting language, so it can do all the bad stuff your user account can do. OSX is so flexible on language that you can pretty much use anything you can think of (AppleScript, perl, python, [ba|c]sh, etc) in a single script, so all the stuff you can do with those languages and shells are possible in a script.
There was a debate over on MacOSXhints.com a week or two ago debating whether Apple should somehow try to "protect" people from malicious scripts, but there doesn't seem to be any sensible way to have a functional scripting language that isn't capable of doing damage when used improperly.