"Why should a thief, a murderer or an adulterer be protected by laws meant to protect the innocent?"
People are innocent until proven guilty. Having said that, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, reading you your rights, are often seen as laws that protect the guilty. They are not. It is true that many criminals get off on technicalities. This happens when police do not follow procedures meant to protect everyone. Without laws like these it would be much easier to convict innocent people of crimes they did not commit. It is already easier to be proven guilty that it is to be proven innocent. Once convicted you are pretty much screwed regardless of innocence. Already a disturbing number of innocent individuals have been incarcereted or even executed for crimes they did not commit.
These laws are meant to protect the innocent, it just so happens that when police fail to uphold these laws guilty people can hide behind them. I for one would rather see one - hundred guilty people go free than one innocent person executed. But people call me an idealist (all christians should be).
" We need to get back to being tough on criminals in order to prevent crime, and if the police can track offenders down then it makes their job easier when they (invariably)reoffend. "
It has been proven that the death penalty is not a detterent to crime. It has also been proven that persons who are thrown into prisons early in life are most likely to become MORE criminal in prison and reoffend when they are realeased. There are some interesting reasons for this. Getting tough on crime will not reduce crime. Removing a criminals reasons for committing a crime will. If you really want cleaner safer streets you would do well to support programs that attack poverty, homelessness etc. You want the reoffense rate to drop, stop supporting the farce that prisons are "correctional facilities" they are punishment and retribution facilities. They are also, ironically, "criminal hardening" facilities. People come out of prisons hardened criminals because of the brutality with which they are met with on a daily basis. Sending an at-risk kid to be raped on a daily basis for five years in a state pen for a minor offense like drugs(most common offense in state pens), will not make him think gee I shouldn't do drugs anymore. I will however make him enraged (justifiably so) at the society which submitted him to such torture. Also in order for him to survive in this environment he will have to become just as hard as those brutalizing him. Now you have one more hardened person. Ofcourse since no one will listen to me on this I propose that we execute all offenders who are sent to state or federal penitentiaries. That way we guarantee a reoffense rate of 0% and it may be more humane that the torture system we have in place now.
STOP THE HYPOCRASY
"Re:Would terminating it be better? (Score:2)
by Misch (pmm9979@rit.removemetoreply.edu) on Thursday August 03, @11:34AM EDT (#111)
(User #158807 Info) http://www.rit.edu/~pmm9979/
Sure. I'll give you the instructions on how to make the wiretap (Carnivore). However, you
can't have access to the wire itself (fiber, copper, or otherwise.)
From everything I've read, carnivore is still a "box" that needs to be PHYSICALLY
connected to the ISP's line. And I can't think of any ISP that will just say, "Sure Mr. Smith,
come on over and tie you packet sniffer directly into our incoming line."
If "Mr. Smith" holds up a warrant then you can bet your ass they will.
I don't see why (form a tech standpoint) an ISP would not be able to do this now (Or years ago).
Just had a though. I may be exposing my ignorance here but, why do they need to look at every e.mail message that goes through an ISP? If this is supposed to be a warrant issued thing where they are trying to "tap" everything a particular individual sends then why do they need to open up my e.mail, they should be able to look at the packet info, or message header, etc, to determine the sender or recipient of a message.
What do you think are the chances that any agency (court appointed???) would be able to review the actual operation of the software once it is installed?
Could someone point a link to documentation that says just how much they get from the tax dollars? Their ads in the post office claim it all comes from postage plus their collectibles stuff. Also, I worked for a small company that did (still does) all of its shipping through USPS. They did business with companies in every country they legally could and only had two shipping problems. In both cases the package had been delivered and the recipient had the package in his mailroom but didn't know about it.
Well aside from the conspiracy theories, there is the fact that there are many a vast number of persons in this country that do not have web access. Leaps in technology have a tendecy to widen the gap between rich and poor or increasingly tech haves and have nots, which according to the CIA factbook is the largest problem in this country. I agree with the concerns, and anything that makes advertisers happy makes me very nervous. But I can see some of the benefit in a society that is connected to the standard means of communication. Granted that printing out e.mail at the post office may suck but it is better than not being able to participate. The last thing technology should do is disenfranchise large segments of the population. There are obvious kinks to work out but this could be a good thing.
For Christmas I gave my sister, who studies opera, a minidisk recorder that she wanted. She uses it to record voice lessons. About a month ago I got a CD in the mail with a copy of a recital that she did and recorded on her minidisk recorder. I was very impressed when I considered the price I paid for that recorder.
Agreed, sort off. Right now you can "quickly" make perfect copies of imperfect copies ( copying an MP3) or imperfect copies of "perfect" material (CD -> MP3). Or perfect copies of perfect material (CD -> CDR)but not quickly or easily exchanged. Now when we can easily distribute perfect copies of CD's (CD->wav, I emphasize easily distribute). RIAA's worst nightmares *may* come true. This may be why they are attacking Napster now, because eventhough they aren't loosing much to MP3's now they may loose a lot in the future. What does not make sense is that they are trying to kill something they cannot kill (They may kill Napster but not online music trading). They should be trying to become key players in online music trading. In the end what irks me most is the attempt to stiffle inovation and freedom.
I always thought that there were studies that showed piracy due to tapes had no real impact on the revenue of record companies, and actually helped promote sales. If anything the record industry fears that their worst nightmare may finally come true, despite the evidence against it. The irony here being that the more they try to stiffle a new distribution format the more they encourage more threatening piracy. Now that I am boycotting RIAA anyone wanna swap burned copies of CDs... This may not sound to realistic for the majority of the population but in a college dorm environment, why not. I would if I was still in college. I don't see how portable MP3 players could scare anyone. or MP3 for that matter. Like you said it's too expensive to carry the CFlash memory that equals the 30+ CD's in my car. We are forgetting that the number of people using portable MP3 players or even MP3s is a small percentage of the total music purchasing population. We are also forgetting that MP3 does not equal CD quality. I find MP3's horribly inconvinient, I cant play them on my really nice stereo I can't easily carry all of them with me and the sound quality ranges from ok to bad.
This is precisely my concern though. I have a particular way of working which involves interruptions from things that I consider important, (messages from friends and family or simpler distractions, such as what EQ zone I will explore tonight), I get my job done and I have enough flexibility to work in this manner. This kind of software could either (benevolently or malevolently) enforce a "prefered" way of working/living that would result in something like fighting with Word autoformatting but at a grander scale. Now if it was completely configurable to my priorities that could be not very cool either because I don't want to be interrupted in the middle of a meeting because a friend just mailed me. I think it would take quite a bit of time for it to learn what I preferred and would be just plain annoying. I don't need a giant paperclip trying to run my life.
"As reported earlier, SoundScan division VNU Marketing tested the theory by looking pecifically at sales in stores near universities,where online music has been more widely adopted than in the general public. In those stores, SoundScan data shows that record sales have actually dropped 4 percent in the past two years. In stores near the 67 colleges that have banned Napster, citing an overload on their internal networks, sales have dropped 7 percent in two years. " It seems to me that this article should be titled, "Online Music hurts Local CD Sales" By online music I mean Napster, CDNow etc. I am also confused by the above, Sales have dropped 4% at stores near univerisites but at stores near univeristies that have banned Napster they have dropped 7%. Does banning Napster make actually things worse or am I just reading this wrong? Does Napster deter people doing things like burning CDs which could have a greater (albeit still samll) effect on CD sales?
What the virus should do is, do nothing destructive to the machine, instead give the user a message listing all of the bad things that could have happened because they use Microsoft products, and propagate itself.
Thomas Jefferson had a number of things to say about education which can basically be sumed up as, education is the cornerstone of a free society. Without an educated population no society can be free. I agree that various third world nations are shackled by various forms of ignorance. Some are bound in traditions some are bound by their governments who realized that keeping their populations uneducated was crucial in order for the regime to stay in power. That is exactly why the world needs these sort of actions. Without free information there cannot be education and no true freedom. If we do not advocate and actively pursue free global information we are denying some the populations the only tools that would be available to them in order to be free themselves. You are basically saying that these people do not deserve freedom because they are not intellecutally free. Aparently if they desreved freedom they would already be free. And... you would deny them the access to infromation necessary to be free. That does not sound so much harsh as arrogant. If corporations are allowed to dominate information and that access to information then there will never be a time for "these things" to happen on their own in third world countries. Let us also not forget that many of the worlds first world nations became so at the expense of what are now third world nations. There is something owed there.
All I can say is wow, you so much more ignorant than I originally thought. Now I find myself hoping that you are just spouting off obvious intellectual sounding nonsense to get a response: flamebait in disguise. Either way you frighten me.
You make a good point, I have met a number of kids whose parents sheltered them so much that they did not know how to handle the world. They went off to college and could never handle the freedom. Two or three of my sisters friends how were super conservative in high school were pregnant by their sophmore year. Or in drugs or well on their way to achoholism. All because their parents were too afraid of the world and chose to sheleter instead of educate. Tried to fit them into a fragile mold instead of helping them become full grow human beings.
I hate to say this but the Bible is not PROOF of anything other that there were people who claim to have seen God's miracles. In fact there is no PROOF of God. The bible tells us we will never find PROOF. To we must believe in God through FAITH. Which is in opposition to PROOF. I understand every athiests rejection of FAITH. It was very hard for me to make the leap.
People who call themselves Christians like yourself sicken me. You try to preach to the world with PROOF not understanding your own ignorace. You approach others with hostility, preaching fear to them. How can someone who claims to know Christ's love say the things you do. How can you defend the inquisition. People died for having the feeling like they had the right to read the bible. But you wouldn't know this because you blind yourself to anything that may disturb you. It was an attempt by a currupt people of power to assert its authority.
HYPOCRIT! I have seen too many good people completely turn their backs to God because of people like you! So shut the hell up and stop giving God a bad name.
Answer me this. If you never read the Satanic Verses how can you know what it was about? I know that many Muslims were very offended but not having read it myself I don't know why. So I don't comment on the book. How do YOU know it deliberately sets out to offend? How do you know it does not make any valid points? Before you comment on a book READ IT! Otherwise you are just preaching from mount ignorance. From your comment it sound like you would avoid anything that has a title that may offend you. You choose ignorance to keep your tiny little bubble of a world safe. How sad.
And you want the rest of us to follow your lead, enforce your ignorance on us, suppress what may sound like it may be inflamatory to keep everybody happy. Again how sad.
I am a Christian, and I also believe in respecting everyone elses views and religions and I don't think people should be inflamatory for no reason but I will never try to force anyone to stop. I will try to educate but in the end it MUST be the individuals choice and they must be free to make it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why should a thief, a murderer or an adulterer be protected by laws meant to protect the innocent?" People are innocent until proven guilty. Having said that, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, reading you your rights, are often seen as laws that protect the guilty. They are not. It is true that many criminals get off on technicalities. This happens when police do not follow procedures meant to protect everyone. Without laws like these it would be much easier to convict innocent people of crimes they did not commit. It is already easier to be proven guilty that it is to be proven innocent. Once convicted you are pretty much screwed regardless of innocence. Already a disturbing number of innocent individuals have been incarcereted or even executed for crimes they did not commit. These laws are meant to protect the innocent, it just so happens that when police fail to uphold these laws guilty people can hide behind them. I for one would rather see one - hundred guilty people go free than one innocent person executed. But people call me an idealist (all christians should be). " We need to get back to being tough on criminals in order to prevent crime, and if the police can track offenders down then it makes their job easier when they (invariably)reoffend. " It has been proven that the death penalty is not a detterent to crime. It has also been proven that persons who are thrown into prisons early in life are most likely to become MORE criminal in prison and reoffend when they are realeased. There are some interesting reasons for this. Getting tough on crime will not reduce crime. Removing a criminals reasons for committing a crime will. If you really want cleaner safer streets you would do well to support programs that attack poverty, homelessness etc. You want the reoffense rate to drop, stop supporting the farce that prisons are "correctional facilities" they are punishment and retribution facilities. They are also, ironically, "criminal hardening" facilities. People come out of prisons hardened criminals because of the brutality with which they are met with on a daily basis. Sending an at-risk kid to be raped on a daily basis for five years in a state pen for a minor offense like drugs(most common offense in state pens), will not make him think gee I shouldn't do drugs anymore. I will however make him enraged (justifiably so) at the society which submitted him to such torture. Also in order for him to survive in this environment he will have to become just as hard as those brutalizing him. Now you have one more hardened person. Ofcourse since no one will listen to me on this I propose that we execute all offenders who are sent to state or federal penitentiaries. That way we guarantee a reoffense rate of 0% and it may be more humane that the torture system we have in place now. STOP THE HYPOCRASY
Last I heard, the Austin Public Library was doing this now after this same debate divided the community.
"Re:Would terminating it be better? (Score:2) by Misch (pmm9979@rit.removemetoreply.edu) on Thursday August 03, @11:34AM EDT (#111) (User #158807 Info) http://www.rit.edu/~pmm9979/ Sure. I'll give you the instructions on how to make the wiretap (Carnivore). However, you can't have access to the wire itself (fiber, copper, or otherwise.) From everything I've read, carnivore is still a "box" that needs to be PHYSICALLY connected to the ISP's line. And I can't think of any ISP that will just say, "Sure Mr. Smith, come on over and tie you packet sniffer directly into our incoming line." If "Mr. Smith" holds up a warrant then you can bet your ass they will. I don't see why (form a tech standpoint) an ISP would not be able to do this now (Or years ago).
Just had a though. I may be exposing my ignorance here but, why do they need to look at every e.mail message that goes through an ISP? If this is supposed to be a warrant issued thing where they are trying to "tap" everything a particular individual sends then why do they need to open up my e.mail, they should be able to look at the packet info, or message header, etc, to determine the sender or recipient of a message.
What do you think are the chances that any agency (court appointed???) would be able to review the actual operation of the software once it is installed?
Could someone point a link to documentation that says just how much they get from the tax dollars? Their ads in the post office claim it all comes from postage plus their collectibles stuff. Also, I worked for a small company that did (still does) all of its shipping through USPS. They did business with companies in every country they legally could and only had two shipping problems. In both cases the package had been delivered and the recipient had the package in his mailroom but didn't know about it.
Well aside from the conspiracy theories, there is the fact that there are many a vast number of persons in this country that do not have web access. Leaps in technology have a tendecy to widen the gap between rich and poor or increasingly tech haves and have nots, which according to the CIA factbook is the largest problem in this country. I agree with the concerns, and anything that makes advertisers happy makes me very nervous. But I can see some of the benefit in a society that is connected to the standard means of communication. Granted that printing out e.mail at the post office may suck but it is better than not being able to participate. The last thing technology should do is disenfranchise large segments of the population. There are obvious kinks to work out but this could be a good thing.
For Christmas I gave my sister, who studies opera, a minidisk recorder that she wanted. She uses it to record voice lessons. About a month ago I got a CD in the mail with a copy of a recital that she did and recorded on her minidisk recorder. I was very impressed when I considered the price I paid for that recorder.
Agreed, sort off. Right now you can "quickly" make perfect copies of imperfect copies ( copying an MP3) or imperfect copies of "perfect" material (CD -> MP3). Or perfect copies of perfect material (CD -> CDR)but not quickly or easily exchanged. Now when we can easily distribute perfect copies of CD's (CD->wav, I emphasize easily distribute). RIAA's worst nightmares *may* come true. This may be why they are attacking Napster now, because eventhough they aren't loosing much to MP3's now they may loose a lot in the future. What does not make sense is that they are trying to kill something they cannot kill (They may kill Napster but not online music trading). They should be trying to become key players in online music trading. In the end what irks me most is the attempt to stiffle inovation and freedom.
I always thought that there were studies that showed piracy due to tapes had no real impact on the revenue of record companies, and actually helped promote sales. If anything the record industry fears that their worst nightmare may finally come true, despite the evidence against it. The irony here being that the more they try to stiffle a new distribution format the more they encourage more threatening piracy. Now that I am boycotting RIAA anyone wanna swap burned copies of CDs... This may not sound to realistic for the majority of the population but in a college dorm environment, why not. I would if I was still in college. I don't see how portable MP3 players could scare anyone. or MP3 for that matter. Like you said it's too expensive to carry the CFlash memory that equals the 30+ CD's in my car. We are forgetting that the number of people using portable MP3 players or even MP3s is a small percentage of the total music purchasing population. We are also forgetting that MP3 does not equal CD quality. I find MP3's horribly inconvinient, I cant play them on my really nice stereo I can't easily carry all of them with me and the sound quality ranges from ok to bad.
This is precisely my concern though. I have a particular way of working which involves interruptions from things that I consider important, (messages from friends and family or simpler distractions, such as what EQ zone I will explore tonight), I get my job done and I have enough flexibility to work in this manner. This kind of software could either (benevolently or malevolently) enforce a "prefered" way of working/living that would result in something like fighting with Word autoformatting but at a grander scale. Now if it was completely configurable to my priorities that could be not very cool either because I don't want to be interrupted in the middle of a meeting because a friend just mailed me. I think it would take quite a bit of time for it to learn what I preferred and would be just plain annoying. I don't need a giant paperclip trying to run my life.
"As reported earlier, SoundScan division VNU Marketing tested the theory by looking pecifically at sales in stores near universities,where online music has been more widely adopted than in the general public. In those stores, SoundScan data shows that record sales have actually dropped 4 percent in the past two years. In stores near the 67 colleges that have banned Napster, citing an overload on their internal networks, sales have dropped 7 percent in two years. " It seems to me that this article should be titled, "Online Music hurts Local CD Sales" By online music I mean Napster, CDNow etc. I am also confused by the above, Sales have dropped 4% at stores near univerisites but at stores near univeristies that have banned Napster they have dropped 7%. Does banning Napster make actually things worse or am I just reading this wrong? Does Napster deter people doing things like burning CDs which could have a greater (albeit still samll) effect on CD sales?
What the virus should do is, do nothing destructive to the machine, instead give the user a message listing all of the bad things that could have happened because they use Microsoft products, and propagate itself.
Thomas Jefferson had a number of things to say about education which can basically be sumed up as, education is the cornerstone of a free society. Without an educated population no society can be free. I agree that various third world nations are shackled by various forms of ignorance. Some are bound in traditions some are bound by their governments who realized that keeping their populations uneducated was crucial in order for the regime to stay in power. That is exactly why the world needs these sort of actions. Without free information there cannot be education and no true freedom. If we do not advocate and actively pursue free global information we are denying some the populations the only tools that would be available to them in order to be free themselves. You are basically saying that these people do not deserve freedom because they are not intellecutally free. Aparently if they desreved freedom they would already be free. And... you would deny them the access to infromation necessary to be free. That does not sound so much harsh as arrogant. If corporations are allowed to dominate information and that access to information then there will never be a time for "these things" to happen on their own in third world countries. Let us also not forget that many of the worlds first world nations became so at the expense of what are now third world nations. There is something owed there.
All I can say is wow, you so much more ignorant than I originally thought. Now I find myself hoping that you are just spouting off obvious intellectual sounding nonsense to get a response: flamebait in disguise. Either way you frighten me.
You make a good point, I have met a number of kids whose parents sheltered them so much that they did not know how to handle the world. They went off to college and could never handle the freedom. Two or three of my sisters friends how were super conservative in high school were pregnant by their sophmore year. Or in drugs or well on their way to achoholism. All because their parents were too afraid of the world and chose to sheleter instead of educate. Tried to fit them into a fragile mold instead of helping them become full grow human beings.
I hate to say this but the Bible is not PROOF of anything other that there were people who claim to have seen God's miracles. In fact there is no PROOF of God. The bible tells us we will never find PROOF. To we must believe in God through FAITH. Which is in opposition to PROOF. I understand every athiests rejection of FAITH. It was very hard for me to make the leap. People who call themselves Christians like yourself sicken me. You try to preach to the world with PROOF not understanding your own ignorace. You approach others with hostility, preaching fear to them. How can someone who claims to know Christ's love say the things you do. How can you defend the inquisition. People died for having the feeling like they had the right to read the bible. But you wouldn't know this because you blind yourself to anything that may disturb you. It was an attempt by a currupt people of power to assert its authority. HYPOCRIT! I have seen too many good people completely turn their backs to God because of people like you! So shut the hell up and stop giving God a bad name.
Answer me this. If you never read the Satanic Verses how can you know what it was about? I know that many Muslims were very offended but not having read it myself I don't know why. So I don't comment on the book. How do YOU know it deliberately sets out to offend? How do you know it does not make any valid points? Before you comment on a book READ IT! Otherwise you are just preaching from mount ignorance. From your comment it sound like you would avoid anything that has a title that may offend you. You choose ignorance to keep your tiny little bubble of a world safe. How sad. And you want the rest of us to follow your lead, enforce your ignorance on us, suppress what may sound like it may be inflamatory to keep everybody happy. Again how sad. I am a Christian, and I also believe in respecting everyone elses views and religions and I don't think people should be inflamatory for no reason but I will never try to force anyone to stop. I will try to educate but in the end it MUST be the individuals choice and they must be free to make it.