Yes, I am claiming file and printer sharing is a good idea. When faced with the choice of researching an enterprise-level file sharing protocol that integrates seamlessly with Active Directory, Windows, auditing, and works on every server and workstation we have and using SMB, I'll use SMB. Why? Because whatever shortcomings it has can be worked around.
Maybe your business has a couple of months and a hundred and fifty grand to recreate itself and reintegrate in a 10,000 client forest, but unlike you we have people to serve.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never had a very successful consulting career waltzing into a business and saying "Your infrastructure sucks; we need to rebuild from the ground up and realign your business to meet what I think your IT needs are," especially when the next guy to walk in will say "Buy five new servers and enjoy a load-balancing firewall. By the way, you don't need to touch ten thousand clients and rebuild fifteen-thousand file shares."
You are right in saying that The Reg does have some articles that are good work. But a man that works one day out of the week helping sick kittens at the animal hopsital and mugs a different person every other day isn't a hard worker, he's an asshole.
The Reg is, like I said, barely above being a tabloid which means that it is not a tabloid but rather a trashy online magazine that fills the majority of its pages with dreck. The Reg is all about filler; they'll write on any useless snippet of information they hear so they can keep a readership until they can come across a real story worth printing (two of which you pointed out).
The problem for me is that the vast majority of what's peddled as "news" is just infotainment trying to get some kind of emotional reaction out of the readership. That's all The Reg does: cast out lines and hope to reel in some fish with big and splashy and adversarial bait.
Agree with me or don't: that kind of participation in society is a drain on society when it's passed off as "news." It's not journalism, it's hackery.
Anyone with half a brain can see this coverage is far superior to the usual shashdot fare.
I agree that those articles are better than the usual crap you see on slashdot, but we're not seeing those things on slashdot. We're seeing THE CRAP from The Register being sold as news-- in case you missed that pertinent part of the slashdot article.
The guy posts here on slashdot all the time; instead of infighting so much, why doesn't someone just ask him to clarify the details of an article written in a newspaper that's barely above being a tabloid?
Anyone that reads too deeply into "news" snippets like these which happen to always be adversarial and use creative verbs like "slams" and "rails against" needs to have his head examined. The Register is the UK tech equivalent of E! television.
So I'm pretty sure I already answered that particular question. Living on intersection B, like skiing or skydiving, is not illegal, and well within your rights.
You're right. And thank you for clarifying your point on why legality makes a difference. I have to disagree, only because while the boss may think a crime is being committed, only a court of law can make that determination. To have it otherwise would be disingenuous; an employer can't independently make a determination of the legality of an act so they are simply "acts," rending the issue moot.
At the same time, if your place of work is resource FOO and you (the employee) are resource BAR, then the boss can be said to have the resources FOO and BAR. The point of permitting the boss to replace BAR when a crime has been committed by BAR is to protect the value of FOO. If an intoxicated driver, ED, hits and kills BAR, can the boss take action against ED for removing resource BAR and jeopardizing resource FOO? I believe the answer is no, because the boss has no relationship with ED; they've never met and ED isn't on the boss's clock. The same is true of BAR--once BAR walks out the door at 5 PM the relationship between the boss and BAR is over; BAR is off the clock. If you're off the clock the boss can't tell you what to do; again to have it otherwise would be disingenuous; that's why we have "on the clock" at all.
You do not, however, have the right (in the US, at least) to deal drugs, or steal cars, or burglarize houses, or run an illegal sports book from your home. So if your employer decides to terminate your employement because you're doing any of these things, I'm not going to feel bad for you...and I don't think the government should either.
...the difference being "innocent until proven guilty" and "guilty until proven innocent."
Perhaps one of the things I'm wondering is, at where is the line drawn? If I move into a planned community, I must obey the rules of that community or x will happen, where x == "something rather unpleasant." If I put a car on blocks in my front yard in violation of those rules, it jeopardizes my home. I am not breaking a law, but I am in violation of an agreement I have with others that could result in me leaving work to deal with moving a dead car off my lawn or moving to a new home. I am contractually obligated not to have a car on my lawn, but can I be fired for that?
I know you said that you're not talking about minor traffic violations, but unless you punch the cop your most serious issue will be traffic court. In this case, it's the potential to lose your home and be involved in lengthy court battles. I'm most interested in your thoughts on that.
Why does the legality make a difference? Either way, no one is guilty of a crime until convicted in a court of law. Should it be up to the employer to determine guilt in issues of legality?
The point is you can't use legality as a basis because there's no way to determine whether the affected party is guilty short of court. The only other part of your argument was regarding the risk level and you already argue that legal acts should be excluded, so it looks like we're back where we started: employers should not be allowed to fire people based on the potential for the employer to be inconvenienced.
Another way to look at it: I live at intersection B which has had thirty pedestrian fatalities in the last year from DWIs. Should my employer be able to fire me because the illegal activities of others may inconvenience him if I get hit on the way home? No, because the employer has no relation to that driver. Likewise when I am not at work I have no relationship with work. If I see my boss at a bar he can't tell me to go work on the Brown project, and while I'm at home I can't ask the company to buy me a new desk chair. We're both inconvenienced (the Brown project doesn't get done until tomorrow, and my back bothers me a little more), but where is the agreement between us that says the other is not allowed to be inconvenienced? The only overlap between me and my employer is at work--anything that falls outside that is mine (or my employer's).
Of course, this is purely philosophical; at will employment laws vary from place to place and typically side with the employer.
Then that's not Windows shutting itself down for no reason, is it? It's spyware that causes the computer to become unstable.
The cause of that may be security holes in Windows, but Windows itself is a pretty stable operating system. It's the software written for it that performs irresponsibly or poorly from time to time (which isn't to say Windows doesn't suck every now and then purely of its own accord).
Your network is always slower than your local system. No matter what you think you can push to a system, you'll always be slower than what you could do locally.
Wrong. In Windows, the filesystem is often the bottleneck. Take a single folder with 100,000 files 30 KB each (~2.9 GB) and copy it to another server connected by gigabit. You'll see it slow down to less than 100 Mb/sec.
And before any slashbots jump out of the woodwork, this is an experiment I've run more than once on servers with RAID-5 arrays and 10,000 RPM drives, Xeon processors and gigabytes of memory. Windows' filesystem is very slow.
Why even include a synopsis of the article? Why doesn't slashdot just publish the title and link to the article? Clicking the link and reading the article yourself will bring you all the information you need.
It surprises me when slashdot folk, who often lament their positions of technical support, criticize others for asking for more information. Would you rather have someone asking you for help tell you the thingy button's broken, or they receive a 403 Forbidden error when they visit http://www.yahoo.com?
Really, how cogent is a story posted on slashdot when basic information that a four year old would request is omitted from its synopsis? It's not. It lacks class and sophistication, like much of slashdot, and is a mark of the increasingly sickening marketing-driven place slashdot's become.
See the other poster's comment on the definition of neolithic. Sorry, but that discredits your post substantially (and perhaps unfairly).
There's a difference between a tribe considering itself and its requisites for survival as being owned and civilized concepts of ownership. Your blinder-colored view of tribal societies (primitive?) blocks even your vision of American/Native American relations and the differences in ideology on ownership ("how can we give you this land when it is not ours? how can you take it when it's not yours?").
If everyone respected it, your users wouldn't be getting any more phishing scams from "someuser@paypal.com" - or "attn@bankofamerica.com"
If everyone respected the intended purpose of email, we wouldn't get spam. And if everyone respected each other, there would no crime, every person would get their own kitten, rivers would run flush with beer and no one would post stupid comments on slashdot. If only people were better.
The lock was invented before anyone presently reading this was born. This is a clear indication of the state of things and in my opinion, the nature of humans... or animals for that matter.
The human was invented before the lock was ever born, and this seems to be a more clear indication to me.
The nature of humans is to work cooperatively towards mutual survival. Tribal societies and their precursors have been around far longer than the lock. The idea of ownership and "lock and key" is generally a by-product of civilization and its immediate pre-cursors.
And if you think a 'market economy' is a 'bad thing,' please, go live in 'Soviet Russia,' where such a thing did not exis- Oh, wait. 'Soviet Russia' ceased to exist because... Wow. Communism doesn't work.
And it took a very long time for Communism to collapse in Russia. Nevermind that there are other communist countries today, and nevermind that there is perhaps a slight chance that the reason these countries are destitute is because of the seventy year old vendetta the United States, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has had against communists.
I love it when people shout out "COMMUNISM DOESN'T WORK!!!" and point at the former Soviet Union, because then I can shout out "CAPITALISM DOESN'T WORK!!!" and point at every single failing capitalist economy and poor-as-fuck country. Let's take a look at one of the countries that has benefited the MOST from capitalism: Haiti.
In this poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, 80% of the population lives in abject poverty, and natural disasters frequently sweep the nation. Two-thirds of all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, which consists mainly of small-scale subsistence farming. Following legislative elections in May 2000, fraught with irregularities, international donors - including the US and EU - suspended almost all aid to Haiti. The economy shrank an estimated 1.2% in 2001, 0.9% in 2002, grew 0.4% in 2003, and shrank by 3.5% in 2004. Suspended aid and loan disbursements totaled more than $500 million at the start of 2003. Haiti also suffers from rampant inflation, a lack of investment, and a severe trade deficit. In early 2005 Haiti paid its arrears to the World Bank, paving the way to reengagement with the Bank. The resumption of aid flows from all donors is alleviating but not ending the nation's bitter economic problems. Civil strife in 2004 combined with extensive damage from flooding in southern Haiti in May 2004 and Tropical Storm Jeanne in northwestern Haiti in September 2004 further impoverished Haiti.
Yeah, capitalism sure works for Haitians.
What people like you don't seem to realize is that capitalism works GREAT if your country is already rich, but when you're broke as fuck it's the equivalent of being a broke as fuck private citizen in a capitalist economy. Sure, you can become super wealthy, but is it more likely that someone already rich will become richer or someone poor will become richer?
Gimme a break, you narrow minded tool. Quit your whining about your one-right-way-to-live.
Every linux box sold represents money ripped from their pocket.
This is not correct. It's not necessarily true that Microsoft products would be purchased instead, nor is it true that any time a server or workstation running Linux is switched to Windows that a new license for Windows has to be purchased.
Microsoft cares a lot about money, but they care much more about saturation. If the market is completely saturated by Windows, everyone will use Windows because everyone uses Windows. That's why Microsoft is letting Indonesia pick up Windows for a buck a pop. They don't just care about the money, they care about getting as many people to use Windows as they can. Once they're in a dominant position they leverage that to extort exorbitant fees for their software from certain customers.
It's the ends and means for Microsoft. Imagine Steve Ballmer screaming "UNLIMITED POWWWWWERRR!!!" as he eletrocutes Linus Torvalds and throws him out a window with the Force. That's Microsoft's view of things.
...except for the passphrase for the disk, which is encouraged to be highly complex.
Besides, if all they need to do is encrypt a single file containing the passwords, they don't need PGP disk; PGP or GPG will work fine to encrypt the single file, with the plus side being that in ten years you don't need to find a copy of Windows XP and a copy of PGP disk to install just to retrieve 143 bytes' worth of text.
From your statements, it is obvious that your view of "justice" is the preferential application of punishment based on personally subjective criteria, which is inherently unjust.
That's pretty close. Allow me to elaborate: justice is all parties finding fairness and balance in a decision. In that sense, objective application of the law is inherently unjust, given my previous examples. The problem is when people put the word "fair" in with the word "objective;" fair is a subjective idea. So yes, my way is subjective, but the manner by which the mentioned objectivity is found is as well.
To elaborate even more and reword your statement (without agreeing that it's how I would formulate the idea), justice is the outcome of a decision in which all facts are considered, not just the facts of the law. Take the example of the cancer patient growing dope; the fact is they're doing it to relieve the pain of a terminal illness, but the facts of the law are that they were growing weed. I don't believe justice is found when sending that person to prison, and that the suppression of facts creates injustice. If one drug dealer is sent to prison and one cancer patient is sent to prison, the score is Justice 1, Injustice 1. How is that just?
I don't believe it's possible to find justice all of the time, and certainly not by my or your way, but I do believe there are improvements to be made pending the cooperation of men.
You submit that two people guilty of breaking the same law should be punished differently based on (in the case you propose) their medical records. From that logic, it is easy to extend the idea to apply across any arbitrary difference between two defendants, be it class, religion or race.
Actually, I submit that two people guilty of breaking the same law should be punished differently based on the facts of the case. It is not so easy to extend to any chosen difference, for example if one is a plumber and another an accountant, and neither of these things reflects upon the case, then they should be discarded. It's about reason, and whether it can be reasoned that any fact of the case is relevant (nevermind that reason is a terribly difficult idea to implement). Unfortunately in the pursuit of justice law has been made in such a way that often the why doesn't matter; at the expense of justice the system of injustice remains viable.
Again, this is a pipe dream. As anyone will tell you, "life isn't fair."
In your mind, you might ascribe less weight to a crime when perpetrated by a breast cancer victim versus a generic stereotypical drug-dealer, but prosecuting both with the same penalty is the only just way to apply law. Now whether or not an actual "law" or "punishment" is unjust is another discussion, but partial application of an existing law does not mitigate that.
I'm not talking about the weight of the crime, I'm talking about the justice of the punishment. Prosecuting both with the same penalty does not create justice in my mind, and I see we differ there.
Partial application of an existing law falls outside the bounds of the system, so according to the rules of the system that is unjust. Unfortunately we're bound by the agreed upon idea of fairness and justice by those that created and perpetuate the system, so I'm forced to agree within that context. I think this is the point where it would become a discussion of change within or from the system in the pursuit of greater justice, as the rules of the system permit injustice and the rules of the system, as you pointed out, do not mitigate that.
The problem when people argue semantics is that they confuse semantics with philosophy, and once someone with an American college education starts talking philosophy, they get confused and start talking about politics and socio-political doctrine.
The difference between penalties someone cultivating marijuana for their own use and someone cultivating it for sale is non-existent. Impartiality means we convict a cancer patient of cultivation and intent to distribute the same as a con. That is unjust.
Impartiality means we send someone to prison for the rest of their natural life under the Three Strikes law for shoplifting $2.69 worth of batteries. (Believe it: http://www.facts1.com/ThreeStrikes/Stories/)
I believe that answers your question; please let me know otherwise.
Justice is not served if injustice is brought to someone. Blanket impartiality breeds inequity and injustice.
Note that I'm not proposing an alternative, but merely pointing out that your statement about what society should do is itself partial. The idea of should is a difficult one to propose, and I'm typically wary of people who start off with should statements (as should you all be).
You're right. If slashdot allowed editing, I would amend my statement to say "with their bodies in the privacy of their homes." I like the idea of lives being lived in the "I don't fuck with you, you don't fuck with me" attitude. In that sense, jacking off in front of a primary school would definitely be considered fucking with someone.
Victimless crimes are the type I don't believe to be steadfastly wrong.
Here's a bunch of guys with literally nothing else to do all day but find ways to exploit the system.
Not true. Most prisons have things like kitchens, laundry facilities, showers and grounds. Do you think they hire people from the local town to manage these things so the prisoners can continue their punishments of free-play all day long?
Prisons are America's 2 million person slave system. We bathe them, clothe them, feed them, and pay them 12 cents an hour. In return, they let us wake them at 5:30 AM six days a week, work them for eight hours in various state-supporting ways, then put them back in bed. It's not exactly "plenty of time to lift weights and convert to Islam."
It is true. While this article is a couple of years old, the data remains mostly the same today. Blacks: 12% of the population, as high as 30% of the prison population. Whites: 75% of the population, about the same for the prison population. While it gets better for you the whiter you are, non-black/non-white prisoners aren't much better off than the blacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I am claiming file and printer sharing is a good idea. When faced with the choice of researching an enterprise-level file sharing protocol that integrates seamlessly with Active Directory, Windows, auditing, and works on every server and workstation we have and using SMB, I'll use SMB. Why? Because whatever shortcomings it has can be worked around.
Maybe your business has a couple of months and a hundred and fifty grand to recreate itself and reintegrate in a 10,000 client forest, but unlike you we have people to serve.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never had a very successful consulting career waltzing into a business and saying "Your infrastructure sucks; we need to rebuild from the ground up and realign your business to meet what I think your IT needs are," especially when the next guy to walk in will say "Buy five new servers and enjoy a load-balancing firewall. By the way, you don't need to touch ten thousand clients and rebuild fifteen-thousand file shares."
If you're interested in some more people measurements, check these two pages:
8 1
6 7
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=10491
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=10176
I prefer the ones regarding space travel.
You are right in saying that The Reg does have some articles that are good work. But a man that works one day out of the week helping sick kittens at the animal hopsital and mugs a different person every other day isn't a hard worker, he's an asshole.
The Reg is, like I said, barely above being a tabloid which means that it is not a tabloid but rather a trashy online magazine that fills the majority of its pages with dreck. The Reg is all about filler; they'll write on any useless snippet of information they hear so they can keep a readership until they can come across a real story worth printing (two of which you pointed out).
The problem for me is that the vast majority of what's peddled as "news" is just infotainment trying to get some kind of emotional reaction out of the readership. That's all The Reg does: cast out lines and hope to reel in some fish with big and splashy and adversarial bait.
Agree with me or don't: that kind of participation in society is a drain on society when it's passed off as "news." It's not journalism, it's hackery.
Anyone with half a brain can see this coverage is far superior to the usual shashdot fare.
I agree that those articles are better than the usual crap you see on slashdot, but we're not seeing those things on slashdot. We're seeing THE CRAP from The Register being sold as news-- in case you missed that pertinent part of the slashdot article.
The guy posts here on slashdot all the time; instead of infighting so much, why doesn't someone just ask him to clarify the details of an article written in a newspaper that's barely above being a tabloid?
Anyone that reads too deeply into "news" snippets like these which happen to always be adversarial and use creative verbs like "slams" and "rails against" needs to have his head examined. The Register is the UK tech equivalent of E! television.
So I'm pretty sure I already answered that particular question. Living on intersection B, like skiing or skydiving, is not illegal, and well within your rights.
...the difference being "innocent until proven guilty" and "guilty until proven innocent."
You're right. And thank you for clarifying your point on why legality makes a difference. I have to disagree, only because while the boss may think a crime is being committed, only a court of law can make that determination. To have it otherwise would be disingenuous; an employer can't independently make a determination of the legality of an act so they are simply "acts," rending the issue moot.
At the same time, if your place of work is resource FOO and you (the employee) are resource BAR, then the boss can be said to have the resources FOO and BAR. The point of permitting the boss to replace BAR when a crime has been committed by BAR is to protect the value of FOO. If an intoxicated driver, ED, hits and kills BAR, can the boss take action against ED for removing resource BAR and jeopardizing resource FOO? I believe the answer is no, because the boss has no relationship with ED; they've never met and ED isn't on the boss's clock. The same is true of BAR--once BAR walks out the door at 5 PM the relationship between the boss and BAR is over; BAR is off the clock. If you're off the clock the boss can't tell you what to do; again to have it otherwise would be disingenuous; that's why we have "on the clock" at all.
You do not, however, have the right (in the US, at least) to deal drugs, or steal cars, or burglarize houses, or run an illegal sports book from your home. So if your employer decides to terminate your employement because you're doing any of these things, I'm not going to feel bad for you...and I don't think the government should either.
Perhaps one of the things I'm wondering is, at where is the line drawn? If I move into a planned community, I must obey the rules of that community or x will happen, where x == "something rather unpleasant." If I put a car on blocks in my front yard in violation of those rules, it jeopardizes my home. I am not breaking a law, but I am in violation of an agreement I have with others that could result in me leaving work to deal with moving a dead car off my lawn or moving to a new home. I am contractually obligated not to have a car on my lawn, but can I be fired for that?
I know you said that you're not talking about minor traffic violations, but unless you punch the cop your most serious issue will be traffic court. In this case, it's the potential to lose your home and be involved in lengthy court battles. I'm most interested in your thoughts on that.
Why does the legality make a difference? Either way, no one is guilty of a crime until convicted in a court of law. Should it be up to the employer to determine guilt in issues of legality?
The point is you can't use legality as a basis because there's no way to determine whether the affected party is guilty short of court. The only other part of your argument was regarding the risk level and you already argue that legal acts should be excluded, so it looks like we're back where we started: employers should not be allowed to fire people based on the potential for the employer to be inconvenienced.
Another way to look at it: I live at intersection B which has had thirty pedestrian fatalities in the last year from DWIs. Should my employer be able to fire me because the illegal activities of others may inconvenience him if I get hit on the way home? No, because the employer has no relation to that driver. Likewise when I am not at work I have no relationship with work. If I see my boss at a bar he can't tell me to go work on the Brown project, and while I'm at home I can't ask the company to buy me a new desk chair. We're both inconvenienced (the Brown project doesn't get done until tomorrow, and my back bothers me a little more), but where is the agreement between us that says the other is not allowed to be inconvenienced? The only overlap between me and my employer is at work--anything that falls outside that is mine (or my employer's).
Of course, this is purely philosophical; at will employment laws vary from place to place and typically side with the employer.
Then that's not Windows shutting itself down for no reason, is it? It's spyware that causes the computer to become unstable.
The cause of that may be security holes in Windows, but Windows itself is a pretty stable operating system. It's the software written for it that performs irresponsibly or poorly from time to time (which isn't to say Windows doesn't suck every now and then purely of its own accord).
And before any slashbots jump out of the woodwork, this is an experiment I've run more than once on servers with RAID-5 arrays and 10,000 RPM drives, Xeon processors and gigabytes of memory. Windows' filesystem is very slow.
Why even include a synopsis of the article? Why doesn't slashdot just publish the title and link to the article? Clicking the link and reading the article yourself will bring you all the information you need.
It surprises me when slashdot folk, who often lament their positions of technical support, criticize others for asking for more information. Would you rather have someone asking you for help tell you the thingy button's broken, or they receive a 403 Forbidden error when they visit http://www.yahoo.com?
Really, how cogent is a story posted on slashdot when basic information that a four year old would request is omitted from its synopsis? It's not. It lacks class and sophistication, like much of slashdot, and is a mark of the increasingly sickening marketing-driven place slashdot's become.
Haven't I seen this before?
"Your honor, I object!"
"And why is that, Mr. Reede?"
"Because it's devastating to my case!"
"Overruled."
"Good call!"
No, the only difference is not one registry key. This is an old myth that only sloppy computer people propagate.
5 should explain it more clearly for you.
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=88756
Did you happen to record this little tirade? It's a perfect example of the parent's description of a podcast.
See the other poster's comment on the definition of neolithic. Sorry, but that discredits your post substantially (and perhaps unfairly).
There's a difference between a tribe considering itself and its requisites for survival as being owned and civilized concepts of ownership. Your blinder-colored view of tribal societies (primitive?) blocks even your vision of American/Native American relations and the differences in ideology on ownership ("how can we give you this land when it is not ours? how can you take it when it's not yours?").
The nature of humans is to work cooperatively towards mutual survival. Tribal societies and their precursors have been around far longer than the lock. The idea of ownership and "lock and key" is generally a by-product of civilization and its immediate pre-cursors.
I love it when people shout out "COMMUNISM DOESN'T WORK!!!" and point at the former Soviet Union, because then I can shout out "CAPITALISM DOESN'T WORK!!!" and point at every single failing capitalist economy and poor-as-fuck country. Let's take a look at one of the countries that has benefited the MOST from capitalism: Haiti. Yeah, capitalism sure works for Haitians.
What people like you don't seem to realize is that capitalism works GREAT if your country is already rich , but when you're broke as fuck it's the equivalent of being a broke as fuck private citizen in a capitalist economy. Sure, you can become super wealthy, but is it more likely that someone already rich will become richer or someone poor will become richer?
Gimme a break, you narrow minded tool. Quit your whining about your one-right-way-to-live.
Microsoft cares a lot about money, but they care much more about saturation. If the market is completely saturated by Windows, everyone will use Windows because everyone uses Windows. That's why Microsoft is letting Indonesia pick up Windows for a buck a pop. They don't just care about the money, they care about getting as many people to use Windows as they can. Once they're in a dominant position they leverage that to extort exorbitant fees for their software from certain customers.
It's the ends and means for Microsoft. Imagine Steve Ballmer screaming "UNLIMITED POWWWWWERRR!!!" as he eletrocutes Linus Torvalds and throws him out a window with the Force. That's Microsoft's view of things.
...except for the passphrase for the disk, which is encouraged to be highly complex.
Besides, if all they need to do is encrypt a single file containing the passwords, they don't need PGP disk; PGP or GPG will work fine to encrypt the single file, with the plus side being that in ten years you don't need to find a copy of Windows XP and a copy of PGP disk to install just to retrieve 143 bytes' worth of text.
That's pretty close. Allow me to elaborate: justice is all parties finding fairness and balance in a decision. In that sense, objective application of the law is inherently unjust, given my previous examples. The problem is when people put the word "fair" in with the word "objective;" fair is a subjective idea. So yes, my way is subjective, but the manner by which the mentioned objectivity is found is as well.
To elaborate even more and reword your statement (without agreeing that it's how I would formulate the idea), justice is the outcome of a decision in which all facts are considered, not just the facts of the law. Take the example of the cancer patient growing dope; the fact is they're doing it to relieve the pain of a terminal illness, but the facts of the law are that they were growing weed. I don't believe justice is found when sending that person to prison, and that the suppression of facts creates injustice. If one drug dealer is sent to prison and one cancer patient is sent to prison, the score is Justice 1, Injustice 1. How is that just?
I don't believe it's possible to find justice all of the time, and certainly not by my or your way, but I do believe there are improvements to be made pending the cooperation of men.
Actually, I submit that two people guilty of breaking the same law should be punished differently based on the facts of the case. It is not so easy to extend to any chosen difference, for example if one is a plumber and another an accountant, and neither of these things reflects upon the case, then they should be discarded. It's about reason, and whether it can be reasoned that any fact of the case is relevant (nevermind that reason is a terribly difficult idea to implement). Unfortunately in the pursuit of justice law has been made in such a way that often the why doesn't matter; at the expense of justice the system of injustice remains viable.
Again, this is a pipe dream. As anyone will tell you, "life isn't fair."
I'm not talking about the weight of the crime, I'm talking about the justice of the punishment. Prosecuting both with the same penalty does not create justice in my mind, and I see we differ there.
Partial application of an existing law falls outside the bounds of the system, so according to the rules of the system that is unjust. Unfortunately we're bound by the agreed upon idea of fairness and justice by those that created and perpetuate the system, so I'm forced to agree within that context. I think this is the point where it would become a discussion of change within or from the system in the pursuit of greater justice, as the rules of the system permit injustice and the rules of the system, as you pointed out, do not mitigate that.
I'm not interested in viewing this as argu
The difference between penalties someone cultivating marijuana for their own use and someone cultivating it for sale is non-existent. Impartiality means we convict a cancer patient of cultivation and intent to distribute the same as a con. That is unjust.
Impartiality means we send someone to prison for the rest of their natural life under the Three Strikes law for shoplifting $2.69 worth of batteries. (Believe it: http://www.facts1.com/ThreeStrikes/Stories/)
I believe that answers your question; please let me know otherwise.
Justice is not served if injustice is brought to someone. Blanket impartiality breeds inequity and injustice.
Note that I'm not proposing an alternative, but merely pointing out that your statement about what society should do is itself partial. The idea of should is a difficult one to propose, and I'm typically wary of people who start off with should statements (as should you all be).
I want drug dealers, and blame the man for their absence :D
You're right. If slashdot allowed editing, I would amend my statement to say "with their bodies in the privacy of their homes." I like the idea of lives being lived in the "I don't fuck with you, you don't fuck with me" attitude. In that sense, jacking off in front of a primary school would definitely be considered fucking with someone.
Victimless crimes are the type I don't believe to be steadfastly wrong.
Prisons are America's 2 million person slave system. We bathe them, clothe them, feed them, and pay them 12 cents an hour. In return, they let us wake them at 5:30 AM six days a week, work them for eight hours in various state-supporting ways, then put them back in bed. It's not exactly "plenty of time to lift weights and convert to Islam."
It is true. While this article is a couple of years old, the data remains mostly the same today. Blacks: 12% of the population, as high as 30% of the prison population. Whites: 75% of the population, about the same for the prison population. While it gets better for you the whiter you are, non-black/non-white prisoners aren't much better off than the blacks.
- list/2001-July/003968.html
http://www.prisonactivist.org/pipermail/prisonact