Nah, this is just a good excuse to bring up a continuing topic in the nerd community which hasn't had a headline recently.
Besides, most people know, what, a couple thousand people well enough that they would say, 'yes, I know a person who was sued'? So what would the math be, fifteen thousand lawsuits, by a couple thousand acquaintances, is about thirty million, so one in ten Americans would know a defendant.
Or try lower numbers: let's say you only know five hundred people well enough, and there were only ten thousand lawsuits, that would be five million acquaintances, or one acquaintance per sixty Americans.
But it's not surprising that both you and I are in the fifty-nine out of sixty people who don't have such an acquaintance.
Really? I would have demanded a little more information. That organization in fact slandered you with false accusations, and you could have a tort against them. It would hardly ever come to that, but you could have fun writing letters and disturbing their lawyers for a while.
Yeah. A couple years ago I got a cease and desist letter. It was hilarious. I lived in an apartment building and ran an intentionally open wireless network. (I had one private with password, one public with no password. I did this as an anonymous favor to my building mates.) One day I got a letter threatening action if I didn't stop downloading, or whatever, and the specific movie they were complaining about was "I Love You, Man".
Now listen to me. Listen carefully. I would never, ever, not in a million years, be interested in "I Love You, Man". I certainly was downloading other things, but there is no way that I would have ever searched for that movie, let alone spent any effort to pirate it. Never.
So, I just ignored the fucking letter. I didn't close my wireless, I didn't warn my neighbors, and I never got another letter. Fuck them. I wasn't very afraid of a lawsuit (because they are rare), and in the unlikely scenario of being sued, I could be another good example of why an IP address does not identify a human being. It would have been a ton of hassle, and I hate hassle, but I'm also just the right kind of asshole to push back against them, if it ever came to that.
However, if they caught me downloading stuff that I actually did download, well then I'd probably push back a little, and then settle. You do the crime, you pay the dime.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that private IT installations have lower downtime averages than cloud services? I've never known that to be true -- in fact exactly the opposite. And if that's not what you are saying, then doesn't that pretty much completely raze your point?
I'm not clear on your point. Do you want me to own two vehicles, instead of the one I own now? One small car to take me back and forth to work, plus a larger one for utility purposes? And then also buy a larger house to garage them both? I haven't done the math, but I'm assuming you have -- how much less energy does it take to manufacture two vehicles, plus a double-size garage, versus just having one vehicle and a single-car garage? I'm sure you can tell me, since obviously you know.
It's also why Volvos are such "safe" cars. Someone has to be pretty desperately concerned for their safety before buying something that ugly.
Really? Are you sure about that? So, if I go look it up, Volvos won't historically be at the top of the curve in crash ratings? Are you sure, or are you just pulling shit out of your ass?
To be clear, I'm not sure. I'd have to go look it up. I'm just wondering if you are the kind of person who bases his beliefs and statements on reality, or whether you form opinions and then twist reality to fit them.
Why didn't you count the vast majority of costs, and focus on only the human lives lost? Is it because your point is so completely wrong that you have to mislead people by leaving out the most important details? or is it because you have a genuine disdain for human life and take ever opportunity to disparage it?
I was ignoring a lof things. It is called a back of the envelope calculation, to see if a proposal passes the smell test.
Right. And your calculation doesn't pass the smell test, because it ignores about 95% of the costs. Good try, though. Next time throw in juuuuust a little more thought, and your trolling won't be so obvious.
Whatever you do, don't ever make the mistake of taking what you posted seriously. I fear that some people actually believe bullshit like that.
I hadn't thought about it that way. Is that right? The law does recognize the difference between, say, cold blooded and hot blooded murder. Isn't that the same as the difference between regular battery and hate-crime battery? Maybe we in this thread have been using the term-of-art "intent" when we should have used a more precise word. Is the right term "state of mind"? If you are a lawyer, or especially knowledgeable, then you can help find the right word.
Fair enough, at least you are consistent. If you disagree with prosecuting a person who hires a hitman, then that is indeed a pretty extreme position to take, but I give you the benefit of the doubt that you take it seriously, or at least think you do.
Tell me, do you understand where people are coming from when they do support the hitman prosecution scenario? or do you not even understand that point of view?
"Why not encourage suicidal people to go ahead and do it?"
I'm not trying to intellectualize it: the answer is because it offends my sense of humanity, and I think the sense of humanity of most people. In almost all circumstances it is grossly unhuman to wish death on a person.
Oh okay, I get you. You don't think the lawyer should waste his time getting the judge to certify this 18-year-old as a minor for the purposes of prosecution. Well worry not! I don't think the lawyer will try to do that, because he would almost certainly fail. Just like you want, I'm pretty sure this 18-year-old will stand trial as an adult who's responsible for his actions!
As for what the lawyer said to these journalists, I think it's a standard part of the work of a lawyer to generate public sympathy for his client zealously, \using language artfully to spin the situation in the best light for his client. It's fine for us to disagree on whether it is appropriate for a lawyer to do so; I think it is appropriate.
"These are politically motivated lists, not carefully planned efforts at protecting society from itself."
My first question is, why can't they be both? What you said is what I said. Legislators meeting with constituents is covered by "sitting around coming up with the list".
My second question is, aren't all laws politically motivated? That's pretty much the point of... you know... politics.
Elsewhere I've been discussing that depending on how the law is written, nerds and homeless people can appear by default. Or, the law can be written very narrowly.
If your complaint is that they only protect certain classes, then I have to presume that you are calling for these laws to be massively expanded and applied much more broadly? I don't know, as a moderate I think some laws like these are best written to be narrow and specific. But hey, you could probably convince me to massively expand them.
I can't think of a way that you could be blamed for someone's suicide because of a mere exchange of words they didn't like. For you to misrepresent bullying as an exchange of words, uncovers you as either an extreme ignoramus, or as a person willing to engage in false equivalencies in order to bolster a political position. I am guessing you are the second of those two, because nobody could equate bullying with talking.
I've only heard of a person being prosecuted for causing a suicide in a few very extreme circumstances such as * a person threatening to kill herself, in an extreme rage, and a second person handing them a loaded gun. This has happened, and I'm not sure how the court ruled. * a person bullying a fragile and vulnerable person, suggesting over and over that they kill themself, until they actually do it. I don't actually know if this has been successfully prosecuted, but recently it was unsuccessfully prosecuted, when that horrible woman bullied her daughter's classmate. * this situation in this story, which is even weaker than the first two, and my guess is that the prosecution will not be successful. But it might be, if the law fits the situation.
One last thing: "blamed for someone's suicide (that seriously makes no sense to me)"
The law sometimes recognizes guilt for indirect actions. For instance, you can be convicted of murder if you hire a hitman to kill someone, even though you "merely exchanged words" with the hitman. In fact there are lots of laws like that.
In the end this case will probably come down to the question "could the bully have reasonably foreseen that the roommate would kill himself?" My guess is that the answer is no, so that charge will not be successful. Prosecutors commonly charge a defendant with a bunch of extra crimes, as part of the trial tactics.
I would object to those laws, but I would never object to them based on some bullshit nonsense like "government isn't allowed to regulate manners". Regulating manners, which is tantamount to regulating human behavior, is what the law does.
I would object otherwise: I would object based on the laws not making the world a better place; I would object because I prefer not to have those laws. (Except public nudity, I don't necessarily object to that law, depending on the specifics.)
Where do you live? Here in the United States, hate crimes are defined as crimes motivated by particular categories -- race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.
I admit that I am not a criminal lawyer. My understanding fits the wiki description:
"In crime and law, hate crimes (also known as bias-motivated crimes) occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, social status or political affiliation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime
"WoW nerds" would be a "social group" or "social status". I suppose it depends on how the law is written. Perhaps a WoW-hate-crime would fit the general description of a hate crime, but not the specific statute in this locality. If you can speak to the specific law in this case, by citing it and showing me that it doesn't include social groups or social status, then I will concede the point.
How about applying it equally? If it were just a matter of "well this guy really hated this other person for being $XYZ," then we would not have amended the law in 2009 to include sexual orientation as a factor.
So, again it depends on how the law is written. Most laws are written with a general principle, and then a long list of definitions. For instance, "speeding" is a crime because it is one of the definitions given for "reckless driving". The law says something like "no person shall drive recklessly, which shall consist of...(among other things) speeding". It would be something like that (I know that one because I've looked it up). So, my assumption is that a hate crime law says something like "battery and murder laws shall have an added 5-years of jail time if motivated by hate such as... (among other things) based on sexual orientation". But even if the law is more narrow than that, applying only to specified classes, that doesn't in any way invalidate it.
Let me ask you this: if the law is open-ended, specifying protection against hate crimes generally, then would you support it? If not, then it's not fair for you to try to claim that as the reason you object.
"We are starting to get into the idea that there are different sorts of hate and different degrees of it....Hate is hate."
I'm not sure what you mean. I certainly think there are different sorts of hate and different degrees of it. Is that something you disagree with? How could you possibly disagree with that?
And to be clear, we don't try to legislate away all hate. We target specific, narrow bands of the most pernicious criminal acts exacerbated by hate.
I'm not following your whole reasoning here, but the initial post to which you replied was proffering a new legal category, which is to say a legal category for consequences imposed by law by the state. It would thus be meaningless for you to say that government shouldn't mention behaviors that don't have consequences -- because they would have consequences.
I'm not sure you have a point at all (which is fine), but if you do you haven't made it clearly. I'm sort of dumb though so things have to be clear before I can understand them.
Slashdot Mirror
No it's not. Why would it be? IP addresses don't commit copyright infringement.
Nah, this is just a good excuse to bring up a continuing topic in the nerd community which hasn't had a headline recently.
Besides, most people know, what, a couple thousand people well enough that they would say, 'yes, I know a person who was sued'? So what would the math be, fifteen thousand lawsuits, by a couple thousand acquaintances, is about thirty million, so one in ten Americans would know a defendant.
Or try lower numbers: let's say you only know five hundred people well enough, and there were only ten thousand lawsuits, that would be five million acquaintances, or one acquaintance per sixty Americans.
But it's not surprising that both you and I are in the fifty-nine out of sixty people who don't have such an acquaintance.
Really? I would have demanded a little more information. That organization in fact slandered you with false accusations, and you could have a tort against them. It would hardly ever come to that, but you could have fun writing letters and disturbing their lawyers for a while.
Yeah. A couple years ago I got a cease and desist letter. It was hilarious. I lived in an apartment building and ran an intentionally open wireless network. (I had one private with password, one public with no password. I did this as an anonymous favor to my building mates.) One day I got a letter threatening action if I didn't stop downloading, or whatever, and the specific movie they were complaining about was "I Love You, Man".
Now listen to me. Listen carefully. I would never, ever, not in a million years, be interested in "I Love You, Man". I certainly was downloading other things, but there is no way that I would have ever searched for that movie, let alone spent any effort to pirate it. Never.
So, I just ignored the fucking letter. I didn't close my wireless, I didn't warn my neighbors, and I never got another letter. Fuck them. I wasn't very afraid of a lawsuit (because they are rare), and in the unlikely scenario of being sued, I could be another good example of why an IP address does not identify a human being. It would have been a ton of hassle, and I hate hassle, but I'm also just the right kind of asshole to push back against them, if it ever came to that.
However, if they caught me downloading stuff that I actually did download, well then I'd probably push back a little, and then settle. You do the crime, you pay the dime.
Ah, yes, reading text on BBSs at 2400 baud. To this day, I still read at exactly that pace. True story.
Holy shit that is the deepest nest of +5 comments in a row I've ever seen.
You both make good points which do not exactly contradict each other.
That depends on your needs. What are you developing? If not an OS, then you have a heck of a lot of options.
What ads? The web has ads?
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that private IT installations have lower downtime averages than cloud services? I've never known that to be true -- in fact exactly the opposite. And if that's not what you are saying, then doesn't that pretty much completely raze your point?
I doubt it. We'll see this headline in 2018, except where today it reads "Barack Obama", then it will say "Jeb Bush".
But, I share your hope, just not much of it.
I'm not clear on your point. Do you want me to own two vehicles, instead of the one I own now? One small car to take me back and forth to work, plus a larger one for utility purposes? And then also buy a larger house to garage them both? I haven't done the math, but I'm assuming you have -- how much less energy does it take to manufacture two vehicles, plus a double-size garage, versus just having one vehicle and a single-car garage? I'm sure you can tell me, since obviously you know.
It's also why Volvos are such "safe" cars. Someone has to be pretty desperately concerned for their safety before buying something that ugly.
Really? Are you sure about that? So, if I go look it up, Volvos won't historically be at the top of the curve in crash ratings? Are you sure, or are you just pulling shit out of your ass?
To be clear, I'm not sure. I'd have to go look it up. I'm just wondering if you are the kind of person who bases his beliefs and statements on reality, or whether you form opinions and then twist reality to fit them.
Why didn't you count the vast majority of costs, and focus on only the human lives lost? Is it because your point is so completely wrong that you have to mislead people by leaving out the most important details? or is it because you have a genuine disdain for human life and take ever opportunity to disparage it?
I was ignoring a lof things. It is called a back of the envelope calculation, to see if a proposal passes the smell test.
Right. And your calculation doesn't pass the smell test, because it ignores about 95% of the costs. Good try, though. Next time throw in juuuuust a little more thought, and your trolling won't be so obvious.
Whatever you do, don't ever make the mistake of taking what you posted seriously. I fear that some people actually believe bullshit like that.
I bought one. It's a fun toy. I also travel with it, instead of my bigass 17-inch laptop. I'm quite satisfied not to have an iPad.
I hadn't thought about it that way. Is that right? The law does recognize the difference between, say, cold blooded and hot blooded murder. Isn't that the same as the difference between regular battery and hate-crime battery? Maybe we in this thread have been using the term-of-art "intent" when we should have used a more precise word. Is the right term "state of mind"? If you are a lawyer, or especially knowledgeable, then you can help find the right word.
Fair enough, at least you are consistent. If you disagree with prosecuting a person who hires a hitman, then that is indeed a pretty extreme position to take, but I give you the benefit of the doubt that you take it seriously, or at least think you do.
Tell me, do you understand where people are coming from when they do support the hitman prosecution scenario? or do you not even understand that point of view?
"Why not encourage suicidal people to go ahead and do it?"
I'm not trying to intellectualize it: the answer is because it offends my sense of humanity, and I think the sense of humanity of most people. In almost all circumstances it is grossly unhuman to wish death on a person.
Oh okay, I get you. You don't think the lawyer should waste his time getting the judge to certify this 18-year-old as a minor for the purposes of prosecution. Well worry not! I don't think the lawyer will try to do that, because he would almost certainly fail. Just like you want, I'm pretty sure this 18-year-old will stand trial as an adult who's responsible for his actions!
As for what the lawyer said to these journalists, I think it's a standard part of the work of a lawyer to generate public sympathy for his client zealously, \using language artfully to spin the situation in the best light for his client. It's fine for us to disagree on whether it is appropriate for a lawyer to do so; I think it is appropriate.
"These are politically motivated lists, not carefully planned efforts at protecting society from itself."
My first question is, why can't they be both? What you said is what I said. Legislators meeting with constituents is covered by "sitting around coming up with the list".
My second question is, aren't all laws politically motivated? That's pretty much the point of... you know... politics.
Elsewhere I've been discussing that depending on how the law is written, nerds and homeless people can appear by default. Or, the law can be written very narrowly.
If your complaint is that they only protect certain classes, then I have to presume that you are calling for these laws to be massively expanded and applied much more broadly? I don't know, as a moderate I think some laws like these are best written to be narrow and specific. But hey, you could probably convince me to massively expand them.
I can't think of a way that you could be blamed for someone's suicide because of a mere exchange of words they didn't like. For you to misrepresent bullying as an exchange of words, uncovers you as either an extreme ignoramus, or as a person willing to engage in false equivalencies in order to bolster a political position. I am guessing you are the second of those two, because nobody could equate bullying with talking.
I've only heard of a person being prosecuted for causing a suicide in a few very extreme circumstances such as
* a person threatening to kill herself, in an extreme rage, and a second person handing them a loaded gun. This has happened, and I'm not sure how the court ruled.
* a person bullying a fragile and vulnerable person, suggesting over and over that they kill themself, until they actually do it. I don't actually know if this has been successfully prosecuted, but recently it was unsuccessfully prosecuted, when that horrible woman bullied her daughter's classmate.
* this situation in this story, which is even weaker than the first two, and my guess is that the prosecution will not be successful. But it might be, if the law fits the situation.
One last thing: "blamed for someone's suicide (that seriously makes no sense to me)"
The law sometimes recognizes guilt for indirect actions. For instance, you can be convicted of murder if you hire a hitman to kill someone, even though you "merely exchanged words" with the hitman. In fact there are lots of laws like that.
In the end this case will probably come down to the question "could the bully have reasonably foreseen that the roommate would kill himself?" My guess is that the answer is no, so that charge will not be successful. Prosecutors commonly charge a defendant with a bunch of extra crimes, as part of the trial tactics.
I would object to those laws, but I would never object to them based on some bullshit nonsense like "government isn't allowed to regulate manners". Regulating manners, which is tantamount to regulating human behavior, is what the law does.
I would object otherwise: I would object based on the laws not making the world a better place; I would object because I prefer not to have those laws. (Except public nudity, I don't necessarily object to that law, depending on the specifics.)
Where do you live? Here in the United States, hate crimes are defined as crimes motivated by particular categories -- race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.
I admit that I am not a criminal lawyer. My understanding fits the wiki description:
"In crime and law, hate crimes (also known as bias-motivated crimes) occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, social status or political affiliation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime
"WoW nerds" would be a "social group" or "social status". I suppose it depends on how the law is written. Perhaps a WoW-hate-crime would fit the general description of a hate crime, but not the specific statute in this locality. If you can speak to the specific law in this case, by citing it and showing me that it doesn't include social groups or social status, then I will concede the point.
How about applying it equally? If it were just a matter of "well this guy really hated this other person for being $XYZ," then we would not have amended the law in 2009 to include sexual orientation as a factor.
So, again it depends on how the law is written. Most laws are written with a general principle, and then a long list of definitions. For instance, "speeding" is a crime because it is one of the definitions given for "reckless driving". The law says something like "no person shall drive recklessly, which shall consist of...(among other things) speeding". It would be something like that (I know that one because I've looked it up). So, my assumption is that a hate crime law says something like "battery and murder laws shall have an added 5-years of jail time if motivated by hate such as... (among other things) based on sexual orientation". But even if the law is more narrow than that, applying only to specified classes, that doesn't in any way invalidate it.
Let me ask you this: if the law is open-ended, specifying protection against hate crimes generally, then would you support it? If not, then it's not fair for you to try to claim that as the reason you object.
"We are starting to get into the idea that there are different sorts of hate and different degrees of it. ...Hate is hate."
I'm not sure what you mean. I certainly think there are different sorts of hate and different degrees of it. Is that something you disagree with? How could you possibly disagree with that?
And to be clear, we don't try to legislate away all hate. We target specific, narrow bands of the most pernicious criminal acts exacerbated by hate.
I'm not following your whole reasoning here, but the initial post to which you replied was proffering a new legal category, which is to say a legal category for consequences imposed by law by the state. It would thus be meaningless for you to say that government shouldn't mention behaviors that don't have consequences -- because they would have consequences.
I'm not sure you have a point at all (which is fine), but if you do you haven't made it clearly. I'm sort of dumb though so things have to be clear before I can understand them.