The best part to me is that the supporters combine patriotism and religion. They love the commandments, considering them the foundation of American government and society. They carry a bible in one hand and a flag in the other... and yet the first three commandments are about as blatantly unconstitutional as is possible to get. It's impossible to reconcile them in any meaningful way.
But they won't. They'll find loopholes. Manipulations. Tricks to dodge any court ruling. Remember these people consider their religion infinitely more important than any earthly law. I can think of a few they can use: - A space is set aside from public monuments. All are permitted access. However, the site is exactly big enough for the ten commandments display and maybe a couple of crosses - anyone else is simply told the site is full. - Non-Christians can apply, and are legally treated equally... except that somehow their paperwork keeps getting misplaced, forms are written illegibly and filing fees don't get processed. Oddly enough, the clerks never seem to lose Christian paperwork. - 'Community decency' standards. Perfectly reasonable - wouldn't do to let someone submit a pornographic display, after all. It just happens that these standards prohibit anything which might be considered 'offensive' to a significant proportion of the community - which includes anything that could be considered as insulting Christianity. By, say, acknowledging other religions exist. - Filing fee or space rental, to prevent frivilous submissions. Perfectly fair: Every monument pays equally, regardless of content. But the fee is high enough that only very large churches can afford it - minority religions would struggle to raise enough money.
They can get complicated. I remember the excitement in one group when we discovered an exploit in Munchkin, a comparatively simple game, caused by the interaction between a class ability, a specific loot card, and a rather rare event. It takes a lot of luck, but when it happens it results in a player being able to pick up the entire loot deck at once.
Still have to discard anything over the hand limit at the end of your turn, but by then you've put down enough useful items to gain a near-unstoppable advantage. So powerful is this 'cleric-hoard' exploit, the munchkin FAQ has an entry specifically saying you're not supposed to do that.
Slight correction: The indecent media claim was made after the fact. He wasn't told why at the time. Also, there was no mention of child porn. Just regular, plain porn.
Translation: 'We were told to get this person out, so we thought we'd search his computer. With any luck we'll find something on there violating one law or another. There are so may of them, after all.'
This is also the reason many raids involve police visiting at three in the morning with a battering ram to smash the door down, then forcing everyone in the house to the ground at gunpoint. The idea is to get the suspects down and immobile as quickly as possible to make sure they don't have any time to destroy evidence.
At a guess, I expect they record all traffic with source or destination addressed of a specific IP (government official's home computers, that sort of thing), and also extract just summary data from certain protocols (All port 25 traffic will be checked to see if it's SMTP, and if so source/dest addresses and subjects captured, and possibly message bodies.) There's no point capturing, say, all facebook traffic when they can obtain it directly from Facebook's servers anyway.
I intented to say it is an inheritable characteristic, one which has been selected for because it confered a genetic advantage. Not for the individual, but for the gene, as it causes people to support their social and therefore genetic relatives at the expense of more genetically distant individuals. It's the trait that says 'Other tribes aren't people, so it's ok to slaughter them and steal their stuff to give to my own extended family.'
I'm sure the encoding is a lot more complicated than a simple 'shun the heretic' gene. Like much of human personality, it's going to be down to the exact interactions between hundreds of genes and their associated controlling DNA.
Taken in a modern context, it gives the ability to dismiss a whole class of people with ease. Like criminals. They get filed away in the 'not my tribe' box. Not real people. Probably a bunch of violent gansters, anyway. They must be scum, or they wouldn't be in prison, so let them suffer.
It is a fundamental part of the human mind to classify all other people as 'my tribe' and 'not my tribe.' It's written in right at the genetic level. People are naturally hard-wired to have no empathy at all for anyone who falls into the latter class, and a tendency to believe only the negative things heard about them.
It's the same basic mechanism behind racism or nationalism. Not my people? Not real people.
Solitary cells, and prison cells in general, are usually constructed to minimise any form of stimulation. Uniform grey walls, undecorated. Grey bedding on grey beds. Nothing that can be picked up or moved.
The root of the issue is that a large chunk of society really struggle with the idea of 'rehabilitation.' Instead they can only see the justice system as a deterrant - in their view, prisoners need to be made to suffer as much as possible, because the threat of this suffering is what stops other people from breaking the law. Modern decency stops them from openly advocating for torture, but they don't feel much like protesting against it either. Any attempt to improve education for prisoners or provide them with help back into the workforce or support after their release is just regarded as a 'weakness,' lessening the terror that prison is supposed to inspire in those contemplating crime.
So we end up with an industrial system for taking people who commit minor offenses, destroying them socially, destroying their education, ruining them financially, making them all but unemployable... and then we wonder why they turn to serious crime once they get out.
Or insulting guard. Or protesting against other ill-treatment. Or being targeted by another prisoner looking to start a fight. There's no judicial oversight or accountability involved, as the prisoner is, well, a prisoner. A warden simply announces 'that guy is a troublemaker, throw him into the isolation cell.'
It doesn't matter if what he did was impressive at all. The point remains: He did a few things, scared a few people, and was sentenced heavily as a public example, aided by prosecutors who were only too happy to outright lie about the threat he posed to add to the punishment. He may have been just douchebag who succeeded by persistence and luck rather than actual skill, but he was still sentenced and punished as if he were a super-hacker capable of bringing the world to its knees with a phone call.
The objective of prosecutors is to either reach a plea agreement that makes them look good, or to get the harshest sentence they possibly can. They will fight dirty to achieve that, and they can be very good at doing so. In their skillful manipulation of the narrative, a script kiddie who needs a good telling off can turn into a terrorist who caused millions of dollars in damages. Any hope of rehabilitation is thrown out the window.
Hacking, copyright infringement... either way, he is a non-violent offender. So why the solitary?
Idealists like to see the justice system as a center for protecting the public safety and rehabilitating offenders. More often, it's used to satisfy the public's sadistic desire to see suffering and ruin inflicted upon those who wrong them.
California makes a lot of use of 'not solitary confinement' as a way to combat prison gangs.
It involves prisoners being kept in single cell for 20 hours a day, with four hours allowed for exercise in a small yard and no communication permitted with other prisoners. Entertainment is not provided. Even books are not permitted, and these conditions can continue for years at the discretion of the head warden. Note that this is not legally solitary confinement, because *that* could be legally considered a form of torture if conducted for so long. Legally, it's simply a means to isolate suspected members of prison gangs.
In much the same way that certain other branches of the US government decided that waking inmates up every hour to verify they are not dead is only a means of preventing suicide, and not intentional sleep deprivation. Because that would be torture.
There's very little outrage about the California situation, because there is very little public sympathy for prisoners, and politicians fear being attacked by their opponents as 'soft on crime.'
Because: 1. Who else will you use? The other major search providers are just as evil when it comes to tracking. 2. Their algorithms are the best around. A few competitors come close - Bing will do when you're just looking for commonly available information. But when you're hunting the obscure, on a purely technological level, Google just do it best.
It's good for not making Skype, p2p programs, online games, FTP and IM file transfers break when ISPs are left with no option but to turn to carrier-level PAT to keep their networks functional.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that way, no. The plan is to give the plane a small mobile cell of its own, connected to the wider network via satellite backhaul.
The best part to me is that the supporters combine patriotism and religion. They love the commandments, considering them the foundation of American government and society. They carry a bible in one hand and a flag in the other... and yet the first three commandments are about as blatantly unconstitutional as is possible to get. It's impossible to reconcile them in any meaningful way.
But they won't. They'll find loopholes. Manipulations. Tricks to dodge any court ruling. Remember these people consider their religion infinitely more important than any earthly law. I can think of a few they can use:
- A space is set aside from public monuments. All are permitted access. However, the site is exactly big enough for the ten commandments display and maybe a couple of crosses - anyone else is simply told the site is full.
- Non-Christians can apply, and are legally treated equally... except that somehow their paperwork keeps getting misplaced, forms are written illegibly and filing fees don't get processed. Oddly enough, the clerks never seem to lose Christian paperwork.
- 'Community decency' standards. Perfectly reasonable - wouldn't do to let someone submit a pornographic display, after all. It just happens that these standards prohibit anything which might be considered 'offensive' to a significant proportion of the community - which includes anything that could be considered as insulting Christianity. By, say, acknowledging other religions exist.
- Filing fee or space rental, to prevent frivilous submissions. Perfectly fair: Every monument pays equally, regardless of content. But the fee is high enough that only very large churches can afford it - minority religions would struggle to raise enough money.
Milton Keynes shall be first.
I think they tried to translate it from internet-dialect to something a bit more formal.
Internet-dialect makes english teachers cry.
They can get complicated. I remember the excitement in one group when we discovered an exploit in Munchkin, a comparatively simple game, caused by the interaction between a class ability, a specific loot card, and a rather rare event. It takes a lot of luck, but when it happens it results in a player being able to pick up the entire loot deck at once.
Still have to discard anything over the hand limit at the end of your turn, but by then you've put down enough useful items to gain a near-unstoppable advantage. So powerful is this 'cleric-hoard' exploit, the munchkin FAQ has an entry specifically saying you're not supposed to do that.
Maximum two years jail time, RIP Act (2000).
Prosecutions are rare, simply because not many people use encryption, but there have been a few.
Slight correction: The indecent media claim was made after the fact. He wasn't told why at the time. Also, there was no mention of child porn. Just regular, plain porn.
I don't think some of those devices could afford a backdoor.
Translation: 'We were told to get this person out, so we thought we'd search his computer. With any luck we'll find something on there violating one law or another. There are so may of them, after all.'
This is also the reason many raids involve police visiting at three in the morning with a battering ram to smash the door down, then forcing everyone in the house to the ground at gunpoint. The idea is to get the suspects down and immobile as quickly as possible to make sure they don't have any time to destroy evidence.
So it's a request with paperwork.
Here in the UK, refusal to give a password to the police upon request is itsself a crime.
They won't be storing it all.
At a guess, I expect they record all traffic with source or destination addressed of a specific IP (government official's home computers, that sort of thing), and also extract just summary data from certain protocols (All port 25 traffic will be checked to see if it's SMTP, and if so source/dest addresses and subjects captured, and possibly message bodies.) There's no point capturing, say, all facebook traffic when they can obtain it directly from Facebook's servers anyway.
I intented to say it is an inheritable characteristic, one which has been selected for because it confered a genetic advantage. Not for the individual, but for the gene, as it causes people to support their social and therefore genetic relatives at the expense of more genetically distant individuals. It's the trait that says 'Other tribes aren't people, so it's ok to slaughter them and steal their stuff to give to my own extended family.'
I'm sure the encoding is a lot more complicated than a simple 'shun the heretic' gene. Like much of human personality, it's going to be down to the exact interactions between hundreds of genes and their associated controlling DNA.
Taken in a modern context, it gives the ability to dismiss a whole class of people with ease. Like criminals. They get filed away in the 'not my tribe' box. Not real people. Probably a bunch of violent gansters, anyway. They must be scum, or they wouldn't be in prison, so let them suffer.
It is a fundamental part of the human mind to classify all other people as 'my tribe' and 'not my tribe.' It's written in right at the genetic level. People are naturally hard-wired to have no empathy at all for anyone who falls into the latter class, and a tendency to believe only the negative things heard about them.
It's the same basic mechanism behind racism or nationalism. Not my people? Not real people.
Solitary cells, and prison cells in general, are usually constructed to minimise any form of stimulation. Uniform grey walls, undecorated. Grey bedding on grey beds. Nothing that can be picked up or moved.
The root of the issue is that a large chunk of society really struggle with the idea of 'rehabilitation.' Instead they can only see the justice system as a deterrant - in their view, prisoners need to be made to suffer as much as possible, because the threat of this suffering is what stops other people from breaking the law. Modern decency stops them from openly advocating for torture, but they don't feel much like protesting against it either. Any attempt to improve education for prisoners or provide them with help back into the workforce or support after their release is just regarded as a 'weakness,' lessening the terror that prison is supposed to inspire in those contemplating crime.
So we end up with an industrial system for taking people who commit minor offenses, destroying them socially, destroying their education, ruining them financially, making them all but unemployable... and then we wonder why they turn to serious crime once they get out.
Or insulting guard. Or protesting against other ill-treatment. Or being targeted by another prisoner looking to start a fight. There's no judicial oversight or accountability involved, as the prisoner is, well, a prisoner. A warden simply announces 'that guy is a troublemaker, throw him into the isolation cell.'
It doesn't matter if what he did was impressive at all. The point remains: He did a few things, scared a few people, and was sentenced heavily as a public example, aided by prosecutors who were only too happy to outright lie about the threat he posed to add to the punishment. He may have been just douchebag who succeeded by persistence and luck rather than actual skill, but he was still sentenced and punished as if he were a super-hacker capable of bringing the world to its knees with a phone call.
The objective of prosecutors is to either reach a plea agreement that makes them look good, or to get the harshest sentence they possibly can. They will fight dirty to achieve that, and they can be very good at doing so. In their skillful manipulation of the narrative, a script kiddie who needs a good telling off can turn into a terrorist who caused millions of dollars in damages. Any hope of rehabilitation is thrown out the window.
Hacking, copyright infringement... either way, he is a non-violent offender. So why the solitary?
Idealists like to see the justice system as a center for protecting the public safety and rehabilitating offenders. More often, it's used to satisfy the public's sadistic desire to see suffering and ruin inflicted upon those who wrong them.
Many judges wouldn't know the difference. Many prosecutors wouldn't care.
California makes a lot of use of 'not solitary confinement' as a way to combat prison gangs.
It involves prisoners being kept in single cell for 20 hours a day, with four hours allowed for exercise in a small yard and no communication permitted with other prisoners. Entertainment is not provided. Even books are not permitted, and these conditions can continue for years at the discretion of the head warden. Note that this is not legally solitary confinement, because *that* could be legally considered a form of torture if conducted for so long. Legally, it's simply a means to isolate suspected members of prison gangs.
In much the same way that certain other branches of the US government decided that waking inmates up every hour to verify they are not dead is only a means of preventing suicide, and not intentional sleep deprivation. Because that would be torture.
There's very little outrage about the California situation, because there is very little public sympathy for prisoners, and politicians fear being attacked by their opponents as 'soft on crime.'
Because:
1. Who else will you use? The other major search providers are just as evil when it comes to tracking.
2. Their algorithms are the best around. A few competitors come close - Bing will do when you're just looking for commonly available information. But when you're hunting the obscure, on a purely technological level, Google just do it best.
It's good for not making Skype, p2p programs, online games, FTP and IM file transfers break when ISPs are left with no option but to turn to carrier-level PAT to keep their networks functional.
My workplace does.
I work at a school. All the IT course instructions are written assuming Windows and Office.
Do not underestimate the ignorance of users. If a menu item isn't in the place they expect it to be, they go calling for helpdesk.