The sites are still there! Okay, so you can't see them. The out of site out of mind attitude is not going to help. Kids are still going to be abused. Find out who hosts the sites, shut them down, and arrest the owners!
In fact, people seem to be missing what the actual problem is here. It's not that people download it (not that that's a good thing). The main problem is that people create it in the first place. That is the part that does the most harm.
Well, I don't disagree that the United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In the past I would have agreed with you, but since I find myself disagreeing with everything Mr. Brown has to say, I can only conclude that this is untrue.
You are taking away money from the competition, and putting ads on a page that most people ignore anyway. This isn't something to get your panties in a bunch about.
At the risk of sounding like an internet stereotype, I agree.
Go argue about which editor or distro is the best... it'll make you feel better;-)
Debian. And if you disagree with me, you're a total l0s3r
Not neccesarily. But I can see the validity in the point of "how can we trust them to post unbiased reviews when they are funded by Microsoft"
I can see the argument. I think it's only reasonable to wait until there's any evidence at all that they've sold out before boycotting them for selling out.
In fact, last time I bought a machine it was less than half that. And by the time there's any game that it can't run, I can spend the same again to get a machine that is faster than any PC on the market today.
Except I won't. I don't think I'll need a new monitor, keyboard or mouse, and I can probably skip a generation for the DVD writer.
It's not about guarentees. It's about the company taking full respinsibility. They can just insure themselves against ludicrously improbably events, have a maximum liability.
But even if you don't want to, running a business is a risk. Perhaps you will lose everything if a gamma ray burst destroys half the planet, or if your servers get clobbered my a meteor. The chances of this happeneing are so remote, that it's not worth considering. If you make multiple backups to multiple servers, then it's possible that the company will still lose the data, but if they do, it's up to them to take full responsibility.
I simply run a script that grabs all my email from my free provider, stores it locally, and forwards it to another email address. It's hardly rocket science.
Of course hotmail isn't much use for this since it doesn't suppoert IMAP, but there are many free email providers that do. Use one of them.
If someone is beating you, you have a good idea where they are, even if blinded. Being a human, or maybe even getting a look at the mugger before he sprayed you, you have a good idea where his head should be.
You're expecting a lot from someone who has been temporarily blinded, in great pain, and disoriented having been attacked.
Better a blind victim & a blind mugger than a blind victim minus wallet/valuables and a mugger prancing happily away.
Those aren't the options I was presenting though. If the mugger can't get hold of pepper spray, then they victim will not be blinded. Personally, I quite like the fact that muggers can't get hold of the things.
So, why haven't they improved on this behaviour, like for example having a configuration whereby middle click allows you to paste one of the past few cuts? Or have some means to highlight without copying? Windows has the capability to cut and paste without the keyboard after all. Why hasn't X evolved?
Anyway, I thought this was an argument about it being illegal in general. Not about whether there could be extenuating circumstances. Should a potential mugger be allowed to have pepper spray? Would it be a lot of use for defence if someone sprayed you first?
What sort of a moron carries a fork around wherever they go!?
A pen knife is not primarily used as an offensive weapon. Perhaps it could unjure someone, but generally speaking the blades are too short on them to be a lot of use as a weapon.
A "weapon", really a class of tool, is neither offensive nor defensive. The method of employment is. You can conduct an offense or a defense, but labeling a tool that can be used in a variety of ways as offensive or defensive is simply arbitrary.
Surely any tool that is intended primarily to inflict harm is an offensive weapon. We're not labelling tools. We're labelling intent.
. Law enforcement personnel are armed with handguns for the purpose of defending themselves.
The baton is intended for defence. The gun is there for protection perhaps, but is still an offensive weapon.
Finding another way (other than using a firearm) to deal with a situation where your life is in danger is a terribly difficult.
Using a firearm to deal with a situation where your life is in danger is also difficult. Is the attacker going to wait for you to get it out?
That wheelchair-bound person doesn't have a whole lot of "other ways" to employ.
Nope. He's at a great disadvantage. a gun isn't going to help much either.
Neither does the woman who is a hundred pounds lighter and ten inches shorter than her attacker have many "other ways" that are as effective and proven as legally employing a firearm.
Run away. Fast.
Is the 80 year old man expected to fight off a 17 year-old attacker with his jujitsu skills?
He could avoid places where he might get mugged. Is he going to have a chance to shoot?
Or can we even expect a reasonably fit adult male to "find another way" when confronted by several other reasonably fit adult males?
Run away. Fast.
But if we proscribe that last option of firing a handgun at an attacker because posession of that handgun is banned, what have we effectively done?
Removed handguns from the the muggers?
The net effect of mandating "find another option" only increases the number of dead victims, provided permit holders comply with the law.
So we just have to make sure that permit holding muggers comply with the law.
I never said anything about having no immediate use for a tool. I said "Without good reason". The fact that it may come in useful is a good reason.
You claim that this multitool is deadly. I took that to mean that it would actually be worthwhile as a weapon. The fact that it's deadly means that if you were also acting in a suspicious manner, and a policeman saw you, I would expect him to ask why you have it. You seem to think that this is the act of a tyrant.
They listen to large donations from influential corporate entities much more.
This is less of a problem in Europe than the US. Campaign spending is limited, even if paid for by other people. I believe all donations have to be declared by the parties.
It's not as if any of the other parties have a different policy, so it's not like you can threaten them with voting for the other guy either.
No, but I can convince them that I will vote for them instead of the other guy if they change their policy.
With DeCSS, there was a reasonable argument made that the decrypted data could be copied (and for some reason the defence didn't point out that so could the encrypted data).
The last time the DMCA was used against hardware manufacturers (Chamberlain garage door openers), the case was dismissed.
Last one I remember is Dunblane in 1996. 17 people were killed (although by an adult rather than other students). If This site on school sshootings is anything to go by, the chances of being shot at school do seem to be quite low wherever you are. Much lower than deaths caused by dustmites, for example.
As an aside, I think the US only has a population around 5 times that of Great Britain.
Suppose I just like carrying it around, and wore a T-shirt with black letters that said "I have no use for my multitool"?
Then why the hell are you carrying it around!? If I was a police officer, I'd ask you why you were carrying it. And I'd make sure I kept my eye on you if nothing else.
This guy was carrying around pepper spray. Well, what possible reason could he have for doing this, you are asking? I'm answering - to defend himself against muggers, in a place he'd already been attacked before. You say - but there's no good reason for anyone to be legally able to carry it because it can be misused!
And I still say there's no use at all for pepper spray, apart from as a weapon. I just don't agree that people should be carrying weapons around.
And you're happily highlighting my point with your bizarre circular logic which completely precludes the likelihood that someone should think about defending themselves.
No... people are entitled to defend themselves. They shouldn't use offensive weapons to do so. They can find another way.
You said "The trouble is, that pepper spray could also be used as an offensive weapon for disabling a victim, and muggers are more likely to get the stuff.". So, your argument is that, if banned, only muggers are more likely to have it, so therefore it should be banned? What?
Ermmmm... NO! If it is NOT banned, muggers are more likely to have it. Where do the muggers get it from if banned? If it is legally available for personal defence, then a mugger will just go to a shop and buy a can. If it is totally banned, then a mugger will have to go to greater expense to get it, which, if he could afford to do, he probably wouldn't go for such a low yield crime in the first place.
Again, what it boils down to (I think) in your mind is that : If something can be misused, despite the fact that it can be used in legitimate defense of one's own person, it is proscribed.
Not quite. My argument is that the potential for personal defence is not in itself a justification for making offensive weapons freely available.
Your argument seems to be that anything that could conceivably be used to defend against muggers should be permitted, even if it is more useful to the mugger, and that banning some things that may be used as a weapon would neccesitate banning everything that could be used as a weapon.
Once you start dictating what you can and cannot do based on need, you can take away anything you like. Today I'm carrying around my 20+ deadly-steel-tool Shrade multitool, despite the fact that I'm not doing any work. Should I be disallowed from doing that?
Nope. Presumably you're carrying around for some reason.
Or maybe if I was just required to pre-file in triplicate the days I was planning on using it, along with a signed affadavit stating I was heading to my house to do some handyman work - that wouldn't be an infringement of my liberties, right?
Of course it would. It would require undue inconvenience. I don't think anyone should have a right even to challenge you on it unless they have some reasonable suspicion that you may be intending to do somebody harm.
Do you really live in that much acute fear every day that you need control on such a fine-grained level?
What's fine grained? I can't think of any reason that someone would want to carry a sharp piece of wood around with them, unless they were a mugger, vampire hunter, or happened to be going camping. The restriction on my doing so therefore doesn't infringe my liberties. Nor does it infringe the liberties of the vampire hunter or the camper, since they both have a perfectly good reason to be carrying sharp pieces of wood.
Here's a question I love hearing the answers to : You're in a room with your child standing behind you. You're holding a loaded.357 revolver. A guy 100 pounds heavier and 6" taller than you is walking towards you with a knife saying "I'm going to kill you and your child." Would you shoot him?
Assuming I don't have the chance to pick up the kid and run away, and there was absolutely no other option, of course I'd shoot him.
I'm not going to carry a gun around just in case though.
Slashdot Mirror
The sites are still there! Okay, so you can't see them. The out of site out of mind attitude is not going to help. Kids are still going to be abused. Find out who hosts the sites, shut them down, and arrest the owners!
In fact, people seem to be missing what the actual problem is here. It's not that people download it (not that that's a good thing). The main problem is that people create it in the first place. That is the part that does the most harm.
Well, I don't disagree that the United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In the past I would have agreed with you, but since I find myself disagreeing with everything Mr. Brown has to say, I can only conclude that this is untrue.
You are taking away money from the competition, and putting ads on a page that most people ignore anyway. This isn't something to get your panties in a bunch about.
;-)
At the risk of sounding like an internet stereotype, I agree.
Go argue about which editor or distro is the best... it'll make you feel better
Debian. And if you disagree with me, you're a total l0s3r
Not neccesarily. But I can see the validity in the point of "how can we trust them to post unbiased reviews when they are funded by Microsoft"
I can see the argument. I think it's only reasonable to wait until there's any evidence at all that they've sold out before boycotting them for selling out.
In fact, last time I bought a machine it was less than half that. And by the time there's any game that it can't run, I can spend the same again to get a machine that is faster than any PC on the market today.
Except I won't. I don't think I'll need a new monitor, keyboard or mouse, and I can probably skip a generation for the DVD writer.
Good thinking. I can build a dish into a sombrero, and it will keep the sun out of my eyes as well.
I haven't used it for a while though. I moved to an area where we don't get cable, so there wasn't really anything to watch.
It's not about guarentees. It's about the company taking full respinsibility. They can just insure themselves against ludicrously improbably events, have a maximum liability.
But even if you don't want to, running a business is a risk. Perhaps you will lose everything if a gamma ray burst destroys half the planet, or if your servers get clobbered my a meteor. The chances of this happeneing are so remote, that it's not worth considering. If you make multiple backups to multiple servers, then it's possible that the company will still lose the data, but if they do, it's up to them to take full responsibility.
I simply run a script that grabs all my email from my free provider, stores it locally, and forwards it to another email address. It's hardly rocket science.
Of course hotmail isn't much use for this since it doesn't suppoert IMAP, but there are many free email providers that do. Use one of them.
If someone is beating you, you have a good idea where they are, even if blinded. Being a human, or maybe even getting a look at the mugger before he sprayed you, you have a good idea where his head should be.
You're expecting a lot from someone who has been temporarily blinded, in great pain, and disoriented having been attacked.
Better a blind victim & a blind mugger than a blind victim minus wallet/valuables and a mugger prancing happily away.
Those aren't the options I was presenting though. If the mugger can't get hold of pepper spray, then they victim will not be blinded. Personally, I quite like the fact that muggers can't get hold of the things.
It is if you're carrying it around with the intention of causing harm to others.
So, why haven't they improved on this behaviour, like for example having a configuration whereby middle click allows you to paste one of the past few cuts? Or have some means to highlight without copying? Windows has the capability to cut and paste without the keyboard after all. Why hasn't X evolved?
I work differently from you then. I often highlight stuff that I want to replace. Highlight to copy is a pain there.
There WASN'T ANOTHER WAY to defend himself.
Shout "HELP"? Avoid the area?
Anyway, I thought this was an argument about it being illegal in general. Not about whether there could be extenuating circumstances. Should a potential mugger be allowed to have pepper spray? Would it be a lot of use for defence if someone sprayed you first?
What sort of a moron carries a fork around wherever they go!?
A pen knife is not primarily used as an offensive weapon. Perhaps it could unjure someone, but generally speaking the blades are too short on them to be a lot of use as a weapon.
A "weapon", really a class of tool, is neither offensive nor defensive. The method of employment is. You can conduct an offense or a defense, but labeling a tool that can be used in a variety of ways as offensive or defensive is simply arbitrary.
Surely any tool that is intended primarily to inflict harm is an offensive weapon. We're not labelling tools. We're labelling intent.
. Law enforcement personnel are armed with handguns for the purpose of defending themselves.
The baton is intended for defence. The gun is there for protection perhaps, but is still an offensive weapon.
Finding another way (other than using a firearm) to deal with a situation where your life is in danger is a terribly difficult.
Using a firearm to deal with a situation where your life is in danger is also difficult. Is the attacker going to wait for you to get it out?
That wheelchair-bound person doesn't have a whole lot of "other ways" to employ.
Nope. He's at a great disadvantage. a gun isn't going to help much either.
Neither does the woman who is a hundred pounds lighter and ten inches shorter than her attacker have many "other ways" that are as effective and proven as legally employing a firearm.
Run away. Fast.
Is the 80 year old man expected to fight off a 17 year-old attacker with his jujitsu skills?
He could avoid places where he might get mugged. Is he going to have a chance to shoot?
Or can we even expect a reasonably fit adult male to "find another way" when confronted by several other reasonably fit adult males?
Run away. Fast.
But if we proscribe that last option of firing a handgun at an attacker because posession of that handgun is banned, what have we effectively done?
Removed handguns from the the muggers?
The net effect of mandating "find another option" only increases the number of dead victims, provided permit holders comply with the law.
So we just have to make sure that permit holding muggers comply with the law.
I never said anything about having no immediate use for a tool. I said "Without good reason". The fact that it may come in useful is a good reason.
You claim that this multitool is deadly. I took that to mean that it would actually be worthwhile as a weapon. The fact that it's deadly means that if you were also acting in a suspicious manner, and a policeman saw you, I would expect him to ask why you have it. You seem to think that this is the act of a tyrant.
They listen to large donations from influential corporate entities much more.
This is less of a problem in Europe than the US. Campaign spending is limited, even if paid for by other people. I believe all donations have to be declared by the parties.
It's not as if any of the other parties have a different policy, so it's not like you can threaten them with voting for the other guy either.
No, but I can convince them that I will vote for them instead of the other guy if they change their policy.
It's not a total waste. If a lot of MPs get a lot of letters saying "we think this is a bad idea", then they'll generally reconsider their position.
With DeCSS, there was a reasonable argument made that the decrypted data could be copied (and for some reason the defence didn't point out that so could the encrypted data).
The last time the DMCA was used against hardware manufacturers (Chamberlain garage door openers), the case was dismissed.
Well, then I'm sorry to say : you're insane.
You're the one who uses a multitool as a security blanket.
Last one I remember is Dunblane in 1996. 17 people were killed (although by an adult rather than other students). If This site on school sshootings is anything to go by, the chances of being shot at school do seem to be quite low wherever you are. Much lower than deaths caused by dustmites, for example.
As an aside, I think the US only has a population around 5 times that of Great Britain.
Suppose I just like carrying it around, and wore a T-shirt with black letters that said "I have no use for my multitool"?
Then why the hell are you carrying it around!? If I was a police officer, I'd ask you why you were carrying it. And I'd make sure I kept my eye on you if nothing else.
This guy was carrying around pepper spray. Well, what possible reason could he have for doing this, you are asking? I'm answering - to defend himself against muggers, in a place he'd already been attacked before. You say - but there's no good reason for anyone to be legally able to carry it because it can be misused!
And I still say there's no use at all for pepper spray, apart from as a weapon. I just don't agree that people should be carrying weapons around.
And you're happily highlighting my point with your bizarre circular logic which completely precludes the likelihood that someone should think about defending themselves.
No... people are entitled to defend themselves. They shouldn't use offensive weapons to do so. They can find another way.
You said "The trouble is, that pepper spray could also be used as an offensive weapon for disabling a victim, and muggers are more likely to get the stuff.". So, your argument is that, if banned, only muggers are more likely to have it, so therefore it should be banned? What?
Ermmmm... NO! If it is NOT banned, muggers are more likely to have it. Where do the muggers get it from if banned? If it is legally available for personal defence, then a mugger will just go to a shop and buy a can. If it is totally banned, then a mugger will have to go to greater expense to get it, which, if he could afford to do, he probably wouldn't go for such a low yield crime in the first place.
Again, what it boils down to (I think) in your mind is that : If something can be misused, despite the fact that it can be used in legitimate defense of one's own person, it is proscribed.
Not quite. My argument is that the potential for personal defence is not in itself a justification for making offensive weapons freely available.
Your argument seems to be that anything that could conceivably be used to defend against muggers should be permitted, even if it is more useful to the mugger, and that banning some things that may be used as a weapon would neccesitate banning everything that could be used as a weapon.
Once you start dictating what you can and cannot do based on need, you can take away anything you like. Today I'm carrying around my 20+ deadly-steel-tool Shrade multitool, despite the fact that I'm not doing any work. Should I be disallowed from doing that?
Nope. Presumably you're carrying around for some reason.
Or maybe if I was just required to pre-file in triplicate the days I was planning on using it, along with a signed affadavit stating I was heading to my house to do some handyman work - that wouldn't be an infringement of my liberties, right?
Of course it would. It would require undue inconvenience. I don't think anyone should have a right even to challenge you on it unless they have some reasonable suspicion that you may be intending to do somebody harm.
Do you really live in that much acute fear every day that you need control on such a fine-grained level?
.357 revolver. A guy 100 pounds heavier and 6" taller than you is walking towards you with a knife saying "I'm going to kill you and your child." Would you shoot him?
What's fine grained? I can't think of any reason that someone would want to carry a sharp piece of wood around with them, unless they were a mugger, vampire hunter, or happened to be going camping. The restriction on my doing so therefore doesn't infringe my liberties. Nor does it infringe the liberties of the vampire hunter or the camper, since they both have a perfectly good reason to be carrying sharp pieces of wood.
Here's a question I love hearing the answers to : You're in a room with your child standing behind you. You're holding a loaded
Assuming I don't have the chance to pick up the kid and run away, and there was absolutely no other option, of course I'd shoot him.
I'm not going to carry a gun around just in case though.