$ rm *
zsh: sure you want to delete all the files in/home/pete [yn]?
Alternatively, my technique for years has been to use the tab key to expand wildcards. zsh is really good at that (better than bash, last I checked) and when you suddenly see the wildcard expand to several hundred files rather than the half-a-dozen you expected...:)
Wow. Thanks for that, that's very interesting (seriously). Is the plural always made with 's, or only in special cases?
For example, is the name "Nederlands" considered to be a plural?:)
I've often wondered where the name "Netherlands" originated, and if it was just accidental that the word makes up two valid English words: "nether" and "lands".
I must say I'm a little surprised at the strength of the negative opinions on sendmail (in the comments) so far. It's not that bad. I now use postfix or exim as my default mailserver on most machines, but sendmail still has a significant "it's known, it's documented, it's mature, if you can follow the instructions then it should Just Work" advantage. Note that I did say "should".;-)
But then I'm usually happiest with Debian's wonderful set-it-all-up-for-me exim-config script:).
"Yes, I'm installing a system and no, I don't want to buggerise around setting up email. Just ask one or two simple multi-choice questions (with sensible defaults), then set it up for me. Thank you."
Heh. Just for that, I'd write all my code using variable and function names like go2, go_to, gotwo, gotoo... etc.
Ahh, endless juvenile humour. Anyway, sounds like that professor shouldn't have been teaching C. I bet he was happy when Java starting getting popular. "Ahh... sweet Java eases the pain...":-)
In fact, now I think about it, the prohibition against installing unapproved software on the laptop wouldn't prevent a kid from sticking in a USB key and running software off that. "Hey, I didn't install anything on the laptop!"
Eh, anyway. Highschools. Free laptops for highschool kids. Feh. *start bad yorkshire accent* When Ah were a lad, we used ta dream of seeing a computer!...:)
Q: What if a student already has another model or brand of laptop computer?
A: Students will be required to use the school district issued laptop for school purposes. This is necessary to ensure that students have a computer that gives them network capability and the ability to run the software that students will need in their classes. For these reasons, other computers will not be used on the Kutztown Area School District network.
So... they want to claim that the students can't do anything "unauthorised" on the laptops because they belong to the school, but they won't allow the students to use their own damn laptops? Riiiight.
Heh, I don't know why the kids wouldn't just grab a LiveCD and boot with that, thus gaining full rights and access to the laptop hardware (well all right, on second thoughts I recall that Linux doesn't support Mac laptop wireless ethernet, so that might not work so well if they're using wireless networking:)). With a USB key (or just a loopback filesystem (possibly even encrypted if they wanted to be paranoid) stored on the Mac OS X filesystem) for storing the data you want to keep private, you're laughing.
And if there were one or more bits of software that they had to use during their classes, no problem. Reboot, remove CD.
When will people learn... you can't lock down a machine when people have full, unsupervised, physical access to that machine!
*roll of eyes*
And what good does that do, exactly? What do you do to correct it? Mail the admin@whateverhost.com? How do we do that if our e-mail is being blocked? Hmm?
You try sending from a mailserver that isn't blocked. At worst, use Hotmail. Or Yahoo Mail. Or Fastmail. Or GMail. Or any of the hundreds of other free webmail providers that make a conscientious effort to stay off blacklists.
Bzzt. You get today's award for not having read the informative slashdot comments, specifically this one - showing that the listing Paul Graham was bitching about covered only one single solitary IP address. As mentioned in alanw's comment, you can look at the Spamhaus record if you wish:
Warned repeatedly, many times, that textileshop.com was spamming, Yahoo chose to continue hosting them. They spammed again. Via Haberstroh. Again. Textileshop has been kicked off other ISPs for spamming.
News flash: Yahoo has more than one IP address. Hard to believe, I know. And very very very very very very very very few of Yahoo's customers/users would actually send email from that one blacklisted IP address.
He didn't say not to block spam hosts; he said that when they blacklist NON-spam sites by the truckload in order to pressure an ISP, they are specifically targetting innocent users in order to carry out their agenda.
Well, it's a good thing that in Paul Graham's case, Spamhaus was only blacklisting the one IP address used by the spammer. Excellent. So there's no problem, right?:-)
If an employee sends an email asking for product information from Companies A, B, C, and D, but only gets answers from C and D, is he going to call you up assuming there's a problem or is he going to assume A and B aren't interested?
For a properly-configured sending mailserver that's had an SMTP connection refused, the person sending the email in question should receive a message back from their mailserver indicating that the email was refused.
There should be no need for anyone to guess anything.
Are you retarded? khasim was asking who matches up to the "has been shot" concept in the situation deacon was trying to analogise (if that's a word:)) - perhaps he was a bit generous when he thought that'd be inherently obvious from the context. Anyway, no one does.
And no, deacon's analogy was not factually or logically similar. That's the problem. It's a horrendously bad analogy.
It'd be (slightly) more appropriate if it was used for a situation where script kiddies were DOSing (making a denial-of-service attack against) IP addresses on a blacklist - then the DOS "attack" would match up to the vigilante machine gun attack (though the implications of a machine gun attack are somewhat different to those of a denial-of-service attack).
But in the situation deacon was trying to analogise, one group of people had configured their servers to not accept email from a set of IP addresses in a blacklist. They're not interfering with or "attacking" those people using the blacklisted IPs. They're just choosing to not accept email traffic from those IPs.
Any acceptable "real" world analogy would have to take that factor into account. Most specifically, no worthwhile analogy could involve the blacklist-users using any form of violence against the blacklisted.
With that said, my dedicated box, with 5 IPs assigned to it, was blocked because [...] the tech at the colo didn't bow to Spamhaus's demands.
It's much clearer and simpler and straightforward and more honest if you put it this way:
"My ISP took a spammer on as a client. The spammer spammed. The ISP received at least one and probably many complaints. They did not terminate the spammer's account. The IP address used by their spamming client got blacklisted. The ISP still did nothing. A wider swathe of IP addresses belonging to that ISP got blacklisted. The ISP's legit customers started complaining. The ISP finally got rid of their spammer and started trying to get themselves off the Spamhaus blacklist. And so I'm complaining about Spamhaus, because they're obviously the bad guys here."
*roll of eyes, grin*
That said, I am nevertheless rather intrigued by your assertion that you, a non-spammer, were trapped under Spamhaus' blacklist of your ISP for several months after your ISP was completely free of spammer scum.
That sounds rather unlikely, from what I understand of Spamhaus' policies. Can you give any specifics (eg. ISP name, specific date ranges that your IP addresses were blocked, the range of your ISP's IP addresses that were blocked, a Spamhaus record about the incident?... Because if I can verify that you're actually telling the truth, my respect for Spamhaus will drop several notches.
Name one SMTP blacklist - just one - that tries to track non-spamming users of a spam-supporting ISP, and tries to maintain blacklists against those users when they move outside the blacklisted ISP.
Having trouble? Of course you are. Because there are no blacklists that do that. None. Zip, zilch, zero.
Next analogy please. If you keep trying, maybe eventually you'll hit on one that doesn't suck quite so badly:-).
BTW - a good analogy is simple, with the absolute minimum distinct components. A bad analogy is (usually) more complicated... because someone using a bad analogy wants to obscure the fact that it's bad, so they make it as complicated and confusing as possible.
It's inappropriate for a few reasons, but the one key reason that I noticed is as follows. Legally speaking, when someone rents a property (whether for living in or for running a store) they are in most key respects supposed to be treated as though it's their property. For example, the real owner is not allowed to intrude upon the property except very occasionally, and only for a brief inspection.
But anyway, the difference with ISPs and their users is that their users are not necessarily recognised as having any sort of legal claim on any of the IP addresses of that ISP. So while the cops (normally) can't shut down independently-leased properties just because someone at a neighbouring property committed a crime, there's nothing wrong with a spam-free ISP refusing to accept email from the network space of a spam-supporting ISP.
I'm not even going to discuss the difference between an active action, eg. shutting down stores, and a passive action, eg. an ISP refusing to accept email (or other kinds of network traffic) from another.:)
Skye16 represents his extraordinarily poor analogy as:
If someone does something wrong while using ServiceX, everyone at ServiceX gets punished. [...]
This is the only element I'm particularly pointing out, because it's one of the bits khasim missed (in his otherwise very precise analysis of your bad analogy).
The thing to remember about blacklists like Spamhaus and SPEWS that list IP ranges is that the block is not aimed at the spammer so much as it is aimed at the ISP hosting the spammer. So the point is that it's the ISP being "punished", not the users of the ISP.
So in your analogy, the users of ServiceX wouldn't be touched, just ServiceX itself. The only downside for the users of ServiceX is that they can't use ServiceX anymore - at least for whatever translates as email service in your (bad) analogy.
While we're talking about analogies, the one I've seen most often used by supporters of wide-ranging email blacklists (including myself) is the pizza-delivery analogy. If you live in a known-bad neighbourhood, you may find that your local pizza-delivery chain won't take orders to deliver there ("won't take orders" == "won't accept email"). They might do that because they've had too many orders from that neighbourhood for which their delivery people aren't paid ("unpaid orders" == "email accepted which turned out to be spam"). So they decide it's just not worth accepting orders from your neighbourhood anymore.
The only point where that analogy falls down is that it's actually much easier for a user of an ISP to change than it is for someone to change house out of a bad neighbourhood:). And of course it's much easier for someone to send their email through an external known-good relay than it is for someone in a bad neighbourhood to relay all their pizza orders through a known-good friend in another neighbourhood.
They may sound over the top to you, but these judges are just following the law. It is not their job to set sentence guidelines, it is a job for the lawmakers.
"I was just following orders!"
I just don't buy the defence. If there was someone else involved, we would've heard about it by now.
Really? You think so? And you think that is sufficient to make the planted-drugs theory impossible?
This is the whole point of why the drug war concept is so very stupid. The way it should work (for all such cases) is: Prosecutor: "She had drugs in her bag." Defense: "She says she didn't put them there." Judge: "Can the prosecution prove she put them there?" Prosecutor: "Er, no." Judge: "Dismissed."
Because such a situation would make it much much harder to convict a drug courier (unless they were actually caught in the act of using or selling the substance), the burden of proof gets thrown out the window - and so the inevitable innocent victims have to try to prove it was impossible for them to have put the substance in their bag. Which is kind of tricky to do.
How could you not believe that you're going to get innocent victims in a system like that? The whole concept of the burden of proof means that if you make it easier for the prosecution to convict, you're going to increase the chances of innocent people being convicted.
Some people think that the occasional innocent person being convicted is an acceptable price to pay for convicting most of the guilty. It's easy to hold a view like that, until it's you or a friend or family member playing the role of the innocent victim.
It happens, don't try to pretend it doesn't. And it happens to actual real people just like you.
The only way you can have a "war on drugs" is by dramatically weakening (a) the burden of proof required to convict someone, and (b) any remaining rights of individual privacy.
"I'm afraid I'll have to strip-search you now. Well, you might have drugs stored in an orifice or two."
I've heard that the judges in the Corby case have never found someone not guilty.
Never.
If that's incorrect, I welcome corrections (I can't remember specifically where I heard/read it in the Australian media, but it was a few places). But if it is true - hm. No, I don't think anyone would want to take their chances in a court like that, where apparently being arrested means you must be guilty.
I will say that it's kind of funny that real crimes require real evidence, but all you need to do to murder someone (in most of South-East Asia) is to stick a couple of kilos of marijuana in their travel bag.
I can't fucking wait until someone does that to one of those cunting judges. See how the system feels from the other side, you arrogant shits. And yes, that also applies to every judge in the US or Australia or Europe that has given someone an insanely over-the-top sentence just because a drug was found in their bag.
And no, I don't think you should expect Australian law whereever you go. Most countries in the world, Australia being one of them, have a number of insane laws and even insaner punishments for "breaking" those laws, as well as stupidly low standards of evidence for "convicting" someone of breaking those laws.
IMHO Saudi Arabia still stands out as the worst of the worst, but almost every country is guilty of (a) making it too easy to convict the innocent, and (b) punishing people for crimes that shouldn't be crimes.
Either Corby was too stupid to know that Indonesia is tough on drugs, or she took the risks willingly.
Interesting to note that you exclude even the possibility of a third option.
Someone actually mentioned it to me during the last WebCore/KHTML "discussion" on slashdot - though it's unfortunately only the ninth hit on Google when searching for "webcore linux".
Probably because it's one of those laws that you'd think nobody could ever be stupid enough to try to enforce, especially in a situation where it's clearly not appropriate.
At least I'd think that of such a situation, and I left my teens behind quite some time ago. I doubt the guy or girl in question were more than vaguely aware that there was a "statutory rape" law, and had no idea that it could possibly apply to them.
Thanks for the response. Interesting, though fairly predictable.
I'd point out that your assertion "you can be sure that the guy is soft-pedaling their activities" is probably very very wrong. What you can be sure of is that he's talking up their activities. It's in his interests that people fear the BSA and think that they have more power than they actually do.
Note especially the response re: what the BSA needs in order to get a court order: "Generally speaking, we would need to provide the court with a sworn affidavit from someone who has firsthand knowledge of the company's actions and is willing to be publicly identified". I'd be fairly surprised if a teacher would be willing or able to do that sort of thing at a school. If nothing else, the you'd never ever lose the reputation as a snitch (even if you felt you were doing the right thing by costing the school far more than your annual salary in money and time to do a pointless audit).
Mind you, I'd be very worried if your legal system allows a rogue company like the BSA to have law enforcement break down your door (metaphorically speaking) on the word of what could be just one bitter ex-employee. That'd have enormous potential for industrial espionage.
If marijuana should be illegal because it's harmful, then alcohol and tobacco should definitely be illegal too because they're much more harmful than marijuana. And probably coffee should be illegal because that's in the same harmfulness ballpark as marijuana.
Marijuana is an interesting case - it's the classic example of a currently illegal drug for which there is no good reason (not even the poor reason of "it'll hurt you!") for its illegality.
It's mildly intoxicating and it's not addictive (perhaps habit-forming at worst (ie. much like using the internet:), but not addictive).
Penn and Teller's Bullshit did an episode on drugs in general (and marijuana in particular) a while ago. The one bit that stuck in my head involved them showing death counts due to particular drugs. Cigarettes - quite a lot, as you'd expect. Alcohol - quite a lot as well. Marijuana... zero. As in "not any at all, ever".
So why is it illegal again?
I find it very difficult to believe the cost to society of legalising all drugs could come anywhere near the cost of the "war on drugs". Also, legalising drugs would (conveniently) upset one group of people more than any other - organised crime (Homer: "Mmmm.... organised crime"). Their biggest money-earner would be gone just like that.
Look, either you have a right to take risks with your body or you don't. And if you think we don't, then what the hell are you doing outside, walking around, breathing potentially unsafe air, drinking/eating potentially unsafe substances?
The cost of what the government chooses to do regarding people with brain damage due to drug abuse (though I doubt that's a significant problem of drug abuse) should not be justification for criminalising the use of, eg. heroin. Otherwise you could use much the same argument to make eating at McDonalds a crime (I'm sure the cost of health care due to obesity would be two or three orders of magnitude larger than the cost of health care due to all drug-abuse problems combined).
Slashdot Mirror
$ rm * /home/pete [yn]?
zsh: sure you want to delete all the files in
Alternatively, my technique for years has been to use the tab key to expand wildcards. zsh is really good at that (better than bash, last I checked) and when you suddenly see the wildcard expand to several hundred files rather than the half-a-dozen you expected... :)
For example, is the name "Nederlands" considered to be a plural? :)
I've often wondered where the name "Netherlands" originated, and if it was just accidental that the word makes up two valid English words: "nether" and "lands".
Sieg Heil! :)
I must say I'm a little surprised at the strength of the negative opinions on sendmail (in the comments) so far. It's not that bad. I now use postfix or exim as my default mailserver on most machines, but sendmail still has a significant "it's known, it's documented, it's mature, if you can follow the instructions then it should Just Work" advantage. Note that I did say "should". ;-)
But then I'm usually happiest with Debian's wonderful set-it-all-up-for-me exim-config script :).
"Yes, I'm installing a system and no, I don't want to buggerise around setting up email. Just ask one or two simple multi-choice questions (with sensible defaults), then set it up for me. Thank you."
Heh. Just for that, I'd write all my code using variable and function names like go2, go_to, gotwo, gotoo... etc.
Ahh, endless juvenile humour. Anyway, sounds like that professor shouldn't have been teaching C. I bet he was happy when Java starting getting popular. "Ahh... sweet Java eases the pain..." :-)
In fact, now I think about it, the prohibition against installing unapproved software on the laptop wouldn't prevent a kid from sticking in a USB key and running software off that. "Hey, I didn't install anything on the laptop!"
Eh, anyway. Highschools. Free laptops for highschool kids. Feh. *start bad yorkshire accent* When Ah were a lad, we used ta dream of seeing a computer!... :)
Yeah, that point is kind of interesting. I haven't seen any other comment mentioning this bit of the Kutztown Area High School laptop usage FAQ yet:
So... they want to claim that the students can't do anything "unauthorised" on the laptops because they belong to the school, but they won't allow the students to use their own damn laptops? Riiiight.
Heh, I don't know why the kids wouldn't just grab a LiveCD and boot with that, thus gaining full rights and access to the laptop hardware (well all right, on second thoughts I recall that Linux doesn't support Mac laptop wireless ethernet, so that might not work so well if they're using wireless networking :)). With a USB key (or just a loopback filesystem (possibly even encrypted if they wanted to be paranoid) stored on the Mac OS X filesystem) for storing the data you want to keep private, you're laughing.
And if there were one or more bits of software that they had to use during their classes, no problem. Reboot, remove CD.
When will people learn... you can't lock down a machine when people have full, unsupervised, physical access to that machine! *roll of eyes*
You try sending from a mailserver that isn't blocked. At worst, use Hotmail. Or Yahoo Mail. Or Fastmail. Or GMail. Or any of the hundreds of other free webmail providers that make a conscientious effort to stay off blacklists.
Bzzt. You get today's award for not having read the informative slashdot comments, specifically this one - showing that the listing Paul Graham was bitching about covered only one single solitary IP address. As mentioned in alanw's comment, you can look at the Spamhaus record if you wish:
News flash: Yahoo has more than one IP address. Hard to believe, I know. And very very very very very very very very few of Yahoo's customers/users would actually send email from that one blacklisted IP address.
Well, it's a good thing that in Paul Graham's case, Spamhaus was only blacklisting the one IP address used by the spammer. Excellent. So there's no problem, right? :-)
For a properly-configured sending mailserver that's had an SMTP connection refused, the person sending the email in question should receive a message back from their mailserver indicating that the email was refused.
There should be no need for anyone to guess anything.
And no, deacon's analogy was not factually or logically similar. That's the problem. It's a horrendously bad analogy.
It'd be (slightly) more appropriate if it was used for a situation where script kiddies were DOSing (making a denial-of-service attack against) IP addresses on a blacklist - then the DOS "attack" would match up to the vigilante machine gun attack (though the implications of a machine gun attack are somewhat different to those of a denial-of-service attack).
But in the situation deacon was trying to analogise, one group of people had configured their servers to not accept email from a set of IP addresses in a blacklist. They're not interfering with or "attacking" those people using the blacklisted IPs. They're just choosing to not accept email traffic from those IPs.
Any acceptable "real" world analogy would have to take that factor into account. Most specifically, no worthwhile analogy could involve the blacklist-users using any form of violence against the blacklisted.
It's much clearer and simpler and straightforward and more honest if you put it this way:
"My ISP took a spammer on as a client. The spammer spammed. The ISP received at least one and probably many complaints. They did not terminate the spammer's account. The IP address used by their spamming client got blacklisted. The ISP still did nothing. A wider swathe of IP addresses belonging to that ISP got blacklisted. The ISP's legit customers started complaining. The ISP finally got rid of their spammer and started trying to get themselves off the Spamhaus blacklist. And so I'm complaining about Spamhaus, because they're obviously the bad guys here."
*roll of eyes, grin*
That said, I am nevertheless rather intrigued by your assertion that you, a non-spammer, were trapped under Spamhaus' blacklist of your ISP for several months after your ISP was completely free of spammer scum.
That sounds rather unlikely, from what I understand of Spamhaus' policies. Can you give any specifics (eg. ISP name, specific date ranges that your IP addresses were blocked, the range of your ISP's IP addresses that were blocked, a Spamhaus record about the incident?... Because if I can verify that you're actually telling the truth, my respect for Spamhaus will drop several notches.
Name one SMTP blacklist - just one - that tries to track non-spamming users of a spam-supporting ISP, and tries to maintain blacklists against those users when they move outside the blacklisted ISP.
Having trouble? Of course you are. Because there are no blacklists that do that. None. Zip, zilch, zero.
Next analogy please. If you keep trying, maybe eventually you'll hit on one that doesn't suck quite so badly :-).
BTW - a good analogy is simple, with the absolute minimum distinct components. A bad analogy is (usually) more complicated... because someone using a bad analogy wants to obscure the fact that it's bad, so they make it as complicated and confusing as possible.
Hint. Hint hint. :)
It's inappropriate for a few reasons, but the one key reason that I noticed is as follows. Legally speaking, when someone rents a property (whether for living in or for running a store) they are in most key respects supposed to be treated as though it's their property. For example, the real owner is not allowed to intrude upon the property except very occasionally, and only for a brief inspection.
But anyway, the difference with ISPs and their users is that their users are not necessarily recognised as having any sort of legal claim on any of the IP addresses of that ISP. So while the cops (normally) can't shut down independently-leased properties just because someone at a neighbouring property committed a crime, there's nothing wrong with a spam-free ISP refusing to accept email from the network space of a spam-supporting ISP.
I'm not even going to discuss the difference between an active action, eg. shutting down stores, and a passive action, eg. an ISP refusing to accept email (or other kinds of network traffic) from another. :)
Skye16 represents his extraordinarily poor analogy as:
This is the only element I'm particularly pointing out, because it's one of the bits khasim missed (in his otherwise very precise analysis of your bad analogy).
The thing to remember about blacklists like Spamhaus and SPEWS that list IP ranges is that the block is not aimed at the spammer so much as it is aimed at the ISP hosting the spammer. So the point is that it's the ISP being "punished", not the users of the ISP.
So in your analogy, the users of ServiceX wouldn't be touched, just ServiceX itself. The only downside for the users of ServiceX is that they can't use ServiceX anymore - at least for whatever translates as email service in your (bad) analogy.
While we're talking about analogies, the one I've seen most often used by supporters of wide-ranging email blacklists (including myself) is the pizza-delivery analogy. If you live in a known-bad neighbourhood, you may find that your local pizza-delivery chain won't take orders to deliver there ("won't take orders" == "won't accept email"). They might do that because they've had too many orders from that neighbourhood for which their delivery people aren't paid ("unpaid orders" == "email accepted which turned out to be spam"). So they decide it's just not worth accepting orders from your neighbourhood anymore.
The only point where that analogy falls down is that it's actually much easier for a user of an ISP to change than it is for someone to change house out of a bad neighbourhood :). And of course it's much easier for someone to send their email through an external known-good relay than it is for someone in a bad neighbourhood to relay all their pizza orders through a known-good friend in another neighbourhood.
"I was just following orders!"
Really? You think so? And you think that is sufficient to make the planted-drugs theory impossible?
This is the whole point of why the drug war concept is so very stupid. The way it should work (for all such cases) is: Prosecutor: "She had drugs in her bag." Defense: "She says she didn't put them there." Judge: "Can the prosecution prove she put them there?" Prosecutor: "Er, no." Judge: "Dismissed."
Because such a situation would make it much much harder to convict a drug courier (unless they were actually caught in the act of using or selling the substance), the burden of proof gets thrown out the window - and so the inevitable innocent victims have to try to prove it was impossible for them to have put the substance in their bag. Which is kind of tricky to do.
How could you not believe that you're going to get innocent victims in a system like that? The whole concept of the burden of proof means that if you make it easier for the prosecution to convict, you're going to increase the chances of innocent people being convicted.
Some people think that the occasional innocent person being convicted is an acceptable price to pay for convicting most of the guilty. It's easy to hold a view like that, until it's you or a friend or family member playing the role of the innocent victim.
It happens, don't try to pretend it doesn't. And it happens to actual real people just like you.
Yeah - it's wonderful to see good wholesome not-at-all-corrupt legal systems at work.
*sigh*
*applause*
Thank you, i. That's it exactly.
The only way you can have a "war on drugs" is by dramatically weakening (a) the burden of proof required to convict someone, and (b) any remaining rights of individual privacy.
"I'm afraid I'll have to strip-search you now. Well, you might have drugs stored in an orifice or two."
I've heard that the judges in the Corby case have never found someone not guilty. Never.
If that's incorrect, I welcome corrections (I can't remember specifically where I heard/read it in the Australian media, but it was a few places). But if it is true - hm. No, I don't think anyone would want to take their chances in a court like that, where apparently being arrested means you must be guilty.
I will say that it's kind of funny that real crimes require real evidence, but all you need to do to murder someone (in most of South-East Asia) is to stick a couple of kilos of marijuana in their travel bag.
I can't fucking wait until someone does that to one of those cunting judges. See how the system feels from the other side, you arrogant shits. And yes, that also applies to every judge in the US or Australia or Europe that has given someone an insanely over-the-top sentence just because a drug was found in their bag.
And no, I don't think you should expect Australian law whereever you go. Most countries in the world, Australia being one of them, have a number of insane laws and even insaner punishments for "breaking" those laws, as well as stupidly low standards of evidence for "convicting" someone of breaking those laws.
IMHO Saudi Arabia still stands out as the worst of the worst, but almost every country is guilty of (a) making it too easy to convict the innocent, and (b) punishing people for crimes that shouldn't be crimes.
Interesting to note that you exclude even the possibility of a third option.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's the Gtk+ WebCore browser! (insert cheers)
At least I'd think that of such a situation, and I left my teens behind quite some time ago. I doubt the guy or girl in question were more than vaguely aware that there was a "statutory rape" law, and had no idea that it could possibly apply to them.
I'd point out that your assertion "you can be sure that the guy is soft-pedaling their activities" is probably very very wrong. What you can be sure of is that he's talking up their activities. It's in his interests that people fear the BSA and think that they have more power than they actually do.
Note especially the response re: what the BSA needs in order to get a court order: "Generally speaking, we would need to provide the court with a sworn affidavit from someone who has firsthand knowledge of the company's actions and is willing to be publicly identified". I'd be fairly surprised if a teacher would be willing or able to do that sort of thing at a school. If nothing else, the you'd never ever lose the reputation as a snitch (even if you felt you were doing the right thing by costing the school far more than your annual salary in money and time to do a pointless audit).
Mind you, I'd be very worried if your legal system allows a rogue company like the BSA to have law enforcement break down your door (metaphorically speaking) on the word of what could be just one bitter ex-employee. That'd have enormous potential for industrial espionage.
If marijuana should be illegal because it's harmful, then alcohol and tobacco should definitely be illegal too because they're much more harmful than marijuana. And probably coffee should be illegal because that's in the same harmfulness ballpark as marijuana.
Marijuana is an interesting case - it's the classic example of a currently illegal drug for which there is no good reason (not even the poor reason of "it'll hurt you!") for its illegality. It's mildly intoxicating and it's not addictive (perhaps habit-forming at worst (ie. much like using the internet :), but not addictive).
Penn and Teller's Bullshit did an episode on drugs in general (and marijuana in particular) a while ago. The one bit that stuck in my head involved them showing death counts due to particular drugs. Cigarettes - quite a lot, as you'd expect. Alcohol - quite a lot as well. Marijuana... zero. As in "not any at all, ever".
So why is it illegal again?
I find it very difficult to believe the cost to society of legalising all drugs could come anywhere near the cost of the "war on drugs". Also, legalising drugs would (conveniently) upset one group of people more than any other - organised crime (Homer: "Mmmm.... organised crime"). Their biggest money-earner would be gone just like that.
Ahhh, the beloved nanny state.
Look, either you have a right to take risks with your body or you don't. And if you think we don't, then what the hell are you doing outside, walking around, breathing potentially unsafe air, drinking/eating potentially unsafe substances?
The cost of what the government chooses to do regarding people with brain damage due to drug abuse (though I doubt that's a significant problem of drug abuse) should not be justification for criminalising the use of, eg. heroin. Otherwise you could use much the same argument to make eating at McDonalds a crime (I'm sure the cost of health care due to obesity would be two or three orders of magnitude larger than the cost of health care due to all drug-abuse problems combined).
Absolutely. And if using the Internet is still harmless in 40 years, you might have a case for legalisation.
But until then, Internet use will be harshly and brutally punished. Internet trafficking, of course, will earn the death penalty.