I have an even better Youtube idea: a parody episode of "To Catch a Predator" where all the adult roles are played by grade school kids and the part of the minor is played by a middle aged guy who baits a little kid to come over (the kid playing the "pedophile" needs a supposedly criminal rationale but it must be nonsexual). He rides his bike to the house with a bottle of grape soda, a box of chocolates, and a bunch of action figures and he gets confronted by a ten year old in a suit: "so... how are you doing? I'm Chris Hansen."
The kid freaks out and runs outside to get arrested by kindergarteners outside who say they're going to take him downtown "to the principal's office". The other kid playing Chris Hansen can do a voiceover at this point. "Incredibly, this isn't the first time this little boy has victimized adult middle-aged men! He's served time in detention before!"
Well Edison was so late 19th-early 20th century. We have to "update elections for the computer age" and "build a bridge to the 21st century". Apparently this means loading elections onto a bus and driving them over just as our new bridge collapses.
HOW F*CKING HARD is it to make a secure voting machine?!?
If one makes the foolish initial decision to use an inherently untrustable device like a computer in the first place, then it comes down to one's choice of an operating system. Diebold chose Windows CE.
She's an actress, but she's also underage. They clearly need to have an actual minor involved, even if she wasn't involved in generating the chat log. Notice how they always have the kid come out and say she'll be right there and to sit tight for a second. The guy misses his big chance to say, "What are you doing here, kid? I came for mature sex! Where's your mother!"
I hate this show but I watch it sometimes when it comes on. Just to see the way people react at the moment they realize their huge mistake. It's the kind of thing you can have on TV without paying too much attention, like COPS- which is about as substantiative, and at least isn't pretending to be news like Dateline NBC. Both shows are steady junk food for the mind. Nothing ever happens. Every show is the same. I wonder if the Romans felt the same way watching lions eat Christians. Pedophilia is an age old problem, and even with the Internet as a new development it doesn't seem deserving of all this coverage. (I can speak with some authority on the matter since my wife and I both despise children and avoid them at all costs.)
It's like Paris Hilton; a tool for generating ad dollars while burying more important news that might piss off a potential advertiser. It clearly takes the angle that this is an "epidemic" even though the same bunch of guys keep showing up. Chris Hansen is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I especially like it when he points out how dishonest they are for lying about their age: "He's not really 37; as our investigation later uncovered, he's well into his forties!" Good to see someone is checking up on that, Chris.
I hope someone shows up who turns out not to be a genuine pedophile, but a prankster there to punk Chris Hansen and turn the tables on him on national TV by lecturing him on his fake journalism and belittling him as a newscaster. That would take a lot of careful preparation to do safely; you couldn't just show up with a bottle of wine, a box of condoms, and a doomed boner. You would need confederates... extensive documentation of your activities prior to the interview... and totally ironclad zero-tolerable proof that you knew of the setup beforehand and that your activities are inconsistent with someone hoping to actually score with a real kid (in the event Chris Hansen doesn't show). You'd have to lie about your gender or something. Also you'd have to get video of the encounter yourself or Chris Hansen will edit you out to fit in one more pedophile. But you'd surely become famous one way or the other.
Well I can tell you that in my own case my opinion is entirely based on the OOXML specification mandating reproduction of one company's old bugs. I love Microsoft otherwise and have a big picture of Bill in my living room.
'We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable. Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.'
This is basically correct. Theater managers cannot sentence people to prison, so of course we have to run to the legal system as the first resort in any dispute. We can't let everyday common sense judgments get in the way of legal judgments from being made or there is no respect for law-n-owrdah. For example when I was shortchanged on butter in my popcorn last week, my lawyer got me a refund from the theater in full accordance with the law. Everyone is entitled to equal protection.
I've just seen too many people here reach for "groupthink" whenever called on a silly claim. Now I'll admit yours is less silly than most of them. But although an accusation of groupthink may be illustrative, by itself it has no substance and proves absolutely nothing- the burden of proof is on you, since it's usually likely that the majority opinion is basically correct.
Except ISO are still a standards body, i.e. a collection of minds, and you're one guy on Slashdot. The characterisation of them as 'corrupt and evil' because they have a job to do and they happen to disagree with Slashdot groupthink
If your opinions are unpopular it's because they are ridiculous, not because you're smart and everyone else is stupid.:P
Silly me. I thought that if OOXML gets an ISO certification it doesn't prove anything other than that they know more about standards than you.
Yep, silly you. You assume the truth of Y and blandly state "if X then Y". While Y is expected to be true, OOXML requires reproduction of all the bugs that have ever shipped in MS Office so (X xor Y) is invariably true. A true value for X would most likely be attributable to corruption of the standards body by Microsoft, so Y would be false in that case. So your statement is a false one.
Using a radar gun is just more efficient and by your argument it's got to go.
It isn't that much more efficient than a pace. You still have to point it at someone. Comparing a radar gun to this system is like comparing a CC on an email to spam. The efficiency improvement is on such a different scale that the difference becomes qualitative.
Well, it just provides a vantage point you can get from a different time rather than a different place.
"A" different time? More like "all time from now on"- not such a subtle distinction. A radar gun isn't logging and recording people all day, and if you look up and don't see a helicopter, it's not like one can fly over later and take a picture of what you're doing right now.
So police choppers and radar-guns are out then, right?
A helicopter just provides a vantage point you can get from the side of a hill, and a radar gun is required to enforce a law. You can't get a speeding ticket without a radar gun measurement backing it up. The radar gun is not an optional thing as far as the cop is concerned- it actually helps you that cops are forced to use them.
If it were a radar gun that lets me type in your name and shows me a list of everywhere you've been for the past few years and all of the occasions when your car momentarily passed over the speed limit, well then maybe you'd have a point.
OK then; I thought you were one of these guys I meet who argue that the fall of Communism means we should dismantle the socialist-oriented institutions developed by the U.S. with great effort in the 19th century (public school system, etc.) before socialism was officially invented.
The future of space travel belongs to the private sector.
That's what they said four years ago about the private sector in Iraq. And privatization turned out to be inferior there to socialism in every way, even as implemented by a buffoon like Saddam Hussein: Socialism 1, Privatization 0. That really opened my eyes to the intellectual bankruptcy of this decades-old canard, that the public sector needs dismantlement and the private sector deserves to be worshiped. They both share corruption as an Achilles heel.
Who the hell wants to watch Nike and Disney doing cross-marketing from a low Earth orbit anyway? Which they will have bought for pennies at a corrupt auction so they can launch billboards and crap into space? LEO has already been considered as a venue for obnoxious advertising, to the horror of astronomers- and once it becomes feasible, you can expect to see a lot of well-funded lobbying efforts to protect its feasibility for investment. I'd rather have our current system even if it occasionally launches drunks or psycho bitches into space.
Not to mention, the fact that you didn't know is your fault and no one else's.
So you view the legislative process as an adversarial process between the government and its citizens. Amazing how this always seems to be a fight between people posting under their names when arguing for privacy rights, and anonymous fascists who believe there is no such thing. These threads fill up with little wannabe fascists when you set it to a zero point threshold.
Uh, no. There was no implication of that sort. Airlines, train and bus systems all monitor you. Good thing too, else you'd show at the station when the junket was cancelled because they couldn't call you.
OK, I think I see what is going on here. In this country the surveillance is not yet quite as Orwellian as you're used to in the UK.
Well OK that was unprofessional of me to snap at Someone. Who. Writes. This. Way.
The relevant question as far as the Fourth Amendment is concerned, is whether the increased surveillance constitutes a search. Because your Fourth Amendment rights aren't forfeited when you leave your house. Ordinarily a policeman can conduct ordinary surveillance of plates on a public road- within human ability- which is one of the parameters under which the legislature and the courts defined the limits of police surveillance. It has still always been possible, if you behaved yourself, to travel on a public road anonymously, and to get where you were going without anyone knowing.
But not anymore, if the police can conduct this ordinary surveillance with superhuman ability. Many people here are looking at the legality of each atomic operation in isolation, and ignoring the fact that thousands of them can soon be carried out each second- a sudden, vast increase in surveillance efficiency. There may be no way soon to avoid traveling by car without having the government record where you are. We will suddenly find out a lot of stuff about a lot of people. This is a vast new development in the power of law enforcement, and the legislature and judiciary should both be expected to react in some way. The law often fails to prohibit things before they become humanly possible to do- it has to be maintained occasionally.
The right to privacy was originally a right derived from Common Law. We all have heard the expression "An Englishman's home is his Castle." This was the rough summary of the right to privacy enjoyed by freemen in England. Of course, it was an ideal, and was not perfectly executed in practice, but the same could be said of much that goes on in this country.
In the US, much of our law is based on a combination of British Common Law, Statutory, and Constitutional law. And, once a statute is written that enumerates what was previously common law, the statutory meaning takes precedence. The right to privacy was one of those unspoken, but widely accepted theories of British Common Law. But with the publication and ratification of the US Constitution, many areas of Common Law became statutory.
Nowadays, the right to privacy is a statutory one, carved out of the intersection of individual rights derived from the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments. For instance, the 5th Amendment gives you the right not to self-incriminate, the 4th gives you protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the 14th and 6th amendments insure that you have due process rights and can't be sent to a prison in Cuba. In the middle of the 20th century, the USSC began to interpret the nexus of these rights as creating an area of individual activity that should be free from government interference. Some of the more famous cases, Griswold v. Connecticut and progeny, Roe v. Wade and progeny, found that while the right to privacy was not enumerated, it was implied, in the same way that if you say "I consult with my attorney Monday through Sunday," you have implied that you also talk to your attorney Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.
While it may be true that you can't travel on public roads with an expectation of privacy, it was always implied that you can travel in public without an expectation of having your travel being monitored. Especially not with God-like powers. Nobody even envisioned such a thing. And let's be realistic here. The only conceivable purpose of a monitoring system designed to track motorists in their daily movements is to effectively conduct surveillance on all citizens in the most effective way possible. It's clearly beyond the pale.
After all you have no expectation to privacy on public roads.
That sort of misses the point- if I had known that the police would be able to use them to track people's movements and integrate the data into a large surveillance system, I would have lobbied my representatives to BLOCK public funding of those roads with my tax dollars. That wasn't part of the deal.
If it comes to pass that the police can conduct omnipotent surveillance on public roads, I will start sending letters to Congress and forming crazy websites lobbying to have all public highway funding shut down- I will demand that none of my taxable income be diverted to support automotive infrastructure in any way. With an oil crisis coming we should be doing this anyway.
You need infrared cameras to read license plate numbers?
It makes no difference if they're infrared or UV. As Scalia clearly explains in the opinion I linked to, that's quite irrelevant:
The Court rejects the Government's argument that the thermal imaging must be upheld because it detected only heat radiating from the home's external surface. Such a mechanical interpretation of the Fourth Amendment was rejected in Katz, where the eavesdropping device in question picked up only sound waves that reached the exterior of the phone booth to which it was attached. Reversing that approach would leave the homeowner at the mercy of advancing technology--including imaging technology that could discern all human activity in the home.
Using public roads is something granted to you by society under certain conditions, hence it's a PRIVILEGE you, like many morons today, have been so babied and protected that you don't know the difference between a right and a privilege.
So the cops can have a detailed database of your whereabouts every hour of every day? Why not keep the cops up to date every time there's nobody home at your house? After all you can always just walk around or use our wonderful public transportation system, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I have an even better Youtube idea: a parody episode of "To Catch a Predator" where all the adult roles are played by grade school kids and the part of the minor is played by a middle aged guy who baits a little kid to come over (the kid playing the "pedophile" needs a supposedly criminal rationale but it must be nonsexual). He rides his bike to the house with a bottle of grape soda, a box of chocolates, and a bunch of action figures and he gets confronted by a ten year old in a suit: "so... how are you doing? I'm Chris Hansen."
The kid freaks out and runs outside to get arrested by kindergarteners outside who say they're going to take him downtown "to the principal's office". The other kid playing Chris Hansen can do a voiceover at this point. "Incredibly, this isn't the first time this little boy has victimized adult middle-aged men! He's served time in detention before!"
Well Edison was so late 19th-early 20th century. We have to "update elections for the computer age" and "build a bridge to the 21st century". Apparently this means loading elections onto a bus and driving them over just as our new bridge collapses.
HOW F*CKING HARD is it to make a secure voting machine?!?
If one makes the foolish initial decision to use an inherently untrustable device like a computer in the first place, then it comes down to one's choice of an operating system. Diebold chose Windows CE.
I'm not inclined to believe that merely pretending to be a teenager on the Internet constitutes entrapment.
She's an actress, but she's also underage. They clearly need to have an actual minor involved, even if she wasn't involved in generating the chat log. Notice how they always have the kid come out and say she'll be right there and to sit tight for a second. The guy misses his big chance to say, "What are you doing here, kid? I came for mature sex! Where's your mother!"
I hate this show but I watch it sometimes when it comes on. Just to see the way people react at the moment they realize their huge mistake. It's the kind of thing you can have on TV without paying too much attention, like COPS- which is about as substantiative, and at least isn't pretending to be news like Dateline NBC. Both shows are steady junk food for the mind. Nothing ever happens. Every show is the same. I wonder if the Romans felt the same way watching lions eat Christians. Pedophilia is an age old problem, and even with the Internet as a new development it doesn't seem deserving of all this coverage. (I can speak with some authority on the matter since my wife and I both despise children and avoid them at all costs.)
It's like Paris Hilton; a tool for generating ad dollars while burying more important news that might piss off a potential advertiser. It clearly takes the angle that this is an "epidemic" even though the same bunch of guys keep showing up. Chris Hansen is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I especially like it when he points out how dishonest they are for lying about their age: "He's not really 37; as our investigation later uncovered, he's well into his forties!" Good to see someone is checking up on that, Chris.
I hope someone shows up who turns out not to be a genuine pedophile, but a prankster there to punk Chris Hansen and turn the tables on him on national TV by lecturing him on his fake journalism and belittling him as a newscaster. That would take a lot of careful preparation to do safely; you couldn't just show up with a bottle of wine, a box of condoms, and a doomed boner. You would need confederates... extensive documentation of your activities prior to the interview... and totally ironclad zero-tolerable proof that you knew of the setup beforehand and that your activities are inconsistent with someone hoping to actually score with a real kid (in the event Chris Hansen doesn't show). You'd have to lie about your gender or something. Also you'd have to get video of the encounter yourself or Chris Hansen will edit you out to fit in one more pedophile. But you'd surely become famous one way or the other.
We have a justice system based on punishing people AFTER they commit a crime not before
But soliciting a minor for sex is a crime.
Well I can tell you that in my own case my opinion is entirely based on the OOXML specification mandating reproduction of one company's old bugs. I love Microsoft otherwise and have a big picture of Bill in my living room.
'We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable. Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.'
This is basically correct. Theater managers cannot sentence people to prison, so of course we have to run to the legal system as the first resort in any dispute. We can't let everyday common sense judgments get in the way of legal judgments from being made or there is no respect for law-n-owrdah. For example when I was shortchanged on butter in my popcorn last week, my lawyer got me a refund from the theater in full accordance with the law. Everyone is entitled to equal protection.
I've just seen too many people here reach for "groupthink" whenever called on a silly claim. Now I'll admit yours is less silly than most of them. But although an accusation of groupthink may be illustrative, by itself it has no substance and proves absolutely nothing- the burden of proof is on you, since it's usually likely that the majority opinion is basically correct.
Except ISO are still a standards body, i.e. a collection of minds, and you're one guy on Slashdot. The characterisation of them as 'corrupt and evil' because they have a job to do and they happen to disagree with Slashdot groupthink
:P
If your opinions are unpopular it's because they are ridiculous, not because you're smart and everyone else is stupid.
Silly me. I thought that if OOXML gets an ISO certification it doesn't prove anything other than that they know more about standards than you.
Yep, silly you. You assume the truth of Y and blandly state "if X then Y". While Y is expected to be true, OOXML requires reproduction of all the bugs that have ever shipped in MS Office so (X xor Y) is invariably true. A true value for X would most likely be attributable to corruption of the standards body by Microsoft, so Y would be false in that case. So your statement is a false one.
Using a radar gun is just more efficient and by your argument it's got to go.
It isn't that much more efficient than a pace. You still have to point it at someone. Comparing a radar gun to this system is like comparing a CC on an email to spam. The efficiency improvement is on such a different scale that the difference becomes qualitative.
Well, it just provides a vantage point you can get from a different time rather than a different place.
"A" different time? More like "all time from now on"- not such a subtle distinction. A radar gun isn't logging and recording people all day, and if you look up and don't see a helicopter, it's not like one can fly over later and take a picture of what you're doing right now.
So police choppers and radar-guns are out then, right?
A helicopter just provides a vantage point you can get from the side of a hill, and a radar gun is required to enforce a law. You can't get a speeding ticket without a radar gun measurement backing it up. The radar gun is not an optional thing as far as the cop is concerned- it actually helps you that cops are forced to use them.
If it were a radar gun that lets me type in your name and shows me a list of everywhere you've been for the past few years and all of the occasions when your car momentarily passed over the speed limit, well then maybe you'd have a point.
OK then; I thought you were one of these guys I meet who argue that the fall of Communism means we should dismantle the socialist-oriented institutions developed by the U.S. with great effort in the 19th century (public school system, etc.) before socialism was officially invented.
I guess you do not read much news about any country anywhere on this planet...
I read the news about every country that has fallen victim to excessive privatization: the U.S. and Iraq. Socialism is old news.
The future of space travel belongs to the private sector.
That's what they said four years ago about the private sector in Iraq. And privatization turned out to be inferior there to socialism in every way, even as implemented by a buffoon like Saddam Hussein: Socialism 1, Privatization 0. That really opened my eyes to the intellectual bankruptcy of this decades-old canard, that the public sector needs dismantlement and the private sector deserves to be worshiped. They both share corruption as an Achilles heel.
Who the hell wants to watch Nike and Disney doing cross-marketing from a low Earth orbit anyway? Which they will have bought for pennies at a corrupt auction so they can launch billboards and crap into space? LEO has already been considered as a venue for obnoxious advertising, to the horror of astronomers- and once it becomes feasible, you can expect to see a lot of well-funded lobbying efforts to protect its feasibility for investment. I'd rather have our current system even if it occasionally launches drunks or psycho bitches into space.
Not to mention, the fact that you didn't know is your fault and no one else's.
So you view the legislative process as an adversarial process between the government and its citizens. Amazing how this always seems to be a fight between people posting under their names when arguing for privacy rights, and anonymous fascists who believe there is no such thing. These threads fill up with little wannabe fascists when you set it to a zero point threshold.
So we should get rid of the police force, as they can become corrupt?
We need police protection in a way that we don't need this.
Uh, no. There was no implication of that sort. Airlines, train and bus systems all monitor you. Good thing too, else you'd show at the station when the junket was cancelled because they couldn't call you.
OK, I think I see what is going on here. In this country the surveillance is not yet quite as Orwellian as you're used to in the UK.
Well OK that was unprofessional of me to snap at Someone. Who. Writes. This. Way.
The relevant question as far as the Fourth Amendment is concerned, is whether the increased surveillance constitutes a search. Because your Fourth Amendment rights aren't forfeited when you leave your house. Ordinarily a policeman can conduct ordinary surveillance of plates on a public road- within human ability- which is one of the parameters under which the legislature and the courts defined the limits of police surveillance. It has still always been possible, if you behaved yourself, to travel on a public road anonymously, and to get where you were going without anyone knowing.
But not anymore, if the police can conduct this ordinary surveillance with superhuman ability. Many people here are looking at the legality of each atomic operation in isolation, and ignoring the fact that thousands of them can soon be carried out each second- a sudden, vast increase in surveillance efficiency. There may be no way soon to avoid traveling by car without having the government record where you are. We will suddenly find out a lot of stuff about a lot of people. This is a vast new development in the power of law enforcement, and the legislature and judiciary should both be expected to react in some way. The law often fails to prohibit things before they become humanly possible to do- it has to be maintained occasionally.
The right to privacy was originally a right derived from Common Law. We all have heard the expression "An Englishman's home is his Castle." This was the rough summary of the right to privacy enjoyed by freemen in England. Of course, it was an ideal, and was not perfectly executed in practice, but the same could be said of much that goes on in this country.
In the US, much of our law is based on a combination of British Common Law, Statutory, and Constitutional law. And, once a statute is written that enumerates what was previously common law, the statutory meaning takes precedence. The right to privacy was one of those unspoken, but widely accepted theories of British Common Law. But with the publication and ratification of the US Constitution, many areas of Common Law became statutory.
Nowadays, the right to privacy is a statutory one, carved out of the intersection of individual rights derived from the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments. For instance, the 5th Amendment gives you the right not to self-incriminate, the 4th gives you protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the 14th and 6th amendments insure that you have due process rights and can't be sent to a prison in Cuba. In the middle of the 20th century, the USSC began to interpret the nexus of these rights as creating an area of individual activity that should be free from government interference. Some of the more famous cases, Griswold v. Connecticut and progeny, Roe v. Wade and progeny, found that while the right to privacy was not enumerated, it was implied, in the same way that if you say "I consult with my attorney Monday through Sunday," you have implied that you also talk to your attorney Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.
While it may be true that you can't travel on public roads with an expectation of privacy, it was always implied that you can travel in public without an expectation of having your travel being monitored. Especially not with God-like powers. Nobody even envisioned such a thing. And let's be realistic here. The only conceivable purpose of a monitoring system designed to track motorists in their daily movements is to effectively conduct surveillance on all citizens in the most effective way possible. It's clearly beyond the pale.
In. The. Home.
Fourth. Amendment. Moron.
After all you have no expectation to privacy on public roads.
That sort of misses the point- if I had known that the police would be able to use them to track people's movements and integrate the data into a large surveillance system, I would have lobbied my representatives to BLOCK public funding of those roads with my tax dollars. That wasn't part of the deal.
If it comes to pass that the police can conduct omnipotent surveillance on public roads, I will start sending letters to Congress and forming crazy websites lobbying to have all public highway funding shut down- I will demand that none of my taxable income be diverted to support automotive infrastructure in any way. With an oil crisis coming we should be doing this anyway.
It makes no difference if they're infrared or UV. As Scalia clearly explains in the opinion I linked to, that's quite irrelevant:
Oh well. Time for my time-honoured usual tirade on this subject...
Driving is NOT A RIGHT! It is a PRIVILEGE
Yeah, so?
WTF does that have to do with the wisdom of building a vast creepy database of everybody's whereabouts?
Using public roads is something granted to you by society under certain conditions, hence it's a PRIVILEGE you, like many morons today, have been so babied and protected that you don't know the difference between a right and a privilege.
So the cops can have a detailed database of your whereabouts every hour of every day? Why not keep the cops up to date every time there's nobody home at your house? After all you can always just walk around or use our wonderful public transportation system, right?
I don't even drive and I think that's whacked.