Maybe, but nobody died. A store which sells illegal drugs will be closed, even when they also sell legitimate stuff to legitimate customers. Is that excessive?
Whereas my terrorism example is probably an exaggeration, your store example is an understatement. A store has customers who have no continuing contractual agreements with the store: You walk in, buy something, pay, walk out. Deal done. In the case of an ISP, the ISP has ongoing contractual obligations to their legitimate customers that have been stomped on by this take-down. Those customers had a term relationship that they paid for in advance, for months if not a year or more, and now that's been forcibly interfered with.
A more apt analogy might be the government or some other entity coming in and forcibly evacuating an apartment building, barring all the tenants from re-entering their own homes, because one criminal rented from that landlord. Yes, I would consider that to be excessive.
There seems to be an implication that Troyak and Group 3 were somehow complicit with all this botnet activity, yet no such claims are actually being explicitly made - just that the ISPs have been "associated" with these botnets, whatever that means.
Did these ISPs have legitimate customers who have now been cut off because of the criminals alongside them on the ISP's network? Was the ISP asked to deal with the situation first, and either ignored or refused such requests? If these ISPs were fronts for the botnet owners, where's the evidence? Did someone just think, oh, there are a bunch of bad guys on this ISP; let's cut the whole thing off and fuck the rest of their customers?
This action sounds like the IT equivalent of a government blowing up an entire city block because a couple terrorists are renting an apartment there.
If these ISPs have legitimate customers, hopefully they sue the hell out of the upstream for this.
'Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density -- 1M people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai -- and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.' Brand adds that in most slums recycling is literally a way of life e.g. the Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 rag-pickers.
Um, yeah. That's because the people living in slums are dirt-bloody-poor. But it's interesting that someone would describe such dismal living conditions in positive terms: I've long suspected that much of environmentalism is nothing more than crypto-Luddism or -primitivism, and this only adds to that suspicion.
The digital letdown was when many of the top ideas generated by the process were to legalize marijuana, solve tax issues and to reinvestigate Obama's birth origins.
So, in other words, they didn't get the answers they wanted to hear. What a "letdown."
Fast forward to February 6 and the same process has been repeated with individual federal agencies as the subject. This time the idea generation has been much more productive, with ideas such as...
That's what I meant by "not quite." The law they passed afterward contains the "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" phrase oft found in obscenity laws, which makes it almost impossible to prosecute someone.
Yup. That this story of Microsoft playing shady games with the court system, not even a week after the Cryptome story, and the completely different attitude Slashdot and so many posters are displaying, because now it's people we don't like being attacked, was just too much to pass up.
So Microsoft secretly filed a suit against 27 unnamed individuals, and got a secret order taking 277 domain names away from them, all based on a mere accusation.
Oh, but since we're fighting spam, I guess that's okay.
Wait until Microsoft starts doing this to go after copyright violations. Will y'all be cheering then?
And these "fundamentals" aren't things that one either believes or not, as though it's a choice. There's simply the way the world is...
The exact same thing is believed by most of the devout fundamentalists out there. Yet, I don't think you want them to be able to force everyone to learn about their idea of "that's simply the way the world is."
I'm not saying I disagree with you. I'm saying that just because I believe something is a universal truth doesn't mean I believe it should be shoved down people's throats.
Actually "don't hurt others" I would say is at the core of my belief system. Non-aggression principle. The freedom to do anything else is just the flipside of that.
I don't think you got the point of my post either. Homeschooling doesn't mean keeping kids at home in some isolated bubble, away from other children, and only interacting with mommy and daddy. There are hundreds, maybe even over a thousand, of homeschooling parents where I'm from: Enough that there are multiple organizations supporting them, representing them in legal battles, helping them network, giving them places to bring their children for socialization amongst other homeschooled children, and so on. "Homeschooled," when done properly, is more akin to "community schooled"---voluntarily, and without State-vetted lesson plans or the attendant micromanagement.
You have one anecdote about a poorly homeschooled child who was taught that way, and the plural of anecdote is not data. Like I said, there are hundreds of homeschoolers in New Hampshire---and here's how many of their students are like the kid you described: zero.
The last attempt to regulate homeschoolers in New Hampshire was justified by the bill sponsor and Education Committee chairwoman for the reasons you talk about: These two politicians "just didn't want to see any children fall through the cracks." Yet, at the public hearings for the bill, when asked for, not one case of this actually happening in New Hampshire could be presented. Homeschoolers are already required to report that they homeschool to school superintendents, so the State does indeed have some knowledge on the progress that homeschooled children are making---and, not one case of inadequate education or socialization could be demonstrated.
How about the individual being subjected to the education?
Y'know, it's possible for the State to not be corrupt. If it's corrupt, rather than changing the policy that doesn't work because of corruption, you should do something about the corruption in the first place.
I don't believe I said the problem was "corruption." The problem is the ideology that one-size-fits-all solutions are legitimate.
The problem with public education as a whole isn't the teachers (although there certainly are some who just don't care), it's the system.
You should read the book by John Taylor Gatto that I linked to earlier. He's a former public school teacher who did his best to actually teach kids until he couldn't stand dealing with the counterproductive bureaucracy anymore, researched and learned what was actually going on with public schools, and got the hell out.
I honestly can't complain about most of my teachers either, back when I was in school---I had several history/social studies teachers who were unorthodox and certainly didn't teach a mindlessly pro-American ideological curriculum. But what Gatto says about the school system---everything from the intentionally dreary and boring classrooms, to the prison-like strictly regimented schedules and class hierarchy, to the forced socialization and forced learning that make so many people hate the concept---rings true.
Ask yourself, what does it teach children to be strictly divided up into age-based and aptitude-based classes? ...to then either ridicule, or be ridiculed, as "jocks," "nerds," "preppies," "vocies," or similar? ...to be forced to learn something, or at least just sit there, whether they want to or not? ...to spend most of the day sitting silently, doing only what they're told, not even able to get up to use the bathroom without permission? ...to define "success" in terms of what their teacher expects of them? ...to constantly seek approval of authority figures in everything they do? ...to drop everything when the bell goes off or the school day ends, and go do something else? ...to either have to constantly deal with bullies, or turn into one in order to get by? ...to always run to teacher when they have a problem with another student? ...to constantly deal with surveillance, metal detectors, locker searches, random drug checks, and the occasional lockdowns and drug-dog raid?
What does spending thirteen years of one's life, three quarters of the year, 6-8 hours per day, living like this, teach people? (This is just some of the stuff I remember from Gatto's book, too.)
* J'raxis goes back and scratches out "Yet, at least."
Hadn't thought of that. Thanks for reminding me of yet more State intervention into people's lives under the excuse of "Won't someone please think of the children." And yeah, what the hell was I thinking? There are myriad examples of people being forced into medical care against their own will, "for their own protection."
0) Gay laws have been somewhat antiquated as I would call it across most of the world until recently (which is no excuse of course). e.g.: Sexual acts between persons of the same sex have been legal nationwide in the US since 2003, pursuant to the US Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas. (meaning they were not legal nationwide before).
If you thought I was implying that the U.S. was better in this respect, I wasn't. Hell, we're still fighting over here against homophobes trying to enshrine anti-homosexual discrimination in state-level constitutions, and at this juncture they are winning. (A majority of states have banned same-sex marriage through constitutional amendment, and several more through statute.)
2) There is no censorship in Germany (article 5 of the Grundgesetz). This does not mean you can say anything you like though. This being a reaction to the 3. Reich and not a leftover.
Sooooo, yes there is censorship, it's just that so many people think it's a good idea and necessary that they don't want to call it censorship.
I'm a bit fed up with Americans always bashing German or other European laws. There are enough cases in which we Europeans scratch our heads about US laws.
I'm not coming at any of this from a pro-U.S. point of view. I'm thoroughly anti-statist, and will criticize every example of authoritarianism I see here, too. (And there is plenty of it.) However, at least the U.S. hasn't, much yet, gone down the path of defining government services as "rights." And our First Amendment protects all political speech, no matter how vile, and virtually every other kind of speech, too.
Quite seriously, how do you determine which rights exist without positive protection?
Simple: Which require positive action (that is, doing something upholds the right), versus which require no action (not doing something upholds the right). As a thought experiment, imagine you were completely alone. Would you have the right to freedom of thought, speech, religion, conscience, and ownership of property? Yes---because there's no one there to infringe upon these rights. Action by the State is only necessary to protect these rights if and only if someone else acts to restrict them. On the other hand, would you have the right to health care, education, or a job? Of course not---these all need to be provided to you by other human beings. If you choose not to, or cannot afford to, buy these services, the State has to act to provide you with them.
The right to human dignity is an interesting case of where "rights" have been used to restrict people's own choices against their will. There was a legal case in France concerning this that actually went all the way to the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights---who ruled that in this case, the "right to human dignity" trumped this individual's own choice to engage in conduct degrading to himself. I've seen similar arguments---not pressed into law yet, but made by various advocates---that the right to human dignity can be similarly used to restrict sexual freedom's. How would you like it if a government started banning voluntarily, consensual sexual behavior between consenting adults because it was seen as "degrading"? (I don't even mean bizarre fetishes; less than a century ago, homosexuality was commonly called "degrading" by homophobes.)
To me the foundation of human rights is an absolute respect for self-ownership and freedom of choice. (Implicit in this is that one can't legitimately choose to violate others' rights, because then one is not respecting the other's right to self-ownership and freedom of choice.) All other legitimate "human" rights---speech, religion, property, &c.---merely derive from this. A person doesn't have the right to life or dignity under this concept: They of course have a right against being killed, but if they voluntarily choose to end their own life, someone can't step in and stop them in order to protect their "right to life." And they of course have a right against undignified treatment by others, but they can't be prevented from voluntarily engaging in degrading behavior by someone insisting on protecting their "right to human dignity."
Are you claiming that sending a kid to public schools for 6-8 hours per day, for three quarters of the year, for thirteen years of their life, is a "minimum", and that that much time spent is just to "let them to know other people's points of view"?
for one i don't think publci education really existed as it does now and nobody cared if you went to school, worked on a farm or were taught in home.
More or less. Compulsory public education as we know it today started in the mid-1800s. Prior to that, education was the responsibility of local communities and the individuals who actually had children.
and being home all day just talking to your mom is going to seriously gimp that.
This is not how "homeschooling" works at all. Homeschooling parents often work together to school their kids, and such children generally get more---and better---social interaction than they do in public schools. When kids are allowed to learn at their own pace, and interact with whom they want, when and how, they do a lot better than they do by being forced to sit in a classroom learning what the teacher says, when the teacher says, at the rate the teacher says, and then getting a few brief periods of "social interaction" (lunch hour, recess, after school activities) in an equally tightly controlled environment. And like I said in another post, if I had a kid and wanted him to have social interaction public school--style, I can beat him up and steal his lunch money myself.:)
Human beings are curious and gregarious creatures, and like to learn and be social, if you let them do it at their own pace and leisure. Force them to do how you want, and they learn to hate it.
Every year the educrats in the New Hampshire State House try to pass another bill regulating homeschooling. And each time, hundreds of homeschooling parents come out to the public hearings and floor votes, with their kids. I'm not personally involved in homeschooling activism, but I repeatedly get to see how it works since I'm up at the State House on some liberty issue or another on a near-weekly basis. It's amazing to see how well-adjusted and well-behaved all the homeschool kids are. Most of them far exceed what the public schools expect of them at any given age (e.g., someone who would be in the second grade reading at a fifth-grade level). I once had an hour-long debate with a fourteen-year-old homeschooled kid (I'm 29) over the merits of the argument presented in this book (and I would have to say the kid did better at it than I did). And spending a day at the State House watching how the sausage gets made is one hell of a better civics lesson than reading some dumbed-down, error-ridden "social studies" textbook in a boring classroom no one wants to be in.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes---and you send the lawyers after the upstream, not your own ISP:
Who pays this idiot's salary? (And does he know where the word comes from?)
Whereas my terrorism example is probably an exaggeration, your store example is an understatement. A store has customers who have no continuing contractual agreements with the store: You walk in, buy something, pay, walk out. Deal done. In the case of an ISP, the ISP has ongoing contractual obligations to their legitimate customers that have been stomped on by this take-down. Those customers had a term relationship that they paid for in advance, for months if not a year or more, and now that's been forcibly interfered with.
A more apt analogy might be the government or some other entity coming in and forcibly evacuating an apartment building, barring all the tenants from re-entering their own homes, because one criminal rented from that landlord. Yes, I would consider that to be excessive.
There seems to be an implication that Troyak and Group 3 were somehow complicit with all this botnet activity, yet no such claims are actually being explicitly made - just that the ISPs have been "associated" with these botnets, whatever that means.
Did these ISPs have legitimate customers who have now been cut off because of the criminals alongside them on the ISP's network? Was the ISP asked to deal with the situation first, and either ignored or refused such requests? If these ISPs were fronts for the botnet owners, where's the evidence? Did someone just think, oh, there are a bunch of bad guys on this ISP; let's cut the whole thing off and fuck the rest of their customers?
This action sounds like the IT equivalent of a government blowing up an entire city block because a couple terrorists are renting an apartment there.
If these ISPs have legitimate customers, hopefully they sue the hell out of the upstream for this.
So let's give the goverment more money so they can be even more efficient at taking our money.
Oh, to have a computer that would slap someone when they make a stupid error...
Um, yeah. That's because the people living in slums are dirt-bloody-poor. But it's interesting that someone would describe such dismal living conditions in positive terms: I've long suspected that much of environmentalism is nothing more than crypto-Luddism or -primitivism, and this only adds to that suspicion.
So, in other words, they didn't get the answers they wanted to hear. What a "letdown."
And "productive" means now they are.
That's what I meant by "not quite." The law they passed afterward contains the "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" phrase oft found in obscenity laws, which makes it almost impossible to prosecute someone.
Yup. That this story of Microsoft playing shady games with the court system, not even a week after the Cryptome story, and the completely different attitude Slashdot and so many posters are displaying, because now it's people we don't like being attacked, was just too much to pass up.
Uh, not quite. See Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002).
So Microsoft secretly filed a suit against 27 unnamed individuals, and got a secret order taking 277 domain names away from them, all based on a mere accusation.
Oh, but since we're fighting spam, I guess that's okay.
Wait until Microsoft starts doing this to go after copyright violations. Will y'all be cheering then?
The exact same thing is believed by most of the devout fundamentalists out there. Yet, I don't think you want them to be able to force everyone to learn about their idea of "that's simply the way the world is."
I'm not saying I disagree with you. I'm saying that just because I believe something is a universal truth doesn't mean I believe it should be shoved down people's throats.
Actually "don't hurt others" I would say is at the core of my belief system. Non-aggression principle. The freedom to do anything else is just the flipside of that.
I don't think you got the point of my post either. Homeschooling doesn't mean keeping kids at home in some isolated bubble, away from other children, and only interacting with mommy and daddy. There are hundreds, maybe even over a thousand, of homeschooling parents where I'm from: Enough that there are multiple organizations supporting them, representing them in legal battles, helping them network, giving them places to bring their children for socialization amongst other homeschooled children, and so on. "Homeschooled," when done properly, is more akin to "community schooled"---voluntarily, and without State-vetted lesson plans or the attendant micromanagement.
You have one anecdote about a poorly homeschooled child who was taught that way, and the plural of anecdote is not data. Like I said, there are hundreds of homeschoolers in New Hampshire---and here's how many of their students are like the kid you described: zero.
The last attempt to regulate homeschoolers in New Hampshire was justified by the bill sponsor and Education Committee chairwoman for the reasons you talk about: These two politicians "just didn't want to see any children fall through the cracks." Yet, at the public hearings for the bill, when asked for, not one case of this actually happening in New Hampshire could be presented. Homeschoolers are already required to report that they homeschool to school superintendents, so the State does indeed have some knowledge on the progress that homeschooled children are making---and, not one case of inadequate education or socialization could be demonstrated.
There's some real data.
How about the individual being subjected to the education?
I don't believe I said the problem was "corruption." The problem is the ideology that one-size-fits-all solutions are legitimate.
The problem with public education as a whole isn't the teachers (although there certainly are some who just don't care), it's the system.
You should read the book by John Taylor Gatto that I linked to earlier. He's a former public school teacher who did his best to actually teach kids until he couldn't stand dealing with the counterproductive bureaucracy anymore, researched and learned what was actually going on with public schools, and got the hell out.
I honestly can't complain about most of my teachers either, back when I was in school---I had several history/social studies teachers who were unorthodox and certainly didn't teach a mindlessly pro-American ideological curriculum. But what Gatto says about the school system---everything from the intentionally dreary and boring classrooms, to the prison-like strictly regimented schedules and class hierarchy, to the forced socialization and forced learning that make so many people hate the concept---rings true.
Ask yourself, what does it teach children to be strictly divided up into age-based and aptitude-based classes?
...to then either ridicule, or be ridiculed, as "jocks," "nerds," "preppies," "vocies," or similar?
...to be forced to learn something, or at least just sit there, whether they want to or not?
...to spend most of the day sitting silently, doing only what they're told, not even able to get up to use the bathroom without permission?
...to define "success" in terms of what their teacher expects of them?
...to constantly seek approval of authority figures in everything they do?
...to drop everything when the bell goes off or the school day ends, and go do something else?
...to either have to constantly deal with bullies, or turn into one in order to get by?
...to always run to teacher when they have a problem with another student?
...to constantly deal with surveillance, metal detectors, locker searches, random drug checks, and the occasional lockdowns and drug-dog raid?
What does spending thirteen years of one's life, three quarters of the year, 6-8 hours per day, living like this, teach people? (This is just some of the stuff I remember from Gatto's book, too.)
Right. It's a crime to hold a certain opinion. Wonder where that idea comes from.
Did you see me anywhere defending the mess that the law is over here?
"Coexist" implies leaving people alone, but you seem to be trying to justify forcing people to do things against their will. Orwell much lately?
* J'raxis goes back and scratches out "Yet, at least."
Hadn't thought of that. Thanks for reminding me of yet more State intervention into people's lives under the excuse of "Won't someone please think of the children." And yeah, what the hell was I thinking? There are myriad examples of people being forced into medical care against their own will, "for their own protection."
If you thought I was implying that the U.S. was better in this respect, I wasn't. Hell, we're still fighting over here against homophobes trying to enshrine anti-homosexual discrimination in state-level constitutions, and at this juncture they are winning. (A majority of states have banned same-sex marriage through constitutional amendment, and several more through statute.)
Sooooo, yes there is censorship, it's just that so many people think it's a good idea and necessary that they don't want to call it censorship.
I'm not coming at any of this from a pro-U.S. point of view. I'm thoroughly anti-statist, and will criticize every example of authoritarianism I see here, too. (And there is plenty of it.) However, at least the U.S. hasn't, much yet, gone down the path of defining government services as "rights." And our First Amendment protects all political speech, no matter how vile, and virtually every other kind of speech, too.
Simple: Which require positive action (that is, doing something upholds the right), versus which require no action (not doing something upholds the right). As a thought experiment, imagine you were completely alone. Would you have the right to freedom of thought, speech, religion, conscience, and ownership of property? Yes---because there's no one there to infringe upon these rights. Action by the State is only necessary to protect these rights if and only if someone else acts to restrict them. On the other hand, would you have the right to health care, education, or a job? Of course not---these all need to be provided to you by other human beings. If you choose not to, or cannot afford to, buy these services, the State has to act to provide you with them.
The right to human dignity is an interesting case of where "rights" have been used to restrict people's own choices against their will. There was a legal case in France concerning this that actually went all the way to the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights---who ruled that in this case, the "right to human dignity" trumped this individual's own choice to engage in conduct degrading to himself. I've seen similar arguments---not pressed into law yet, but made by various advocates---that the right to human dignity can be similarly used to restrict sexual freedom's. How would you like it if a government started banning voluntarily, consensual sexual behavior between consenting adults because it was seen as "degrading"? (I don't even mean bizarre fetishes; less than a century ago, homosexuality was commonly called "degrading" by homophobes.)
To me the foundation of human rights is an absolute respect for self-ownership and freedom of choice. (Implicit in this is that one can't legitimately choose to violate others' rights, because then one is not respecting the other's right to self-ownership and freedom of choice.) All other legitimate "human" rights---speech, religion, property, &c.---merely derive from this. A person doesn't have the right to life or dignity under this concept: They of course have a right against being killed, but if they voluntarily choose to end their own life, someone can't step in and stop them in order to protect their "right to life." And they of course have a right against undignified treatment by others, but they can't be prevented from voluntarily engaging in degrading behavior by someone insisting on protecting their "right to human dignity."
Are you claiming that sending a kid to public schools for 6-8 hours per day, for three quarters of the year, for thirteen years of their life, is a "minimum", and that that much time spent is just to "let them to know other people's points of view"?
Why does it matter to you whether or not some random stranger believes in the same "fundamentals of the world around them" as you do?
More or less. Compulsory public education as we know it today started in the mid-1800s. Prior to that, education was the responsibility of local communities and the individuals who actually had children.
This is not how "homeschooling" works at all. Homeschooling parents often work together to school their kids, and such children generally get more---and better---social interaction than they do in public schools. When kids are allowed to learn at their own pace, and interact with whom they want, when and how, they do a lot better than they do by being forced to sit in a classroom learning what the teacher says, when the teacher says, at the rate the teacher says, and then getting a few brief periods of "social interaction" (lunch hour, recess, after school activities) in an equally tightly controlled environment. And like I said in another post, if I had a kid and wanted him to have social interaction public school--style, I can beat him up and steal his lunch money myself. :)
Human beings are curious and gregarious creatures, and like to learn and be social, if you let them do it at their own pace and leisure. Force them to do how you want, and they learn to hate it.
Every year the educrats in the New Hampshire State House try to pass another bill regulating homeschooling. And each time, hundreds of homeschooling parents come out to the public hearings and floor votes, with their kids. I'm not personally involved in homeschooling activism, but I repeatedly get to see how it works since I'm up at the State House on some liberty issue or another on a near-weekly basis. It's amazing to see how well-adjusted and well-behaved all the homeschool kids are. Most of them far exceed what the public schools expect of them at any given age (e.g., someone who would be in the second grade reading at a fifth-grade level). I once had an hour-long debate with a fourteen-year-old homeschooled kid (I'm 29) over the merits of the argument presented in this book (and I would have to say the kid did better at it than I did). And spending a day at the State House watching how the sausage gets made is one hell of a better civics lesson than reading some dumbed-down, error-ridden "social studies" textbook in a boring classroom no one wants to be in.