It would be interesting to see how this bumps up against their common-carrier status. Under that ruling they take no responsibility for the contents of their transmissions (i.e. child porn) because it isn't theirs and they have no knowledge of it. If, on the other hand they get ownership then the next kiddie porn sent is not just the property (and problem) of the sender but also of Verizon (by which I mean all of its shareholders).
This, like the obssession over internet filtering makes me thing that more and more two things are going on: 1) This has been happening for far longer than anyone knew, possibly on a much larger scale, and they are despirate to retrospectively legitimize it and/or keep the true extent of it secret.
2) They are being entirely short-sighted in jumping headfirst into it now when their predecessors had the good sense (perhaps in the Wake of Vietnam era spying or earlier) to stay the hell away from this road because it won't be profitable or desirable, or even workable in the long run.
Soldiers in the field are themselves constantly at risk of life and limb. They are also constantly under stress and tension. Such stresses and risks are what forms the bond with their comrades as well as their equipment. Everything, everyone, has to work right or likely they all die. This is why sailors refer to their ship as she, and call her by name, why they get almost tearful when thinking of a favored ship and wear caps claiming them as a member of her crew. This is why Airforce officers feel an attachment to their planes and why Army officers care for their sidearms. This anthropomorphization is an essential facet of how they operate not just a side effect. The application to a mine-clearing robot may be new but not so unprecedented.
This attachment shows up in other ways too. Kevin Mitnick is said to once have cried when being informed that he broke Bell Lab's latest computers because he had spent so much time with them that he'd become attached.
Now contrast that with an office job where the computer is not your friend but your enemy, you need the reports on time, you need them now why WHY! won't it work. Clearly the computer must be punished it is and uppity evil servant that will not OBEY!
If you were to stop talking about "Robots Rights" and start talking about say "Ship's rights" then you might have a fair analogy. To men and women of the sea a ship, their ship is a living thing so of course it should be cared for and respected. To people who live on land and don't deal with ships, this is crazy, even subversive to the natural order. To people who have developed an intimate hatred of such things giving them rights will only encourage what they see as a dangerous tendency to get uppity.
On a serious note though the one unaddressed question with "Robot Rights" is which robots? If we are to take the minefield clearing robot as a standard what about those less intelligent? Does my Mindstorms deserve it? Does my Laptop? Granted my laptop doesn't move but it executes tasks the same as any other machine. At what point do we draw the line.
In America, and I suspect elsewhere, race based laws fell down on the question of "what race?" Are you 100% black? 1/2 One quadroon (1/4) or octaroon (1/8) as they used to say? How the hell do you measure that? Ditto for the racial purity laws of the Nazi's. Crap about skull shape aside there really is no easy or hard standard. Right now the law is dancing around this with the question of who is "Adult" enough to stand trial and be executed, or "Alive" enough to stay on life support. No easy answers exist and therin lies the fighting.
The same thing will occur with "Robot Rights" we will be forced to define what it means to be a robot and that isn't so easy.
Will they wait until you are identified as a terrorist and then "switch on the lip-reading feature? Will they have it store all readings on the fly and then go back to analyze them once something bad has happened? Will they "mine" this data on the fly looking for key phrases as they are spoken by some would-be criminal looking at the camera (James Bond style)? Or will they simply use such recognition tech after the fact when viewing or reviewing selected portions of video?
My money would be on the latter but I fail to see how this is either a) a real big "Gee whiz" or b) likely to impact their investigations much.
From what I know of present tech the lip readings are unlikely to be that accurate. Cutting edge tech on speech to text is not all that robust and that is processing the actual audio, you know... speech, while the lip reading would be far worse. Consider the problem of alternate interpretations like this look at someone's lips with your ears covered and ask them to say several random sentences using words like 'gun', 'run', 'ghunga din', 'bomb', 'attack', etc. Now imagine doing that in poor lighting conditions from an angle well above them and some distance away. Now consider that you have no idea what the other words were and thus little to narrow the search space. If you assume that the words fit some pattern of 'terrorist speech' then you may get a 'match' but that is a big assumption to make and one that is unlikely to yield much useful info especially if it required detailed analysis by one person.
So when you couple that problem with the ongoing question of whether these cameras ever help to prevent and deter crimes or only seem to be useful in producing evidence once criminals have already been caught or crimes already committed then it begs the question as to whether this will help, hurt (by producing false 'evidence' and wasting police time and implicating good people), or do nothing at all.
Given that I find it unlikely any of the tube bombers were dumb enough to spell out their plans while staring at a camera I suspect it will be one of the latter two.
The Knotty problem becomes one of interconnections. Sure department X needs to know fact A and department Y needs to know fact B, and sure we have laws blocking X from collecting B and Y from collecting A but when all such records are public and publicly searchable then the point is rendered moot, then X can know B and Y can know A and the stalker down the street can know both.
This is, in fact, just what the late and unlamented Total Information Awareness project was all about and what private companies such as ChoicePoint are still about, linking otherwise innocuous information so Big Brother doesn't have to.
As has been correctly noted (e.g. with Census data being used to hunt down Asian-Americans during WWII for no good reason) laws preventing one department from sharing with another are moot when such sharing is possible. They become even more moot when all that it takes is a few seconds with google.
While I agree with you that laws restricting the info collected are and will be a good thing, I feel that they alone are not the sword to cut this Gordian Knot.
And let's not forget about the regulatory nightmare in the U.S. known as the Superfund law, the EPA regulatory program best known for requiring expensive but often needless cleanup of toxic waste sites, along with endless litigation over such cleanups.
For those unfamiliar with superfund it requires, and pays for, cleanup of truly hazardous sites in the U.S. ranging from large-scale toxic spills (e.g. Love Canal New York) to military disposal sites and deliberate poisoning of the drinking water with nuclear waste (e.g. Project Chariot).
Such waste has often been produced by or with the support of the federal government in communities that have little resources to combat the problems. Dismissing it out of hand is only possible for those who've never been exposed to it and who don't care about the lives of others.
But then of course there's this:
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk-science expert and advocate of free enterprise, and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
CEI is a neoliberal thinktank that has been outspoken against any governmental environmental policy including action on global warming once stating that: "reducing these levels [Creenhouse gas emmissions], even in "baby steps," would "result in the deaths of more people in the U.S. than global warming would worldwide"
See also:
In May 2006, CEI released a controversial ad campaign with two television commercials [6] arguing that global warming is not a problem. The commercials used the tagline "Carbon Dioxide - They call it pollution; We call it life." One ad stated that the world's glaciers are "growing, not melting... getting thicker, not thinner."[4] The ad cited two Science articles to support its claims. However, the editor for Science stated that the ad "misrepresents the conclusions of the two cited Science papers... by selective referencing". The author of the articles, Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said CEI was misrepresenting his previous research to back their claims. "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," he said. [7]
The FBI says it found CDs with child porn in Perez's room, the only one it searched. An open-and-shut case? No, because there's a twist: the Yahoo account used to send the message belonged to a Mr. Rob Ram, according to Yahoo's records. Perez had a roommate named Robert Ramos and an open WiFi connection, but that was not enough to convince a federal judge to keep the seized CDs from being used in his prosecution. Perez entered a conditional guilty plea to the charges and received a sentence of four years and nine months.
In this case the issue at hand is whether the physical media containing child porn that were found in his room could be used against him. The arguments with regards to OpenWEP would cover incidental usage but here he is actually in possession of physical media not just an access point that was used.
As stated in the article the question on appeal is whether the use of the AP was sufficient grounds for a search warrant to be executed on the home. The catch is that this is different than the question of whether OpenWAP == Probable Cause. In the case of the former the issue is that someone on the network was in possession of Child Porn so the argument goes that the first, natural, place to look is the person who owns the network itself.
If, on the other hand the latter was the case then simply having an openAP would be sufficient to trigger an investigation, that was not the case here. As such the headline and title article are somewhat misleading.
Not exactly. While that law is on the books in some places I do not believe that it is fully national. Moreover it encodes a rather incorrect understanding of the way things work. Firstly 1 old-growth redwood != 2 saplings. So the net impact is not balanced out and if we kill old trees faster than the new ones can grow then we will still have a destructive impact.
Seconslu the costs to the environment is not entirely about the trees, there is the brush and underbrsh, the animals, etc all of which are displaced. And they cannot easily move to wherever the new trees are planted.
Note that while I laud the idea of planting trees, a viable forest with treesu, underbrush, animal and vegetable life != an orderly arbor of young saplings with no secondary plants.
No the stated issue is kiddies but if you read the text the goal is elimination of all "porn", and advancing the role that it isn't just the mom n' pop's job to secure the network, it is their job to monitor it making them go from local cafe to local snoop.
This isn't about running open networks it is about running a free internet or one where the Parent's Television Councils says what we can and cannot do.
Some might worry that this will be intrusive - a big brother in the skies, spying on people the government wants to watch.
But the man in charge of security in Caracas, Ramon Morales Rossi, played down that idea.
Of Course he says that, what would he say? I find the printing of slogans on them "We watch over you for your security" to be very newspeak.
While it might be true that the dirigibles will help to an extent, they can at least monitor places faster than a foot-mounted officer might get there, I find it unlikely that these will really eliminate or even substantially reduce the crime problem. Evidence from places like Britain and other areas have shown that, at best, such cameras make catching people after the fact sometimes easier but even that constant monitoring isn't necessarily useful.
At the end of the day the goal should be to prevent crime and I find it unlikely that a fleet of such airships would do it in the long term. More likely they will be used at the next anti-government demonstration to gather "intelligence" on the opposition.
At the end of the day, in my experience, crime is driven by economic and political factors and can only be mitigated by that, and by strong community-based policing. I've certainly seen that in my own town were "targeted" neighborhoods (aka Black Neighborhoods") are given little regular police protection (i.e. officers walking beats, getting to know the neighbors, etc) but are the subject of regular well-staged "crackdowns" in which the swat team rolls through watching over them for their security. The police complain, rightly, that when something happens there they get no help from the residents. The residents complain, rightly, that the police aren't there regularly, aren't from there, don't know anyone, and tend to treat them like an enemy population to be suppressed, not citizens whom they protect.
In the most recent incident the police rolled through with the swat team, kleig lights and weapons pointed at anyone they saw in a "drug sweep", noone was caught, it was simply a show of force. Yet all the rest of the nights, the police aren't seen and it is only neighborhood watch groups that get anything done.
If by "our guys" you mean people who aren't CEO's or who at least know what they are talking about and aren't in it for the money, they do, just not all the time. In many cases the CEO's have the connections (political, financial and personal) to the elected officials that gets their phones answered and them invited to talk as if they know what direction is up. In Yarro's case he is also the Chairman of the CP80 group that is seeking to apply community-norm based restrictions to the internet a-la television where everything we see is dictated by the Parents Television Council.
This is a problem both in that the legislators are clearly not making an effort to get testimony from people who think the internet is just fine, a poor job for which they should be fired. It is also a side-effect of the way Politics is done these days with large donations driving much of the action and television ads with elected officials "speaking to" and "reaching out for" their constituents rather than say listening.
If you want to make your views known on this I say ring up the people involved and critique what was said, logically. Doing so often enough often gets you invited to these things.
It is interesting, but not surprising, that the CP80 group is involved in this. After all Yarro CEO of SCO is their Chairman.
For those not familiar with it CP80 is a proposal that calls for segregating internet content into "safe" and "unsafe" by legally declaring some ports to be regulated and some unregulated. The regulation model is the "Community Norms" model that the FCC uses to allow the Parents Television Council to tell us all what we can and cannot watch on TV.
Leaving aside the fact that this, like all similar proposals, ignores the manifold legal hurdles in defining "adult" and "non-adult" content (just read the book of Revelations in the Bible sometime) it also ignores the fact that the port-based communication is an international standard, and one that would not be workable for the U.S. to mandate alone.
My favorite part about it really is the fact that even if this act were implemented it would still require some special settings or filtration on the user end (i.e. the home computer) to keep the bad ports off. Thus the problem that it seems even the CEO of SCO has that his kids know more about computers than him, would still remain.
Incidentally Wal-Mart is listed as a major sponsor of the group.
To date the act does not appear to have been submitted to Congress.
If their "brain is frying trying to understand the technology involved" (damn!) then the best thing to do is explain it to them, along with the consequences of a bad decision. One could, for example write to a legislator explaining the concept of a popup blocker and the extremely low likelihood of "just entering a search term" causing a "tornado of popups" unless the search term was "I want a tornado of popups to take down my machine".
One could also explain, if one lived in Utah, that one would think very very poorly of any elected official who let SCO of all people railroad them into trying to railroad some unworkable and useless ban on a perfectly legitimate activity (open hotspots) based upon no evidence other than frying brains and luddite morons.
One could also, perhaps best, explain the extremely negative economic impact such legislation would have in the short term (forcing otherwise acceptable mom n' pops to spend money preventing legal activities) and in the long-term by hurting Utah's efforts to modernize its infrastructure, attract new businesses and convince prospective high-tech employers and employees that it isn't a backwards theocratic nuthouse but a modern forward-looking state that values, among other things, freedom of speech and technology at least half as much as it values free guns. (This will work for out-of-staters by the way if phrases along the lines of "I won't bring my money and jobs there...")
The (incredibly poor) Committee page is here. The Committee's members are: Sen. Scott K. Jenkins, Co Chair Rep. Michael E. Noel, Co Chair Rep. Roger E. Barrus Rep. Ralph Becker Rep. Jim Bird Rep. Melvin R. Brown Sen. Mike Dmitrich Rep. Janice M. Fisher Rep. Lynn N. Hemingway Rep. Steven R. Mascaro Rep. Kay L. McIff Sen. Darin G. Peterson Rep. Aaron Tilton Sen. Carlene M. Walker Rep. Richard W. Wheeler Richard C. North, Policy Analyst Christopher R. Parker, Associate General Counsel Tracey Fredman, Legislative Secretary
Probably a valid guess. What I find interesting is the fact that he is calling to reduce the excessive sentences under the Rockafeller laws, which most people concede hasn't deterred anyone or helped in any way, while at the same time calling for the death penalty only for cop killers and 'Terrorists'. Leaving aside how much fun is had even trying to define the latter group it seems a bit murky. The two obvious questions I see are: 1) How many "terrorists" has New York prosecuted? Do they anticipate more and believe that they are getting ahead of the thing or that the idea of execution will faze them? and 2) Why only for these groups? If the death penalty is in limbo either because it doesn't work or isn't implemented with proper safeguards for the innocent, why are these two exempt. If it doesn't work in general ro in other cases, then what proof is there that it will work here? Additionally if it isn't implemented with proper safeguards for the innocent (if it even can be) elsewhere what guarantee is there that it will be in these cases? It would seem that, given the high-profile, rapid-trial characteristics of these crimes that punishing the innocent would be more likely not less. Indeed some of the more high-profile death-penalty reversals that I recall have been accusations of assaults on police or other similar "front-page" crimes.
The Filed first system is horrible as it makes a case for people who didn't invent something but got it to the office first getting th most. It was just such a loophole that allowed AZT to be "patented" in England by a private company even though it had already been invented here (by our tax dollars). This isn't reform and it won't fix the underlying issues in the patent system (vis bad patents getting accepted). All it will do is further hand support to the patent-trolls of the world.
"I miss the days when it was a fight over big government versus small government not my invasive bureaucracy versus your big bureaucracy"
In an age when massive amounts of federal dollars are being spent to convince us to spend more massive amounts of federal dollars to erode our own freedoms in the name of safety, giving up what we are fighting for in order to fight, I think we can all sympathize with that.
Interestingly the article also says that he wants to extend the death penalty to people who kill cops or those labeled as "Terrorists". No specific context is given to explain a) why such measures are needed as killing cops and terrorism can already get the death penalty in many ways (e.g. capitol murder or federal executions) or b) how "terrorists" would be defined according to the law.
As vague as the definition of "porn" is "terrorism" is just as loose, and far more telegenic.
You, and the other posters seem to have missed the one essential hook for net neutrality, indeed the only one that counts; Common Carrier Status. In order for you, and the phone company, and UPS to not be charged with a crime when someone does something illegal via your service you have to be a Common Carrier. Lacking that status you would be charged as an accessory to the crime even if you ratted them out first.
The cost of being a common carrier is having no content-based selection in what you carry. You must be completely neutral and select customers based upon what they are willing to pay not what they want to send. Once you hook things to what they want to send (i.e. content) then you are no longer a common carrier and you are responsible for knowing what is being sent at all times and answering for it if it isn't.
The issue here is twofold. Firstly the status Cringley is looking at might be more aligned to paying extra so the package moves faster type service which doesn't (necessarily) violate common carrier status. However , the argument that many ISP's are making is that they should be able to have their cake and eat it too that is, filter based upon content in order to make more money and stifle competitors while at the same time not being responsible for the legality of any content sent (i.e. child porn). Such a position is basically a whiny monopolists cant that I have no time for.
And yes it is true that the lines are private, in large part, but the service itself is still an infrastructural service and one that, like phone lines, has costs too significant to allow for basic competition. Not anyone can setup their own phonelines. As such that is the legal hook for government regulation and guaranteed fairness. Without it the dominant position of extant carriers (who built their power under the open competition regime but now want to shut the door on other competitors) would become so dominant as to be a monopoly and kill any hope for an open internet market.
At present the places without paper receips (vis Sarasota Florida, Maryland, etc) are the ones with real problem. States like New Mexico which had up to 10% vote losses among minorities during the 2004 election have switched to optical scanners with audits and have not looked back. Are they perfect? No. Are they a whole hell of a lot better off than they were? Oh yes.
This bill does many of the things that we in the/. community have argued for for some time now including open code inspection, reliable voting systems, and yes, reliable recounts and audits. Now is the time for the/. community to act on our endless snarky comments and help to move real change forward.
The Bill's text and record are available at Thomas. While there you can peruse the list of 200 Cosponsors to see if your house rep is among them (and should be given a cookie for that) or not (and should be corrected).
If you both support the bill and are a U.S. Citizen or Resident, you can go to the U.S. House of Representatives Website at www.house.gov, and Write your rep or contact them via their website (Recommended) to urge them to support the bill or thank them for already cosponsoring it.
With time to spare you can head over to the Senate and urge your senators to back the forthcoming companion bill in the senate. Following that a stop off to contact The Executive Branch (va a aqui para Espanol) to urge signing of the bill wouldn't hurt.
If you believe in any of the things this bill does then a few minutes on the phone or sending a polite e-mail shouldn't be too much. As cynical as we all can be about the influence of money on elections a groundswell is too costly to be overrun.
Yes, this bill will not solve every problem with our political system but what kind of an excuse is there for whining? By your reasoning we shouldn't have bothered with the Clean Air act because it didn't address water pollution or the Clean Water Act because it didn't address air pollution, nor should we have bothered with the endangered species act because it did nothing about outsourcing.
This bill will not fix every problem that plagues our election system. It will fix some of the problems. Is that sufficient reason to pass it? Oh Hell Yes!
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Were they really becoming Fences? I mean do you have actual stats on that or just some anecdote off of Fox 'News'?
It would be interesting to see how this bumps up against their common-carrier status. Under that ruling they take no responsibility for the contents of their transmissions (i.e. child porn) because it isn't theirs and they have no knowledge of it. If, on the other hand they get ownership then the next kiddie porn sent is not just the property (and problem) of the sender but also of Verizon (by which I mean all of its shareholders).
This, like the obssession over internet filtering makes me thing that more and more two things are going on:
1) This has been happening for far longer than anyone knew, possibly on a much larger scale, and they are despirate to retrospectively legitimize it and/or keep the true extent of it secret.
2) They are being entirely short-sighted in jumping headfirst into it now when their predecessors had the good sense (perhaps in the Wake of Vietnam era spying or earlier) to stay the hell away from this road because it won't be profitable or desirable, or even workable in the long run.
Soldiers in the field are themselves constantly at risk of life and limb. They are also constantly under stress and tension. Such stresses and risks are what forms the bond with their comrades as well as their equipment. Everything, everyone, has to work right or likely they all die. This is why sailors refer to their ship as she, and call her by name, why they get almost tearful when thinking of a favored ship and wear caps claiming them as a member of her crew. This is why Airforce officers feel an attachment to their planes and why Army officers care for their sidearms. This anthropomorphization is an essential facet of how they operate not just a side effect. The application to a mine-clearing robot may be new but not so unprecedented.
This attachment shows up in other ways too. Kevin Mitnick is said to once have cried when being informed that he broke Bell Lab's latest computers because he had spent so much time with them that he'd become attached.
Now contrast that with an office job where the computer is not your friend but your enemy, you need the reports on time, you need them now why WHY! won't it work. Clearly the computer must be punished it is and uppity evil servant that will not OBEY!
If you were to stop talking about "Robots Rights" and start talking about say "Ship's rights" then you might have a fair analogy. To men and women of the sea a ship, their ship is a living thing so of course it should be cared for and respected. To people who live on land and don't deal with ships, this is crazy, even subversive to the natural order. To people who have developed an intimate hatred of such things giving them rights will only encourage what they see as a dangerous tendency to get uppity.
On a serious note though the one unaddressed question with "Robot Rights" is which robots? If we are to take the minefield clearing robot as a standard what about those less intelligent? Does my Mindstorms deserve it? Does my Laptop? Granted my laptop doesn't move but it executes tasks the same as any other machine. At what point do we draw the line.
In America, and I suspect elsewhere, race based laws fell down on the question of "what race?" Are you 100% black? 1/2 One quadroon (1/4) or octaroon (1/8) as they used to say? How the hell do you measure that? Ditto for the racial purity laws of the Nazi's. Crap about skull shape aside there really is no easy or hard standard. Right now the law is dancing around this with the question of who is "Adult" enough to stand trial and be executed, or "Alive" enough to stay on life support. No easy answers exist and therin lies the fighting.
The same thing will occur with "Robot Rights" we will be forced to define what it means to be a robot and that isn't so easy.
Will they wait until you are identified as a terrorist and then "switch on the lip-reading feature? Will they have it store all readings on the fly and then go back to analyze them once something bad has happened? Will they "mine" this data on the fly looking for key phrases as they are spoken by some would-be criminal looking at the camera (James Bond style)? Or will they simply use such recognition tech after the fact when viewing or reviewing selected portions of video?
... speech, while the lip reading would be far worse. Consider the problem of alternate interpretations like this look at someone's lips with your ears covered and ask them to say several random sentences using words like 'gun', 'run', 'ghunga din', 'bomb', 'attack', etc. Now imagine doing that in poor lighting conditions from an angle well above them and some distance away. Now consider that you have no idea what the other words were and thus little to narrow the search space. If you assume that the words fit some pattern of 'terrorist speech' then you may get a 'match' but that is a big assumption to make and one that is unlikely to yield much useful info especially if it required detailed analysis by one person.
My money would be on the latter but I fail to see how this is either a) a real big "Gee whiz" or b) likely to impact their investigations much.
From what I know of present tech the lip readings are unlikely to be that accurate. Cutting edge tech on speech to text is not all that robust and that is processing the actual audio, you know
So when you couple that problem with the ongoing question of whether these cameras ever help to prevent and deter crimes or only seem to be useful in producing evidence once criminals have already been caught or crimes already committed then it begs the question as to whether this will help, hurt (by producing false 'evidence' and wasting police time and implicating good people), or do nothing at all.
Given that I find it unlikely any of the tube bombers were dumb enough to spell out their plans while staring at a camera I suspect it will be one of the latter two.
The Knotty problem becomes one of interconnections. Sure department X needs to know fact A and department Y needs to know fact B, and sure we have laws blocking X from collecting B and Y from collecting A but when all such records are public and publicly searchable then the point is rendered moot, then X can know B and Y can know A and the stalker down the street can know both.
This is, in fact, just what the late and unlamented Total Information Awareness project was all about and what private companies such as ChoicePoint are still about, linking otherwise innocuous information so Big Brother doesn't have to.
As has been correctly noted (e.g. with Census data being used to hunt down Asian-Americans during WWII for no good reason) laws preventing one department from sharing with another are moot when such sharing is possible. They become even more moot when all that it takes is a few seconds with google.
While I agree with you that laws restricting the info collected are and will be a good thing, I feel that they alone are not the sword to cut this Gordian Knot.
For those unfamiliar with superfund it requires, and pays for, cleanup of truly hazardous sites in the U.S. ranging from large-scale toxic spills (e.g. Love Canal New York) to military disposal sites and deliberate poisoning of the drinking water with nuclear waste (e.g. Project Chariot).
Such waste has often been produced by or with the support of the federal government in communities that have little resources to combat the problems. Dismissing it out of hand is only possible for those who've never been exposed to it and who don't care about the lives of others.
But then of course there's this:
CEI is a neoliberal thinktank that has been outspoken against any governmental environmental policy including action on global warming once stating that: "reducing these levels [Creenhouse gas emmissions], even in "baby steps," would "result in the deaths of more people in the U.S. than global warming would worldwide"
See also:
The above was taken from ElWiki
see 7Digital
In this case the issue at hand is whether the physical media containing child porn that were found in his room could be used against him. The arguments with regards to OpenWEP would cover incidental usage but here he is actually in possession of physical media not just an access point that was used.
As stated in the article the question on appeal is whether the use of the AP was sufficient grounds for a search warrant to be executed on the home. The catch is that this is different than the question of whether OpenWAP == Probable Cause. In the case of the former the issue is that someone on the network was in possession of Child Porn so the argument goes that the first, natural, place to look is the person who owns the network itself.
If, on the other hand the latter was the case then simply having an openAP would be sufficient to trigger an investigation, that was not the case here. As such the headline and title article are somewhat misleading.
Not exactly. While that law is on the books in some places I do not believe that it is fully national. Moreover it encodes a rather incorrect understanding of the way things work. Firstly 1 old-growth redwood != 2 saplings. So the net impact is not balanced out and if we kill old trees faster than the new ones can grow then we will still have a destructive impact.
Seconslu the costs to the environment is not entirely about the trees, there is the brush and underbrsh, the animals, etc all of which are displaced. And they cannot easily move to wherever the new trees are planted.
Note that while I laud the idea of planting trees, a viable forest with treesu, underbrush, animal and vegetable life != an orderly arbor of young saplings with no secondary plants.
No the stated issue is kiddies but if you read the text the goal is elimination of all "porn", and advancing the role that it isn't just the mom n' pop's job to secure the network, it is their job to monitor it making them go from local cafe to local snoop.
This isn't about running open networks it is about running a free internet or one where the Parent's Television Councils says what we can and cannot do.
Of Course he says that, what would he say? I find the printing of slogans on them "We watch over you for your security" to be very newspeak.
While it might be true that the dirigibles will help to an extent, they can at least monitor places faster than a foot-mounted officer might get there, I find it unlikely that these will really eliminate or even substantially reduce the crime problem. Evidence from places like Britain and other areas have shown that, at best, such cameras make catching people after the fact sometimes easier but even that constant monitoring isn't necessarily useful.
At the end of the day the goal should be to prevent crime and I find it unlikely that a fleet of such airships would do it in the long term. More likely they will be used at the next anti-government demonstration to gather "intelligence" on the opposition.
At the end of the day, in my experience, crime is driven by economic and political factors and can only be mitigated by that, and by strong community-based policing. I've certainly seen that in my own town were "targeted" neighborhoods (aka Black Neighborhoods") are given little regular police protection (i.e. officers walking beats, getting to know the neighbors, etc) but are the subject of regular well-staged "crackdowns" in which the swat team rolls through watching over them for their security. The police complain, rightly, that when something happens there they get no help from the residents. The residents complain, rightly, that the police aren't there regularly, aren't from there, don't know anyone, and tend to treat them like an enemy population to be suppressed, not citizens whom they protect.
In the most recent incident the police rolled through with the swat team, kleig lights and weapons pointed at anyone they saw in a "drug sweep", noone was caught, it was simply a show of force. Yet all the rest of the nights, the police aren't seen and it is only neighborhood watch groups that get anything done.
Your post reminds me of someone who has nothing better to do than criticize people for making the joke before they could.
Hmm, I guess its time to create www.IWantATornadoOfPopupsToTakeDownMyMachine.com. Or is it really better to put that under .net?
If by "our guys" you mean people who aren't CEO's or who at least know what they are talking about and aren't in it for the money, they do, just not all the time. In many cases the CEO's have the connections (political, financial and personal) to the elected officials that gets their phones answered and them invited to talk as if they know what direction is up. In Yarro's case he is also the Chairman of the CP80 group that is seeking to apply community-norm based restrictions to the internet a-la television where everything we see is dictated by the Parents Television Council.
This is a problem both in that the legislators are clearly not making an effort to get testimony from people who think the internet is just fine, a poor job for which they should be fired. It is also a side-effect of the way Politics is done these days with large donations driving much of the action and television ads with elected officials "speaking to" and "reaching out for" their constituents rather than say listening.
If you want to make your views known on this I say ring up the people involved and critique what was said, logically. Doing so often enough often gets you invited to these things.
It is interesting, but not surprising, that the CP80 group is involved in this. After all Yarro CEO of SCO is their Chairman.
For those not familiar with it CP80 is a proposal that calls for segregating internet content into "safe" and "unsafe" by legally declaring some ports to be regulated and some unregulated. The regulation model is the "Community Norms" model that the FCC uses to allow the Parents Television Council to tell us all what we can and cannot watch on TV.
Leaving aside the fact that this, like all similar proposals, ignores the manifold legal hurdles in defining "adult" and "non-adult" content (just read the book of Revelations in the Bible sometime) it also ignores the fact that the port-based communication is an international standard, and one that would not be workable for the U.S. to mandate alone.
My favorite part about it really is the fact that even if this act were implemented it would still require some special settings or filtration on the user end (i.e. the home computer) to keep the bad ports off. Thus the problem that it seems even the CEO of SCO has that his kids know more about computers than him, would still remain.
Incidentally Wal-Mart is listed as a major sponsor of the group.
To date the act does not appear to have been submitted to Congress.
Act to oppose it.
/.'ers are doing it.
If their "brain is frying trying to understand the technology involved" (damn!) then the best thing to do is explain it to them, along with the consequences of a bad decision. One could, for example write to a legislator explaining the concept of a popup blocker and the extremely low likelihood of "just entering a search term" causing a "tornado of popups" unless the search term was "I want a tornado of popups to take down my machine".
One could also explain, if one lived in Utah, that one would think very very poorly of any elected official who let SCO of all people railroad them into trying to railroad some unworkable and useless ban on a perfectly legitimate activity (open hotspots) based upon no evidence other than frying brains and luddite morons.
One could also, perhaps best, explain the extremely negative economic impact such legislation would have in the short term (forcing otherwise acceptable mom n' pops to spend money preventing legal activities) and in the long-term by hurting Utah's efforts to modernize its infrastructure, attract new businesses and convince prospective high-tech employers and employees that it isn't a backwards theocratic nuthouse but a modern forward-looking state that values, among other things, freedom of speech and technology at least half as much as it values free guns. (This will work for out-of-staters by the way if phrases along the lines of "I won't bring my money and jobs there...")
The (incredibly poor) Committee page is here. The Committee's members are:
Sen. Scott K. Jenkins, Co Chair
Rep. Michael E. Noel, Co Chair
Rep. Roger E. Barrus
Rep. Ralph Becker
Rep. Jim Bird
Rep. Melvin R. Brown
Sen. Mike Dmitrich
Rep. Janice M. Fisher
Rep. Lynn N. Hemingway
Rep. Steven R. Mascaro
Rep. Kay L. McIff
Sen. Darin G. Peterson
Rep. Aaron Tilton
Sen. Carlene M. Walker
Rep. Richard W. Wheeler
Richard C. North, Policy Analyst
Christopher R. Parker, Associate General Counsel
Tracey Fredman, Legislative Secretary
They can be located here.
Start your e-mailing and phone dialing (faxes are fun too!)
C'mon, all the cool
Probably a valid guess. What I find interesting is the fact that he is calling to reduce the excessive sentences under the Rockafeller laws, which most people concede hasn't deterred anyone or helped in any way, while at the same time calling for the death penalty only for cop killers and 'Terrorists'. Leaving aside how much fun is had even trying to define the latter group it seems a bit murky. The two obvious questions I see are: 1) How many "terrorists" has New York prosecuted? Do they anticipate more and believe that they are getting ahead of the thing or that the idea of execution will faze them? and 2) Why only for these groups? If the death penalty is in limbo either because it doesn't work or isn't implemented with proper safeguards for the innocent, why are these two exempt. If it doesn't work in general ro in other cases, then what proof is there that it will work here? Additionally if it isn't implemented with proper safeguards for the innocent (if it even can be) elsewhere what guarantee is there that it will be in these cases? It would seem that, given the high-profile, rapid-trial characteristics of these crimes that punishing the innocent would be more likely not less. Indeed some of the more high-profile death-penalty reversals that I recall have been accusations of assaults on police or other similar "front-page" crimes.
The Filed first system is horrible as it makes a case for people who didn't invent something but got it to the office first getting th most. It was just such a loophole that allowed AZT to be "patented" in England by a private company even though it had already been invented here (by our tax dollars). This isn't reform and it won't fix the underlying issues in the patent system (vis bad patents getting accepted). All it will do is further hand support to the patent-trolls of the world.
In an age when massive amounts of federal dollars are being spent to convince us to spend more massive amounts of federal dollars to erode our own freedoms in the name of safety, giving up what we are fighting for in order to fight, I think we can all sympathize with that.
Interestingly the article also says that he wants to extend the death penalty to people who kill cops or those labeled as "Terrorists". No specific context is given to explain a) why such measures are needed as killing cops and terrorism can already get the death penalty in many ways (e.g. capitol murder or federal executions) or b) how "terrorists" would be defined according to the law.
As vague as the definition of "porn" is "terrorism" is just as loose, and far more telegenic.
You, and the other posters seem to have missed the one essential hook for net neutrality, indeed the only one that counts; Common Carrier Status. In order for you, and the phone company, and UPS to not be charged with a crime when someone does something illegal via your service you have to be a Common Carrier. Lacking that status you would be charged as an accessory to the crime even if you ratted them out first.
The cost of being a common carrier is having no content-based selection in what you carry. You must be completely neutral and select customers based upon what they are willing to pay not what they want to send. Once you hook things to what they want to send (i.e. content) then you are no longer a common carrier and you are responsible for knowing what is being sent at all times and answering for it if it isn't.
The issue here is twofold. Firstly the status Cringley is looking at might be more aligned to paying extra so the package moves faster type service which doesn't (necessarily) violate common carrier status. However , the argument that many ISP's are making is that they should be able to have their cake and eat it too that is, filter based upon content in order to make more money and stifle competitors while at the same time not being responsible for the legality of any content sent (i.e. child porn). Such a position is basically a whiny monopolists cant that I have no time for.
And yes it is true that the lines are private, in large part, but the service itself is still an infrastructural service and one that, like phone lines, has costs too significant to allow for basic competition. Not anyone can setup their own phonelines. As such that is the legal hook for government regulation and guaranteed fairness. Without it the dominant position of extant carriers (who built their power under the open competition regime but now want to shut the door on other competitors) would become so dominant as to be a monopoly and kill any hope for an open internet market.
At present the places without paper receips (vis Sarasota Florida, Maryland, etc) are the ones with real problem. States like New Mexico which had up to 10% vote losses among minorities during the 2004 election have switched to optical scanners with audits and have not looked back. Are they perfect? No. Are they a whole hell of a lot better off than they were? Oh yes.
This bill does many of the things that we in the /. community have argued for for some time now including open code inspection, reliable voting systems, and yes, reliable recounts and audits. Now is the time for the /. community to act on our endless snarky comments and help to move real change forward.
The Bill's text and record are available at Thomas. While there you can peruse the list of 200 Cosponsors to see if your house rep is among them (and should be given a cookie for that) or not (and should be corrected).
If you both support the bill and are a U.S. Citizen or Resident, you can go to the U.S. House of Representatives Website at www.house.gov, and Write your rep or contact them via their website (Recommended) to urge them to support the bill or thank them for already cosponsoring it.
With time to spare you can head over to the Senate and urge your senators to back the forthcoming companion bill in the senate. Following that a stop off to contact The Executive Branch (va a aqui para Espanol) to urge signing of the bill wouldn't hurt.
If you believe in any of the things this bill does then a few minutes on the phone or sending a polite e-mail shouldn't be too much. As cynical as we all can be about the influence of money on elections a groundswell is too costly to be overrun.
Ed Felten's comments on the bill can be found Here.
Yes, this bill will not solve every problem with our political system but what kind of an excuse is there for whining? By your reasoning we shouldn't have bothered with the Clean Air act because it didn't address water pollution or the Clean Water Act because it didn't address air pollution, nor should we have bothered with the endangered species act because it did nothing about outsourcing.
This bill will not fix every problem that plagues our election system. It will fix some of the problems. Is that sufficient reason to pass it? Oh Hell Yes!