Bottom line: The Geneva Convention doesn't apply because these people are not fighting on behalf of a government which could be reasonably expected to control their misguided actions
You don't think Osama bin Laden could say "Okay, boys, the Jihad is over?" He's the leader of Al Qaeda, you know.
As for "misguided actions", you mean like invading Iraq in search of WMD that don't exist? Or do you mean like invading Vietnam on the premise that the NVA shot at our ships, which has now been proven to be a complete fabrication.
One thing that I do think we can agree on is that any US troops the "enemy combatants" capture will probably be tortured, maimed, etc. But isn't the big differentiation between "us" and "them" is that the Evil Doers target civilians, while we only target the military? (make that pseudo-military to get around the GC) That we have freedom and they hate freedom? That we are fighting to defend the American Way of Life, including the Bill of Rights, which states quite clearly in the 6th Amendment that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial..."
You can't have it both ways. There may be compelling reasons for designating U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants" and detaining them indefinitely. Unfortunately that goes against the Constitution.
A more apt argument for you might be that it's not the Geneva Convention which is outdated, it's the U.S. Constitution. That's really what you're saying.
Al Qaedia and its operatives have been identified as enemy combatants. Effectively, there's already an international 'warrant for their arrest'.
Enemy combatant? Sorry, Interpol has never heard of that term. Nor it is anywhere in the Geneva Convention. I don't think it carries much weigh outside of a government that wants to deny rights to a broad group of individuals because doing so is far more expedient than actually honoring the Constitutional right to due process.
Sorry, I'm not impressed by your phony rhetoric and fractured analogies.
By the way, have you ever heard of Joseph Padilla? He's a U.S. Citizen, like you and me, and he's also an "enemy combatant." Our government feels its perfectly fine to keep him in jail forever without even charging him with a crime. How do you feel about that?
I thought we were defending freedom, not totalitarianism.
or maybe those computers failed because after arriving in the semi truck at school district HQ they had to be set up once to image, then loaded in another truck, distributed to the schools, set up again, and so on. Also, they're in schools, they will be abused.
Not that i'm saying this is the reason but it might play a role. The more you move them around, the more likely something will get jostled or slammed in a bad way. Like a hard drive pulling some serious G's on a pot hole.
one of the most annoying things about dell is that you can buy two identical model numbers and find that they have different sound cards or RAM or whatever in them. I know it keeps their costs low, but in a large institutional setting, where the whole point was standardization, it's really annoying that the contents of the "dimension 4300" may differ from one computer to the next.
I love both of those games to death and I'm surprised I never heard the name Eugene Jarvis before this article.
There's a few things that send both of those games over the top. First of all they have some of the best sounds of any game. You can hear the "lander picks up a colonist" sound in like 100+ hip-hop songs these days.
Then there was the, literally, non-stop action of these games. When you are playing Robotron, the longest break in the action is approximately one second, and that's between levels. It's not even long enough to take a sip of your drink! Defender is pretty much the same but you might be able to sneak a quick chug in at the end of a wave if you don't mind spilling beer down the front of your shirt.
Where I play there's that "Big Buck Hunter" game right next to Robotron. That game not only costs twice as much, it's mostly waiting around and pretty scenery. I prefer the immersive experience of Robotron over the eye candy of those games any day. And Robotron has some pretty good eye candy, it's just the eye candy of 23 years ago.
For those of you that think Robotron is too hard, it's not. Sure, when it came out, I couldn't handle the two joysticks. But I went back to it and I've gotten pretty good. Defender had the same "controls are too hard" problem for lots of people.
You know what's really hot? Chicks who play Robotron. I've met one or two. But I've never seen a woman on Defender. Hmmm maybe it's time for an OSDN peronals ad:
Defender of Human Race seeking like-minded female for trips through wherever the Hyperspace button takes us. Turn-ons: Smart bombs, rescuing humans, extra lives. Turn-offs: Mutants, Baiters, and when the whole planet blows up.
MP3 is good for "casual" listening but it actually sucks for "audiophile" listening and there are other formats that "sound" better.
A "drm layer" will encumber any encoding scheme with a "feature" that will eventually be circumvented anyway. I can understand the MP3 spec owners wanting to "embrace and extend" their widely-accepted standard, but I don't want that.
Shouldn't we be at the point where we can wipe the memory of your personal stereo thingie and put your own code in there for ogg or whatever floats your boat? Okay maybe not now but in five or ten years?
I'm pretty leery of any DRM "solution" until the courts have done a better job establishing what my digital rights are in the first place.
There are so many things wrong with this. First of all, I didn't read the article. But that's not even important. My opinions matter way more than me having to read some article on Slashdot.
Number one, the fact that somebody is registering domain names that are spell-alikes of real domains is questionable. The fact that they get linked to some porno site is sleazy. The part where he made a million dollars helps draw things into focus a bit, though. Before that I thought this guy was some sort of pedophile psycho. But apparently he's just trying to make a buck off the Internet, and who here hasn't tried that. There are plenty who have cyber-succeeded and not been sleazy, sure. But it's the Wild West, baby!
But does this particular sleazy incident warrant Congresional action? It seems to me like it's only a handful of people registering these URLs. Heck this guy must have done quite a few to net $1mil. (Maybe I'd know that if I read the article. Who cares.)
I'd like to know what sort of research Congress did before passing the PROTECT Act of 2003. Did they attempt to finger this dude? Apparently not or he surely would have been dragged before some committe, somewhere. Or did Congress hear horror stories of kids trying to find Pokemon on line only to find something that made them ask their parents uncomfortable questions.
Speaking of which, what the *fuck* are kids doing on the Internet in the first place? That is a dumb idea, it's neglectful for parents to let kids surf without watching over their shoulder. Of course the flip side to that is there should be some sort of decency standards, and without a doubt the Internet has been wrestling with that since, well, how long has alt.talk.abortion been around? For that matter I'm pretty sure I signed the "save goatse" petition.
Okay, I just read the article, it doesn't really answer any questions. I'd love to know what he had that got him the "one count of possessing child pornography."
You know what, this law sucks. This basically makes registering a domain name that might be mistaken for disney a federal crime. How about fuckdisney.com? Couldn't that fall under this umbrella? I thought that any company with half a brain would just register all the spell-alikes anyway; it's cheap and there's no way they'll get the wrong message then. This stinks like the 1998 NET Act, which made copyright infringement a federal crime too. What the fuck, Congress, is there no room for civil proceedings anymore? Let's just make everything a crime? Do you know how much money that is going to cost? We'll need a ton more federal lawyers, and prison space once you're done with the trials.
Criminalizing shady behavior is a slippery slope. It's perfectly legal to lie, in fact that right is pretty much guaranteed by the First Amendment. We should be working towards a society where issues like cybersquatting and redirecting kids to porn sites don't require contfrontational, litigational, Congressional intervention. We should be able to work this out without some bureaucrat deciding it's time we take heed of the power he wields.
The guy should have been aware of this law and just registered all these domain names from his villa in the Mediterranean, free of Uncle Sam's long arm. Aside from that, he probably deserves the 2.5 years he gets, even if the law he broke is totally for the benefit of Disney, Nickelodeon, and a few other exploitative corporation that prey on the young. They don't sell sex, but they pump a hell of a lot of sugar into the veins of young America. Why one is reprehensible and the other is condoned is anybody's guess.
"interactive fiction" whatever. The modern day equivalent is called Vice City. If you are parapalegic or somegthing and cant work a mouse it's called KOTOR.
But there is something to be said for that world unfolding on the amber screen over an acoustically coupled modem... Then there was the parser. Noun Verb would get you very far, like "kill orc" or "scream bear." "Scream bear" is one of my favorites. I couldn't get across the bridge without giving up the pot-o-honey treasure item to the bear guarding the walkway. Well, in my frustration, I typed "scram, bear" into the command line.
The game only read the first three letters of any word you typed in, so it interpreted "scram" as "scream" and followed up with some message about the poor bear cup being scared off and running away. So I won that game, but only through an act of frustration which I seriously doubt was intentional on the part of the programmer.
There are a few other good ones, like "the magic password to enter is needed" and you type in "needed". Come to think of it, these games are a lot more cerebral than Vice City or KOTOR and it's too bad that the blinky lights have taken over. Oh well I guess that's civilization for you. TV or smallpox, I guess we chose TV.
Bonus points for whoever actually typed in "lick dots" without cheating.
Ditto what ratpick says about crappy analogies. We see this "locks on doors" style of analogy a lot (esp. on Slashdot). There's many variants. One says "even if the door is unlocked it still trespassing." Another says "The vendor who sold you the lock is at fault since he knew his locks could be picked." And so on.
These analogies have nothing to do with real life. They're just analogies and they don't really help us understand the situation. Why? Because Microsoft is not some guy living in a house, or a locksmith with a small shop, they're one of the most powerful corporations in the world.
When I was in college there was a rapist who attacked girls living off campus. One victim was living in an apartment where the bathroom window physically could not be locked. The guy crawled through and raped her. Guess who got sued? The apartment's management company. Guess why? Becuase they were the only ones with enough money worth going after.
But there are some crucial differences between landlord-tenant law and whatever sort of law you'd use to try to hold Microsoft (or any vendor) liable for faulty software. For starters, cracking a system is not a violent crime. (Though the prison sentence for "hackers" is probably on par with what rapists get. But that's a judicial and/or legislative problem, not a legal liability issue.) Furthermore, the EULA states right on it that they can't warrant the system against break-ins.
In fact Microsoft doesn't even make security/firewall products in the first place, so this is (analogy alert) like suing the guy who makes your file cabinets after thieves break your locks and find that the file cabinets themselves are wide open. Nevermind that Microsoft markets their products as more secure and reliable -- THAT'S MARKETING HYPE and, compared to previous versions of Windows, it's probably valid marketing hype.
Landlords are obliged to provide a safe place for you to live, in return for your money. Microsoft makes no claim that they'll provide a safe way to connect your systems to the Internet, and they never have. The only people who might be liable for cracking systems would be a managed data center or co-location facility that actually makes the claim that your box won't get rooted.
Cars, alcohol, and guns kill people all the time. That doesn't mean that Chevrolet, Coors, and Colt are negligent or liable for the resulting mayhem. I'm no Microsoft fanboy but I'm really sick of this stupid locks-on-doors analogy. That whole line of thought is a red herring.
How do you secure systems on the Internet? I certainly don't know. Frankly I don't think there are too many people who do. From what I've seen you've got two choices: Trust a few vendors like Cisco and SecurID, or trust a few unix geeks.
If you're holding up Bill Gates as the poster boy for "market forces" then you must have missed just about everything the company has done in about the past ten years. Sure their rise was phenomenal, and in fact I think it's the trap of their success that has pushed Gates to the draconian (and felonious) measures to ensure that noone strays from the One Microsoft Way. When 95% of the world's PCs run your OS, there aren't really that many new markets to establish, or profits to reap. Now he must squeeze those he's got, and keep them in his grasp. Many people aren't going to buy a new computer in the next few years. How can Microsoft keep the revenue coming in? Surely it's only in the best interests of the shareholders to assert some of that vast power and market influence for the good of the company.
Ah, You can't have it both ways. You can't claim that "market forces" or the "invisible hand" led to Microsoft's dominant position and then look the other way when Microsoft twists the arm of the OEMs to crush BeOS. Or when they blatanly lied about the inseperability of IE from Windows and then spent the next five years deliberately entangling the two so that now, in fact, IE dlls perform core GUI functions.
Is capitalism a Machiavellian endeavor? Or are there rules to this game? I think how someone addresses this is predictive of their view on the "Is Microsoft Evil" question.
My solution was this: Take Elian out on a boat. Have him walk to the end of the pier. Tell him: "You can join your mom, or you we can take you back to Cuba. Your choice, kid."
In both cases, looking back (with knowledge of how things played out) we might see something that could have been done differently.
That's all water under the bridge. The important thing is this: Have we learned anything that will make us behave differently in the future? If the answer is "no" then all those killed by the feds died for nothing. By extension, all those that died in Oklahoma City died for nothing too. More, I predict, will die.
When do you think it's acceptable for our law enforcement agencies to kill people? One of the factors in the decision to storme Waco was this: the siege had lasted so long they were afraid "operational fatigue" would make the troops sloppy, so they'd better go in now. Is that a legitimate reason for the use of deadly force? Because you're sick of waiting for the rat you've cornered (and outnumbered and out-gunned) to make a move?
I don't like the term "crazy people" but I'll use it for the sake of expediency. We can and should full well expect "crazy people" to do things like Waco et. al. in the future. This is a problem that society will have to deal with. There have been a few spectacular faliures, specifically Waco, which led more "crazy people" to blow up Oklahoma City.
There is an imperiousness to our power, this attitude made it easy to justify a military operation against civilian targets in Waco. It made it easy to ignore the threats of Osama bin Laden (his beef, among others, being the wide-scale presence of US military near Mecca and Medina.) There is no need to negotiate with kooks like bin Laden, or wackos like Koresh. In fact, it's pretty easy to write both of them off as "crazy people." But doing so turns a blind eye to their very real sense of injustice. I'm not saying they're right, that's pretty much irrelevant. The point is this: We've come through the looking glass, the reality is that we no longer live in an era where our arrogance will go unchecked so easily.
I will leave you with the comment that Randy Weaver's wife was holding their young son when she was killed. The intended target was Randy. Had the bullet strayed farther off course, could you dismiss the child's death so quickly? A rational man does not fire into a crowd of civilians, notwithstanding the fact that the crowd is the target's family. Someone drunk with power, knowing full well his federal badge will shield him, and public opinion will paint the victim as a lunatic, might go ahead and take the shot, knowing it won't really matter if they miss. Hmmm is this the anarchy you were speaking about?
You can't really blame "the ruby ridge guy" for the fact that an FBI sniper missed him and assassinated his wife. I'd say culpability lies with the triggerman, and so did the Idaho attorney general who attempted to prosecute the sniper for that killing. (The Federal courts blocked that, though, since he was "just following orders.")
I'm saying it has to be a two-way street. Lets say that for the "bad guys" everything they do which leads to a police action justifies that police action. But shouldn't the authorities have to play by those rules too? If I speed off from a gas station after stealing 20 bucks of gas, and the cops chase me, and an innocent bystander gets run over, is that 100% my fault? Shouldn't the cops have the responsibility to consider that pursuing a high-speed chase in a densely populated area might do more harm than good? And it is for this reason that more and more cities will break off a high-speed chase if it's deemed unsafe.
People who set actions in motion, be it criminals, nuts with guns, or the police (not necessarily mutually exclusive groups I should add) have to consider the consequences. There is a point at which things cannot be un-done. For something like Waco we could (and did) spend years trying to assign blame, and there's plenty to go around. It was the authorities who decided to storm the compound, which is when all hell broke loose. Surely they must bear some share of the burden for the outcome of that decision. It certainly cannot be viewed as a law enforcement success when that many civilians die. To put all the blame on the "evil-doers" ignores the opportunity to see what went wrong and how we might avoid future Wacos and Ruby Ridges.
Spending all that money to build this stuff will prop up our economy and create jobs. Nothing that creates jobs can be bad, so in that way it is a defense of our way of life. (Either that or proof that the capitalism will eat itself.)
Republicans 3 Star Wars. I never heard Bush mention it once during the 2000 campaign, but about two weeks into office he announced big-time funding for it.
Microsoft's approach to PocketPC is completely the opposite of how they established DOS and cornered the PC market. DOS was sold as an operating system that would run on anybody's PC, regardless of manufacture. It wasn't what you'd call "open source" but it did open up the hardware platform and provide a common reference point we could build on.
PocketPC, on the other hand, takes an entirely different approach. You're stuck with MS-imposed limitations like a chunky 320x240 screen size and you can't break out of the Windows shell to the underlying lower-level functions. Working with PocketPC has been very frustrating for me; it's got vendor lock-in coming at you from two angles (MS and whichever OEM branded the unit).
With PocketPC, Microsoft has torn a page from Apple's playbook when it comes to product positioning and the complete lack of "freedom to innovate." Unfortunately their design ideas aren't any better than Apple's were a decade ago with the Newton.
If Microsoft truly wanted to compete in the PDA realm, what they need to do is come up with a DOS-equivalent that will run on a Palm or Clie or even a PocketPC. Indeed it's clever how they're pushing the commodity hardware costs onto the OEMs, and all they have to do is come up with the software. (A bit reminiscent of Dell's JIT manufacturing.) But in the long run I think a product that has both a closed software architecture and a closed hardware spec isn't going to fly.
And there's also the bloatware problem. Why should a PocketPC need a 406MHz CPU? A Clie with twice the pixels gets by on a much leaner chip.
if you make the losing party pay, you can pretty much guarantee that people like you or I will never, ever go up against a big corporation and their hordes of lawyers. If you lost, you'd be bankrupt.
Saying Israel doesn't have a right to exist is not the same as saying the people living in Israel should be eradicated. The US led a war against Iraq, but they didn't commit genocide. Being against a state is not the same as being against its citizenry.
Israel, my anonymous friend, is a political abstraction, as are all nations. People, on the other hand, are people.
Can you differentiate between Israel and Jews? How do you account for the millions of non-Jews living in Israel? By your logic, being anti-Israel makes me anti-Semitic. Then I guess I must be anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim and anti-Christian too, since all those people and more reside in Israel.
I guess this means you're one of those people who can't distinguish between anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-Zionist.
Let me ask you, if not supporting Israel's right to exist makes one an Anti-Semite, does that mean that not supporting the ETA means I'm anti-Basque? Or wanting to keep a unified Iraq makes me anti-Kurd? Am i anti-Tibetan if I buy Chinese goods at Wal-Mart? Am I anti-Irish if I don't support the IRA or Sinn Fein?
Sharon has killed a lot of people that didn't deserve it. Someone with your education must know this. Instead you're playing games, trying to paint me as some sort of racist.
This whole "right to exist" thing is kind of a joke. There is no right to exist. The only land any country possesses is what they can hold, usually through military means. It's a dog eat dog world, not one where magical mandates from some dusty old parchment (here I could mean either the Torah or the Declaration of Independence) confer any real legitimacy upon anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, I covered that in my post. Read past that part and get to the part where we all have to be grown ups and live in this world together.
As Stalin put it, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
Like the USA has never tortured anyone.... god you're ignorant.
What makes you say that he committed treason? Seen any evidence?
Also, if you kill all the operatives, how will you ever crack the conspiracy in which you seemignly believe he was engaged?
Bottom line: The Geneva Convention doesn't apply because these people are not fighting on behalf of a government which could be reasonably expected to control their misguided actions
You don't think Osama bin Laden could say "Okay, boys, the Jihad is over?" He's the leader of Al Qaeda, you know.
As for "misguided actions", you mean like invading Iraq in search of WMD that don't exist? Or do you mean like invading Vietnam on the premise that the NVA shot at our ships, which has now been proven to be a complete fabrication.
One thing that I do think we can agree on is that any US troops the "enemy combatants" capture will probably be tortured, maimed, etc. But isn't the big differentiation between "us" and "them" is that the Evil Doers target civilians, while we only target the military? (make that pseudo-military to get around the GC) That we have freedom and they hate freedom? That we are fighting to defend the American Way of Life, including the Bill of Rights, which states quite clearly in the 6th Amendment that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial..."
You can't have it both ways. There may be compelling reasons for designating U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants" and detaining them indefinitely. Unfortunately that goes against the Constitution.
A more apt argument for you might be that it's not the Geneva Convention which is outdated, it's the U.S. Constitution. That's really what you're saying.
Al Qaedia and its operatives have been identified as enemy combatants. Effectively, there's already an international 'warrant for their arrest'.
Enemy combatant? Sorry, Interpol has never heard of that term. Nor it is anywhere in the Geneva Convention. I don't think it carries much weigh outside of a government that wants to deny rights to a broad group of individuals because doing so is far more expedient than actually honoring the Constitutional right to due process.
Sorry, I'm not impressed by your phony rhetoric and fractured analogies.
By the way, have you ever heard of Joseph Padilla? He's a U.S. Citizen, like you and me, and he's also an "enemy combatant." Our government feels its perfectly fine to keep him in jail forever without even charging him with a crime. How do you feel about that?
I thought we were defending freedom, not totalitarianism.
or maybe those computers failed because after arriving in the semi truck at school district HQ they had to be set up once to image, then loaded in another truck, distributed to the schools, set up again, and so on. Also, they're in schools, they will be abused.
Not that i'm saying this is the reason but it might play a role. The more you move them around, the more likely something will get jostled or slammed in a bad way. Like a hard drive pulling some serious G's on a pot hole.
one of the most annoying things about dell is that you can buy two identical model numbers and find that they have different sound cards or RAM or whatever in them. I know it keeps their costs low, but in a large institutional setting, where the whole point was standardization, it's really annoying that the contents of the "dimension 4300" may differ from one computer to the next.
There's a few things that send both of those games over the top. First of all they have some of the best sounds of any game. You can hear the "lander picks up a colonist" sound in like 100+ hip-hop songs these days.
Then there was the, literally, non-stop action of these games. When you are playing Robotron, the longest break in the action is approximately one second, and that's between levels. It's not even long enough to take a sip of your drink! Defender is pretty much the same but you might be able to sneak a quick chug in at the end of a wave if you don't mind spilling beer down the front of your shirt.
Where I play there's that "Big Buck Hunter" game right next to Robotron. That game not only costs twice as much, it's mostly waiting around and pretty scenery. I prefer the immersive experience of Robotron over the eye candy of those games any day. And Robotron has some pretty good eye candy, it's just the eye candy of 23 years ago.
For those of you that think Robotron is too hard, it's not. Sure, when it came out, I couldn't handle the two joysticks. But I went back to it and I've gotten pretty good. Defender had the same "controls are too hard" problem for lots of people.
You know what's really hot? Chicks who play Robotron. I've met one or two. But I've never seen a woman on Defender. Hmmm maybe it's time for an OSDN peronals ad:
I wont be the first to make this suggestion..
MP3 is good for "casual" listening but it actually sucks for "audiophile" listening and there are other formats that "sound" better.
A "drm layer" will encumber any encoding scheme with a "feature" that will eventually be circumvented anyway. I can understand the MP3 spec owners wanting to "embrace and extend" their widely-accepted standard, but I don't want that.
Shouldn't we be at the point where we can wipe the memory of your personal stereo thingie and put your own code in there for ogg or whatever floats your boat? Okay maybe not now but in five or ten years?
I'm pretty leery of any DRM "solution" until the courts have done a better job establishing what my digital rights are in the first place.
There are so many things wrong with this. First of all, I didn't read the article. But that's not even important. My opinions matter way more than me having to read some article on Slashdot.
Number one, the fact that somebody is registering domain names that are spell-alikes of real domains is questionable. The fact that they get linked to some porno site is sleazy. The part where he made a million dollars helps draw things into focus a bit, though. Before that I thought this guy was some sort of pedophile psycho. But apparently he's just trying to make a buck off the Internet, and who here hasn't tried that. There are plenty who have cyber-succeeded and not been sleazy, sure. But it's the Wild West, baby!
But does this particular sleazy incident warrant Congresional action? It seems to me like it's only a handful of people registering these URLs. Heck this guy must have done quite a few to net $1mil. (Maybe I'd know that if I read the article. Who cares.)
I'd like to know what sort of research Congress did before passing the PROTECT Act of 2003. Did they attempt to finger this dude? Apparently not or he surely would have been dragged before some committe, somewhere. Or did Congress hear horror stories of kids trying to find Pokemon on line only to find something that made them ask their parents uncomfortable questions.
Speaking of which, what the *fuck* are kids doing on the Internet in the first place? That is a dumb idea, it's neglectful for parents to let kids surf without watching over their shoulder. Of course the flip side to that is there should be some sort of decency standards, and without a doubt the Internet has been wrestling with that since, well, how long has alt.talk.abortion been around? For that matter I'm pretty sure I signed the "save goatse" petition.
Okay, I just read the article, it doesn't really answer any questions. I'd love to know what he had that got him the "one count of possessing child pornography."
You know what, this law sucks. This basically makes registering a domain name that might be mistaken for disney a federal crime. How about fuckdisney.com? Couldn't that fall under this umbrella? I thought that any company with half a brain would just register all the spell-alikes anyway; it's cheap and there's no way they'll get the wrong message then. This stinks like the 1998 NET Act, which made copyright infringement a federal crime too. What the fuck, Congress, is there no room for civil proceedings anymore? Let's just make everything a crime? Do you know how much money that is going to cost? We'll need a ton more federal lawyers, and prison space once you're done with the trials.
Criminalizing shady behavior is a slippery slope. It's perfectly legal to lie, in fact that right is pretty much guaranteed by the First Amendment. We should be working towards a society where issues like cybersquatting and redirecting kids to porn sites don't require contfrontational, litigational, Congressional intervention. We should be able to work this out without some bureaucrat deciding it's time we take heed of the power he wields.
The guy should have been aware of this law and just registered all these domain names from his villa in the Mediterranean, free of Uncle Sam's long arm. Aside from that, he probably deserves the 2.5 years he gets, even if the law he broke is totally for the benefit of Disney, Nickelodeon, and a few other exploitative corporation that prey on the young. They don't sell sex, but they pump a hell of a lot of sugar into the veins of young America. Why one is reprehensible and the other is condoned is anybody's guess.
thanks, that's great. of course i was only ten when playing that game so screwing the bear probably never occurred to me ;)
"interactive fiction" whatever. The modern day equivalent is called Vice City. If you are parapalegic or somegthing and cant work a mouse it's called KOTOR.
But there is something to be said for that world unfolding on the amber screen over an acoustically coupled modem... Then there was the parser. Noun Verb would get you very far, like "kill orc" or "scream bear." "Scream bear" is one of my favorites. I couldn't get across the bridge without giving up the pot-o-honey treasure item to the bear guarding the walkway. Well, in my frustration, I typed "scram, bear" into the command line.
The game only read the first three letters of any word you typed in, so it interpreted "scram" as "scream" and followed up with some message about the poor bear cup being scared off and running away. So I won that game, but only through an act of frustration which I seriously doubt was intentional on the part of the programmer.
There are a few other good ones, like "the magic password to enter is needed" and you type in "needed". Come to think of it, these games are a lot more cerebral than Vice City or KOTOR and it's too bad that the blinky lights have taken over. Oh well I guess that's civilization for you. TV or smallpox, I guess we chose TV.
Bonus points for whoever actually typed in "lick dots" without cheating.
Ditto what ratpick says about crappy analogies. We see this "locks on doors" style of analogy a lot (esp. on Slashdot). There's many variants. One says "even if the door is unlocked it still trespassing." Another says "The vendor who sold you the lock is at fault since he knew his locks could be picked." And so on.
These analogies have nothing to do with real life. They're just analogies and they don't really help us understand the situation. Why? Because Microsoft is not some guy living in a house, or a locksmith with a small shop, they're one of the most powerful corporations in the world.
When I was in college there was a rapist who attacked girls living off campus. One victim was living in an apartment where the bathroom window physically could not be locked. The guy crawled through and raped her. Guess who got sued? The apartment's management company. Guess why? Becuase they were the only ones with enough money worth going after.
But there are some crucial differences between landlord-tenant law and whatever sort of law you'd use to try to hold Microsoft (or any vendor) liable for faulty software. For starters, cracking a system is not a violent crime. (Though the prison sentence for "hackers" is probably on par with what rapists get. But that's a judicial and/or legislative problem, not a legal liability issue.) Furthermore, the EULA states right on it that they can't warrant the system against break-ins.
In fact Microsoft doesn't even make security/firewall products in the first place, so this is (analogy alert) like suing the guy who makes your file cabinets after thieves break your locks and find that the file cabinets themselves are wide open. Nevermind that Microsoft markets their products as more secure and reliable -- THAT'S MARKETING HYPE and, compared to previous versions of Windows, it's probably valid marketing hype.
Landlords are obliged to provide a safe place for you to live, in return for your money. Microsoft makes no claim that they'll provide a safe way to connect your systems to the Internet, and they never have. The only people who might be liable for cracking systems would be a managed data center or co-location facility that actually makes the claim that your box won't get rooted.
Cars, alcohol, and guns kill people all the time. That doesn't mean that Chevrolet, Coors, and Colt are negligent or liable for the resulting mayhem. I'm no Microsoft fanboy but I'm really sick of this stupid locks-on-doors analogy. That whole line of thought is a red herring.
How do you secure systems on the Internet? I certainly don't know. Frankly I don't think there are too many people who do. From what I've seen you've got two choices: Trust a few vendors like Cisco and SecurID, or trust a few unix geeks.
If you're holding up Bill Gates as the poster boy for "market forces" then you must have missed just about everything the company has done in about the past ten years. Sure their rise was phenomenal, and in fact I think it's the trap of their success that has pushed Gates to the draconian (and felonious) measures to ensure that noone strays from the One Microsoft Way. When 95% of the world's PCs run your OS, there aren't really that many new markets to establish, or profits to reap. Now he must squeeze those he's got, and keep them in his grasp. Many people aren't going to buy a new computer in the next few years. How can Microsoft keep the revenue coming in? Surely it's only in the best interests of the shareholders to assert some of that vast power and market influence for the good of the company.
Ah, You can't have it both ways. You can't claim that "market forces" or the "invisible hand" led to Microsoft's dominant position and then look the other way when Microsoft twists the arm of the OEMs to crush BeOS. Or when they blatanly lied about the inseperability of IE from Windows and then spent the next five years deliberately entangling the two so that now, in fact, IE dlls perform core GUI functions.
Is capitalism a Machiavellian endeavor? Or are there rules to this game? I think how someone addresses this is predictive of their view on the "Is Microsoft Evil" question.
My solution was this: Take Elian out on a boat. Have him walk to the end of the pier. Tell him: "You can join your mom, or you we can take you back to Cuba. Your choice, kid."
In both cases, looking back (with knowledge of how things played out) we might see something that could have been done differently.
That's all water under the bridge. The important thing is this: Have we learned anything that will make us behave differently in the future? If the answer is "no" then all those killed by the feds died for nothing. By extension, all those that died in Oklahoma City died for nothing too. More, I predict, will die.
When do you think it's acceptable for our law enforcement agencies to kill people? One of the factors in the decision to storme Waco was this: the siege had lasted so long they were afraid "operational fatigue" would make the troops sloppy, so they'd better go in now. Is that a legitimate reason for the use of deadly force? Because you're sick of waiting for the rat you've cornered (and outnumbered and out-gunned) to make a move?
I don't like the term "crazy people" but I'll use it for the sake of expediency. We can and should full well expect "crazy people" to do things like Waco et. al. in the future. This is a problem that society will have to deal with. There have been a few spectacular faliures, specifically Waco, which led more "crazy people" to blow up Oklahoma City.
There is an imperiousness to our power, this attitude made it easy to justify a military operation against civilian targets in Waco. It made it easy to ignore the threats of Osama bin Laden (his beef, among others, being the wide-scale presence of US military near Mecca and Medina.) There is no need to negotiate with kooks like bin Laden, or wackos like Koresh. In fact, it's pretty easy to write both of them off as "crazy people." But doing so turns a blind eye to their very real sense of injustice. I'm not saying they're right, that's pretty much irrelevant. The point is this: We've come through the looking glass, the reality is that we no longer live in an era where our arrogance will go unchecked so easily.
I will leave you with the comment that Randy Weaver's wife was holding their young son when she was killed. The intended target was Randy. Had the bullet strayed farther off course, could you dismiss the child's death so quickly? A rational man does not fire into a crowd of civilians, notwithstanding the fact that the crowd is the target's family. Someone drunk with power, knowing full well his federal badge will shield him, and public opinion will paint the victim as a lunatic, might go ahead and take the shot, knowing it won't really matter if they miss. Hmmm is this the anarchy you were speaking about?
You can't really blame "the ruby ridge guy" for the fact that an FBI sniper missed him and assassinated his wife. I'd say culpability lies with the triggerman, and so did the Idaho attorney general who attempted to prosecute the sniper for that killing. (The Federal courts blocked that, though, since he was "just following orders.")
I'm saying it has to be a two-way street. Lets say that for the "bad guys" everything they do which leads to a police action justifies that police action. But shouldn't the authorities have to play by those rules too? If I speed off from a gas station after stealing 20 bucks of gas, and the cops chase me, and an innocent bystander gets run over, is that 100% my fault? Shouldn't the cops have the responsibility to consider that pursuing a high-speed chase in a densely populated area might do more harm than good? And it is for this reason that more and more cities will break off a high-speed chase if it's deemed unsafe.
People who set actions in motion, be it criminals, nuts with guns, or the police (not necessarily mutually exclusive groups I should add) have to consider the consequences. There is a point at which things cannot be un-done. For something like Waco we could (and did) spend years trying to assign blame, and there's plenty to go around. It was the authorities who decided to storm the compound, which is when all hell broke loose. Surely they must bear some share of the burden for the outcome of that decision. It certainly cannot be viewed as a law enforcement success when that many civilians die. To put all the blame on the "evil-doers" ignores the opportunity to see what went wrong and how we might avoid future Wacos and Ruby Ridges.
Jake: 'Scmods?' What is that some new kind of VD?
Elwood: State County Municipal Offender Data System.
Spending all that money to build this stuff will prop up our economy and create jobs. Nothing that creates jobs can be bad, so in that way it is a defense of our way of life. (Either that or proof that the capitalism will eat itself.)
Republicans 3 Star Wars. I never heard Bush mention it once during the 2000 campaign, but about two weeks into office he announced big-time funding for it.
But then my stock in Pfizer would go down and the economy would suffer.
People suffering is fine. The economy suffering is a big concern!
thanks! This would take forever on bittorrent at like 4KB/sec. I'm getting 150 KB/sec from you :)
Microsoft's approach to PocketPC is completely the opposite of how they established DOS and cornered the PC market. DOS was sold as an operating system that would run on anybody's PC, regardless of manufacture. It wasn't what you'd call "open source" but it did open up the hardware platform and provide a common reference point we could build on.
PocketPC, on the other hand, takes an entirely different approach. You're stuck with MS-imposed limitations like a chunky 320x240 screen size and you can't break out of the Windows shell to the underlying lower-level functions. Working with PocketPC has been very frustrating for me; it's got vendor lock-in coming at you from two angles (MS and whichever OEM branded the unit).
With PocketPC, Microsoft has torn a page from Apple's playbook when it comes to product positioning and the complete lack of "freedom to innovate." Unfortunately their design ideas aren't any better than Apple's were a decade ago with the Newton.
If Microsoft truly wanted to compete in the PDA realm, what they need to do is come up with a DOS-equivalent that will run on a Palm or Clie or even a PocketPC. Indeed it's clever how they're pushing the commodity hardware costs onto the OEMs, and all they have to do is come up with the software. (A bit reminiscent of Dell's JIT manufacturing.) But in the long run I think a product that has both a closed software architecture and a closed hardware spec isn't going to fly.
And there's also the bloatware problem. Why should a PocketPC need a 406MHz CPU? A Clie with twice the pixels gets by on a much leaner chip.
if you make the losing party pay, you can pretty much guarantee that people like you or I will never, ever go up against a big corporation and their hordes of lawyers. If you lost, you'd be bankrupt.
Saying Israel doesn't have a right to exist is not the same as saying the people living in Israel should be eradicated. The US led a war against Iraq, but they didn't commit genocide. Being against a state is not the same as being against its citizenry.
Israel, my anonymous friend, is a political abstraction, as are all nations. People, on the other hand, are people.
Can you differentiate between Israel and Jews? How do you account for the millions of non-Jews living in Israel? By your logic, being anti-Israel makes me anti-Semitic. Then I guess I must be anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim and anti-Christian too, since all those people and more reside in Israel.
I guess this means you're one of those people who can't distinguish between anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-Zionist.
Let me ask you, if not supporting Israel's right to exist makes one an Anti-Semite, does that mean that not supporting the ETA means I'm anti-Basque? Or wanting to keep a unified Iraq makes me anti-Kurd? Am i anti-Tibetan if I buy Chinese goods at Wal-Mart? Am I anti-Irish if I don't support the IRA or Sinn Fein?
Sharon has killed a lot of people that didn't deserve it. Someone with your education must know this. Instead you're playing games, trying to paint me as some sort of racist.
This whole "right to exist" thing is kind of a joke. There is no right to exist. The only land any country possesses is what they can hold, usually through military means. It's a dog eat dog world, not one where magical mandates from some dusty old parchment (here I could mean either the Torah or the Declaration of Independence) confer any real legitimacy upon anything.
You're right, wrong place. My bad.
try this:
http://www.indictsharon.net/
I'm surprised your pathetic attempt at a google search didn't find that, since it was the first hit for "ariel sharon war crimes."