Wouldn't THESE guys now possess the largest collection of child pornography? Why are these guys NOT in Jail? Why are they
not on trial?
Because they are the Good Guys(tm). Only the Bad Guys(tm) get in trouble for possessing mere information.
And that is where society crosses the line between justice and ritualized violence. Private possession of a picture hurts no one, yet society needs someone to hate. Society needs someone to disenfranchise. Salem had its witch trials, and now we have thought trials on similar pretenses. Any excuse to act against "weirdos," "freaks," or others who while not hurting people are otherwise a target of persecution. No one likes Humphry. Silly Bill of Rights, getting rid of him was much easier back in the 1600s. Lets see what he has on his computer... pictures of a nudist colony and an essay on terrorism. Right, throw this terrorist pedophile in jail.
Hurting children is bad and indefensible. Data laying idle on a harddrive hurts no one, at least in any rational sense.
Thinking about it - almost 2 miles, 35 mins. Hell, WALK. For the love of God, get some exercise
Correct, walking is faster. But if I'm waiting around for the bus I can sneak in some studying. Plenty of other people also walk to save time, I just use the time for something else.
Things UMass Lowell needs before taking on such a lavish venture:
Working residence hall fire alarms.
Parking (and not just for faculty, students go here too).
Elevators that don't trap people between floors every week.
Working shuttle bus service. My last class on Tuesdays and Thursdays ends at 15:15 on south campus. The shuttle bus delivers me to my dorm around 15:50, covering almost two miles. (Thanks to a friend, I get a ride back to my dorm in 5-10 minutes).
UMass Lowell doesn't even run the campus network in an ethical and sane manner (pulling connections for groundless abuse complaints before conferring with the alleged abuser), I sure as hell won't trust them with any computer I use.
This is all gee-whiz stuff; they hope that this laptop computer craze will mask all the other problems.
I wonder if they upgraded thier equipment so this would not happen again.
There are no special points in the electrical system which are particularly vulnerable to magnetic storms. Working on thousands of miles of high tension lines, a magnetic storm induces a lot of current.
Short of shielding every long distance transmission line, there is really no way to protect them.
No. HTTP supports caching. FTP doesn't (at least not easily). If several LAN users are using a local cache, multiple requests to the same HTTP URL will be retrieved once over the Internet. Plug that local cache into a distributed cache mesh and popular content is mirrored automatically and transparently to the user.
If you have a problem with current HTTP clients, man wget, or post your problems in detail so the community can see what it has to offer.
In the larger picture, FTP is inferior to HTTP for anonymous file transfers of any size.
You cant use
bundle per-virtual-server anonymous FTP access on the domain name to clients.
Just use HTTP for what you were using anonymous FTP for. Current HTTP implementations are a little slower than current FTP implementations, but HTTP is much easier to cache and proxy. Go with HTTP.
Re:Hmmmm some interesting fallout from that...
on
Focusing Audio
·
· Score: 1
... it'd be a boon for the hearing impaired in public spaces. Amplified sound targeted to where they are sitting/standing.
Wouldn't be effective. How do you propose tracking the person around the room? What about the comfort of others near the loud zone?
At least in the United States, movie theaters and the like built or renovated since 1992 must provide patrons with headphones for their hearing comfort. That should be enough.
A computer seldom retains factory configuration for long. People are adding software, reinstalling Windows, throwing in hardware, and in general making a mess of things.
Auto makers have the benefit of products that don't change a lot once they leave the assembly line. A new radio and some window tinting are the most dramtic changes many[1] cars get. If the axle falls of or the tires explode it is safe to assume that it was not due to some twit fucking with it.
Computer makers have no such benefit. Not long after it leaves the box, the happy computer user is causing all kinds of trouble with it. Putting out every possible fire would be difficult. Who will pay for the extra service and support?
"New Dell ZZ77 2 GHz computer, $899, $2599 in Pennsylvania."
Pennsylvania is trying to promote itself as a hi-tech state. This appears to be a step in the wrong direction.
Just wondering what this is going to do in terms of upper-atmosphere pollution.
I mean, commercial jets are bad enough. Maybe we need to put the restriction back as an environmental law. Maybe we need to make strict emission quota laws for the booster rockets and suchlike that will be used.
Absolutely. All that water vapor produced by the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen certainly requires regulation. Think of how humid it will get for the ecosystem at 20 km (65000 feet).
Enough environmental policy has been based upon junk "feel-good" science. Give us a break.
Find a human, any human. Inside that human's noggin are his most private thoughts. Other reasonable persons understand that it is not good to coerce these thoughts out of someone if he isn't willing to share, even if they suspect those thoughts aren't kosher. Be it the details on how to make an atomic bomb, rob a bank, or an image of a naked 12 year old, those thoughts are basically safe in the head.
Humans are toolmakers. We construct implements to increase our abilities. And now we have evolved from stone tools to computers. Data quietly sitting on a hard drive is just like data in your head: it is harmless by itself. Thinking about robbing a bank is not the same as actually doing it.
As any real crime must involve other physical evidence, society has no legitimate need to seize this very personal data. But as history shows us, society will happily trample on individual rights whenever it sees fit.
You have the right to private thoughts. Don't let the mobs violate you, protect your private information with strong cryptography.
It's true. Constitutional protections do not apply to minors. Minors do not have, for example, the right to freedom of speech or freedom of assembly, because the U.S. Constitution does not recognize them as citizens.
If they aren't citizens, why do they have to pay income tax? Why can they be tried as adults?
I will never give these government restrictions against minors one bit of respect until they completely drop taxes for minors. Fair is fair.
I believe this law doesn't go far enough! We need to protect our children from board games which teach them that enough money will solve all your problems.
Consider Monopoly, for instance. The object of the game is to get as much money as possible and bankrupt the other players. Children see that it is okay to financially destroy other people! And look at the high amounts of money used when playing it. Exposed to routine use of those incredibly high sums, children will see the high sums of money in the drug trade as no big deal!
It doesn't end at board games either! Games like jumping rope and basketball teach children that it is okay to exclude the handicapped. That intolerance is unacceptable! Ban those games and let the eggheads figure out how to make hopscotch ADA compliant!
Crypto is no help because you want to limit the number of identities someone can have, and yet you don't want to put any hurdles in the way of new customers.
Why not use hash cash? Each user will need to generate a hash cash token to identify themselves, and any given token can be banned. Since it is expensive to generate a new hash cash token, this will thwart such abuses.
Anti-felon. I live in Massachusetts, which is one of only three states that haven't disenfranchised felons (along with Vermont and another New England state, probably Rhode Island)
The list is Massachusetts, Maine (once part of Massachusetts), Vermont (lets everything vote), and New Hampshire (used to not allow felons to vote, however).
Its interesting that all these states happen to be geographically contiguous, especially since they disagree on many other fundamental points.
but the legislature has proposed and passed a constitutional amendment changing that, which now goes to the voters in November where it'll probably get overwhelmingly approved, since no one else seems to mind punishing a person twice and taking away the most fundamental liberty democratic nations can claim, simply out of spite, at a time when voter turnout in the regular population is at an all-time low.
I support the right of felons to vote, in Massachusetts and elsewhere. If society really was right in convicting someone of a felony, then society has nothing to be afraid of by giving them a vote.
These disenfranchisement measures potentially amounts to a tool for one part of society to silence another. Somehow get the heretics branded as felons, and your opposition is silenced.
BOSTON (AP) - The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has passed a law making use of the local accent mandatory for all purposes.
"We are tiahed of all these tourists coming from places like Quebec, Brazil, England, and New Yawk. We can't understand a word they say," said Governor Cellucci.
Locals support the measure. "Fucking tourists. Can't understand them. And they stop their cahs at red lights!" said one Boston resident.
Under the new law, it is a felony punishable by 15 years in prison for not being understood. The law also makes it legal to brutally beat those with strange accents.
No visitors in the Bay State that we asked could speak clearly enough for an interview.
Implementation of this technology changes the question of decorum from "does this impact others?" to "does something prevent me from doing this?"
A jerk with a disabled cell phone is still a jerk, and given the opportunity will engage in acts conducive to his station. Also, others are encouraged to become inconsiderate, secure in the knowledge that automatic facilities will do the thinking for them.
Further down the slope we encounter a considerable number of individuals who conduct themselves without thinking about their actions, relying instead on little gizmos to stop them from being idiots. That is probably a quality society should not boast.
20% of the comments here express concern that the rocket is going to veer off course and land in either the guy's neighborhood, Kansas or some third world country. Lets review the facts:
The rocket is expected to go 30 miles, straight up, from a desert in Oregon. One presumes that he will truck his rocket out to the middle of nowhere to keep clear of population.
The capsule doesn't appear to have substantial wings. Left to its own devices, it won't glide all over the planet.
The world isn't going to end when this guy launches his rocket.
In today's "go! go! go!" Internet boom, we seldom take time to appreciate what we have done so far.
1 billon. 1 thousand million. 1x10^9. That's the population of China. That's 1/6 the population of the world. If you presume the web was really born on January 1, 1990 (I don't know the exact date, but this is close enough), 261,096 pages were put up per day on average. Impressive.
3 Mbps is perfectly adequate for 3600 users if those 3600 users are doing what a typical student would need to do for their schoolwork. It only starts becoming inadequate if those students start doing stuff that has nothing to do with education, like downloading lots of music files, or pron.
You are forgetting one important fact: a large part of those 3600 users are students who live on campus. So in addition to doing schoolwork, these students sleep, party, watch television, eat meals, and heaven forbid, play on the net.
However, these paying students are usually the first to get restrictions on net use, often in lieu of putting restrictions on faculty and staff (you know, the ones that get paid to be there).
Even without a declaration of war, the leakage of this information was, and still possibly is, dangerous to national security by the virtue that it endangers citizens (i.e., members of the original agents' families, etc.)
Correct, which is why the parties responsible for keeping that classified information safe should be reprimanded. John Young had no such obligation.
If people die, yes. It's called manslaugter. Something to do with reckless endangerment to other peoples lives.
The courts don't agree with you, but lets consider this. Lets say its a crime to publish something that causes someone to kill themselves. One can argue that it should be a lesser crime to publish something that causes someone much heartache. While we're at it, lets make it a crime to make fun of some poor kid on the playground.
As much as I'd personally like to see mean school bullies get punished, it doesn't work with reality. Carrying this tangent to its logical conclusion basically means you can't say anything bad about anyone, ever. So much for the first ammendment, hell everyone on slashdot thats saying bad things about John Young would be in trouble.
During the Gulf war, while Israel was being bombed, a CNN reporter in Tel Aviv broadcasted missile hit locations based upon street names, etc. The Israeli military ordered that he stop, and he did not. He was deported.
That example is irrelevant to this discussion. In that case it was war, and in war certain freedoms are suspended in the name of helping to preserve those freedoms further down the road. No such declaration of war exists here.
Following Ed's logic, it is perfectly fine if I break into your house, rape your wife, kill your kids, and cut your legs off, so long as I justify it by giving you a stern warning (after the fact, no less) that your home security system is woefully inadequate. "No need to thank me, sir, just performing a public service."
No, that isn't perfectly fine. But following your analogy, all Young did was point out the inadequecies of the security system.
You could argue (and I would join you) that breaching computer security is different than endangering a human life -- unless, of course, that breaching computer security results in the endangerment of human lives.
Throughout this discussion, the common arguement is that he comprimised computer security. Young did no such thing, he discovered publicly published data. Would you be crying foul if he found this information buried in some library?
There are gray areas to almost everything, but the sanctity of human life should be an overarching consideration in anything you do.
How far do you want to take this? People have killed themselves over what was published about them, should the publishers go to jail for that?
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't THESE guys now possess the largest collection of child pornography? Why are these guys NOT in Jail? Why are they not on trial?
Because they are the Good Guys(tm). Only the Bad Guys(tm) get in trouble for possessing mere information.
And that is where society crosses the line between justice and ritualized violence. Private possession of a picture hurts no one, yet society needs someone to hate. Society needs someone to disenfranchise. Salem had its witch trials, and now we have thought trials on similar pretenses. Any excuse to act against "weirdos," "freaks," or others who while not hurting people are otherwise a target of persecution. No one likes Humphry. Silly Bill of Rights, getting rid of him was much easier back in the 1600s. Lets see what he has on his computer... pictures of a nudist colony and an essay on terrorism. Right, throw this terrorist pedophile in jail.
Hurting children is bad and indefensible. Data laying idle on a harddrive hurts no one, at least in any rational sense.
And the number one thing UMass Lowell needs before taking on such a lavish venture: To stop phoning in bomb threats to Merrimack College!
This is interesting, tell me more about it.
Thinking about it - almost 2 miles, 35 mins. Hell, WALK. For the love of God, get some exercise
Correct, walking is faster. But if I'm waiting around for the bus I can sneak in some studying. Plenty of other people also walk to save time, I just use the time for something else.
Things UMass Lowell needs before taking on such a lavish venture:
UMass Lowell doesn't even run the campus network in an ethical and sane manner (pulling connections for groundless abuse complaints before conferring with the alleged abuser), I sure as hell won't trust them with any computer I use. This is all gee-whiz stuff; they hope that this laptop computer craze will mask all the other problems.
I wonder if they upgraded thier equipment so this would not happen again.
There are no special points in the electrical system which are particularly vulnerable to magnetic storms. Working on thousands of miles of high tension lines, a magnetic storm induces a lot of current.
Short of shielding every long distance transmission line, there is really no way to protect them.
ftp>get XFree* vs. click .. click .. click .. click .. click .. click
Definitely one disadvtange, though a good HTTP client will make things better. Someday that will be a reality.
No. HTTP supports caching. FTP doesn't (at least not easily). If several LAN users are using a local cache, multiple requests to the same HTTP URL will be retrieved once over the Internet. Plug that local cache into a distributed cache mesh and popular content is mirrored automatically and transparently to the user.
If you have a problem with current HTTP clients, man wget, or post your problems in detail so the community can see what it has to offer.
In the larger picture, FTP is inferior to HTTP for anonymous file transfers of any size.
You cant use bundle per-virtual-server anonymous FTP access on the domain name to clients.
Just use HTTP for what you were using anonymous FTP for. Current HTTP implementations are a little slower than current FTP implementations, but HTTP is much easier to cache and proxy. Go with HTTP.
Wouldn't be effective. How do you propose tracking the person around the room? What about the comfort of others near the loud zone?
At least in the United States, movie theaters and the like built or renovated since 1992 must provide patrons with headphones for their hearing comfort. That should be enough.
A computer seldom retains factory configuration for long. People are adding software, reinstalling Windows, throwing in hardware, and in general making a mess of things.
Auto makers have the benefit of products that don't change a lot once they leave the assembly line. A new radio and some window tinting are the most dramtic changes many[1] cars get. If the axle falls of or the tires explode it is safe to assume that it was not due to some twit fucking with it.
Computer makers have no such benefit. Not long after it leaves the box, the happy computer user is causing all kinds of trouble with it. Putting out every possible fire would be difficult. Who will pay for the extra service and support?
"New Dell ZZ77 2 GHz computer, $899, $2599 in Pennsylvania."
Pennsylvania is trying to promote itself as a hi-tech state. This appears to be a step in the wrong direction.
[1] On average.
Just wondering what this is going to do in terms of upper-atmosphere pollution.
I mean, commercial jets are bad enough. Maybe we need to put the restriction back as an environmental law. Maybe we need to make strict emission quota laws for the booster rockets and suchlike that will be used.
Absolutely. All that water vapor produced by the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen certainly requires regulation. Think of how humid it will get for the ecosystem at 20 km (65000 feet).
Enough environmental policy has been based upon junk "feel-good" science. Give us a break.
Find a human, any human. Inside that human's noggin are his most private thoughts. Other reasonable persons understand that it is not good to coerce these thoughts out of someone if he isn't willing to share, even if they suspect those thoughts aren't kosher. Be it the details on how to make an atomic bomb, rob a bank, or an image of a naked 12 year old, those thoughts are basically safe in the head.
Humans are toolmakers. We construct implements to increase our abilities. And now we have evolved from stone tools to computers. Data quietly sitting on a hard drive is just like data in your head: it is harmless by itself. Thinking about robbing a bank is not the same as actually doing it.
As any real crime must involve other physical evidence, society has no legitimate need to seize this very personal data. But as history shows us, society will happily trample on individual rights whenever it sees fit.
You have the right to private thoughts. Don't let the mobs violate you, protect your private information with strong cryptography.
It's true. Constitutional protections do not apply to minors. Minors do not have, for example, the right to freedom of speech or freedom of assembly, because the U.S. Constitution does not recognize them as citizens.
If they aren't citizens, why do they have to pay income tax? Why can they be tried as adults?
I will never give these government restrictions against minors one bit of respect until they completely drop taxes for minors. Fair is fair.
I believe this law doesn't go far enough! We need to protect our children from board games which teach them that enough money will solve all your problems.
Consider Monopoly, for instance. The object of the game is to get as much money as possible and bankrupt the other players. Children see that it is okay to financially destroy other people! And look at the high amounts of money used when playing it. Exposed to routine use of those incredibly high sums, children will see the high sums of money in the drug trade as no big deal!
It doesn't end at board games either! Games like jumping rope and basketball teach children that it is okay to exclude the handicapped. That intolerance is unacceptable! Ban those games and let the eggheads figure out how to make hopscotch ADA compliant!
Crypto is no help because you want to limit the number of identities someone can have, and yet you don't want to put any hurdles in the way of new customers.
Why not use hash cash? Each user will need to generate a hash cash token to identify themselves, and any given token can be banned. Since it is expensive to generate a new hash cash token, this will thwart such abuses.
Anti-felon. I live in Massachusetts, which is one of only three states that haven't disenfranchised felons (along with Vermont and another New England state, probably Rhode Island)
The list is Massachusetts, Maine (once part of Massachusetts), Vermont (lets everything vote), and New Hampshire (used to not allow felons to vote, however).
Its interesting that all these states happen to be geographically contiguous, especially since they disagree on many other fundamental points.
but the legislature has proposed and passed a constitutional amendment changing that, which now goes to the voters in November where it'll probably get overwhelmingly approved, since no one else seems to mind punishing a person twice and taking away the most fundamental liberty democratic nations can claim, simply out of spite, at a time when voter turnout in the regular population is at an all-time low.
I support the right of felons to vote, in Massachusetts and elsewhere. If society really was right in convicting someone of a felony, then society has nothing to be afraid of by giving them a vote.
These disenfranchisement measures potentially amounts to a tool for one part of society to silence another. Somehow get the heretics branded as felons, and your opposition is silenced.
BOSTON (AP) - The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has passed a law making use of the local accent mandatory for all purposes.
"We are tiahed of all these tourists coming from places like Quebec, Brazil, England, and New Yawk. We can't understand a word they say," said Governor Cellucci.
Locals support the measure. "Fucking tourists. Can't understand them. And they stop their cahs at red lights!" said one Boston resident.
Under the new law, it is a felony punishable by 15 years in prison for not being understood. The law also makes it legal to brutally beat those with strange accents.
No visitors in the Bay State that we asked could speak clearly enough for an interview.
Implementation of this technology changes the question of decorum from "does this impact others?" to "does something prevent me from doing this?"
A jerk with a disabled cell phone is still a jerk, and given the opportunity will engage in acts conducive to his station. Also, others are encouraged to become inconsiderate, secure in the knowledge that automatic facilities will do the thinking for them.
Further down the slope we encounter a considerable number of individuals who conduct themselves without thinking about their actions, relying instead on little gizmos to stop them from being idiots. That is probably a quality society should not boast.
20% of the comments here express concern that the rocket is going to veer off course and land in either the guy's neighborhood, Kansas or some third world country. Lets review the facts:
The world isn't going to end when this guy launches his rocket.
In today's "go! go! go!" Internet boom, we seldom take time to appreciate what we have done so far.
1 billon. 1 thousand million. 1x10^9. That's the population of China. That's 1/6 the population of the world. If you presume the web was really born on January 1, 1990 (I don't know the exact date, but this is close enough), 261,096 pages were put up per day on average. Impressive.
3 Mbps is perfectly adequate for 3600 users if those 3600 users are doing what a typical student would need to do for their schoolwork. It only starts becoming inadequate if those students start doing stuff that has nothing to do with education, like downloading lots of music files, or pron.
You are forgetting one important fact: a large part of those 3600 users are students who live on campus. So in addition to doing schoolwork, these students sleep, party, watch television, eat meals, and heaven forbid, play on the net.
However, these paying students are usually the first to get restrictions on net use, often in lieu of putting restrictions on faculty and staff (you know, the ones that get paid to be there).
Even without a declaration of war, the leakage of this information was, and still possibly is, dangerous to national security by the virtue that it endangers citizens (i.e., members of the original agents' families, etc.)
Correct, which is why the parties responsible for keeping that classified information safe should be reprimanded. John Young had no such obligation.
If people die, yes. It's called manslaugter. Something to do with reckless endangerment to other peoples lives.
The courts don't agree with you, but lets consider this. Lets say its a crime to publish something that causes someone to kill themselves. One can argue that it should be a lesser crime to publish something that causes someone much heartache. While we're at it, lets make it a crime to make fun of some poor kid on the playground.
As much as I'd personally like to see mean school bullies get punished, it doesn't work with reality. Carrying this tangent to its logical conclusion basically means you can't say anything bad about anyone, ever. So much for the first ammendment, hell everyone on slashdot thats saying bad things about John Young would be in trouble.
During the Gulf war, while Israel was being bombed, a CNN reporter in Tel Aviv broadcasted missile hit locations based upon street names, etc. The Israeli military ordered that he stop, and he did not. He was deported.
That example is irrelevant to this discussion. In that case it was war, and in war certain freedoms are suspended in the name of helping to preserve those freedoms further down the road. No such declaration of war exists here.
Following Ed's logic, it is perfectly fine if I break into your house, rape your wife, kill your kids, and cut your legs off, so long as I justify it by giving you a stern warning (after the fact, no less) that your home security system is woefully inadequate. "No need to thank me, sir, just performing a public service."
No, that isn't perfectly fine. But following your analogy, all Young did was point out the inadequecies of the security system.
You could argue (and I would join you) that breaching computer security is different than endangering a human life -- unless, of course, that breaching computer security results in the endangerment of human lives.
Throughout this discussion, the common arguement is that he comprimised computer security. Young did no such thing, he discovered publicly published data. Would you be crying foul if he found this information buried in some library?
There are gray areas to almost everything, but the sanctity of human life should be an overarching consideration in anything you do.
How far do you want to take this? People have killed themselves over what was published about them, should the publishers go to jail for that?