I don't know about the others, but I have to wonder exactly how one could screw up giant robots beating up giant monsters. I still plan on seeing "Pacific Rim" for that reason.
Yeah... I heard this a few decades ago in grade school and I thought "WTF? Just about every organism on earth has two genders including things like plants. How can they say that the Y chromosome is going away?"
To be fair, the Y-chromosome isn't the only way of determining gender, and the Y-chromosome of non-mammalian species has no common ancestor to those of mammals (they all degenerated long after splitting off).
Some species use the number of X chromosomes. Reptiles and avians use ZW chromosomes, where the "female chromosome" is the shorter, degenerate one. Ants and bees are just kind of weird. The platypus has something like 10 sex chromosomes and lacks the SRY gene, so we have no idea how it really works AFAIK, and platyfish (unrelated) have some sort of weird W/X/Y system.
Single gender in plants is relatively rare, and I have no idea how it works.
Unfortunately, my WTF moments concerning these "scientific conclusions" haven't stopped. It's only gotten more frequent as I've matured.
I think that's more of a problem with bad science journalism than bad science, though.
Works fine for me. My kids love "The Princess Bride", "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", "Back to the Future", "Star Wars", etc.
Heh. You know, I'm fond of all of the movies on that list, but I think you need to compare each one to the beat sheet and see how far they deviate from it. Almost every single one hits all the elements, and most of them follow them in order. (I can't remember the plot of "Bill & Ted" clearly enough to verify it.)
Oddly, they seem to have been produced in parallel, with neither inspiring the other. Bugs's Life was released just 2 months after Antz, with both in production for quite some time beforehand (the final render pass for each likely took more than 2 months).
Oh no, there's a LOT more drama behind the story of Antz and A Bug's Life. Just because they took years to produce in parallel doesn't mean that they started at the same time nor that they were developed in secret with the other studio unaware of the "coincidence." You can read all about the sordid story here.
The Y chromosome is a li'l runt and they think it won't even be there anymore in a hunnert thousand years or so.
I don't think there's anyone who takes this seriously any more. There were some people suggesting that if genes are lost at a linear rate off the Y chromosome, it should disappear in another 10 million years. However, chimpanzees and humans show no difference in the number of genes on the Y chromosome since we diverged 6-7 million years ago, and we've both only lost one gene since we diverged from the rhesus macaque 25 mya. Given that sequencing of the platypus genome puts the common mammalian Y chromosome at a max of age of 166 mya, this suggests the linear model is just wrong.
The Wikipedia has good article on this from which I drew my numbers, if you're interested in more.
[A]nd on the other I have my getting killed in a hail of bullets from SWAT and the FBI before they stick me in jail for life (possibly without a trial).
Well, at least the jail time wouldn't be too onerous after all that.
Government - They want you to pay more tax. If they can connect you with a crime to improve their statistics then perfect...
Convicted felons don't get the nice jobs that let them earn enough to provide much in the way of taxes, and depending on how long they were in prison, they may never be able to make up the cost of housing them in the first place.
I don't follow, the cite you gave still requires the officer to have probable cause. Where is the probable cause to search every vehicle? Is it the government's claim that every person is a possible criminal? If so, then the Fourth Amendment means nothing.
That's, essentially, all they have to have. No warrants. No requirement to pre-clear the search with a court with a claim of probable cause supported by oath. The Fourth Amendment requires a bit more than *just* probable cause.
Because of that, we have no guarantee that their probable cause was justified. We have no records of why they searched her car, and we most likely never will if they didn't find anything they'd like to use in court against her. She could try filing a section 1983 claim, but that's a bit more hassle than its worth for the small amount of money she has a very unlikely chance of claiming that depends on them not being able to come up with probable cause that passes the sniff test.
If this goes to the Supreme Court, I can't see this doing anything other than establishing that the police have the power to request this data without a warrant at will. Smith v. Maryland (1979) established that police do not need a warrant for pen register data (the record of who you were calling and when), because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when you voluntarily transmit that data to a third party (the phone company). Note that this is different from the *content* of your calls -- wiretaps still require warrants, but certain metadata is free game.
Since your cell phones are effectively transmitting their location at all times over the public airwaves, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Supreme Court will rule that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in that data.
But we've had a long history of selling weapons to pretty much anybody. Except Iran, DPRK, and Cuba, of course.
Cross Iran off that list, given how much we sold to the Shah before the revolution (which how they still have American aircraft in service), and the arms we sold them during Iran-Contra affair.
How is the Watergate break-in worse than bugging the campaign office of Mitch McConnell?
Unlike with Nixon, there's no evidence that Obama had anything to do with that. The Watergate scandal, in comparison, involved people from Nixon's presidential campaign (Liddy), the US Attorney General, and Nixon's personal Presidential Council. It's most likely that Curtis Morrison acted independently. He was a member of Kentucky liberal advocacy group that had no connections (that I'm aware of at least) to Obama or his Presidential Campaign. If you have evidence that says otherwise, I'd love to read it.
Just because Obama is a Democratic President doesn't mean that he's actually directly in charge of every Democrat or other liberal.
How is creating an "enemies list" worse than targeting your enemies through the IRS, the EPA, and other federal agencies, and have the NSA spy on them and on reporters?
Well, first of all, the IRS scandal was mischaracterized in its early stages by the media. The IRS looked at a broad spectrum of 501(c) groups. Conservative groups were targeted (groups that mentioned "Tea party," "9/12", "patriots," etc.). So were liberal groups (ones that mentioned "occupy," "progress," "equality," etc.). So were groups interested in Israel, constitutional issues, the integrity of elections, and several other nonpartisan issues. Of those groups, the only one that was denied 501(c) status was Emerge America, a liberal advocacy group. No conservative groups were denied.
Now it wasn't completely non-partisan. Conservative groups were delayed in receiving their approval. There's indication that the National Organization for Marriage had its 2008 tax return deliberately leaked. Some chicanery was going on there.
But did Obama know? Signs indicate that he learned of it about the same time the public did. (He was aware of an ongoing investigation but not the contents of it.) No evidence has arisen that he did know ahead of time.
As for the EPA FOIA fee thing, I'll admit that's kind of shady. I don't believe it comes from the top, but it's a black mark on his administration, I think based on the facts I currently have. I think the effects of being on Nixon's enemies list was a bit more harsh: tax audits, denial of federal grants and contracts, etc.
For the last, I hate the NSA spying programs, but is there any evidence they've specifically went after reporters? I'd love to hear it. (More fuel for the fire on that subject, as far as I'm concerned.)
Nixon never orchestrated a false flag kidnapping at a consulate, and then tried to cover it up when it went south.
Neither did Obama. That's full-on crank territory if you want to claim that's what Benghazi was. Nixon did however orchestrate a burglary at the Chilean embassy, which is far closer to what you're accusing Obama of than what actually happened.
He never sold weapons to drug cartels.
True, you'd have to wait for Reagan for that. Of course, he was straight up selling arms to terrorists and using the money fund drug trafficking contras to fight communists. (Yet another episode in a long, terrible history of covert US actions to support terrible people just because they are the enemies of our enemies.)
Obama's ATF, at least, was selling the guns to try to track down criminals with an intent to disrupt and arrest them -- not to deliberately support them. Still, a pretty colossal screw up considering how many arms weren't recovered.
He didn't target children with drones, either.
Only because he didn't have them. The carpet bombing of Cambodia, which killed tens of thousands of civilians was a far greater atrocity than Obama's drone program (which I think is unconscionable too; just on a far different scale of "collateral damage," aka negligent mass murder).
Call me old school but I still need to hear the car go vroom.
There should be an app for that. No, seriously. It's got a sound system with subwoofers. It should be relatively trivial.
Kind of like all how some modern electronic guitar amps can mimic the flaws...er.. special sound of many different old vacuum tube-based analog models. If some old fossil (no offens) can't stand missing the quirks of the previous technology, then we can emulate it. Plus, it gives you the fun of switching up the feel of your car. Want to feel like you're in a sports car? Excellent. Want to it to sound like driving a dump truck? Well, that's cool too.
Hey with the introduction of Fracking there is not problem with the availability of gas to create electricity to power these green vehicles. LOL
Mock if you will, but that's a good thing. While I'd rather us not use gas in favor of renewables, I would much rather use natural gas than coal. The same applies to electricity from natural gas generation v. gasoline. Small progress is better than twiddling your thumbs until the perfect solution is ready.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is a well-known group of leftist activists who consistently advocate for greater govt control over people's lifestyles. Anything the organization says must be weighed against its known ideological biases.
I pretty much should have stopped reading at the ad hominem attack, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
The fact that their document uses the phrase "higher global warming emissions" immediately indicates that the document assumes that humans are causing the climate to change, an assumption for which there is no proof only hand-waving fear mongering based on nothing more than dubious computer models.
The relationship between concentrations thermal infrared-absorbing gasses in the atmosphere and the amount of solar energy retained by the atmosphere is very, very basic physics. The fact that these gasses are on the rise in the atmosphere is very simple to track and has been tracked well for the past several decades.
As for whether this represents a deviation from the historical record, then you have to start getting to the reams of data from ice core, tree rings, O16/O18 ratios in corals, sediment layers, etc. The long and short of it is that we can get pretty solid estimates on both temperature and CO2 levels going back millions of years, and the theorem that CO2 levels cause changes in temperature seems very solid. We are soon to see CO2 levels not seen since the mid-Pliocene, and we're getting there faster than any other major change in CO2 levels in the geological record. (Frankly it's not how much CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere that's dangerous -- it's how fast we're doing it, without giving Earth's species enough time to evolve, adapt, and naturally sequester.)
Any legitimate analysis of the environmental impact of switching to EVs must include all the factors involved including the costs of electricity production, EV materials production, EV materials disposal, electricity losses due to transmission, distribution and charging, the cost of battery replacement, the economic cost of waiting for vehicles to charge, the economic cost of capital investment in EV production, etc.
Oh, I agree. And they must be compared against the existing infrastucture and its costs: the emissions costs of the vehicle's use of gasoline, the costs of transporting it, the costs of materials used to construct the car (e.g. catalytic converters), losses and damage due to spills, evaporation at the pump, etc., the energy costs and emissions and other pollution from drilling, extraction, and refinement (including the varying costs of techniques like fracking and material like tar sands oil), the costs of continued capital investment in gasoline vehicle production and fuel supply infrastructure, pipeline losses, community risks from pipeline spills or oil tanker crashes, etc.
Okay, it seems I really did misread the intent behind your words, and I apologize for that and for unfairly maligning your position.
Every single dollar or man hour of effort spent trying to catch a hacker, is infinitely better spent improving security to make hacking more difficult.... Legislators, law enforcement, lawyers and courts are expensive. Rather than putting a few hackers in jail, we could use that money to research security holes and fix them for billions of people.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with that, but I can't quite get up on my high horse about that one.:-)
I don't think the legal costs of sending hackers to jail is more expensive than the costs of subsidizing security, nor do I think the government should be in the business of subsidizing the costs of fixing sloppy programming. Writing solid, secure code is hard and expensive. It seems like any such policy would be nothing more than a trough for companies to feed off the public dime without provably improving their products like so many other subsidies.
And really, I do think the government should be in the business of discouraging bad actors; nothing makes computers all that special. Simply making the "game" more challenging without any penalties for failure would just encourage people to try harder when what we really want is for people *not* to break into systems with malicious intent.
At risk of hyperbole due to dipping into analogies again, you could make the same argument that we shouldn't be penalizing burglars when we could instead be spending money on making houses more secure. At some point the economics and the incentives for good/bad behavior fall apart.
I think there's a difference between created fiction and voyeurism of real human suffering.
Yeah, I gotta put snuff in the same box as child porn. Repulsive when created by the pen and paper and worthy of social ostracism; utterly indefensible when involving real acts occurring to real people and worthy of prison time.
The notion that the law should not protect the weak from those who deliberately seek to do them harm because it's their fault for being weak is morally repugnant regardless of the situation.
It is the same as the "she was asking for it because of her outfit" argument in rape cases. It's the same as telling a kid that it's their fault for not standing up to a bully. It's the same as telling someone "caveat emptor" when someone scams them out of their home or their retirement savings.
You call them different situations, but the real difference is that you are confident of your ability to defend yourself in the realm of computers, and you see everyone else's lack of similar expertise and diligence indefensible. You only call for rule of the strong in computing because you see yourself as strong.
Personally, I think laws against malicious hacking are good and necessary. I don't think the CFAA is narrowly enough tailored to that task, but it's better than the wild west.
I don't know about the GP poster, but unless the weather's trying actively to kill me, I generally don't care enough to keep up with it. That's what we have buildings for -- to keep it away from us. Now when it gets good and angry enough to make an attempt on me and my neighbors, I do appreciate the warning.
I rely on my phone for an alarm clock (one that actually tracks the depth of my sleep and wakes me at the most appropriate moment), and I do not appreciate it being co-opted at that time of the night.
Slashdot Mirror
Video rentals long predate Redbox. They were around 30 years ago.
Tch. *pushes glasses up* I was into video rentals before they were popular.
Why don't the producers see that creativity and novelty are exciting?
Oh, they do! They're just hoping someone will come with a formula that will let them fake it.
I don't know about the others, but I have to wonder exactly how one could screw up giant robots beating up giant monsters. I still plan on seeing "Pacific Rim" for that reason.
Yeah... I heard this a few decades ago in grade school and I thought "WTF? Just about every organism on earth has two genders including things like plants. How can they say that the Y chromosome is going away?"
To be fair, the Y-chromosome isn't the only way of determining gender, and the Y-chromosome of non-mammalian species has no common ancestor to those of mammals (they all degenerated long after splitting off).
Some species use the number of X chromosomes. Reptiles and avians use ZW chromosomes, where the "female chromosome" is the shorter, degenerate one. Ants and bees are just kind of weird. The platypus has something like 10 sex chromosomes and lacks the SRY gene, so we have no idea how it really works AFAIK, and platyfish (unrelated) have some sort of weird W/X/Y system.
Single gender in plants is relatively rare, and I have no idea how it works.
Unfortunately, my WTF moments concerning these "scientific conclusions" haven't stopped. It's only gotten more frequent as I've matured.
I think that's more of a problem with bad science journalism than bad science, though.
Works fine for me. My kids love "The Princess Bride", "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", "Back to the Future", "Star Wars", etc.
Heh. You know, I'm fond of all of the movies on that list, but I think you need to compare each one to the beat sheet and see how far they deviate from it. Almost every single one hits all the elements, and most of them follow them in order. (I can't remember the plot of "Bill & Ted" clearly enough to verify it.)
Oddly, they seem to have been produced in parallel, with neither inspiring the other. Bugs's Life was released just 2 months after Antz, with both in production for quite some time beforehand (the final render pass for each likely took more than 2 months).
Oh no, there's a LOT more drama behind the story of Antz and A Bug's Life. Just because they took years to produce in parallel doesn't mean that they started at the same time nor that they were developed in secret with the other studio unaware of the "coincidence." You can read all about the sordid story here.
The Y chromosome is a li'l runt and they think it won't even be there anymore in a hunnert thousand years or so.
I don't think there's anyone who takes this seriously any more. There were some people suggesting that if genes are lost at a linear rate off the Y chromosome, it should disappear in another 10 million years. However, chimpanzees and humans show no difference in the number of genes on the Y chromosome since we diverged 6-7 million years ago, and we've both only lost one gene since we diverged from the rhesus macaque 25 mya. Given that sequencing of the platypus genome puts the common mammalian Y chromosome at a max of age of 166 mya, this suggests the linear model is just wrong.
The Wikipedia has good article on this from which I drew my numbers, if you're interested in more.
Facebook doesn't take money from my paycheck.
If you're not paying for a service, you're not the customer. You're the product.
[A]nd on the other I have my getting killed in a hail of bullets from SWAT and the FBI before they stick me in jail for life (possibly without a trial).
Well, at least the jail time wouldn't be too onerous after all that.
Government - They want you to pay more tax. If they can connect you with a crime to improve their statistics then perfect...
Convicted felons don't get the nice jobs that let them earn enough to provide much in the way of taxes, and depending on how long they were in prison, they may never be able to make up the cost of housing them in the first place.
I don't follow, the cite you gave still requires the officer to have probable cause. Where is the probable cause to search every vehicle? Is it the government's claim that every person is a possible criminal? If so, then the Fourth Amendment means nothing.
That's, essentially, all they have to have. No warrants. No requirement to pre-clear the search with a court with a claim of probable cause supported by oath. The Fourth Amendment requires a bit more than *just* probable cause.
Because of that, we have no guarantee that their probable cause was justified. We have no records of why they searched her car, and we most likely never will if they didn't find anything they'd like to use in court against her. She could try filing a section 1983 claim, but that's a bit more hassle than its worth for the small amount of money she has a very unlikely chance of claiming that depends on them not being able to come up with probable cause that passes the sniff test.
If this goes to the Supreme Court, I can't see this doing anything other than establishing that the police have the power to request this data without a warrant at will. Smith v. Maryland (1979) established that police do not need a warrant for pen register data (the record of who you were calling and when), because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when you voluntarily transmit that data to a third party (the phone company). Note that this is different from the *content* of your calls -- wiretaps still require warrants, but certain metadata is free game.
Since your cell phones are effectively transmitting their location at all times over the public airwaves, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Supreme Court will rule that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in that data.
The very reason is because the contents of your car has long been held protected under the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution...
Nope. See US v. Carroll (1925), and more broadly, the evolution of the motor vehicle exception.
But we've had a long history of selling weapons to pretty much anybody. Except Iran, DPRK, and Cuba, of course.
Cross Iran off that list, given how much we sold to the Shah before the revolution (which how they still have American aircraft in service), and the arms we sold them during Iran-Contra affair.
Wow, there's a lot to go through here.
How is the Watergate break-in worse than bugging the campaign office of Mitch McConnell?
Unlike with Nixon, there's no evidence that Obama had anything to do with that. The Watergate scandal, in comparison, involved people from Nixon's presidential campaign (Liddy), the US Attorney General, and Nixon's personal Presidential Council. It's most likely that Curtis Morrison acted independently. He was a member of Kentucky liberal advocacy group that had no connections (that I'm aware of at least) to Obama or his Presidential Campaign. If you have evidence that says otherwise, I'd love to read it.
Just because Obama is a Democratic President doesn't mean that he's actually directly in charge of every Democrat or other liberal.
How is creating an "enemies list" worse than targeting your enemies through the IRS, the EPA, and other federal agencies, and have the NSA spy on them and on reporters?
Well, first of all, the IRS scandal was mischaracterized in its early stages by the media. The IRS looked at a broad spectrum of 501(c) groups. Conservative groups were targeted (groups that mentioned "Tea party," "9/12", "patriots," etc.). So were liberal groups (ones that mentioned "occupy," "progress," "equality," etc.). So were groups interested in Israel, constitutional issues, the integrity of elections, and several other nonpartisan issues. Of those groups, the only one that was denied 501(c) status was Emerge America, a liberal advocacy group. No conservative groups were denied.
Now it wasn't completely non-partisan. Conservative groups were delayed in receiving their approval. There's indication that the National Organization for Marriage had its 2008 tax return deliberately leaked. Some chicanery was going on there.
But did Obama know? Signs indicate that he learned of it about the same time the public did. (He was aware of an ongoing investigation but not the contents of it.) No evidence has arisen that he did know ahead of time.
As for the EPA FOIA fee thing, I'll admit that's kind of shady. I don't believe it comes from the top, but it's a black mark on his administration, I think based on the facts I currently have. I think the effects of being on Nixon's enemies list was a bit more harsh: tax audits, denial of federal grants and contracts, etc.
For the last, I hate the NSA spying programs, but is there any evidence they've specifically went after reporters? I'd love to hear it. (More fuel for the fire on that subject, as far as I'm concerned.)
Nixon never orchestrated a false flag kidnapping at a consulate, and then tried to cover it up when it went south.
Neither did Obama. That's full-on crank territory if you want to claim that's what Benghazi was. Nixon did however orchestrate a burglary at the Chilean embassy, which is far closer to what you're accusing Obama of than what actually happened.
He never sold weapons to drug cartels.
True, you'd have to wait for Reagan for that. Of course, he was straight up selling arms to terrorists and using the money fund drug trafficking contras to fight communists. (Yet another episode in a long, terrible history of covert US actions to support terrible people just because they are the enemies of our enemies.)
Obama's ATF, at least, was selling the guns to try to track down criminals with an intent to disrupt and arrest them -- not to deliberately support them. Still, a pretty colossal screw up considering how many arms weren't recovered.
He didn't target children with drones, either.
Only because he didn't have them. The carpet bombing of Cambodia, which killed tens of thousands of civilians was a far greater atrocity than Obama's drone program (which I think is unconscionable too; just on a far different scale of "collateral damage," aka negligent mass murder).
If some old fossil (no offens)
Oh, fantastic. Nothing is more special than gently mocking someone while making a typo of it.
Call me old school but I still need to hear the car go vroom.
There should be an app for that. No, seriously. It's got a sound system with subwoofers. It should be relatively trivial.
Kind of like all how some modern electronic guitar amps can mimic the flaws ...er.. special sound of many different old vacuum tube-based analog models. If some old fossil (no offens) can't stand missing the quirks of the previous technology, then we can emulate it. Plus, it gives you the fun of switching up the feel of your car. Want to feel like you're in a sports car? Excellent. Want to it to sound like driving a dump truck? Well, that's cool too.
Actually, that sounds kind of fun...
Hey with the introduction of Fracking there is not problem with the availability of gas to create electricity to power these green vehicles. LOL
Mock if you will, but that's a good thing. While I'd rather us not use gas in favor of renewables, I would much rather use natural gas than coal. The same applies to electricity from natural gas generation v. gasoline. Small progress is better than twiddling your thumbs until the perfect solution is ready.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is a well-known group of leftist activists who consistently advocate for greater govt control over people's lifestyles. Anything the organization says must be weighed against its known ideological biases.
I pretty much should have stopped reading at the ad hominem attack, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
The fact that their document uses the phrase "higher global warming emissions" immediately indicates that the document assumes that humans are causing the climate to change, an assumption for which there is no proof only hand-waving fear mongering based on nothing more than dubious computer models.
The relationship between concentrations thermal infrared-absorbing gasses in the atmosphere and the amount of solar energy retained by the atmosphere is very, very basic physics. The fact that these gasses are on the rise in the atmosphere is very simple to track and has been tracked well for the past several decades.
As for whether this represents a deviation from the historical record, then you have to start getting to the reams of data from ice core, tree rings, O16/O18 ratios in corals, sediment layers, etc. The long and short of it is that we can get pretty solid estimates on both temperature and CO2 levels going back millions of years, and the theorem that CO2 levels cause changes in temperature seems very solid. We are soon to see CO2 levels not seen since the mid-Pliocene, and we're getting there faster than any other major change in CO2 levels in the geological record. (Frankly it's not how much CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere that's dangerous -- it's how fast we're doing it, without giving Earth's species enough time to evolve, adapt, and naturally sequester.)
I recommend you start here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/
Any legitimate analysis of the environmental impact of switching to EVs must include all the factors involved including the costs of electricity production, EV materials production, EV materials disposal, electricity losses due to transmission, distribution and charging, the cost of battery replacement, the economic cost of waiting for vehicles to charge, the economic cost of capital investment in EV production, etc.
Oh, I agree. And they must be compared against the existing infrastucture and its costs: the emissions costs of the vehicle's use of gasoline, the costs of transporting it, the costs of materials used to construct the car (e.g. catalytic converters), losses and damage due to spills, evaporation at the pump, etc., the energy costs and emissions and other pollution from drilling, extraction, and refinement (including the varying costs of techniques like fracking and material like tar sands oil), the costs of continued capital investment in gasoline vehicle production and fuel supply infrastructure, pipeline losses, community risks from pipeline spills or oil tanker crashes, etc.
I mean, fair's fair.
Okay, it seems I really did misread the intent behind your words, and I apologize for that and for unfairly maligning your position.
Every single dollar or man hour of effort spent trying to catch a hacker, is infinitely better spent improving security to make hacking more difficult. ...
Legislators, law enforcement, lawyers and courts are expensive. Rather than putting a few hackers in jail, we could use that money to research security holes and fix them for billions of people.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with that, but I can't quite get up on my high horse about that one. :-)
I don't think the legal costs of sending hackers to jail is more expensive than the costs of subsidizing security, nor do I think the government should be in the business of subsidizing the costs of fixing sloppy programming. Writing solid, secure code is hard and expensive. It seems like any such policy would be nothing more than a trough for companies to feed off the public dime without provably improving their products like so many other subsidies.
And really, I do think the government should be in the business of discouraging bad actors; nothing makes computers all that special. Simply making the "game" more challenging without any penalties for failure would just encourage people to try harder when what we really want is for people *not* to break into systems with malicious intent.
At risk of hyperbole due to dipping into analogies again, you could make the same argument that we shouldn't be penalizing burglars when we could instead be spending money on making houses more secure. At some point the economics and the incentives for good/bad behavior fall apart.
A lot of stuff on the Internet can torment people for years. It's not like anything else gets deleted from the Internet.
You say that like it justifies itself instead of the exact opposite.
I think there's a difference between created fiction and voyeurism of real human suffering.
Yeah, I gotta put snuff in the same box as child porn. Repulsive when created by the pen and paper and worthy of social ostracism; utterly indefensible when involving real acts occurring to real people and worthy of prison time.
The notion that the law should not protect the weak from those who deliberately seek to do them harm because it's their fault for being weak is morally repugnant regardless of the situation.
It is the same as the "she was asking for it because of her outfit" argument in rape cases. It's the same as telling a kid that it's their fault for not standing up to a bully. It's the same as telling someone "caveat emptor" when someone scams them out of their home or their retirement savings.
You call them different situations, but the real difference is that you are confident of your ability to defend yourself in the realm of computers, and you see everyone else's lack of similar expertise and diligence indefensible. You only call for rule of the strong in computing because you see yourself as strong.
Personally, I think laws against malicious hacking are good and necessary. I don't think the CFAA is narrowly enough tailored to that task, but it's better than the wild west.
I don't know about the GP poster, but unless the weather's trying actively to kill me, I generally don't care enough to keep up with it. That's what we have buildings for -- to keep it away from us. Now when it gets good and angry enough to make an attempt on me and my neighbors, I do appreciate the warning.
It's my alarm clock.
It's NOT the government's alarm clock for me.
I rely on my phone for an alarm clock (one that actually tracks the depth of my sleep and wakes me at the most appropriate moment), and I do not appreciate it being co-opted at that time of the night.