No, what it;s saying is if someone else is convicted of a crime, you can't appeal their case on the grounds that
you may later be convicted of the same crime.
Let's get our terminology right here: Nothing about this case or the CPHack case involves a "crime". It was a civil case brought by Mattel against the authors of the CPHack paper, and doesn't concern any criminal law whatsoever.
So, the original poster who said:
... this
ruling makes very little sense to me. I mean, is it really trying to say that if one person does something illegal and
ends up in court, and then other people do exactly the same, only the first person can be found guilty of that
crime?
... is slightly misguided, because nothing "illegal" has been done, no "crime" has been committed, and nobody has been found "guilty" of anything -- What has happened is that Mattel has made a complaint, and that complaint has been upheld in court.
In order for that complaint to be upheld against everyone else, Mattel would have to complain in court against everyone else. This isn't like a criminal case where someone is prosecuted for breaching a specific piece of legislation, this is a case of Mattel pointing to a couple of discrete individuals and saying to the court, "Help us out with these guys, stop what they're doing," and the court has done precisely that without stopping anyone else from doing whatever it is that they happen to be doing.
What the hell are you talking about, mutnix? Just about everything you've said in this posting is crap (and believe me, I'm not fan of Telstra, so I'm not going to defend them without justification).
Here in the UK you have to be within 10 miles of the local exchange in order for BT to consider you for ADSL. I would assume that this is for technical reasons, and would hold true in any country. So how does this work in Oz where the population density is low
We have more telephone exchanges.
Is it just cities and really large towns that will get the benfit of this?
That's another issue entirely. One of the big deals this year has been Telstra's performance in remote areas. There are some people out there in the middle of nowhere whose phone service is provided by 100 miles of copper and god knows how many amplifiers and repeaters, where the last ten miles are cable-tied to one of the bits of fencing wire by the side of the road on the dirt track which leads to their house. Expecting to be able to use modems over a line like that is fantasy, but the Government has declared that every household in Australia, no matter how remote, should be able to have access to high speed data.
Of course, since we're in Australia and our telco is fucked, "High Speed" means "64k" -- Yes, folks, ISDN is considered a premium, business-quality high speed data service here, and it costs about the same amount per month as a T1 over similar distances does in the US. Nevertheless, how are you going to get 64k down the copper strung along someone's fence?
Answer: You don't. Telstra has been a world leader in the use of alternative technologies, including satellite, spread-spectrum, and other forms of wireless communications. So that's what they're using.
In practice, this means that if you're in a remote-enough area, you might not have a local exchange at all, so expecting ADSL is a bit rich. Cities will get it first, major regional areas will get it next, and communities out in the middle of nowhere will get some mantra about "technical difficulties", which reall means, "We don't want to spend the cash necessary to outfit your pissant little local exchange with a DSLAM."
We just petition our congressional (Read federal) representatives to pass a law that make a software transaction aproximatly the same as a book transaction.
The point is this: the article makes it very clear that what he is primarily looking for in a partner is what it does for him. Whether she will be there for him, have time for him, whatever. I find that disturbing, since (and, like about a lot things, maybe I'm just not disillusioned enough) love should be based on a desire to do things for the other. What they do for you is secondary.
Anyone who doesn't go looking for someone else who can live up to their own wants, needs or desires is doomed. Like someone else in these comments said, breasts aren't the be-all-and-end-all of women, but if they turn you on you'd be a complete fool to "choose" a woman who didn't have them. A relationship should be mutually rewarding, which means you should get your own needs satisfied when you go into it; you should keep a little bit of yourself in a relationship, and maintain the expectation that while you're satisfying your partner's needs she's satisfying yours too.
If one sees a relationship primarily as a source of affection for oneself (and I realize that a lot of people, men and women, do this) then it IS a lot closer to prostitution than love.
A lot of people, men and women, should do this.
In the past social pressures have pushed people together and made them stick together whether they love and respect each other or not (my grandparents are a prime example; They couldn't stand each other, and stopped loving each other 30 years ago, but their religion and their social conditioning eliminated divorce as a reasonable way to "solve" that problem -- As a result they've both had an utterly miserable old-age, something I wouldn't wish on anybody).
All kinds of things are worthy of respect, and the precise subset of things you respect might be different from mine or Rob's -- That isn't a bad thing. You might be turned on by fireside chats, Rob may be turned on by breasts, I might be turned on by someone who looks good in a bikini... But what's probably more likely is that we're all turned on by fireside chats with someone who has great tits and looks good in a bikini:-) Rob appears (to me) to be in the former category, and talked about a wide-ranging set of things which he finds attractive and which other geeks might relate to, but you and others have jumped down his throat for daring to express a small subset of those opinions. His message was far more comprehensive than "I want someone with big tits who cleans up after me and fetches beer on demand," but as soon as flames start flying over that subset of what he likes we kinda lose perspective on all the other worthy things which appeared in the article...
Finally, Rob must have known with reasonable certainty that he'd get flamed royally for daring to speak about some of these things, but he went ahead with it anyway. I respect him for that, and I think there should be more of it: We should be able to be honest in public instead of ducking away from very important truths simply because we know some people with a political axe to grind won't like it. Your original comment about how Katz would be proud a forum like slashdot exists is no doubt true, but I suspect the comments of some of the readers following the article would detract somewhat from the gloss. One of the great losses our society has suffered throughout the 90's is that people have become afraid to talk about what they really think, because there are so many little groups who make a professional point of attacking opinions; My hope for the next decade is that the Internet can help us get back to reality by providing forums for people to be honest about what they think about homosexual Mozambiquian llamas without having to put up with public denigration and hate-crime lawsuits from "The Peoples' Front In Support of Reinforcement of the Sexual Self-Determination of Mozambiquian Llamas".
Roblimo may want a wife as a long term prostitute, but hopefully most of us are looking for a real soulmate.
And what, precisely, is Rob's wife supposed to think of a comment like that?
For all the soul-wracked wringing of hands shown in this thread, I'm yet to see one of the politically-correct complainers show the slightest bit of sensitivity towards Rob's position or the decisions of his wife, someone who is (no doubt) just as intelligent, caring and wonderful as anyone else in the human race.
What are you people thinking when you make stupid, asinine accusations like that? Have you totally missed the points Rob talked about in his article? What makes you think you can complain about Rob's political correctness while at the same time denigrating his wife as a fucking prostitute.
Ferchrissakes, get a life. There is truth and meaning beyond political-correctness. It is normal to refuse to strike up a relationship with someone who doesn't meet your needs, and it's normal for those needs to include a pleasing aesthetic and a mutual desire to serve each other. Criticizing Rob for putting his thoughts about these TRUTHS just shows that you're too busy being politically-correct to acknowledge your own humanity.
They're not looking at any web sites; The Minister for IT doesn't even use email. They're relying on what special interest groups are telling them (where "special interest groups" includes the most radically morals-sprouting zeroes in the country...) and ignoring anyone and everyone who does know what's going on.
The Minister gave a speech in the Australian Senate yesterday which tagged everyone who disagreed with the recently passed Broadcasting Services Act as "maniacs". How is rational, measured discussion supposed to be carried out in that kind of environment?
It's easy: Just like you, we're plagued by ignorant politicians who don't care enough to try to understand the stuff they're regulating. Unlike you, however, we have no bill of rights in our constitution to protect us from their excesses.
The only thing stopping the US from turning out like Australia is the First Amendment. I'm amazed at how few americans understand this.
Cyberpatrol CAN block individual URLs/directories/whatever, it's just that they choose not to.
Censorware is complete snake-oil; there's no way that it'll ever work as advertised because the net is growing so fast that it's impossible for them to fund development of the blacklist by selling software packages for $49.95 ea to an extremely limited market. They'd need to employ thousands of people to surf the web all day just to find the sites that will be created TODAY, and that's saying nothing about all the web sites that already exist.
CyberPatrol reacts to this in a way which is similar to virtually all other censorware: It gives up any pretense of accuracy and performs wholesale blocking of entire domains whenever it suits. Your ISP doesn't necessarily have any control over this, any more than the "Maple Soccer League" home page had over the fact that they were blocked (the descriptions of the teams in their league included the words "Under 15", so they must be kiddyporn, right?)
The problem in this case is that someone couldn't find your resume. I'd question whether I really wanted to work for someone who was dumb enough to hide their head in a box when they're on the web by using CyberPatrol. While you're complaining, keep in mind that the problem isn't that large: Packages like CypherPatrol are only used by the terminally insecure, the vast majority of people on the web will be totally unaffected by their blacklist.
To see more about CyberPatrol, see The Censorware Project, which specializes in exposing the stuff that is supposed to be bringing up our kids. While you're reading it, ask yourself: "Is it right that these people should be able to charge money for software which can never work?"
So you would honestly remove any and all authority from a parent to discipline or limit his/her children. That's amazing, that really is, I knew many/. readers were extremists but this really is something.
I'm sorry, but this is pure hyperbole. It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that I don't advocate that at all.
Roughly analogous to the thinking a hundred years ago, where the law failed to treat certain people as human beings on the basis of their skin color, even though the constitution said nothing about blacks
Now you're equating PARENTING with SLAVERY, if you weren't serious, this would be hilarious. Blacks during American and European slavery were treated differently based on external appearance. That is WRONG. Children are treated differently because they are intellectually and emotionally immature, and NOT, as you would have us believe, because they are short.
I'm not talking about slavery, I'm talking about the past 20 - 100 years of American history where slavery has been and gone but blacks have still been treated badly.
There was serious academic research done in the 1920's and 1930's to show that african americans were, in an evolutionary sense, closer to apes than "good god-fearin' whitefolk." The results of that utterly bizarre research was, and sometimes still is, used to justify the most henious restrictions on the lives of black people even though slavery was abolished over a century ago.
Now back to the subject at hand and the parallels with the case presented above: From their early teens, so-called "children" are often a lot more mature than you seem to think they are. They can reason, use logic, make their own moral and ethical conclusions, learn from their mistakes and take responsibility for thier actions. Yet you refuse to believe this; you treat them as non-humans with non-human-rights, forcing them to use censorware against tieir will because you've made an arbitrary judgement about their maturity based on nothing more substantial than their age. You haven't even met the people you'd censor.
UEN in Utah serves the entire public school system and some public libraries; The restrictions it has in place affect "children" up to age 18 (!!! doesn't that set alarm bells running?) and adult teachers and library users (!!! doesn't that set even more alarm bells ringing?). We're not talking about 1 year olds crying because a nappy is being changed against their will, or petulant 8 year olds complaining about being grounded, we're talking about people who are fully functional adults by every measurable metric except the one defined by law, which treats them as children, regardless of their maturity, until age 18.
That is the injustice here. That is the parallel between the denial of basic human rights to these people and the denial of basic human rights to african americans. "Children" remain the only group of people in American society who are routinely denied basic rights for no reason other than prejudice, bad law and appearance.
I have no trouble believing that a 15 year old is capable of making decisions about the kind of content they want to see on the web. The Utah public school system, however, doesn't make any distinction whatsoever between that 15 year old and a five year old starting school for the first time.
If you want to distort this into "shoving porn into the faces of children," then go ahead and do it in the knowledge that you are being knowingly dishonest. That is not what this case is about, and it never has been. This case is about the ability of Utah parents to make their own decisions about the upbringing their children get instead of trusting the moral guidance of their treasured offspring to a piece of software.
Frankly, I think your equating children with adults is a bit ridiculous when you take it to its logical conclusion. Should parents not have the right to ground their children or send them to their rooms because it constitutes unfair imprisonment without a trial before their peers?
You seem to be confusing two very different messages in this post.
On one hand you're talking about things like licenses to drive or serve in the military, which are based on a child's physical ability to do whatever tasks are in question (drive, fight, whatever).
On the other hand, you're talking about age limitations which have been chosen with absolute arbitrariness (the right to vote, buy a gun, drink, get grounded, etc).
The first category I'd argue are justified. The second category are not. The courts seem to agree with this in many instances (which is why, for instance, parents legally cannot ground their children; children can divorce their parents if they understand the issues and have good enough reasons, and why so-called minors have been able to join the military, legitimately or not).
Is there any magical age at which a child gains sufficient political maturity to be able to vote? Why is a person of 20 years and 364 days considered by the state to be unable to handle liquor, but the same person can buy it with impunity exactly one day later?
It gets even more bizarre when you consider that the very same people who clamour for censorship on the grounds of protecting childrens' innocence are often advocating putting children through adult courts and the adult prison system for certain crimes.
If a child understands the issues, they are old enough to make their own decisions based on those issues. The only person in the world qualified to work out if a child understands the issues is the child themselves. If a child feels oppressed due to state censorship efforts then the state should have no right to impose that censorship.
Why is this so hard to understand? How come WebSense and all the other bogus snake-oil censorware programs can be justified for 17.9999 year olds but not 18-year-olds? Why does the US, a supposedly free country, permit the existance of a "freedom underclass" based on something as arbitrary as age?
Should a child who gets in trouble be able to ascert a right to an attorney?
A child in trouble already has an absolute, incontrovertibe constitutional right to an attorney. Again, if you do not understand this you are not qualified to influence the course of this discussion.
You seem to think that the law doesn't treat someone as a human being if they're too young -- Roughly analogous to the thinking a hundred years ago, where the law failed to treat certain people as human beings on the basis of their skin color, even though the constitution said nothing about blacks (or earlier this century when Germany said certain people were less than human due to their religion). You are incorrect. It is people like you that perpetuate the underclass I speak of above, just like people in the deep south perpetuated the idea that blacks were too stupid to understand the concept of "rights" for decades after the rest of the country had (sort of) come to the complete opposite conclusion. It's a very dangerous attitude, adopted despite thousands of years of history which shows that if a group considers its treatment at the hands of the more privileged to be unjust they just reach out and grab the rights they need whether the privileged ones let them or not.
And that, my friend, is the power that the Internet gives to those children who are mature enough to understand that they're being treated unjustly by being forced to use censorware.
Now, please tell me how [the text of the first amendment ] can be interpretted to provide the right for children to look at pornography, even if their parents don't want them to.
See, this is exactly the point I was making about foreigners thinking it's bizarre that Americans don't even understand their own declaration of independence and constitution even though it's apparently so important to them.
If you live in a free country, when you look at your laws you should be asking, "What doesn't this prohibit?" instead of, "What does this permit?" One of the hallmarks of a free country is that everything is legal unless it's explicitly declared to be illegal.
When you look at the First Amendment, you should be asking, "Does this deny rights to children or limit them to adults?" If the answer is "no" (and it most assuredly is in this case) then you can only conclude that the law is age-neutral.
Now you tell me: What is so deficient about teenagers that it should be considered rational to deny them basic human rights, such as the unfettered access to information you expect and take for granted for yourself? Doesn't that strike you as a bit unjust, similar to the injustice inherent in denying someone rights due to their skin color or religion? Why does the United States permit the existance of a legal underclass with essentially no rights whatsoever?
And don't give me any crap about "protecting the innocence of children," because that kind of thing is predicated on the very wrong-headed notion that children have innocence to begin with. If a child is old enough to grasp the concept of free speech and understand that it's unjust that censorware inhibits their ability to use the Internet, they're old enough to have the right to get rid of the censorware. The fact that that right is often denied to them by the same people who claim the very same right for themselves says very nasty things about American society. Basically, it makes you look like a load of hypocrites.
The first amendment guarantees freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and press, not the right to access any and all information.
The United States Supreme Court disagrees with you on this point. You have the right to access and/or publish any information you can find, up to and including classified documents (as the New York Times so dramatically demonstrated in the Pentagon Papers case). That's a direct consequence of the first amendment; If you don't understand that then you aren't really qualified to contribute to this discussion.
Additionally, the Bill of Rights provides rights for adults, not children.
Sorry, but this is complete twaddle. Courts have routinely held that children have a right to freedom of speech on every issue from school uniforms through to the CDA. If you think the First Amendment doesn't apply to children then I think you need to seriously reevaluate your stance on this issue with the knowledge that you are utterly incorrect in some of the basic assumptions that have contributed to your beliefs. To use common vernacular, your behaviour on this topic is un-American.
If it were otherwise, then children would have the right to bear arms under the second amendment.
do you believe it you have the right to tell other people how to raise their children?
That's kinda the crux of the issue: In an earlier post you said there were certain types of material that should never be provided to children. Doesn't that mean that you're telling "... other people how to reise their children"?
Where you have it wrong is that you seem to think this is a community issue. It isn't -- It's a family issue. There are no such things as "community standards," because communities are too diverse. Pretending community standards exist for no reason other than to set censorship guidelines is one of those things that makes foreigners think the US attitude towards their first amendment is a complete farce.
Yes, it's "sensibly written", but that's the whole problem: Walsh used to lead ASIO, which serves Australia as a cross between NSA and CIA, so it's kinda expected that he'd have a good grasp of the issues.
Because he has such a good grasp of the issues, he said things in his report (which, need I remind anyone, was written for PUBLIC RELEASE) which the Government didn't like, e.g.: Key Escrow is fundamentally broken and short keys are manifestly inadequate.
As a result of writing down what everyone outside the Government knows is obvious, but which the Government can never be seen to admit if it wants to be able to justify its short key and export control policies, Walsh got his report suppressed.
It's good for us that the Government here isn't actually very good at anything, and their attempts to suppress the report have failed utterly. It's almost comical how many times they've got it wrong, really. Someone in the Attorney Generals' dept must be feeling pretty stupid by now.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's get our terminology right here: Nothing about this case or the CPHack case involves a "crime". It was a civil case brought by Mattel against the authors of the CPHack paper, and doesn't concern any criminal law whatsoever.
So, the original poster who said:
In order for that complaint to be upheld against everyone else, Mattel would have to complain in court against everyone else. This isn't like a criminal case where someone is prosecuted for breaching a specific piece of legislation, this is a case of Mattel pointing to a couple of discrete individuals and saying to the court, "Help us out with these guys, stop what they're doing," and the court has done precisely that without stopping anyone else from doing whatever it is that they happen to be doing.
- mark
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Yeesh!
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We have more telephone exchanges.
That's another issue entirely. One of the big deals this year has been Telstra's performance in remote areas. There are some people out there in the middle of nowhere whose phone service is provided by 100 miles of copper and god knows how many amplifiers and repeaters, where the last ten miles are cable-tied to one of the bits of fencing wire by the side of the road on the dirt track which leads to their house. Expecting to be able to use modems over a line like that is fantasy, but the Government has declared that every household in Australia, no matter how remote, should be able to have access to high speed data.
Of course, since we're in Australia and our telco is fucked, "High Speed" means "64k" -- Yes, folks, ISDN is considered a premium, business-quality high speed data service here, and it costs about the same amount per month as a T1 over similar distances does in the US. Nevertheless, how are you going to get 64k down the copper strung along someone's fence?
Answer: You don't. Telstra has been a world leader in the use of alternative technologies, including satellite, spread-spectrum, and other forms of wireless communications. So that's what they're using.
In practice, this means that if you're in a remote-enough area, you might not have a local exchange at all, so expecting ADSL is a bit rich. Cities will get it first, major regional areas will get it next, and communities out in the middle of nowhere will get some mantra about "technical difficulties", which reall means, "We don't want to spend the cash necessary to outfit your pissant little local exchange with a DSLAM."
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Do you have any idea of how hard that's gonna be?
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Anyone who doesn't go looking for someone else who can live up to their own wants, needs or desires is doomed. Like someone else in these comments said, breasts aren't the be-all-and-end-all of women, but if they turn you on you'd be a complete fool to "choose" a woman who didn't have them. A relationship should be mutually rewarding, which means you should get your own needs satisfied when you go into it; you should keep a little bit of yourself in a relationship, and maintain the expectation that while you're satisfying your partner's needs she's satisfying yours too.
A lot of people, men and women, should do this.
In the past social pressures have pushed people together and made them stick together whether they love and respect each other or not (my grandparents are a prime example; They couldn't stand each other, and stopped loving each other 30 years ago, but their religion and their social conditioning eliminated divorce as a reasonable way to "solve" that problem -- As a result they've both had an utterly miserable old-age, something I wouldn't wish on anybody).
All kinds of things are worthy of respect, and the precise subset of things you respect might be different from mine or Rob's -- That isn't a bad thing. You might be turned on by fireside chats, Rob may be turned on by breasts, I might be turned on by someone who looks good in a bikini... But what's probably more likely is that we're all turned on by fireside chats with someone who has great tits and looks good in a bikini
Finally, Rob must have known with reasonable certainty that he'd get flamed royally for daring to speak about some of these things, but he went ahead with it anyway. I respect him for that, and I think there should be more of it: We should be able to be honest in public instead of ducking away from very important truths simply because we know some people with a political axe to grind won't like it. Your original comment about how Katz would be proud a forum like slashdot exists is no doubt true, but I suspect the comments of some of the readers following the article would detract somewhat from the gloss. One of the great losses our society has suffered throughout the 90's is that people have become afraid to talk about what they really think, because there are so many little groups who make a professional point of attacking opinions; My hope for the next decade is that the Internet can help us get back to reality by providing forums for people to be honest about what they think about homosexual Mozambiquian llamas without having to put up with public denigration and hate-crime lawsuits from "The Peoples' Front In Support of Reinforcement of the Sexual Self-Determination of Mozambiquian Llamas".
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And what, precisely, is Rob's wife supposed to think of a comment like that?
For all the soul-wracked wringing of hands shown in this thread, I'm yet to see one of the politically-correct complainers show the slightest bit of sensitivity towards Rob's position or the decisions of his wife, someone who is (no doubt) just as intelligent, caring and wonderful as anyone else in the human race.
What are you people thinking when you make stupid, asinine accusations like that? Have you totally missed the points Rob talked about in his article? What makes you think you can complain about Rob's political correctness while at the same time denigrating his wife as a fucking prostitute .
Ferchrissakes, get a life. There is truth and meaning beyond political-correctness. It is normal to refuse to strike up a relationship with someone who doesn't meet your needs, and it's normal for those needs to include a pleasing aesthetic and a mutual desire to serve each other. Criticizing Rob for putting his thoughts about these TRUTHS just shows that you're too busy being politically-correct to acknowledge your own humanity.
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The Minister gave a speech in the Australian Senate yesterday which tagged everyone who disagreed with the recently passed Broadcasting Services Act as "maniacs". How is rational, measured discussion supposed to be carried out in that kind of environment?
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The only thing stopping the US from turning out like Australia is the First Amendment. I'm amazed at how few americans understand this.
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Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a000d'
/security/inc/scripts.txt, line 279
Type mismatch: 'CInt'
Great. Enterprise-class reliability, huh?
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Censorware is complete snake-oil; there's no way that it'll ever work as advertised because the net is growing so fast that it's impossible for them to fund development of the blacklist by selling software packages for $49.95 ea to an extremely limited market. They'd need to employ thousands of people to surf the web all day just to find the sites that will be created TODAY, and that's saying nothing about all the web sites that already exist.
CyberPatrol reacts to this in a way which is similar to virtually all other censorware: It gives up any pretense of accuracy and performs wholesale blocking of entire domains whenever it suits. Your ISP doesn't necessarily have any control over this, any more than the "Maple Soccer League" home page had over the fact that they were blocked (the descriptions of the teams in their league included the words "Under 15", so they must be kiddyporn, right?)
The problem in this case is that someone couldn't find your resume. I'd question whether I really wanted to work for someone who was dumb enough to hide their head in a box when they're on the web by using CyberPatrol. While you're complaining, keep in mind that the problem isn't that large: Packages like CypherPatrol are only used by the terminally insecure, the vast majority of people on the web will be totally unaffected by their blacklist.
To see more about CyberPatrol, see The Censorware Project, which specializes in exposing the stuff that is supposed to be bringing up our kids. While you're reading it, ask yourself: "Is it right that these people should be able to charge money for software which can never work?"
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It works out how to spread by reading your Outlook address book. If you don't have one of those, you aren't part of the problem.
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I'm sorry, but this is pure hyperbole. It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that I don't advocate that at all.
I'm not talking about slavery, I'm talking about the past 20 - 100 years of American history where slavery has been and gone but blacks have still been treated badly.
There was serious academic research done in the 1920's and 1930's to show that african americans were, in an evolutionary sense, closer to apes than "good god-fearin' whitefolk." The results of that utterly bizarre research was, and sometimes still is, used to justify the most henious restrictions on the lives of black people even though slavery was abolished over a century ago.
Now back to the subject at hand and the parallels with the case presented above: From their early teens, so-called "children" are often a lot more mature than you seem to think they are. They can reason, use logic, make their own moral and ethical conclusions, learn from their mistakes and take responsibility for thier actions. Yet you refuse to believe this; you treat them as non-humans with non-human-rights, forcing them to use censorware against tieir will because you've made an arbitrary judgement about their maturity based on nothing more substantial than their age. You haven't even met the people you'd censor.
UEN in Utah serves the entire public school system and some public libraries; The restrictions it has in place affect "children" up to age 18 (!!! doesn't that set alarm bells running?) and adult teachers and library users (!!! doesn't that set even more alarm bells ringing?). We're not talking about 1 year olds crying because a nappy is being changed against their will, or petulant 8 year olds complaining about being grounded, we're talking about people who are fully functional adults by every measurable metric except the one defined by law, which treats them as children, regardless of their maturity, until age 18.
That is the injustice here. That is the parallel between the denial of basic human rights to these people and the denial of basic human rights to african americans. "Children" remain the only group of people in American society who are routinely denied basic rights for no reason other than prejudice, bad law and appearance.
I have no trouble believing that a 15 year old is capable of making decisions about the kind of content they want to see on the web. The Utah public school system, however, doesn't make any distinction whatsoever between that 15 year old and a five year old starting school for the first time.
If you want to distort this into "shoving porn into the faces of children," then go ahead and do it in the knowledge that you are being knowingly dishonest. That is not what this case is about, and it never has been. This case is about the ability of Utah parents to make their own decisions about the upbringing their children get instead of trusting the moral guidance of their treasured offspring to a piece of software.
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On one hand you're talking about things like licenses to drive or serve in the military, which are based on a child's physical ability to do whatever tasks are in question (drive, fight, whatever).
On the other hand, you're talking about age limitations which have been chosen with absolute arbitrariness (the right to vote, buy a gun, drink, get grounded, etc).
The first category I'd argue are justified. The second category are not. The courts seem to agree with this in many instances (which is why, for instance, parents legally cannot ground their children; children can divorce their parents if they understand the issues and have good enough reasons, and why so-called minors have been able to join the military, legitimately or not).
Is there any magical age at which a child gains sufficient political maturity to be able to vote? Why is a person of 20 years and 364 days considered by the state to be unable to handle liquor, but the same person can buy it with impunity exactly one day later?
It gets even more bizarre when you consider that the very same people who clamour for censorship on the grounds of protecting childrens' innocence are often advocating putting children through adult courts and the adult prison system for certain crimes.
If a child understands the issues, they are old enough to make their own decisions based on those issues. The only person in the world qualified to work out if a child understands the issues is the child themselves. If a child feels oppressed due to state censorship efforts then the state should have no right to impose that censorship.
Why is this so hard to understand? How come WebSense and all the other bogus snake-oil censorware programs can be justified for 17.9999 year olds but not 18-year-olds? Why does the US, a supposedly free country, permit the existance of a "freedom underclass" based on something as arbitrary as age?
A child in trouble already has an absolute, incontrovertibe constitutional right to an attorney. Again, if you do not understand this you are not qualified to influence the course of this discussion.
You seem to think that the law doesn't treat someone as a human being if they're too young -- Roughly analogous to the thinking a hundred years ago, where the law failed to treat certain people as human beings on the basis of their skin color, even though the constitution said nothing about blacks (or earlier this century when Germany said certain people were less than human due to their religion). You are incorrect. It is people like you that perpetuate the underclass I speak of above, just like people in the deep south perpetuated the idea that blacks were too stupid to understand the concept of "rights" for decades after the rest of the country had (sort of) come to the complete opposite conclusion. It's a very dangerous attitude, adopted despite thousands of years of history which shows that if a group considers its treatment at the hands of the more privileged to be unjust they just reach out and grab the rights they need whether the privileged ones let them or not.
And that, my friend, is the power that the Internet gives to those children who are mature enough to understand that they're being treated unjustly by being forced to use censorware.
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See, this is exactly the point I was making about foreigners thinking it's bizarre that Americans don't even understand their own declaration of independence and constitution even though it's apparently so important to them.
If you live in a free country, when you look at your laws you should be asking, "What doesn't this prohibit?" instead of, "What does this permit?" One of the hallmarks of a free country is that everything is legal unless it's explicitly declared to be illegal.
When you look at the First Amendment, you should be asking, "Does this deny rights to children or limit them to adults?" If the answer is "no" (and it most assuredly is in this case) then you can only conclude that the law is age-neutral.
Now you tell me: What is so deficient about teenagers that it should be considered rational to deny them basic human rights, such as the unfettered access to information you expect and take for granted for yourself? Doesn't that strike you as a bit unjust, similar to the injustice inherent in denying someone rights due to their skin color or religion? Why does the United States permit the existance of a legal underclass with essentially no rights whatsoever?
And don't give me any crap about "protecting the innocence of children," because that kind of thing is predicated on the very wrong-headed notion that children have innocence to begin with. If a child is old enough to grasp the concept of free speech and understand that it's unjust that censorware inhibits their ability to use the Internet, they're old enough to have the right to get rid of the censorware. The fact that that right is often denied to them by the same people who claim the very same right for themselves says very nasty things about American society. Basically, it makes you look like a load of hypocrites.
The United States Supreme Court disagrees with you on this point. You have the right to access and/or publish any information you can find, up to and including classified documents (as the New York Times so dramatically demonstrated in the Pentagon Papers case). That's a direct consequence of the first amendment; If you don't understand that then you aren't really qualified to contribute to this discussion.
Sorry, but this is complete twaddle. Courts have routinely held that children have a right to freedom of speech on every issue from school uniforms through to the CDA. If you think the First Amendment doesn't apply to children then I think you need to seriously reevaluate your stance on this issue with the knowledge that you are utterly incorrect in some of the basic assumptions that have contributed to your beliefs. To use common vernacular, your behaviour on this topic is un-American.
They do.
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That's kinda the crux of the issue: In an earlier post you said there were certain types of material that should never be provided to children. Doesn't that mean that you're telling "... other people how to reise their children"?
Where you have it wrong is that you seem to think this is a community issue. It isn't -- It's a family issue. There are no such things as "community standards," because communities are too diverse. Pretending community standards exist for no reason other than to set censorship guidelines is one of those things that makes foreigners think the US attitude towards their first amendment is a complete farce.
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Because he has such a good grasp of the issues, he said things in his report (which, need I remind anyone, was written for PUBLIC RELEASE) which the Government didn't like, e.g.: Key Escrow is fundamentally broken and short keys are manifestly inadequate.
As a result of writing down what everyone outside the Government knows is obvious, but which the Government can never be seen to admit if it wants to be able to justify its short key and export control policies, Walsh got his report suppressed.
It's good for us that the Government here isn't actually very good at anything, and their attempts to suppress the report have failed utterly. It's almost comical how many times they've got it wrong, really. Someone in the Attorney Generals' dept must be feeling pretty stupid by now.
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