Certainly for law enforcement, elections are a very bad idea. It puts the mob mentality in charge of a very serious responsibility, and it gives law enforcement improper motives by elevating convictions above justice.
Elected law enforcement enables persecution of minorities, among other things.
In this case, it leads to a prosecutor who has to go for a friggin MISDEMEANOR rather than back down and admit he was a dangerous jackass from day one. Had there been ANYTHING to his case, the woman would have had to make concessions such as avoiding contact with children, restrictions on internet access, etc. Since that didn't happen, we can easily conclude that she was faced with thousands, or tens of thousands, in additional legal bills vs a meaningless misdemeanor charge and sought to put an end to her Kafkaesque nightmare.
having read about 20% of the comments, i feel rather certain that America is on the decline. 49.5% of the country seem to have an allegiance to bullshit first, party second, and the well-being of America a distant third.
as a patriot, i have to say fuck you.
spin is finding a partisan angle to every fact.
TFA and half the commenters seem to regard this as mandatory.
The COS has a long history of vindictiveness, and plenty of lawyers. They probably already threw resources at Anonymous equivalent to whatever law enforcement can do. The only thing law enforcement can add is warrants and subpeona power.
The Clinton administration's opposition to encryption technology has made it vastly easier for governments to spy on their citizens, by slowing the adoption of encryption into core internet data communications.
Even John Ashcroft opposed their restrictions (though these days he has a different attitude towards government powers).
So spare me the crocodile tears.
If you want your data to be secure, you better own, host, store, and secure it yourself. No major corporation is going to protect you from governmental powers, and you really wouldn't want them to have that power. At least the government is theoretically accountable to you in some way.
As much as I like Google and Yahoo etc, you can't get the same kind of accountability from them you can from the local dogcatcher.
Oh I agree that dumping people into Java is foolish. You could dump them into Python and by the time they figured out Java, which would take about 6 weeks, they'd be 2 years ahead of the people who knew Java but never had to consider multiple languages.
Software development methodology is pretty primitive, if you take the long historical view. It's nice to teach but it doesn't give anyone any long-term advantages.
I say this as a brief math major, who was fortunate enough to study lambda calculus (fireside chats with Uncle Gerald) and to use the Internet in the late 80s. You want to know fundamentals of algorithm and theory, and to get some experience in applying them. If you do that, you can pick up Python/Java/Ruby/DotNet in a matter of days.
Or you can be a Liberal Arts major who learns lousy practices and no theory on LAMP and be an idiot forever.
Sadly, sites that adopt this will still be cesspools of hateful comments. Because, ultimately, they don't have the courage to edit fairly and won't adopt./-style moderation.
So... newspaper cite will still be cesspool of hate. Fair-minded users who value privacy will still ditch. Phhht.
The real lesson is that old-media sites still haven't learned what makes internet comment boards successful, and they revert to old-school control tactics that won't help and will harm.
Mod this parent up: the subject is what I came here to say - the consumer always pays.
I'm ready to take up cutlass and musket against those who are against Net Neutrality - I think it's that important.
But there is, indeed, a more nuanced side. The trick is that the big content companies and the ISPs have to, uh, to quote McCain, "cut the bullshit". Miro, Bittorrent and P2P in general have to be accepted. Because it saves them (and everyone) shitloads of money. If the broadband providers - worldwide, this is not just a US issue - could come to some kind of agreement to tolerate P2P and make some kind of legal framework available - it could be a win-win-win-win.
I'm not optimistic about the intelligence or the motives of the corporations or corporate leaders. However, I am - possibly naively - optimistic about market forces in this case. The case is just too strong. Short hops reward all.
So with the caveat that equitable agreements can be reached for all, I am (barely) in favor of packet pricing.
But without a system that will keep the tiniest voices on a par (euro per euro) with the biggest, without a system that preserves right-to-packets of both providers and end users (and the US, and as far as I know, the world sucks in terms of heavily weighting download packets vs uploads for no legitimate reason except "we can"), and unless the system proves resistant to political manipulation - without basic values of open societies protected - then it's time for a tea party.
I fear that all nations - or enough to seal the deal - are trending towards policies that are appropriate for China. These are not policies that are appropriate or workable for free, open, multi-ethnic societies. Those kind of policies (witness GoDaddy's stomping of SecList) are simply incompatible with those of free societies of the last several hundred years.
And without those values, the future will be a "Dark Ages" parody of the 20th century. And not in a good way.
Of course, it's also true that ISPs in the US are undermining their common carrier status every time they chip away at net neutrality.
The end result, by current trends, will be a severe curtailment of speech online, and the USA will be no more free than China. I don't think that will happen, the pendulum should swing back, but it's a real risk.
I think that GWB has been more destructive to America than we can really contemplate right now, but I have to give the credit to "the other side" on this one.
There was a time when encryption-by-default could have become the norm for Internet communications. It was largely passed by because the Clinton administration treated encryption technology as if it were chemical weapons. Even though the math to do it was a genie out of the bottle, they forbade American companies from trafficking in encryption technology if it involved overseas clients. So either it wasn't pursued, or the companies went overseas (e.g. F-Secure) but the end result is that encryption did not become a fundamental part of Internet communications.
Even weirder, one of the few to take a stand against this was John Ashcroft. Though, to his credit, he stood up to illegal wiretapping in the Dubya years as well. I don't agree with him on very much at all, but I have to give him credit for being a rare principled individual on this score.
So, to sum up, had the Clinton admin not squashed crypto so badly, we might not have to worry about mass spying on the public. They'd still be able to get around the encryption when it really mattered; they do black bag jobs and put keyloggers in mafioso computers when they need to do that, and I think that's a good balance of civil liberties and legitimate law enforcement, assuming warrants are involved.
Sadly, America has apparently decided that the First Amendment is tolerable, the Second is awesome, and fuck the rest of them. What an insult to our nation.
My favorite amendment? The Ninth: any rights not explicitly delineated in the Bill of Rights probably exist. Of course, the current Supreme Court (and conservatives in general) shit on that amendment, for some weird reason.
Compare to facebook. You get spammed with all kinds of crap, plus connections from all kinds of people you only marginally want to know, plus there's all kinds of viral - as in, it will make you sick and infect other people - kind of "apps", which are really just spam vectors for shit you don't care about - meanwhile, the only interesting part is updates on who knows who, and the status updates, where the pressing question is whether they should all start with the word "is", and that passes for a deep debate.
Plus, you can't actually delete anything from Facebook, really.
I prefer Twitter, blog, and IM, thanks. Even if it's just a diary posted on the lampost in front of my house, I don't care.
I know an MIT blackjack player who was "on the team" and I heard about it when he was actually doing it (and the world at large had no idea about it) and he was making craploads of money on summer vacation. He's making bucketfuls now in the financial world. I can't say I heard this guy's name, but then again, I never heard any names.
The story is worthy of a better treatment (fiction or non-fiction) than it's gotten, for a variety of reasons that seem sort of obvious to me: lack of true sleaze factor, lack of heist movie payoff, it's hard to write gangster-cool roles for nerds, etc. "Cool Hand Luke" has not ensued. Basically, someone would have to write a compelling character story, which would be much easier if any of these folks had subsequently been involved in major crime/scandal, or else just quit and moved to Hawaii and surfed while living off a repetoire of cheap bar bet stunts, but that hasn't happened.
Exactly. He's a first-rate asshole most of the time he opens his mouth.
Vertical monopolies are bad for the economy, generally speaking.
Earth to Scott: we already tried bundling access and content. Remember online services like AOL and Compuserve? They got their asses handed to them by the openness of the Internet.
What kind of cretinous, drooling idiot, outside of a CEO of a company offering broadband, wants to go back that way again?
I just programmed my cable modem to use 4.2.2.1-3 for DNS. Problem solved. At work, under a RoadRunner business connection, we've long run our own DNS because the RoadRunner DNS servers have always been just shit.
Suspiciously, however, I didn't turn off the "service". Someone at the other end did it. I refused to give them my phone number, so either they used caller ID to pull up my account without my consent, or they blacked out my cable modem MAC when I started portscanning the server and looking up a hundred variations of www.stopfuckingwithmydnsroadrunnersucksdogballs.com.
All around evil. Cable companies are doing this to boil the Net Neutrality frog, have no doubt about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly for law enforcement, elections are a very bad idea. It puts the mob mentality in charge of a very serious responsibility, and it gives law enforcement improper motives by elevating convictions above justice.
Elected law enforcement enables persecution of minorities, among other things.
In this case, it leads to a prosecutor who has to go for a friggin MISDEMEANOR rather than back down and admit he was a dangerous jackass from day one. Had there been ANYTHING to his case, the woman would have had to make concessions such as avoiding contact with children, restrictions on internet access, etc. Since that didn't happen, we can easily conclude that she was faced with thousands, or tens of thousands, in additional legal bills vs a meaningless misdemeanor charge and sought to put an end to her Kafkaesque nightmare.
But at most linearly, and not much - because of increase survival times, as opposed to the geometric effect of birth rates.
On that note, countries with long lives tend to need to support a fair amount of old people, which makes kids expensive, and keeps birth rates down.
Countries where birth rates are high and where life spans are short have a strong correlation. And they keep growing.
Compare, say, any European country or Japan or coastal US vs any sub-Saharan African country.
And as someone with a spouse with cancer, I have to say go fuck yourself.
Oh you and your facts.
Might as well sell buggy-whips in the USA these days.
having read about 20% of the comments, i feel rather certain that America is on the decline. 49.5% of the country seem to have an allegiance to bullshit first, party second, and the well-being of America a distant third.
as a patriot, i have to say fuck you.
spin is finding a partisan angle to every fact.
TFA and half the commenters seem to regard this as mandatory.
pseudoscientific truthiness meter. look up.
The COS has a long history of vindictiveness, and plenty of lawyers. They probably already threw resources at Anonymous equivalent to whatever law enforcement can do. The only thing law enforcement can add is warrants and subpeona power.
What the hell, I'll go for this one.
The Clinton administration's opposition to encryption technology has made it vastly easier for governments to spy on their citizens, by slowing the adoption of encryption into core internet data communications.
Even John Ashcroft opposed their restrictions (though these days he has a different attitude towards government powers).
So spare me the crocodile tears.
If you want your data to be secure, you better own, host, store, and secure it yourself. No major corporation is going to protect you from governmental powers, and you really wouldn't want them to have that power. At least the government is theoretically accountable to you in some way.
As much as I like Google and Yahoo etc, you can't get the same kind of accountability from them you can from the local dogcatcher.
Of course, we've only explored a trillionth of a trillionth of the solar system, never mind the universe, therefore all astronomy must be wrong.
Shouldn't you be at the RNC convention, dumbass?
Yes, to keep the machines from being hacked.
Now... How could anti-virus software lose "some" votes.
It just defies common sense.
I agree. How would anti-virus software lose just "some" votes?
I call shenanigans. Fuck Ohio, fuck Florida. They need to be disenfranchised til they get their shit sorted out.
Except that it doesn't drop all votes...
Can anyone come up with a valid explanation how (without shenanigans) anti-virus software could lose votes? Not all - just "some" votes.
Anyone?
Hollow earth is way more cool.
Flat earth requires a degree of durrr the hollow-earthers can never match.
And we'll still be dealing with SQL injection code for another decade.
Digg?
Oh, sorry, I thought you said "fire the idiotic editors and replace them with a heap of chicken bones."
Oh I agree that dumping people into Java is foolish. You could dump them into Python and by the time they figured out Java, which would take about 6 weeks, they'd be 2 years ahead of the people who knew Java but never had to consider multiple languages.
Software development methodology is pretty primitive, if you take the long historical view. It's nice to teach but it doesn't give anyone any long-term advantages.
I say this as a brief math major, who was fortunate enough to study lambda calculus (fireside chats with Uncle Gerald) and to use the Internet in the late 80s. You want to know fundamentals of algorithm and theory, and to get some experience in applying them. If you do that, you can pick up Python/Java/Ruby/DotNet in a matter of days.
Or you can be a Liberal Arts major who learns lousy practices and no theory on LAMP and be an idiot forever.
Some of us even have an A.B.
Sadly, sites that adopt this will still be cesspools of hateful comments. Because, ultimately, they don't have the courage to edit fairly and won't adopt ./-style moderation.
So... newspaper cite will still be cesspool of hate. Fair-minded users who value privacy will still ditch. Phhht.
The real lesson is that old-media sites still haven't learned what makes internet comment boards successful, and they revert to old-school control tactics that won't help and will harm.
Very funny indeed.
Mod this parent up: the subject is what I came here to say - the consumer always pays.
I'm ready to take up cutlass and musket against those who are against Net Neutrality - I think it's that important.
But there is, indeed, a more nuanced side. The trick is that the big content companies and the ISPs have to, uh, to quote McCain, "cut the bullshit". Miro, Bittorrent and P2P in general have to be accepted. Because it saves them (and everyone) shitloads of money. If the broadband providers - worldwide, this is not just a US issue - could come to some kind of agreement to tolerate P2P and make some kind of legal framework available - it could be a win-win-win-win.
I'm not optimistic about the intelligence or the motives of the corporations or corporate leaders. However, I am - possibly naively - optimistic about market forces in this case. The case is just too strong. Short hops reward all.
So with the caveat that equitable agreements can be reached for all, I am (barely) in favor of packet pricing.
But without a system that will keep the tiniest voices on a par (euro per euro) with the biggest, without a system that preserves right-to-packets of both providers and end users (and the US, and as far as I know, the world sucks in terms of heavily weighting download packets vs uploads for no legitimate reason except "we can"), and unless the system proves resistant to political manipulation - without basic values of open societies protected - then it's time for a tea party.
I fear that all nations - or enough to seal the deal - are trending towards policies that are appropriate for China. These are not policies that are appropriate or workable for free, open, multi-ethnic societies. Those kind of policies (witness GoDaddy's stomping of SecList) are simply incompatible with those of free societies of the last several hundred years.
And without those values, the future will be a "Dark Ages" parody of the 20th century. And not in a good way.
But the "last mile" can't be offshored.
Of course, it's also true that ISPs in the US are undermining their common carrier status every time they chip away at net neutrality.
The end result, by current trends, will be a severe curtailment of speech online, and the USA will be no more free than China. I don't think that will happen, the pendulum should swing back, but it's a real risk.
I think that GWB has been more destructive to America than we can really contemplate right now, but I have to give the credit to "the other side" on this one.
There was a time when encryption-by-default could have become the norm for Internet communications. It was largely passed by because the Clinton administration treated encryption technology as if it were chemical weapons. Even though the math to do it was a genie out of the bottle, they forbade American companies from trafficking in encryption technology if it involved overseas clients. So either it wasn't pursued, or the companies went overseas (e.g. F-Secure) but the end result is that encryption did not become a fundamental part of Internet communications.
Even weirder, one of the few to take a stand against this was John Ashcroft. Though, to his credit, he stood up to illegal wiretapping in the Dubya years as well. I don't agree with him on very much at all, but I have to give him credit for being a rare principled individual on this score.
So, to sum up, had the Clinton admin not squashed crypto so badly, we might not have to worry about mass spying on the public. They'd still be able to get around the encryption when it really mattered; they do black bag jobs and put keyloggers in mafioso computers when they need to do that, and I think that's a good balance of civil liberties and legitimate law enforcement, assuming warrants are involved.
Sadly, America has apparently decided that the First Amendment is tolerable, the Second is awesome, and fuck the rest of them. What an insult to our nation.
My favorite amendment? The Ninth: any rights not explicitly delineated in the Bill of Rights probably exist. Of course, the current Supreme Court (and conservatives in general) shit on that amendment, for some weird reason.
Compare to facebook. You get spammed with all kinds of crap, plus connections from all kinds of people you only marginally want to know, plus there's all kinds of viral - as in, it will make you sick and infect other people - kind of "apps", which are really just spam vectors for shit you don't care about - meanwhile, the only interesting part is updates on who knows who, and the status updates, where the pressing question is whether they should all start with the word "is", and that passes for a deep debate.
Plus, you can't actually delete anything from Facebook, really.
I prefer Twitter, blog, and IM, thanks. Even if it's just a diary posted on the lampost in front of my house, I don't care.
Interesting.
I know an MIT blackjack player who was "on the team" and I heard about it when he was actually doing it (and the world at large had no idea about it) and he was making craploads of money on summer vacation. He's making bucketfuls now in the financial world. I can't say I heard this guy's name, but then again, I never heard any names.
The story is worthy of a better treatment (fiction or non-fiction) than it's gotten, for a variety of reasons that seem sort of obvious to me: lack of true sleaze factor, lack of heist movie payoff, it's hard to write gangster-cool roles for nerds, etc. "Cool Hand Luke" has not ensued. Basically, someone would have to write a compelling character story, which would be much easier if any of these folks had subsequently been involved in major crime/scandal, or else just quit and moved to Hawaii and surfed while living off a repetoire of cheap bar bet stunts, but that hasn't happened.
If I can't start with the patent and figure out how to build the "infringing" technology from it, it's a worthless patent.
If reading the patent doesn't give me some insight that makes building the "infringing" device easier, it's a worthless patent.
This is a worthless patent. They might as well have written "Play the guitar... on a computer!!! And see pictures!!! ZOMG!"
Exactly. He's a first-rate asshole most of the time he opens his mouth.
Vertical monopolies are bad for the economy, generally speaking.
Earth to Scott: we already tried bundling access and content. Remember online services like AOL and Compuserve? They got their asses handed to them by the openness of the Internet.
What kind of cretinous, drooling idiot, outside of a CEO of a company offering broadband, wants to go back that way again?
I just programmed my cable modem to use 4.2.2.1-3 for DNS. Problem solved. At work, under a RoadRunner business connection, we've long run our own DNS because the RoadRunner DNS servers have always been just shit.
Suspiciously, however, I didn't turn off the "service". Someone at the other end did it. I refused to give them my phone number, so either they used caller ID to pull up my account without my consent, or they blacked out my cable modem MAC when I started portscanning the server and looking up a hundred variations of www.stopfuckingwithmydnsroadrunnersucksdogballs.com.
All around evil. Cable companies are doing this to boil the Net Neutrality frog, have no doubt about it.