Is it worse to steal $10,000 from 1 person than it is $1 from 10,000 people?
Simply because it's been spread out among a lot of people doesn't mean that this guy wasn't using his time and computer to defraud people and hijack their computer resources for his own illicit gain; we're talking about everything from quackery to black-hat cracking. If this was all focused on a single individual, we'd all be talking about how light a sentence that 9 years would be. I don't think we should let up because the victims were numerous and the individual harm is less noticible.
"Canadians are supposed to be passive and polite to a fault. Americans are supposed to be Freedom loving individuals that hate big government interfering in their life."
Americans hate big government because we have a constant living example. Canadians take a more proactive stance on big government by now allowing one to happen in the first place.
Ironic that the ones that didn't revolt were the ones that seemed to get it right.
That's not a measure of party corruption, just which particular party is Pwn3d by the telcos. There are numerous other organizations that can Pwn a party.
"Where the government takes your money and gives it to someone else?"
How do you think telcos are able to give beneficial rates to larger and/or bundled customers? Is it because they overcharge the smaller customers and use that money to subsidize the larger ones?
So long as we're talking about state-mandated monopolies, where I'm not allowed to not do business with them, I'd rather have the money taken from me be redistributed by my government, where I at least can pretend to have some influence over where it goes, rather than some sales and marketing department.
"any group of Texans can set up a non-profit and build their own network."
Unless that group is a municipality?
"And no, the city government (or any level of government) shouldn't be able to tax and spend on anything they feel like simply because a few legislators think its darn clever."
You're assuming the service would be paid for by tax dollars instead of user fees (which is how many other municipal utilities, such as water, are paid for). As mentioned in the previous/. article, the bill bans those as well.
This isn't a matter of one group of legislators deciding to spend tax dollars and another not, this is little more than the state legislators deciding they know best and taking the decision out of the hands of smaller governments. Which is interesting when, arguably, local legislators are more in-touch with the interests of the people than Austin.
"Neither method is good, but which of the two is better has long been resolved."
Communist-style concepts of state ownership weren't exactly famous for their theories of federalism and devolution. Whether you look at the USSR or what we have in the USA today, you're still talking about centrallized decisions of whether the state or a private interest gets the monopoly, made by the state or the nation as a whole instead of letting localities make up their own minds, a method that, to my knowledge, has never really been given a chance (let alone proven to fail).
"Last I checked, rent is $5-$6 per pole per attachment per year."
That's not all that low when you consider the owners of the poles typically bought their rights-of-way for a one-time fee of $1. Property owners are expected to sell for that $1 and never see any sort of return on the sale they're not allowed to say "no" to, even if they're not wired themselves. They don't even get a property tax break for the easement they no longer own.
If eminent domain is going to force me to all but give my property to another private interest, I'd at least prefer that the decision to make me do so is a local one rather than a centrallized one. And, personally, I'd prefer my property to be taken away and kept by the government directly, if for no other reason than because they would then be held accountable for the results of their eminent domain mandate to begin with.
"Amtrak is failing because it offers a service no one wants,"
Nobody wants to ride a train, or nobody wants to ride a train on rail networks designed to move freight, where passenger trains need to slow down and let trains owned by the rail owners have the priority?
"The more interesting issue is whether possession of information should be a crime. For example is (or should) possession of a photograph of a crime itself a crime?"
You're forgetting that those pictures of child pornography are generally produced for profit by the perpretrators themselves. The producers of child porn typicall aren't the same people as the consumers, and pictures that are distributed are pictures that the producer made money off of, thereby inspiring to make more such photos. The issue really isn't the content of the photos so much as the distribution of them.
" The reason why ILECs are regulated is because the telephone was the primary method of realtime person-to-person communication which wasn't face to face for damn near 100 years, and government decided that it was vital enough to require that telephone service be provided to as many people as possible in as high of a state of reliability as possible."
That doesn't explain why it was decided that ILECs should own the wires as well as provide service on those wires. They were granted those monopolies because of the example of the railroads (with government giving companies exclusive rights to lay track down in cerain areas, effectively barring others).
Some could say that the example of the railroads was used because of how well-managed an example it was. However, I think a realist could point out that the telephone monopolies were handed out because politicians saw it as a new source of graft and corruption to line their pockets with, just like the railroads had been.
Is Amtrak up a creek because of government mismanagement, or because their hands are tied by using tracks they're not allowed to own? How much longer until the current state of affairs in our telephone networks produces an Amtrak analog?
"Government subsidized anything sucks the life out of a market and just about guarantees stagnation. They're right to block it in Texas!"
So the people and city of Altoona shouldn't be free to decide and handle their own affairs without interference from Harrisburg simply because you happen to agree with a particular state law, reguardless of what it does to individual rights within a municipality? The people of Altoona should have to justify themselves to, say, voters in Philadelphia (among other places) in order to take actions that would only directly effect themselves?
"The ILECs and cable companies use your right-of-way that you, the taxpayer, own."
They own it because self-styled libertarians believe that it's better to grant a for-profit private enterprise a monopoly on owning it rather than the government directly. Apparently, state-granted monopolies are magically somehow better-managed than state-owned infrastructure, even though the "free market" arguments apply to neither.
Being for-profit, they have no vested interest in opening their network to their competition. If the state own the actual wires directly (while not providing service on those wires), we wouldn't have this problem. But that's herecy in this age of privatization and deregulation.
"As a libertarian I'm generally against state governments spending tax dollars on services that people would otherwise pay for themselves"
On the other hand, my libertarian leanings tell me I should support this on devolution grounds: If the people of a municipality want to do this, what right does someone elsewhere in the state have to tell them that it's wrong and illegal? It's interesting that it's a Republican-dominated state legislature that's doing it...
Really, in their quest for personal liberty, one would think that the LP would be more interested in supporting municipal powers over statewide fiats, instead of being in favor of such statewide laws simply because they're in favor of "private enterprise."
"It's plainly clear that the Constitution is referring to specific powers rather than vague general "goals""
Yeah, like the "specific power" to do whatever it damned well feels like in areas like interstate commerce? Heck, there aren't any goals mentioned anywhere in Article I. It's a list of what Congress can do with no mention to what ends those powers must be used towards, nothing beyond the vague generalities in the preamble.
The only goal Congress has to work towards is the goal of keeping themselves in office; the goal is to serve the will of the people. And the people have shown time and again that they don't give a damn what Congress does, so this is what you can expect.
"I think history is going to look back on DST as essentially equivalent to the (anecdotal) story of lawmakers legislating pi to 3."
The Romans managed to put a dome on the Pantheon at a time when they taught their engineers that pi was exactly 3 1/8.
"So changing your clock alters the rotation or axial tilt of the Earth?"
No, changing clocks changes whether or not you're awake for said hours of daylight.
Besides, local noon drifts whether you change your clocks by an hour or not. The reason we use mechanical timepieces to begin with is because the sun is an unreliable source.
"A. No, see, normally it would get dark at 7. Now it gets dark at 8! Q. But the sun doesn't rise until 8 or 9 AM."
Yes, but you still punch in at 8 reguardless, so daylight hours in the morning that would otherwise have been spent hitting the snooze bar or cussing out the driver in front of you are moved to the evening, allowing you to enjoy dinner outside.
"When you need to make your blanket longer, do you cut a foot off one end and sew it onto the other?"
It's a matter of pulling the blanket up to your chin (and off your feet) because your feet are too hot.
"Why don't you just wake up an hour earlier, if you want more daylight?"
Because that hour will be wasted with thoughts along the lines of "I gotta go to work in an hour." Think about it: if we all enjoyed looking foward to your day's work, everybody would wake up at 0300 or so and go to bed as soon as they got home. We want our time home to be perceived as a winding down, not a spooling up.
"Why not just do away with DST completely, and by congressional mandate, require all businesses (banks, stores, employers, etc.) shift their hours back one hour? Requiring such a shift by legislative means is no worse than DST, and it need only happen once."
Because Congress is specifically authorized to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures" (such as measurements of what time it is), but federal regulations on what hours a business is allowed/supposed to operate during gets really fuzzy really fast. Federal courts will probably let them get away with it via the ol' Interstate Commerce Clause, but I'd personally rather have Congress fucking up the specific than the vague.
"Cows don't really care what the clock says the time is."
The same applies whether the clock is moved or not. Cows can't read clocks and are more likely to go by the amount of light in the sky, I'd imagine. Between the tilt of the earth and the equation of time, you're fucked anyway.
"And if farmers can do it, I don't know why other businessmen can't: how hard is it to schedule your employees to optimize for daylight?"
Because you'd have a lack of consistency between different employers. If your lunch hour gets moved around and the store's hours are moved around, and if they're not moved in exactly the same way, you don't get to buy what you need during lunch and the store loses money because you weren't able to make a purchase.
"It's not like daylight savings time saves daylight: it just adjusts the clock,"
It moves the work window foreward to allow more sunlight after work in which to spend free time (as opposed to more sunlight before work which would be spent asleep) while also following the drift in solar noon (see above equation of time link). It moves sunlight from sleeping hours to waking hours.
"Why not just set $WORKING_HOURS to what we really want,"
Yeah, right... a lot of us work by what the time clock says.
"I chose to live in a place where I can cycle all year around (downtown Toronto)"
When last I heard, acts of Congress don't affect you.
"I also think the government should impose taxes on guzzlers and use them for rebates for non-guzzlers."
Government will go for the former and forget the latter. For example, California imposed some steep taxes on gasoline, ostensibly to curb gasoline consumption. Now that Californians are driving more fuel-efficient cars and less tax revenue is coming in because of it, they now want to mount GPS units on all Californian cars to tax mileage on the cars. Of course, even if they move to this plan, they'll still keep the gasoline tax...
You can't trust the government to siphon funds from one source and reliably send it to someone else. Even ignoring the arguments on the merits of wealth distribution, there's little guarantee that the money won't get "lost in transit."
Hey, I don't pretend to know why, but that's about what an SMB/DH cart I sold recently on eBay went for. The starting price was around $0.40, so it wasn't my fault.
"I think the $10 Splinter Cell 9 + $59 S&H may just turn me off."
Um... we're not exactly talking UPS here. By Hong Kong Post's international rates, you could get a small package ~150 g to the US for around $3.00 (1.00 HKD ~ 0.13 USD). The price will, of course, go up if you want bells and whistles like tracking, but if you don't want it overnight, there's no need to pay for overnight pricing.
"They will consider missions to mars and other planets after 2025"
Gee, but everybody on Slashdot already knows that manned space exploration just isn't worth it! Everything we could possibly want to do in space can be done by robots!
And why is the Japanese government getting involved? Every red-blooded libertarian knows that space exploration is something best conducted by private enterprise!
"Why should everything in the whole world be dumbed down for the lowest common denominator?"
Because that lowest common denominator tend to be customers and even voters. The lowest common denominator needs to be taken into account because of their sheer mass.
"Would you give me your CC details in the street if I asked nicely? No? You Sure?"
Depends: are you one of those mythical Slashdot women?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Is it worse to steal $10,000 from 1 person than it is $1 from 10,000 people?
Simply because it's been spread out among a lot of people doesn't mean that this guy wasn't using his time and computer to defraud people and hijack their computer resources for his own illicit gain; we're talking about everything from quackery to black-hat cracking. If this was all focused on a single individual, we'd all be talking about how light a sentence that 9 years would be. I don't think we should let up because the victims were numerous and the individual harm is less noticible.
"Canadians are supposed to be passive and polite to a fault. Americans are supposed to be Freedom loving individuals that hate big government interfering in their life."
Americans hate big government because we have a constant living example. Canadians take a more proactive stance on big government by now allowing one to happen in the first place.
Ironic that the ones that didn't revolt were the ones that seemed to get it right.
That's not a measure of party corruption, just which particular party is Pwn3d by the telcos. There are numerous other organizations that can Pwn a party.
"Where the government takes your money and gives it to someone else?"
How do you think telcos are able to give beneficial rates to larger and/or bundled customers? Is it because they overcharge the smaller customers and use that money to subsidize the larger ones?
So long as we're talking about state-mandated monopolies, where I'm not allowed to not do business with them, I'd rather have the money taken from me be redistributed by my government, where I at least can pretend to have some influence over where it goes, rather than some sales and marketing department.
"any group of Texans can set up a non-profit and build their own network."
/. article, the bill bans those as well.
Unless that group is a municipality?
"And no, the city government (or any level of government) shouldn't be able to tax and spend on anything they feel like simply because a few legislators think its darn clever."
You're assuming the service would be paid for by tax dollars instead of user fees (which is how many other municipal utilities, such as water, are paid for). As mentioned in the previous
This isn't a matter of one group of legislators deciding to spend tax dollars and another not, this is little more than the state legislators deciding they know best and taking the decision out of the hands of smaller governments. Which is interesting when, arguably, local legislators are more in-touch with the interests of the people than Austin.
"Neither method is good, but which of the two is better has long been resolved."
Communist-style concepts of state ownership weren't exactly famous for their theories of federalism and devolution. Whether you look at the USSR or what we have in the USA today, you're still talking about centrallized decisions of whether the state or a private interest gets the monopoly, made by the state or the nation as a whole instead of letting localities make up their own minds, a method that, to my knowledge, has never really been given a chance (let alone proven to fail).
"Last I checked, rent is $5-$6 per pole per attachment per year."
That's not all that low when you consider the owners of the poles typically bought their rights-of-way for a one-time fee of $1. Property owners are expected to sell for that $1 and never see any sort of return on the sale they're not allowed to say "no" to, even if they're not wired themselves. They don't even get a property tax break for the easement they no longer own.
If eminent domain is going to force me to all but give my property to another private interest, I'd at least prefer that the decision to make me do so is a local one rather than a centrallized one. And, personally, I'd prefer my property to be taken away and kept by the government directly, if for no other reason than because they would then be held accountable for the results of their eminent domain mandate to begin with.
"Amtrak is failing because it offers a service no one wants,"
Nobody wants to ride a train, or nobody wants to ride a train on rail networks designed to move freight, where passenger trains need to slow down and let trains owned by the rail owners have the priority?
"The more interesting issue is whether possession of information should be a crime. For example is (or should) possession of a photograph of a crime itself a crime?"
You're forgetting that those pictures of child pornography are generally produced for profit by the perpretrators themselves. The producers of child porn typicall aren't the same people as the consumers, and pictures that are distributed are pictures that the producer made money off of, thereby inspiring to make more such photos. The issue really isn't the content of the photos so much as the distribution of them.
" The reason why ILECs are regulated is because the telephone was the primary method of realtime person-to-person communication which wasn't face to face for damn near 100 years, and government decided that it was vital enough to require that telephone service be provided to as many people as possible in as high of a state of reliability as possible."
That doesn't explain why it was decided that ILECs should own the wires as well as provide service on those wires. They were granted those monopolies because of the example of the railroads (with government giving companies exclusive rights to lay track down in cerain areas, effectively barring others).
Some could say that the example of the railroads was used because of how well-managed an example it was. However, I think a realist could point out that the telephone monopolies were handed out because politicians saw it as a new source of graft and corruption to line their pockets with, just like the railroads had been.
Is Amtrak up a creek because of government mismanagement, or because their hands are tied by using tracks they're not allowed to own? How much longer until the current state of affairs in our telephone networks produces an Amtrak analog?
" This is a somewhat strange choice by Microsoft, in my opinion."
Given that the software was writen in conjunction with Canadian law enforcement agencies, it may not have been their choice to make.
"Government subsidized anything sucks the life out of a market and just about guarantees stagnation. They're right to block it in Texas!"
So the people and city of Altoona shouldn't be free to decide and handle their own affairs without interference from Harrisburg simply because you happen to agree with a particular state law, reguardless of what it does to individual rights within a municipality? The people of Altoona should have to justify themselves to, say, voters in Philadelphia (among other places) in order to take actions that would only directly effect themselves?
"The ILECs and cable companies use your right-of-way that you, the taxpayer, own."
They own it because self-styled libertarians believe that it's better to grant a for-profit private enterprise a monopoly on owning it rather than the government directly. Apparently, state-granted monopolies are magically somehow better-managed than state-owned infrastructure, even though the "free market" arguments apply to neither.
Being for-profit, they have no vested interest in opening their network to their competition. If the state own the actual wires directly (while not providing service on those wires), we wouldn't have this problem. But that's herecy in this age of privatization and deregulation.
"As a libertarian I'm generally against state governments spending tax dollars on services that people would otherwise pay for themselves"
On the other hand, my libertarian leanings tell me I should support this on devolution grounds: If the people of a municipality want to do this, what right does someone elsewhere in the state have to tell them that it's wrong and illegal? It's interesting that it's a Republican-dominated state legislature that's doing it...
Really, in their quest for personal liberty, one would think that the LP would be more interested in supporting municipal powers over statewide fiats, instead of being in favor of such statewide laws simply because they're in favor of "private enterprise."
"It's plainly clear that the Constitution is referring to specific powers rather than vague general "goals""
Yeah, like the "specific power" to do whatever it damned well feels like in areas like interstate commerce? Heck, there aren't any goals mentioned anywhere in Article I. It's a list of what Congress can do with no mention to what ends those powers must be used towards, nothing beyond the vague generalities in the preamble.
The only goal Congress has to work towards is the goal of keeping themselves in office; the goal is to serve the will of the people. And the people have shown time and again that they don't give a damn what Congress does, so this is what you can expect.
"I think history is going to look back on DST as essentially equivalent to the (anecdotal) story of lawmakers legislating pi to 3."
The Romans managed to put a dome on the Pantheon at a time when they taught their engineers that pi was exactly 3 1/8.
"So changing your clock alters the rotation or axial tilt of the Earth?"
No, changing clocks changes whether or not you're awake for said hours of daylight.
Besides, local noon drifts whether you change your clocks by an hour or not. The reason we use mechanical timepieces to begin with is because the sun is an unreliable source.
"A. No, see, normally it would get dark at 7. Now it gets dark at 8!
Q. But the sun doesn't rise until 8 or 9 AM."
Yes, but you still punch in at 8 reguardless, so daylight hours in the morning that would otherwise have been spent hitting the snooze bar or cussing out the driver in front of you are moved to the evening, allowing you to enjoy dinner outside.
"When you need to make your blanket longer, do you cut a foot off one end and sew it onto the other?"
It's a matter of pulling the blanket up to your chin (and off your feet) because your feet are too hot.
"Why don't you just wake up an hour earlier, if you want more daylight?"
Because that hour will be wasted with thoughts along the lines of "I gotta go to work in an hour." Think about it: if we all enjoyed looking foward to your day's work, everybody would wake up at 0300 or so and go to bed as soon as they got home. We want our time home to be perceived as a winding down, not a spooling up.
"Why move the time we can just adjust our mindset?"
Because of the force required to change the mental momentum of the great unwashed masses. That second law of motion's a bitch.
"Why not just do away with DST completely, and by congressional mandate, require all businesses (banks, stores, employers, etc.) shift their hours back one hour? Requiring such a shift by legislative means is no worse than DST, and it need only happen once."
Because Congress is specifically authorized to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures" (such as measurements of what time it is), but federal regulations on what hours a business is allowed/supposed to operate during gets really fuzzy really fast. Federal courts will probably let them get away with it via the ol' Interstate Commerce Clause, but I'd personally rather have Congress fucking up the specific than the vague.
"Cows don't really care what the clock says the time is."
The same applies whether the clock is moved or not. Cows can't read clocks and are more likely to go by the amount of light in the sky, I'd imagine. Between the tilt of the earth and the equation of time, you're fucked anyway.
"And if farmers can do it, I don't know why other businessmen can't: how hard is it to schedule your employees to optimize for daylight?"
Because you'd have a lack of consistency between different employers. If your lunch hour gets moved around and the store's hours are moved around, and if they're not moved in exactly the same way, you don't get to buy what you need during lunch and the store loses money because you weren't able to make a purchase.
"It's not like daylight savings time saves daylight: it just adjusts the clock,"
It moves the work window foreward to allow more sunlight after work in which to spend free time (as opposed to more sunlight before work which would be spent asleep) while also following the drift in solar noon (see above equation of time link). It moves sunlight from sleeping hours to waking hours.
"Why not just set $WORKING_HOURS to what we really want,"
Yeah, right... a lot of us work by what the time clock says.
"I chose to live in a place where I can cycle all year around (downtown Toronto)"
When last I heard, acts of Congress don't affect you.
"I also think the government should impose taxes on guzzlers and use them for rebates for non-guzzlers."
Government will go for the former and forget the latter. For example, California imposed some steep taxes on gasoline, ostensibly to curb gasoline consumption. Now that Californians are driving more fuel-efficient cars and less tax revenue is coming in because of it, they now want to mount GPS units on all Californian cars to tax mileage on the cars. Of course, even if they move to this plan, they'll still keep the gasoline tax...
You can't trust the government to siphon funds from one source and reliably send it to someone else. Even ignoring the arguments on the merits of wealth distribution, there's little guarantee that the money won't get "lost in transit."
Hey, I don't pretend to know why, but that's about what an SMB/DH cart I sold recently on eBay went for. The starting price was around $0.40, so it wasn't my fault.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing, I suppose.
"China or Hong Kong (which, incidentally, is part of China)"
Yes, but Hong Kong still maintains their own independent postal authority, which is why you should address things directly to Hong Kong instead of China.
"I think the $10 Splinter Cell 9 + $59 S&H may just turn me off."
Um... we're not exactly talking UPS here. By Hong Kong Post's international rates, you could get a small package ~150 g to the US for around $3.00 (1.00 HKD ~ 0.13 USD). The price will, of course, go up if you want bells and whistles like tracking, but if you don't want it overnight, there's no need to pay for overnight pricing.
I notice you're a realist and still haven't put "get laid" on your todo list.
You give people too much credit by assuming they weren't stupid before they got on the internet.
You're assuming he wasn't always like this.
There's nothing special about candidates for political office.
"They will consider missions to mars and other planets after 2025"
Gee, but everybody on Slashdot already knows that manned space exploration just isn't worth it! Everything we could possibly want to do in space can be done by robots!
And why is the Japanese government getting involved? Every red-blooded libertarian knows that space exploration is something best conducted by private enterprise!
"Just a quick not-well-thought-out idea, but what about trying to turn this over to the public,"
Gee, I thought the US government acted with the consent and will of the public!
"Why should everything in the whole world be dumbed down for the lowest common denominator?"
:)
Because that lowest common denominator tend to be customers and even voters. The lowest common denominator needs to be taken into account because of their sheer mass.
"Would you give me your CC details in the street if I asked nicely? No? You Sure?"
Depends: are you one of those mythical Slashdot women?