Being afraid of terrorists blowing up malls and municipal airports is sheer madness?
Have you heard of a small country called Israel, perchance? They have to deal with that kind of threat on a daily basis. I wouldn't know if they're afraid, but they do have bomb shelters everywhere, and almost everyone, from "soccer moms" to priests carry firearms on their persons for protection.
A lot depends on the specific environment and how dissimilar the projects are. The smaller the organization and the more similar the projects, the more reasonable such a move might be. However, the more projects of divergent types there are....
Not only does that seem like a horrible idea from the standpoint of producing functional, usable programs, but it also seems like a nightmare for the employees on a personal basis.
Why?
If you pick a single language, the employees will be little more than cogs on a wheel, and easily replaceable - at least, that's what management thinks, and will think. Management will likely want to pick something like.NET, which is pretty familiar to most recent graduates and works on "all the Windows platforms".
What happens from there? Could be a number of things. Layoffs, firings, pay cuts... and once one of those things starts, the other two are likely to follow quickly. Can't get a project done on time due to the language you're required to use? BZZT! Fired! Expanding deadlines resulting in increased costs? Gotta get some cheaper developers! Meanwhile, anyone who manages to hang on has to deal with the organizational shit, and possibly a pay cut on top of threat of job loss.
But this wasn't a homicide. It was a suicide. How can anyone other than the person who commits harm to themselves be responsible? It's a person's own free will to commit suicide.
To you and me, or anyone else, this might seem like a useless feature. But someone will see the business sense (or whatever they call it) in the idea; they'll buy it and put it online, maybe in an Amazon-like site. And people will use it, and it will be touted as a "success" - even if it's not all that useful or accurate.
While I agree with you on the basic idea, when combined with (say) user book ratings, such a tool could be valuable in assessment. A non-insignificant part of what makes a book enjoyable throughout (aside from the non-categorical "human element" necessary for good fiction) are the things charted by this proof of concept.
When Orwell wrote 1984, he looked at the prevailing trends in British culture as well as the encroaching and growing Russian culture of the day and tried to extend the trend to its ultimate (and exaggerated) conclusion. As he thought well on the topic, and was vary thorough at conveying the foundational ideas and methods behind such a system through his writing, it could have been used as a study guide.
Totalitarian dictators, such as Mao, Stalin, Tito, and so on all probably read his work, as well as the works of their philosophical ancestors - Hitler, Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, and so on.
We can see a pretty thorough culmination of such ideals in practice in the propped-up dictatorships in South America (both the ones put in place by the US historically, as well as the current crop of communist/leftist states), as well as throughout
Really, the practice has been going on for eons; applying modern technologies such as firearms, news media, and surveillance are all pretty new, and their applications to totalitarian rule took a couple decades to work into something usable by the State. Now, places like China and to a lesser extent Britain are honing and perfecting it to the point spoken of by Orwell, where the citizens (subjects) aren't even aware that they're living in such a controlled environment: traffic/security cameras on every corner; State controlled media, education, and entertainment; selective enforcement of obscure laws to keep people in line; and so on and so forth, all rolled into a comprehensive social, economical, and political nationalist ball.
I think you either fundamentally misunderstand what intelligence is, or have misrepresented said understanding in your post.
What you seem to be conveying as "intelligence", isn't; it's knowledge.
Intelligence will always* be limited, and there will be "haves" and "have nots", with a gradient between the two extremes. It's a subjective measurement, but the prevailing cultural understanding (and benchmark) is that common intelligence markers are determination, a drive to succeed and learn new things, and an inquisitive mind able to solve problems put before it. Likewise, the ability to form cogent, internally-consistent opinions (and new knowledge) from acquired knowledge has also been such an indicator.
Books themselves did not indicate intelligence. Books were expensive, yes - and it was commonly expected that someone with enough money to spend it on books was either poor in almost every other worldly respect, or was thoroughly established. The books themselves have always just been considered simple knowledge for a person to aggregate.
"Stupid" people will continue to take things at face value and not look deeper. They might utilize such technologies to provide themselves with better answers to life problems (helping them make better decisions), but it's not likely: stupid people have always done stupid things, and they will continue to be driven by the herd mentality and "social wisdom" - which we know as "superstitions" when applied to past eras.
As for hurdles and dangers, what exactly do you perceive? Stupid people will always make poor decisions, and providing them with a larger base of targeted/pertinent information from which to make said decisions hardly seems like it'd result in "dangers".
* Barring some sort of fortified nano-drink or brain augmentations we might have available in the future, that is. I'm not going to hold my breath.
If a machine is repurposed, as in, taken out and used for something else, then it's trivial to change the hostname while doing so. You WANT to break any and all associations with the previous role, as you don't want someone else in IT not following procedure (or someone with technical prowess in that dept) to think "lothar = hr-web" and thus fucking with lothar, when in fact lothar is the new purch-web system.
And if you're just adding a service to the box, it's pretty trivial to point a CNAME record to the same address. Naming a host with its purpose is beneficial as it reduces needless redundancy (ie hostname "pointyhairedboss" with cname "hr-web"), and it can save you a lot of problems down the line with regard to user relations: you do NOT want the possibility for someone with authority over you and a degree of technical prowess to discover your disdain for them or your lack of professionalism.
And, I should note, I intentionally stated "hr-web-1" and "hr-web-2" in the original post, as this leaves hr-web available in the event that they're doing load balancing or some other shared role task. You're still able to string as many machines on the back as you want, and use a single address for access.
If you MUST use a 'nickname' to refer to a machine, make them comply with a naming convention involving purpose/role/location: no proper names, so as to aid in identification (ie, finding "it-w2k8-153" in logs is much more useful than finding "lothar" in logs, when you're not immediately aware of network topography - and it makes it much easier to identify systems on the network which shouldn't be there, or doing specific things they shouldn't be doing.)
The -only- reason to pick proper names over a logical, technically-oriented naming convention in a planned environment is an emotional connection to said machines. It's common in IT, but it's also pretty unhealthy.
How, exactly, did she perpetrate homicide? The girl's death was ruled a suicide, which is mutually exclusive to a homicide.
She harassed, verbally assaulted, and otherwise tried to cause harm. But the girl herself was the one who committed suicide.
If that's the argument, and she gets charged, it too sets dangerous precedent. People should be liable for their own actions, not the stupid, crazy things others do at your suggestion or harassment.
If I (say) called a man a dirty pig fucker and he came over and murdered me and my family, would I be guilty of murder and suicide? That seems to be the argument you're making by stating it should be homicide for this woman.
Just think, for a moment, what the possible implications of this case will be.
EULAs/click-through agreements will now be considered legally binding, whereas in the past they have not. It would then be not only a breach of contract and a violation of copyright law, but a massive criminal offense to (say) have a copy of Windows installed on your computer for which you have no "valid" license to use.
I bet the people running the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft legal department are going ape shit at this very moment with ecstasy at the possibility of this precedent becoming available to them for litigation purposes. "You will either pay the fine we impose for violation of our copyright. No, we will not take this to civil court as we have in the past. We will take this to criminal court, where you will likely be locked up for a very, very long time, and have all of your rights deprived when - if - you get out."
As the movie says, "What good is a lawyer, if you can not speak."
But she didn't "drive the girl to commit suicide". Our legal system would contest such an assertion (self-determination is a foundational principle here in the US, meaning that the girl had the free will to kill herself or not).
(And if anyone is to be responsible for the suicide, it would be the parents of the girl, as parents are responsible for the actions of their children more often than not. And note, suicide is a crime.)
What this woman did was commit a number of crimes, yes. Criminal harassment, probably. Slander and defamation, most likely. Minor assault? Yeah.
BUT NONE OF THOSE HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SUICIDE, AS THE SUICIDE WAS NOT THE ACTION OF THE WOMAN.
I think the bitch should be lynched and hung from a lamp post, or at the very tarred and feathered. But that's an emotional response and has nothing at all to do with the legal system of a civilized society.
And I would still rather there be no charges be levied against her at all that have her be charged with a bullshit charge like this - which sets very, very dangerous legal precedent. The job of the courts is to try people on actual guilt of a crime, and not to punish her for a reprehensible act which no law actually covers - but use a bullshit proxy law through which to do it.
If there is no applicable law, then lawmakers are the ones to fault. We are a civil society and do not try people for things like this, as a rule. If it means someone guilty of harming another gets off in a fringe case, so be it: the purpose of trying people for crimes and putting them in prison is meant primarily as a deterrent to future crimes of the same type, not to punish the criminal.
So let me get this straight: you think that if I provide a form with my MiddleName LastName as contact information, instead of First Last (for the purpose of screening spam) I'd be providing "incorrect information". Or what if I mistype my name?
Whether I enter an entirely different name, a typo, or a variant of my legal name, the information is still "incorrect". Each would be easily identifiable as incorrect if even a little background was looked into.
And it is not reasonable to assume for the user to enter correct information if the service provider does not care, as a general rule, what is entered.
What this case comes down to is intent, and as they can not try intent any more than they can try thought crime (yet!), this is really quite a dishonest way to try the woman. There are other things they can, and should try to try her on, but none will likely stick - because, again, it comes down to intent, which they can't prove.
So the suicide of this girl is the fault of another parent, not the girl's own parents?
Where were this girl's parents? Were they monitoring what she did online to make sure she was safe? Surely they knew (if they were in the least bit involved with her life) that she was upset.
As morally reprehensible as I find this behavior, it should not be something illegal - as she has been charged. Suicide is a crime - should they also stick her with delinquency of a minor, or some other such bullshit charge?
Charge her with harassment and the intent to do harm, or whatever it is they stick people for who do such things. That much is evident, and what she actually did.
(Overall, I think charges which involve computer use are grossly over-exaggerated, whether due to lack of understanding or some other reason, and do not often fit the actual crime. This is all the more the case as it is very easy to break some obscure crime while using the Internet, often unknowingly, due to the ease of doing so and the lack of clear demarcations. Most people figure: how can I break the law from the privacy of my livingroom if nobody is harmed?)
Technically, Lori Drew did no such thing. It drives me insane when otherwise logical people say things like "such-and-such caused me to do it!" because it simply isn't true; and, in this specific case, it's patently false, as every single
Nobody forced the girl to do anything. She did not have to read the messages. She did not have to get emotional about the messages, and she could have dismissed them out of hand. And most certainly - unless Lori Drew actually performed the "suicide" herself (in which case, there are laws set aside to handle those specific instances), Lori Drew had nothing to with the girl's actual death.
Correlation is not causation.
If Lori Drew is responsible for this death, then she needs to be charged with manslaughter or murder. End of story. (Of course, the burden of proof could not be met there, so instead they're simply charging her with the death of what amounts to an emotionally unstable young-adult who took her own life through proxy law.)
What, because a site's policy states something you think it's ok to not pay any attention to it? To blow-by the sign-up form with false data that just meets the field validation?
Christ indeed. IMO, who cares how people "use" sign-up forms, the provider expects valid information to be entered. What, because there is finally a consequence to providing false information just to sign-up to a site you're getting pissy? Please. Now if they only start to go after all the spammers with yahoo/google/hotmail account we'll have some progress.
Here's (part of) the problem: since when is a click-through EULA legally binding?
Last I checked, an agreement is not legally binding unless both parties are signatories. As far as I know, that means a signature is still required.
Furthermore, the use of an alias is not, as far as I know, illegal. As MySpace does not require your SSN, there is no identity theft involved here. Should an author be arrested for using a pen name?
A person's name is like an access code. You can not gain access me unless you know who I am, and I can use different names to help screen said access. Who [i]doesn't[/i] use a secondary email address and/or a secondary name (maybe a variant of your real name) to help screen spam? It is the same fundamental issue: a 'service' requires you to provide a name and email address for service, and if you're not giving them a valid one, you are in breech of said service.
If I were to sign up using my nickname - ie, who I am known as by most people - to sign up for a service, would I be providing false information? Let's say my nickname is Frank (because my birth name is something horrid, like Cletus or Wilbur), is that fraud (and thus, unauthorized access?
Realistically, the most severe charge this should get would be akin non-criminal trespass, akin to walking across someone's lawn or jumping a fence to cut across a block.
I know a half dozen people who could be tried for this - and that's scary as hell. Shit, I'm probably liable for such a thing on one website or another, and I imagine 99% of the internet population is, as well.
A law which turns the majority into criminals is an unjust law; a law which is unevenly applied is tyrannical when it has also turned the majority into criminals. Such a law with an application such as this is the very mark of oppressive government: it allows the government (and the individuals within its organization!) to crush, at will, anyone they do not like.
(And no, I did not read the article, as it is slashdotted.)
And, for many (most) people, something that's broken* without their knowledge of it being so is drastically preferable to something that's broken and interferes with their ability to Do Stuff - or the statistically-significant possibility of such an occurrence.
And, for most people, "broken" doesn't just mean the browser. It also means any plugins or extensions which they use with regularity. Very, very few people will give a damn about a point release which fixes xyz code injection vulnerability in javascript unless it fixes something overtly irritating (like regular crashes) when there's the possibility (as has happened in the past with regularity) of an add-on breaking.
So, in their mind, an "upgrade" would more than likely introduce more problems than it fixes. Ergo, it's not broken.
I wonder: does that "using an old Firefox version" percentage consider that Firefox (and its branded derivatives) on Linux does not have this "auto update" feature?
I can certainly see people not upgrading to the latest version for a number of months if it requires the newer browser version to make it into the distributions' downstream for users to install. (For instance, Debian still packages a Firefox (Iceweasel) 2.x version.)
Oh, and with "the US" I basically mean the government. Because - face it - without their governments even American, Russian, Chinese, Irani and even French people would be friends (most of the time... there are sport events too;)).
Yeah, because there aren't derisive belief systems which conflict with each other. And corporations are not fundamentally greedy.
There is a myriad of reasons as to why we went to Iraq, all fully justifiable and (mostly) sanctioned by the UN - the UN just didn't have the balls to back up their stance, not even vocally.
Consider this another item which the emotionally-consumed, irrational people will ignore for preference of their feelings of superiority and righteous indignation.
This is some of the best advice in this thread, and it really needs to get some mod points to help counteract the stupid advice of "use comic book character names!" and single-level schema topography.
This guy's advice works because: 1) it scales to any size organization 2) it identifies the actual equipment 3) it identifies the equipment location 4) it identifies what the equipment does/how it fits into the organization
Aside from scaling well and being able to tell you where, what, and how, there's little more than a naming scheme should do.
There are times when you know you can use less without impeding future deployments (such as a geographically-isolated business which would be unable to expand), and that's OK. But for the most part, reducing yourself to a naming convention with a namespace of only a couple hundred variants at best (comic characters, etc.) which tells you -nothing- about what you're looking at is problematic.
Here's a funny one for you which will cause nightmares: systems named after firearm cartridges. So you get things like: 22lr, 223rem, 556x43, 270win, 762x39, 762x59 - and so on and so forth. Then you've got the additional problem of having two different naming conventions for a cartridge, and you start having problems (ie 308win vs. 762NATO vs. 762x51 - all essentially identical cartridges). Just... don't.
Only problem with something like that schema is that it tends to reach its practical limits at some point.
What happens when you can't figure out the name of a car that hasn't been used?
It seems like useless management overhead, with the only reasons for continuance being that a) this is the way it's always been done, b) it'd be a real pain to change, and c) emotional attachments.
Slashdot Mirror
Being afraid of terrorists blowing up malls and municipal airports is sheer madness?
Have you heard of a small country called Israel, perchance? They have to deal with that kind of threat on a daily basis. I wouldn't know if they're afraid, but they do have bomb shelters everywhere, and almost everyone, from "soccer moms" to priests carry firearms on their persons for protection.
A lot depends on the specific environment and how dissimilar the projects are. The smaller the organization and the more similar the projects, the more reasonable such a move might be. However, the more projects of divergent types there are....
Not only does that seem like a horrible idea from the standpoint of producing functional, usable programs, but it also seems like a nightmare for the employees on a personal basis.
Why?
If you pick a single language, the employees will be little more than cogs on a wheel, and easily replaceable - at least, that's what management thinks, and will think. Management will likely want to pick something like .NET, which is pretty familiar to most recent graduates and works on "all the Windows platforms".
What happens from there? Could be a number of things. Layoffs, firings, pay cuts... and once one of those things starts, the other two are likely to follow quickly. Can't get a project done on time due to the language you're required to use? BZZT! Fired! Expanding deadlines resulting in increased costs? Gotta get some cheaper developers! Meanwhile, anyone who manages to hang on has to deal with the organizational shit, and possibly a pay cut on top of threat of job loss.
In 5 years the company won't exist.
But this wasn't a homicide. It was a suicide. How can anyone other than the person who commits harm to themselves be responsible? It's a person's own free will to commit suicide.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
To you and me, or anyone else, this might seem like a useless feature. But someone will see the business sense (or whatever they call it) in the idea; they'll buy it and put it online, maybe in an Amazon-like site. And people will use it, and it will be touted as a "success" - even if it's not all that useful or accurate.
While I agree with you on the basic idea, when combined with (say) user book ratings, such a tool could be valuable in assessment. A non-insignificant part of what makes a book enjoyable throughout (aside from the non-categorical "human element" necessary for good fiction) are the things charted by this proof of concept.
When Orwell wrote 1984, he looked at the prevailing trends in British culture as well as the encroaching and growing Russian culture of the day and tried to extend the trend to its ultimate (and exaggerated) conclusion. As he thought well on the topic, and was vary thorough at conveying the foundational ideas and methods behind such a system through his writing, it could have been used as a study guide.
Totalitarian dictators, such as Mao, Stalin, Tito, and so on all probably read his work, as well as the works of their philosophical ancestors - Hitler, Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, and so on.
We can see a pretty thorough culmination of such ideals in practice in the propped-up dictatorships in South America (both the ones put in place by the US historically, as well as the current crop of communist/leftist states), as well as throughout
Really, the practice has been going on for eons; applying modern technologies such as firearms, news media, and surveillance are all pretty new, and their applications to totalitarian rule took a couple decades to work into something usable by the State. Now, places like China and to a lesser extent Britain are honing and perfecting it to the point spoken of by Orwell, where the citizens (subjects) aren't even aware that they're living in such a controlled environment: traffic/security cameras on every corner; State controlled media, education, and entertainment; selective enforcement of obscure laws to keep people in line; and so on and so forth, all rolled into a comprehensive social, economical, and political nationalist ball.
I think you either fundamentally misunderstand what intelligence is, or have misrepresented said understanding in your post.
What you seem to be conveying as "intelligence", isn't; it's knowledge.
Intelligence will always* be limited, and there will be "haves" and "have nots", with a gradient between the two extremes. It's a subjective measurement, but the prevailing cultural understanding (and benchmark) is that common intelligence markers are determination, a drive to succeed and learn new things, and an inquisitive mind able to solve problems put before it. Likewise, the ability to form cogent, internally-consistent opinions (and new knowledge) from acquired knowledge has also been such an indicator.
Books themselves did not indicate intelligence. Books were expensive, yes - and it was commonly expected that someone with enough money to spend it on books was either poor in almost every other worldly respect, or was thoroughly established. The books themselves have always just been considered simple knowledge for a person to aggregate.
"Stupid" people will continue to take things at face value and not look deeper. They might utilize such technologies to provide themselves with better answers to life problems (helping them make better decisions), but it's not likely: stupid people have always done stupid things, and they will continue to be driven by the herd mentality and "social wisdom" - which we know as "superstitions" when applied to past eras.
As for hurdles and dangers, what exactly do you perceive? Stupid people will always make poor decisions, and providing them with a larger base of targeted/pertinent information from which to make said decisions hardly seems like it'd result in "dangers".
* Barring some sort of fortified nano-drink or brain augmentations we might have available in the future, that is. I'm not going to hold my breath.
It's all about the Pentiums, baby.
If a machine is repurposed, as in, taken out and used for something else, then it's trivial to change the hostname while doing so. You WANT to break any and all associations with the previous role, as you don't want someone else in IT not following procedure (or someone with technical prowess in that dept) to think "lothar = hr-web" and thus fucking with lothar, when in fact lothar is the new purch-web system.
And if you're just adding a service to the box, it's pretty trivial to point a CNAME record to the same address. Naming a host with its purpose is beneficial as it reduces needless redundancy (ie hostname "pointyhairedboss" with cname "hr-web"), and it can save you a lot of problems down the line with regard to user relations: you do NOT want the possibility for someone with authority over you and a degree of technical prowess to discover your disdain for them or your lack of professionalism.
And, I should note, I intentionally stated "hr-web-1" and "hr-web-2" in the original post, as this leaves hr-web available in the event that they're doing load balancing or some other shared role task. You're still able to string as many machines on the back as you want, and use a single address for access.
If you MUST use a 'nickname' to refer to a machine, make them comply with a naming convention involving purpose/role/location: no proper names, so as to aid in identification (ie, finding "it-w2k8-153" in logs is much more useful than finding "lothar" in logs, when you're not immediately aware of network topography - and it makes it much easier to identify systems on the network which shouldn't be there, or doing specific things they shouldn't be doing.)
The -only- reason to pick proper names over a logical, technically-oriented naming convention in a planned environment is an emotional connection to said machines. It's common in IT, but it's also pretty unhealthy.
Homicide?
How, exactly, did she perpetrate homicide? The girl's death was ruled a suicide, which is mutually exclusive to a homicide.
She harassed, verbally assaulted, and otherwise tried to cause harm. But the girl herself was the one who committed suicide.
If that's the argument, and she gets charged, it too sets dangerous precedent. People should be liable for their own actions, not the stupid, crazy things others do at your suggestion or harassment.
If I (say) called a man a dirty pig fucker and he came over and murdered me and my family, would I be guilty of murder and suicide? That seems to be the argument you're making by stating it should be homicide for this woman.
What I want to know is how it can be possible to impersonate a fictional, completely non-existent person. It's a bit of an oxymoron.
Might this not be covered under, say, artist expression? She may have been doing "research" or performance art, yes?
This is a really, really bad charge...
Just think, for a moment, what the possible implications of this case will be.
EULAs/click-through agreements will now be considered legally binding, whereas in the past they have not. It would then be not only a breach of contract and a violation of copyright law, but a massive criminal offense to (say) have a copy of Windows installed on your computer for which you have no "valid" license to use.
I bet the people running the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft legal department are going ape shit at this very moment with ecstasy at the possibility of this precedent becoming available to them for litigation purposes. "You will either pay the fine we impose for violation of our copyright. No, we will not take this to civil court as we have in the past. We will take this to criminal court, where you will likely be locked up for a very, very long time, and have all of your rights deprived when - if - you get out."
As the movie says, "What good is a lawyer, if you can not speak."
The fact is that if such a law can be so broadly applied to cover this, the law is overly broad and ill-defined.
I believe that is the primary contention of most people who are pissed about this charge.
And a conspiracy in the US (IANAL, and IIRC) requires 2 or more people.
But she didn't "drive the girl to commit suicide". Our legal system would contest such an assertion (self-determination is a foundational principle here in the US, meaning that the girl had the free will to kill herself or not).
(And if anyone is to be responsible for the suicide, it would be the parents of the girl, as parents are responsible for the actions of their children more often than not. And note, suicide is a crime.)
What this woman did was commit a number of crimes, yes. Criminal harassment, probably. Slander and defamation, most likely. Minor assault? Yeah.
BUT NONE OF THOSE HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SUICIDE, AS THE SUICIDE WAS NOT THE ACTION OF THE WOMAN.
Really?
I think the bitch should be lynched and hung from a lamp post, or at the very tarred and feathered. But that's an emotional response and has nothing at all to do with the legal system of a civilized society.
And I would still rather there be no charges be levied against her at all that have her be charged with a bullshit charge like this - which sets very, very dangerous legal precedent. The job of the courts is to try people on actual guilt of a crime, and not to punish her for a reprehensible act which no law actually covers - but use a bullshit proxy law through which to do it.
If there is no applicable law, then lawmakers are the ones to fault. We are a civil society and do not try people for things like this, as a rule. If it means someone guilty of harming another gets off in a fringe case, so be it: the purpose of trying people for crimes and putting them in prison is meant primarily as a deterrent to future crimes of the same type, not to punish the criminal.
So let me get this straight: you think that if I provide a form with my MiddleName LastName as contact information, instead of First Last (for the purpose of screening spam) I'd be providing "incorrect information". Or what if I mistype my name?
Whether I enter an entirely different name, a typo, or a variant of my legal name, the information is still "incorrect". Each would be easily identifiable as incorrect if even a little background was looked into.
And it is not reasonable to assume for the user to enter correct information if the service provider does not care, as a general rule, what is entered.
What this case comes down to is intent, and as they can not try intent any more than they can try thought crime (yet!), this is really quite a dishonest way to try the woman. There are other things they can, and should try to try her on, but none will likely stick - because, again, it comes down to intent, which they can't prove.
So the suicide of this girl is the fault of another parent, not the girl's own parents?
Where were this girl's parents? Were they monitoring what she did online to make sure she was safe? Surely they knew (if they were in the least bit involved with her life) that she was upset.
As morally reprehensible as I find this behavior, it should not be something illegal - as she has been charged. Suicide is a crime - should they also stick her with delinquency of a minor, or some other such bullshit charge?
Charge her with harassment and the intent to do harm, or whatever it is they stick people for who do such things. That much is evident, and what she actually did.
(Overall, I think charges which involve computer use are grossly over-exaggerated, whether due to lack of understanding or some other reason, and do not often fit the actual crime. This is all the more the case as it is very easy to break some obscure crime while using the Internet, often unknowingly, due to the ease of doing so and the lack of clear demarcations. Most people figure: how can I break the law from the privacy of my livingroom if nobody is harmed?)
Technically, Lori Drew did no such thing. It drives me insane when otherwise logical people say things like "such-and-such caused me to do it!" because it simply isn't true; and, in this specific case, it's patently false, as every single
Nobody forced the girl to do anything. She did not have to read the messages. She did not have to get emotional about the messages, and she could have dismissed them out of hand. And most certainly - unless Lori Drew actually performed the "suicide" herself (in which case, there are laws set aside to handle those specific instances), Lori Drew had nothing to with the girl's actual death.
Correlation is not causation.
If Lori Drew is responsible for this death, then she needs to be charged with manslaughter or murder. End of story. (Of course, the burden of proof could not be met there, so instead they're simply charging her with the death of what amounts to an emotionally unstable young-adult who took her own life through proxy law.)
What, because a site's policy states something you think it's ok to not pay any attention to it? To blow-by the sign-up form with false data that just meets the field validation?
Christ indeed. IMO, who cares how people "use" sign-up forms, the provider expects valid information to be entered. What, because there is finally a consequence to providing false information just to sign-up to a site you're getting pissy? Please. Now if they only start to go after all the spammers with yahoo/google/hotmail account we'll have some progress.
Here's (part of) the problem: since when is a click-through EULA legally binding?
Last I checked, an agreement is not legally binding unless both parties are signatories. As far as I know, that means a signature is still required.
Furthermore, the use of an alias is not, as far as I know, illegal. As MySpace does not require your SSN, there is no identity theft involved here. Should an author be arrested for using a pen name?
A person's name is like an access code. You can not gain access me unless you know who I am, and I can use different names to help screen said access. Who [i]doesn't[/i] use a secondary email address and/or a secondary name (maybe a variant of your real name) to help screen spam? It is the same fundamental issue: a 'service' requires you to provide a name and email address for service, and if you're not giving them a valid one, you are in breech of said service.
If I were to sign up using my nickname - ie, who I am known as by most people - to sign up for a service, would I be providing false information? Let's say my nickname is Frank (because my birth name is something horrid, like Cletus or Wilbur), is that fraud (and thus, unauthorized access?
Realistically, the most severe charge this should get would be akin non-criminal trespass, akin to walking across someone's lawn or jumping a fence to cut across a block.
I know a half dozen people who could be tried for this - and that's scary as hell. Shit, I'm probably liable for such a thing on one website or another, and I imagine 99% of the internet population is, as well.
A law which turns the majority into criminals is an unjust law; a law which is unevenly applied is tyrannical when it has also turned the majority into criminals. Such a law with an application such as this is the very mark of oppressive government: it allows the government (and the individuals within its organization!) to crush, at will, anyone they do not like.
(And no, I did not read the article, as it is slashdotted.)
And, for many (most) people, something that's broken* without their knowledge of it being so is drastically preferable to something that's broken and interferes with their ability to Do Stuff - or the statistically-significant possibility of such an occurrence.
And, for most people, "broken" doesn't just mean the browser. It also means any plugins or extensions which they use with regularity. Very, very few people will give a damn about a point release which fixes xyz code injection vulnerability in javascript unless it fixes something overtly irritating (like regular crashes) when there's the possibility (as has happened in the past with regularity) of an add-on breaking.
So, in their mind, an "upgrade" would more than likely introduce more problems than it fixes. Ergo, it's not broken.
*(the word's broken, damn it, not broke!)
I wonder: does that "using an old Firefox version" percentage consider that Firefox (and its branded derivatives) on Linux does not have this "auto update" feature?
I can certainly see people not upgrading to the latest version for a number of months if it requires the newer browser version to make it into the distributions' downstream for users to install. (For instance, Debian still packages a Firefox (Iceweasel) 2.x version.)
You're kidding, right?
Oh, and with "the US" I basically mean the government. Because - face it - without their governments even American, Russian, Chinese, Irani and even French people would be friends (most of the time... there are sport events too ;)).
Yeah, because there aren't derisive belief systems which conflict with each other. And corporations are not fundamentally greedy.
Eyup!
There is a myriad of reasons as to why we went to Iraq, all fully justifiable and (mostly) sanctioned by the UN - the UN just didn't have the balls to back up their stance, not even vocally.
Consider this another item which the emotionally-consumed, irrational people will ignore for preference of their feelings of superiority and righteous indignation.
MOD THIS UP
This is some of the best advice in this thread, and it really needs to get some mod points to help counteract the stupid advice of "use comic book character names!" and single-level schema topography.
This guy's advice works because:
1) it scales to any size organization
2) it identifies the actual equipment
3) it identifies the equipment location
4) it identifies what the equipment does/how it fits into the organization
Aside from scaling well and being able to tell you where, what, and how, there's little more than a naming scheme should do.
There are times when you know you can use less without impeding future deployments (such as a geographically-isolated business which would be unable to expand), and that's OK. But for the most part, reducing yourself to a naming convention with a namespace of only a couple hundred variants at best (comic characters, etc.) which tells you -nothing- about what you're looking at is problematic.
Here's a funny one for you which will cause nightmares: systems named after firearm cartridges. So you get things like: 22lr, 223rem, 556x43, 270win, 762x39, 762x59 - and so on and so forth. Then you've got the additional problem of having two different naming conventions for a cartridge, and you start having problems (ie 308win vs. 762NATO vs. 762x51 - all essentially identical cartridges). Just... don't.
Only problem with something like that schema is that it tends to reach its practical limits at some point.
What happens when you can't figure out the name of a car that hasn't been used?
It seems like useless management overhead, with the only reasons for continuance being that a) this is the way it's always been done, b) it'd be a real pain to change, and c) emotional attachments.