The os-obsessed person cited in the article as limiting her sex partner options was Violet Blue. Your comment that "the odds of *ever* getting laid are not particularly good for os-obsessed humans" is, in her case, so wrong it's beyond funny.
In Texas, Municipal Utility Districts provide utilities to places that municipalities have yet to reach. If you want to build subdivision out in the middle of nowhere, you can set up a MUD to provide (typically) water service. MUDs have (sort of) public infrastructure (storage tanks, pumping stations, etc.) that needs to be protected, so they have been granted the authority to set up police forces.
Now, here's the deal. There have been a few situation where a subdivision development failed and the MUD ceased operating. It still existed as a legal entity, though. Some creative types then bought the defunct entity for peanuts, went "active", and proceeded to equip their police force with automatic weapons. Really, these were guys who just wanted to own and shoot machine guns but couldn't get through the approval process, something that's impossible if you have a local top cop who, for political reasons, refuses to sign off on your paperwork. (Nothing in federal law compels them; local sherrifs/chiefs of police have, essentially, veto power over whether private citizens within their jurisdiction can own automatic weapons.) Police forces, however, do not have to get any approval from anyone outside their ranks to own such firearms.
It was a neat trick. I remember when it hit the papers some years ago. I don't recall if anyone ever got around to closing that loophole, though.
Rights don't apply to parolees. If you're on parole, you're still under the jurisdiction of the court as if you were in jail. Your parole officer can show up at any time of the day or night to search your house, make you pee in a cup, whatever. You have to do it. If you refuse, you've violated parole and can go back to jail. When you agreed to be paroled, you signed documents agreeing to all this.
That's parole. Remember, parole is supposed to eventually end. At the end of it, you've paid your debt to society and you get to start over with nearly all your rights intact (and the ones you don't have, like voting and owning a gun, can be restored to you if you apply and a judge approves).
The offender lists seek to make parolee status permanent, turning all sentences into life sentences.
I really don't know how this passes constitutional muster. I was heartbroken when I learned, upon the enacting of an offender registry law (the memory is dim and I don't remember when or where it was), how a not inconsiderable number of now-quite-old men who had gotten (essentially) tickets for homosexual solicitation back in the 1950s had to register themselves as sex offenders so as to make themselves available to be publicly reviled.
Offender registration and tracking is evil. It's understandable; in some cases, it's probably prevented something terrible from happening. But it's still, on balance, evil. There must be a better way.
I don't know where he got his info, but I did find this dated August 2008. Quoting, in part:
Presently, no trial date has been set because the government and the defense have been wrangling over discovery issues. Mainly, the government tried to force Libman and Greenberg to meet with their attorneys in a Miami FBI squad room to review evidence - without confidentiality. The defense has asked for copies of their hard drives, but the government has refused to supply the defense with the hard drives seized in 2006.
That's a common issue. If you follow the mailing lists to which computer forensic examiners subscribe, you'll see that there's a lot of tension over this issue. The authorities feel that if they give the defense full, normal, private access to the evidence, they (the government) will be releasing child porn. They don't want to put themselves in that position.
Sometimes wires get crossed badly when prosecutors give access but don't get any buy-in from local cops. There have been a couple of cases in the U.K. where forensics examiners hired by the defense have been raided for suspicion of possession of child porn when the source of the porn was files that had been released by the prosecutors to the defense attorneys. This whole area of the law is something around which high weirdness commonly swirls.
One side note: H. Louis Sirkin is defense counsel for one of the Webe principals. If you know free speech cases, that name should ring a bell.
I realize that I'm an old guy and the fact that I learned to type on a manual typewriter makes my viewpoints potentially dismissable. However, I have a fond keyboard memory.
About 25 years ago, Panasonic made a "wedge" typewriter. If you've ever seen one, you'll know what I mean. It was a very large office model. The keys had nearly zero feel and medium travel. At the end of their travel, they stopped like tapping your fingers on a granite block.
I have no idea how Panasonic managed it, but even with zero apparent resistance, I never "over-typed" on it. The keys returned to their rest positions without delay, never causing me to lose feel.
I could consistently do over 100 wpm on that keyboard. That was way faster than my norm.
Mercy, I loved that thing. If there were a similar computer keyboard, I'd pay well over $100 for it.
...who's going to drop anti-aircraft missiles to you and the other Wolverines while you're holed up in the Grand Tetons?
Now, that's funny. Thanks. I needed a laugh about now. (And the Simpson's reference was a great way to cap off your post, too.)
...the nation's 2nd most powerful domestic lobby...doesn't actually spend money to defend people who actually exercise those rights against abuse (sic) law enforcement.
You have a seriously important point, there. I wonder if there's any organization that helps out in those cases. Do you know of any?
OTOH, firearms did work for the American revolutionaries, the Afghans against the Russians, and the WW2 vets who fought for fair elections at the Battle of Athens, TN.
Revolutions are tricky business. You only start them as a last resort and your chances of success are lousy. But they are a basic human right and you need guns to carry them out.
Any government that restricts gun ownership is trying to preemptively stave off certain problems such as street violence and revolution. The motivation to do that can be good (a genuine concern for public safety) or they can be evil (plans to take over some day may be thwarted by an armed populace).
I'm not willing to bet everything on the good intentions of my legislators. I'd like to have a bit of a reserve. And I look askance at anyone who would take it away from me.
As for your sentence decrying the militarization of the police in America - that's a huge problem. Just huge. Don't get me started...
Good question. Last I heard, the case was still hanging in limbo.
They had to get a conviction of Pierson for supplying child porn before they could make a case against Webe for selling it. Pierson eventually pled guilty to just one count after initially being charged with producing 60 pictures picked from the thousands upon thousands he had supplied to Webe.
I always assumed the Webe case would hang out there until the prosecution offered some deal to make it all go away quietly. Their case is crap, after all.
I'll do some research from home and post back if I find out anything before this topic is locked.
That's, imo, a hugely insightful question. My answer is also just my opinion.
I believe we lost that point (defining CP as absolutely requiring that a child had to be raped to make it) when we criminalized simple possession. The problem is we didn't know we had lost anything when we did that.
In the context of the time, criminalizing simple possession was obviously the right thing to do. Back then, the only way to get CP was to buy it. If you possessed it, you had to have bought it. If you bought it, you were giving money to people to encourage them to rape children. That's bad, no matter how you look at it.
Nowadays, things have radically changed. Most CP isn't bought; it's found. Most CP isn't made for monetary profit; it's made by kids messing around and by adults who are seeking self-validation for their perversion by producing and releasing the material. Thus, possessing CP no longer encourages it to be made. If we were just now getting around to outlawing it, we probably wouldn't because outlawing possession no longer has any real purpose, i.e. outlawing possession no longer does anything to encourage or discourage production.
In response to this, lots of other justifications have come along to keep possession illegal. There's the grooming argument; pervs can show their porn to little kids, thus convincing the kids that this behavior is normal. There's also the "continuing rape" theory that says children in CP are raped again, mentally, every time someone looks at the CP in which they appear. That second argument is just goofy-stupid and I dismiss it out of hand. The first argument, however, probably has some small (very small) merit and is enough for me to argue that no change in the legal prohibition against possession is necessary.
The problems arise when we accept any of these arguments *separately* from the original requirement that kids have to be raped to produce the stuff. If, for example, we accept that the possession of any material that can be used to groom children for abuse should be legally proscribed, then we are forced to look the other way when the forces of anti-freedom start outlawing anything they claim can be used for that purpose. They can outlaw text, drawings, photos - literally anything - if we allow the argument that anything that has the potential for misuse should be outlawed.
Since we, as a society, have accepted that the definition of CP no longer requires children to be hurt, we have opened the floodgates. Anything that a legislator considers icky enough can be outlawed. Anything that offends a prosecutor can get you arrested. Thus, things that were previously just dismissed as being, at worst, in bad taste can now result in people doing jail time. Take a picture of kids in the bath or your 10-year-old topless on the beach while vacationing in Brazil? You're risking your freedom. Use a computer to make a picture of some non-existent person who's apparently short and undeveloped? Same story. All a prosecutor has to do is convince a jury you got some kind of sick jollies from the process of creation and, wham-bam, you're in jail.
If you want to define an exact point in time, you should probably look to the early-1980s U.S. Supreme Court case where a film showing shirtless boys counting money on a bed while an adult male got dressed in the background was found to be CP. Given the overall context of the case and the implication of the film that the boys had just been paid for sex, the court held that neither nudity or sexual activity was necessary for the harmful-to-kids production of child porn. Really, though, it was a long process to get to this point. Short of Barack's oldest girl making a porn vid with her best friend and releasing it to the world, I can't imagine anything that could awaken the general populace to the notion that you really shouldn't call something child porn unless it involves grown-ups physically abusing little kids.
Any broader definition is an invitation to rampant irrationality. Just like we have now.
I've never understood why those two camps don't join forces. I'm in both (I'm pro-free speech and pro-gun rights) but I find very few people who are like me. I've spent a lot of time talking to porn producers and they tend to think of gun owners as a bunch of rednecks that they don't want to associate with. My gun owning friends tend to think of porn producers as sleazy, Godless pervs that they don't want to associate with. Both groups seem to dislike each other intensely on a personal basis.
Both groups are fighting for freedom. They really ought to get together. They have far more in common than they realize.
If you're an oldster or a lawyer of the sort who can quote Dost, this may be sad but it isn't surprising.
For you young 'uns out there, listen up for a history lesson.
For a very long time in the U.S., child porn was legal. Admittedly, this point can be argued. Some say it was always illegal because it was always obscene. However, it wasn't prosecuted because the possibility existed that it could be produced in a way that was not obscene. Whether it was technically legal or illegal isn't important. The practical matter is that it wasn't prosecuted, wasn't specifically prohibited, and was easily available to anyone who wanted to send off a money order or walk into a big city adult book store.
IN the mid 1970s, the first laws were passed that said it was illegal. First amendment concerns surfaced but those were beaten back with the argument that producing it required that a crime be committed by an adult against a child. You couldn't produce child porn without actually raping a child. By the early 1980s, it was pretty much illegal everywhere in the U.S., though simple possession didn't get outlawed everywhere, uniformly until then. Even now, there have been major nations that didn't outlaw simple possession until recently. Simple possession didn't become illegal in Brazil, for example, until this year.
The U.S., though, was a different case. By the mid to late 1980s, the stuff had been mostly stamped out. In fact, immediately before the rise of the ubiquitous home internet connection, nearly all child porn sold in the U.S. was actually sold by the United States Postal Service as a part of sting operations.
In some of the early court decisions, the first amendment concerns were dismissed with the explicit allowance that depictions of underage sex for artistic purposes could continue unhindered as long as the actors involved were of age. At the time, the example often cited was "The Last Picture Show."
Since then, things have gradually changed from the sensible to the insane. The changes have been far too many and too complex to outline here and each change has been rather gradual. As the law now stands (IANAL, etc.) literally any picture of a child can be considered porn if a prosecutor can convince a jury that it was produced or possessed for prurient purposes. Nudity is not required. Sexual activity is not required. Prosecutors are willing to proceed on the flimsiest basis when motivated by stupidity or politics, sometimes successfully (the Pierson case, as a lead-in to prosecuting WebeWeb), sometimes unsuccessfully (as in the attempt in Oklahoma to criminalize the highly regarded movie "The Tin Drum.")
I'm not a big fan of Paul Little (the few minutes I've spent with him on several occasions convinced me that he's an ultimately harmless boor) but he should not be looking at jail time. Yet in this (U.S.) society, all rationality has flown right out the window where this subject is concerned.
Here are my two main points (and, incidentally, this is why I know so much about the subject):
1. If you value civil liberties, you need to know about child porn. It's the boogey man, just like "commies" back in the 1950s, that is used as an excuse to build freedom-destroying infrastructure into our laws and communications systems.
2. The original definition of child porn that justified outlawing it included one central tenet - that producing it requires adults to rape children. Nowadays, a large (probably the overwhelming majority) of child porn is produced by children for the consumption of children and there are no adults involved at any stage. If you have a 12-year-old with a web cam in their room or a digital camera built into their cell phone, there is a much-larger-than-you'd-like-to-admit possibility that you're providing a home for a child porn production studio.
Combine those two things and we're looking at a situation where child porn can be used to criminalize a huge portion of the populace. Forgive me for drawing parallels where
As some of the other posters have pointed out, it's a good idea to turn on your signal a bit earlier than when you know you can move over.
In practice, I think that's the best compromise, though I tend to wait until I've gone far enough ahead that I think I'm actually going to be able to move to the right. You never know when the guy to your right is going to turn out to be one of those jerks who accelerates to prevent you from coming over. That's happened to me plenty of times.
The old driver's ed way would have us wait even later but if you do that, BoySpeedRacer is going to try to slalom through the gap behind you.
There's no good solution except for the guy behind to stop tailgating; we know that'll never happen.
You are one of those idiots that rides the speed limit in the left lane on a wide open highway aren't you?
Absolutely never when conditions permit.
Unfortunately, my high-speed driving is on freeways in Houston where the early morning commute on Beltway 8 is at near-max capacity (all lanes must be in use) with packs of cars going 70-80mph, generally just one car length apart. That environment seems to breed an endless supply of folks who think that any vehicle moving less than 10 miles over the limit is just another cone on an autocross course, to be flown by at the closest possible distance.
True story: A couple of months ago, I was doing 70 in the left lane. A car comes flying up behind me so I increase speed a bit and look for a gap I can move into to my right. The dude behind me is so incensed that someone has the audacity to not ram his way into an unsafe gap to the right just to get out of his way, he pulls to the *left* and passes me on the shoulder. He uses the debris-littered, narrow, bumpy shoulder to hit about 90 mph.
With idiots like that running around, forgive me if I just decide to revert back to doing it the way they taught me in driver's ed 35 years ago. My attitude is less charitable than it used to be. I simply can't justify forcing myself to drive like a dangerous idiot just to keep from pissing off someone who thinks the rules of the road should apply to everyone *except* them.
A word of advice, previously mentioned: signal before you finish passing.
Actually, I do. I tend to turn on the signal about halfway between the time I move past the car on my right and the time I anticipate moving over. Unfortunately, that means there's usually about a car length plus a foot or two between my rear bumper and the front bumper of the car to my right. That's about the time that boy speed racer hits the gas, closes to within six inches of my rear bumper, and jerks to the right.
There's just no winning. A little thought toward helping *everyone* maintain a safe cushion around their vehicle is pooh-poohed by the jerks on the road. And there seems to be an endless supply of jerks.
Please stop talking about things you obviously haven't thought through and don't understand.
If I pass then move over after just two car lengths, I've pretty much demonstrated the classic definition of cutting someone off. The only result is that they are then caused to either tailgate me or unexpectedly slow down, potentially causing a problem for the person behind them. Just because the guy flying up my butt is anxious is no reason for me to be a dick. His tailgating means we have two cars in an unsafe relationship and if we have a wreck we can at least have a hope of confining it to one lane. But if I try to get out of Mr. Speedracer's way by cutting off the guy in the lane next to me, we now have two unsafe maneuvers happening at the same time instead of one and I've involved another car and another lane in our potential accident. Bad news. Just because the guy behind me is stupid doesn't mean I want to join him in endangering my fellow motorists.
When I pass, I wait until I can see both headlights of the car I passed in my rearview mirror. Then I signal and move over. Anyone who thinks I wait too long to move over or who, worse, tries to shoot through the gap between us is an incompetent menace.
I've done a bit more reading about it and it will be useful. It's not the all-in-one solution I need, but it will certainly help. Thanks for your thoughts.
I'm happy your eyes are still good. Presbyopia hit me like a hammer a couple of years ago (I'm 48) and, to the extent possible, I need pretty much everything to be as big and readable as possible. I can no longer work with high resolutions unless the screens are gigantic or I'm willing to strain hard for short periods, as might be the case when I'm editing a photo.
You will not see the need for a large monitor with lower resolution in 11 months. But someday you'll find yourself squinting at your display and you'll realize "Oh, so this is what those old farts were talking about. Now I understand."
One feature I failed to find under Ubuntu is a facility to check for duplicate files. When backing up my mother's photos, I had maintained some redundancy. In the end, I used a command-line utility called fdupes to locate and delete the duplicates.
Did you ever find anything better? Fdupes, according to their web page, requires the user to specify directories. I need something that searches the entire machine and defines dupes carefully, giving me a choice to move or delete individual files or groups of files or their directories when the files are verified as dupes by name, date, size, and checksum or any combination thereof. Something that would also do some fuzzy searching via file and directory name would be even better. So far, I've found nothing.
Nice article, btw. I hope the followup reports continuing success.
It's about time they made 20" LCD's with a 1280x1024 resolution for people over the age of 40 who use it as a tool and not a hobby.
This is some smart thinking. As much as I'd like to have a one of those 24" NEC monitors that's optimized for photographers (I used to be a photographer and am very critical about displays for photographs. Everything I can afford sucks.), my ideal would be a three-monitor setup: one for photos, one for dual-use gaming and productivity apps, and one as you describe just for getting my work done. I'd prefer they all be 24-inchers, though.
There are lots of 19-inch monitors with 1280x1024 native resolution. Check pricewatch.com to find lots of really cheap refurbs. Newegg has plenty of new ones.
Frankly, I don't know if this is a bad thing. We've been saying for years that everyone needs to encrypt everything by default and it hasn't happened because "normal" people don't see the need for their "normal" traffic.
Take Freenet as an example. It's never reached critical mass and there's little worthwhile content (as of the last time I checked; I gave up on it some time back). But what happens if people can't get their torrents to work and all their mules and limes and kazaas stop working? Freenet with Frost needs just a decent installer package and enough users so that it scales up to reasonable speed. If that happened, how would that get filtered? Would the govt demand the blocking of everything that's encrypted? I can imagine some big players in the e-commerce game might have a thought or two on that subject.
I don't use bittorrent or any emule/kazaa-like applications, but I think I've read that they all can be configured to encrypt all transfers.
If governments want to stop "bad" traffic, they should realize that the tools are available for it to all go underground and flourish in ways the govt can't effectively monitor, much less censor. Are governments really stupid enough to hasten that situation?
I think so. Whether it's Freenet, some other encrypted environment, or just encryption on top of currently popular protocols, part of me welcomes the censorship because I know it will finally start moving people to protect their communications. I think that's a good thing that will come from all this censorsip silliness.
And to think - If the music industry had just bought out Napster and and used it to its potential, how many man-millenia of labor could have been put to productive use instead of wasted in stupid cat 'n mouse games?
How long ago was this? And were the people doing the work Revenue Agents, Revenue Officers, or Special Agents?
I don't mean to be arcane, but there's a big difference between a tax audit, even an intrusive one, and the kinds of things that require "rummaging through the house." Rummaging through the house == a lot more than an audit. I can think of only a few things that warrant that sort of treatment.
1. Many, many years ago if you wanted to compromise a tax liability, you had to submit a financial statement that was fully verified. Verification included having a Revenue Officer rummage through the house looking for hidden assets. That practice ended decades ago.
2. The collection of taxes by seizing personal property, including going through your house looking for assets, can happen. It requires a judge to grant an entry order and a pre-existing liability. That sort of thing can happen year after year to delinquents for as long as they remain delinquent. But times have changed. A writ of entry to enter a private home (as opposed to the premises of a business) was always incredibly rare; I haven't heard of one being granted in the last decade.
3. Special Agents can rummage through the house in pursuit of a criminal investigation, pursuant to a search warrant. That's about as far from a simple tax audit as you can imagine.
I don't have enough information to make a judgement, but it certainly sounds like your uncle had more going on than just an audit. If he has any old paperwork, take a look at it. If the noob you refer to had the title of "Revenue Agent" then maybe it was an audit and something was happening that I've never heard of. But if said noob bore the title "Revenue Officer" or "Special Agent," then it wasn't an audit.
There is still an active contention that the IRS is illegal under the 16th amendment
You forgot to add "by wackjobs, flim-flam men, and the self-deluded."
there are also several active movements to repeal the 16th amendment
In all honesty, because I really mean this: Good luck with that. Actually repealing the amendment is the only real, legal way to destroy income taxes and if that's your goal and you can be successful, more power to you. But for the gp to just declare the the IRS is illegal is not just trolling, it's not even smart trolling.
At the IRS, we keenly appreciate such irony, especially where audits are concerned. Everyone who works here is audited; it's part of the hiring process. If you're hired right out of college, there's a substantial chance your audit will consist of someone looking at your returns, concluding there's nothing worth looking at, and re-filing them. Thus, some new employees don't even realize they've been audited. But it happens to everyone. When I came aboard, I'd just closed down a Schedule C business with a big loss for the last year of operation. I got the fine-toothed comb treatment.
Everyone at the IRS has empathy for people being audited. That empathy can get a little rusty after years of dealing with bad people. But it's there, nevertheless.
You've managed to (fail to) make an obtuse (frankly, opaque) point about the BATFE by conflating political history from nearly 100 years ago with present-day network design. That's really impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
The os-obsessed person cited in the article as limiting her sex partner options was Violet Blue. Your comment that "the odds of *ever* getting laid are not particularly good for os-obsessed humans" is, in her case, so wrong it's beyond funny.
Violet Blue fans feel free to chime in here.
In Texas, Municipal Utility Districts provide utilities to places that municipalities have yet to reach. If you want to build subdivision out in the middle of nowhere, you can set up a MUD to provide (typically) water service. MUDs have (sort of) public infrastructure (storage tanks, pumping stations, etc.) that needs to be protected, so they have been granted the authority to set up police forces.
Now, here's the deal. There have been a few situation where a subdivision development failed and the MUD ceased operating. It still existed as a legal entity, though. Some creative types then bought the defunct entity for peanuts, went "active", and proceeded to equip their police force with automatic weapons. Really, these were guys who just wanted to own and shoot machine guns but couldn't get through the approval process, something that's impossible if you have a local top cop who, for political reasons, refuses to sign off on your paperwork. (Nothing in federal law compels them; local sherrifs/chiefs of police have, essentially, veto power over whether private citizens within their jurisdiction can own automatic weapons.) Police forces, however, do not have to get any approval from anyone outside their ranks to own such firearms.
It was a neat trick. I remember when it hit the papers some years ago. I don't recall if anyone ever got around to closing that loophole, though.
Rights don't apply to parolees. If you're on parole, you're still under the jurisdiction of the court as if you were in jail. Your parole officer can show up at any time of the day or night to search your house, make you pee in a cup, whatever. You have to do it. If you refuse, you've violated parole and can go back to jail. When you agreed to be paroled, you signed documents agreeing to all this.
That's parole. Remember, parole is supposed to eventually end. At the end of it, you've paid your debt to society and you get to start over with nearly all your rights intact (and the ones you don't have, like voting and owning a gun, can be restored to you if you apply and a judge approves).
The offender lists seek to make parolee status permanent, turning all sentences into life sentences.
I really don't know how this passes constitutional muster. I was heartbroken when I learned, upon the enacting of an offender registry law (the memory is dim and I don't remember when or where it was), how a not inconsiderable number of now-quite-old men who had gotten (essentially) tickets for homosexual solicitation back in the 1950s had to register themselves as sex offenders so as to make themselves available to be publicly reviled.
Offender registration and tracking is evil. It's understandable; in some cases, it's probably prevented something terrible from happening. But it's still, on balance, evil. There must be a better way.
Thanks. I've never heard of Cherry but I'll definitely check 'em out.
I don't know where he got his info, but I did find this dated August 2008. Quoting, in part:
That's a common issue. If you follow the mailing lists to which computer forensic examiners subscribe, you'll see that there's a lot of tension over this issue. The authorities feel that if they give the defense full, normal, private access to the evidence, they (the government) will be releasing child porn. They don't want to put themselves in that position.
Sometimes wires get crossed badly when prosecutors give access but don't get any buy-in from local cops. There have been a couple of cases in the U.K. where forensics examiners hired by the defense have been raided for suspicion of possession of child porn when the source of the porn was files that had been released by the prosecutors to the defense attorneys. This whole area of the law is something around which high weirdness commonly swirls.
One side note: H. Louis Sirkin is defense counsel for one of the Webe principals. If you know free speech cases, that name should ring a bell.
I realize that I'm an old guy and the fact that I learned to type on a manual typewriter makes my viewpoints potentially dismissable. However, I have a fond keyboard memory.
About 25 years ago, Panasonic made a "wedge" typewriter. If you've ever seen one, you'll know what I mean. It was a very large office model. The keys had nearly zero feel and medium travel. At the end of their travel, they stopped like tapping your fingers on a granite block.
I have no idea how Panasonic managed it, but even with zero apparent resistance, I never "over-typed" on it. The keys returned to their rest positions without delay, never causing me to lose feel.
I could consistently do over 100 wpm on that keyboard. That was way faster than my norm.
Mercy, I loved that thing. If there were a similar computer keyboard, I'd pay well over $100 for it.
Now, that's funny. Thanks. I needed a laugh about now. (And the Simpson's reference was a great way to cap off your post, too.)
You have a seriously important point, there. I wonder if there's any organization that helps out in those cases. Do you know of any?
OTOH, firearms did work for the American revolutionaries, the Afghans against the Russians, and the WW2 vets who fought for fair elections at the Battle of Athens, TN.
Revolutions are tricky business. You only start them as a last resort and your chances of success are lousy. But they are a basic human right and you need guns to carry them out.
Any government that restricts gun ownership is trying to preemptively stave off certain problems such as street violence and revolution. The motivation to do that can be good (a genuine concern for public safety) or they can be evil (plans to take over some day may be thwarted by an armed populace).
I'm not willing to bet everything on the good intentions of my legislators. I'd like to have a bit of a reserve. And I look askance at anyone who would take it away from me.
As for your sentence decrying the militarization of the police in America - that's a huge problem. Just huge. Don't get me started...
Good question. Last I heard, the case was still hanging in limbo.
They had to get a conviction of Pierson for supplying child porn before they could make a case against Webe for selling it. Pierson eventually pled guilty to just one count after initially being charged with producing 60 pictures picked from the thousands upon thousands he had supplied to Webe.
I always assumed the Webe case would hang out there until the prosecution offered some deal to make it all go away quietly. Their case is crap, after all.
I'll do some research from home and post back if I find out anything before this topic is locked.
That's, imo, a hugely insightful question. My answer is also just my opinion.
I believe we lost that point (defining CP as absolutely requiring that a child had to be raped to make it) when we criminalized simple possession. The problem is we didn't know we had lost anything when we did that.
In the context of the time, criminalizing simple possession was obviously the right thing to do. Back then, the only way to get CP was to buy it. If you possessed it, you had to have bought it. If you bought it, you were giving money to people to encourage them to rape children. That's bad, no matter how you look at it.
Nowadays, things have radically changed. Most CP isn't bought; it's found. Most CP isn't made for monetary profit; it's made by kids messing around and by adults who are seeking self-validation for their perversion by producing and releasing the material. Thus, possessing CP no longer encourages it to be made. If we were just now getting around to outlawing it, we probably wouldn't because outlawing possession no longer has any real purpose, i.e. outlawing possession no longer does anything to encourage or discourage production.
In response to this, lots of other justifications have come along to keep possession illegal. There's the grooming argument; pervs can show their porn to little kids, thus convincing the kids that this behavior is normal. There's also the "continuing rape" theory that says children in CP are raped again, mentally, every time someone looks at the CP in which they appear. That second argument is just goofy-stupid and I dismiss it out of hand. The first argument, however, probably has some small (very small) merit and is enough for me to argue that no change in the legal prohibition against possession is necessary.
The problems arise when we accept any of these arguments *separately* from the original requirement that kids have to be raped to produce the stuff. If, for example, we accept that the possession of any material that can be used to groom children for abuse should be legally proscribed, then we are forced to look the other way when the forces of anti-freedom start outlawing anything they claim can be used for that purpose. They can outlaw text, drawings, photos - literally anything - if we allow the argument that anything that has the potential for misuse should be outlawed.
Since we, as a society, have accepted that the definition of CP no longer requires children to be hurt, we have opened the floodgates. Anything that a legislator considers icky enough can be outlawed. Anything that offends a prosecutor can get you arrested. Thus, things that were previously just dismissed as being, at worst, in bad taste can now result in people doing jail time. Take a picture of kids in the bath or your 10-year-old topless on the beach while vacationing in Brazil? You're risking your freedom. Use a computer to make a picture of some non-existent person who's apparently short and undeveloped? Same story. All a prosecutor has to do is convince a jury you got some kind of sick jollies from the process of creation and, wham-bam, you're in jail.
If you want to define an exact point in time, you should probably look to the early-1980s U.S. Supreme Court case where a film showing shirtless boys counting money on a bed while an adult male got dressed in the background was found to be CP. Given the overall context of the case and the implication of the film that the boys had just been paid for sex, the court held that neither nudity or sexual activity was necessary for the harmful-to-kids production of child porn. Really, though, it was a long process to get to this point. Short of Barack's oldest girl making a porn vid with her best friend and releasing it to the world, I can't imagine anything that could awaken the general populace to the notion that you really shouldn't call something child porn unless it involves grown-ups physically abusing little kids.
Any broader definition is an invitation to rampant irrationality. Just like we have now.
I've never understood why those two camps don't join forces. I'm in both (I'm pro-free speech and pro-gun rights) but I find very few people who are like me. I've spent a lot of time talking to porn producers and they tend to think of gun owners as a bunch of rednecks that they don't want to associate with. My gun owning friends tend to think of porn producers as sleazy, Godless pervs that they don't want to associate with. Both groups seem to dislike each other intensely on a personal basis.
Both groups are fighting for freedom. They really ought to get together. They have far more in common than they realize.
If you're an oldster or a lawyer of the sort who can quote Dost, this may be sad but it isn't surprising.
For you young 'uns out there, listen up for a history lesson.
For a very long time in the U.S., child porn was legal. Admittedly, this point can be argued. Some say it was always illegal because it was always obscene. However, it wasn't prosecuted because the possibility existed that it could be produced in a way that was not obscene. Whether it was technically legal or illegal isn't important. The practical matter is that it wasn't prosecuted, wasn't specifically prohibited, and was easily available to anyone who wanted to send off a money order or walk into a big city adult book store.
IN the mid 1970s, the first laws were passed that said it was illegal. First amendment concerns surfaced but those were beaten back with the argument that producing it required that a crime be committed by an adult against a child. You couldn't produce child porn without actually raping a child. By the early 1980s, it was pretty much illegal everywhere in the U.S., though simple possession didn't get outlawed everywhere, uniformly until then. Even now, there have been major nations that didn't outlaw simple possession until recently. Simple possession didn't become illegal in Brazil, for example, until this year.
The U.S., though, was a different case. By the mid to late 1980s, the stuff had been mostly stamped out. In fact, immediately before the rise of the ubiquitous home internet connection, nearly all child porn sold in the U.S. was actually sold by the United States Postal Service as a part of sting operations.
In some of the early court decisions, the first amendment concerns were dismissed with the explicit allowance that depictions of underage sex for artistic purposes could continue unhindered as long as the actors involved were of age. At the time, the example often cited was "The Last Picture Show."
Since then, things have gradually changed from the sensible to the insane. The changes have been far too many and too complex to outline here and each change has been rather gradual. As the law now stands (IANAL, etc.) literally any picture of a child can be considered porn if a prosecutor can convince a jury that it was produced or possessed for prurient purposes. Nudity is not required. Sexual activity is not required. Prosecutors are willing to proceed on the flimsiest basis when motivated by stupidity or politics, sometimes successfully (the Pierson case, as a lead-in to prosecuting WebeWeb), sometimes unsuccessfully (as in the attempt in Oklahoma to criminalize the highly regarded movie "The Tin Drum.")
I'm not a big fan of Paul Little (the few minutes I've spent with him on several occasions convinced me that he's an ultimately harmless boor) but he should not be looking at jail time. Yet in this (U.S.) society, all rationality has flown right out the window where this subject is concerned.
Here are my two main points (and, incidentally, this is why I know so much about the subject):
1. If you value civil liberties, you need to know about child porn. It's the boogey man, just like "commies" back in the 1950s, that is used as an excuse to build freedom-destroying infrastructure into our laws and communications systems.
2. The original definition of child porn that justified outlawing it included one central tenet - that producing it requires adults to rape children. Nowadays, a large (probably the overwhelming majority) of child porn is produced by children for the consumption of children and there are no adults involved at any stage. If you have a 12-year-old with a web cam in their room or a digital camera built into their cell phone, there is a much-larger-than-you'd-like-to-admit possibility that you're providing a home for a child porn production studio.
Combine those two things and we're looking at a situation where child porn can be used to criminalize a huge portion of the populace. Forgive me for drawing parallels where
As some of the other posters have pointed out, it's a good idea to turn on your signal a bit earlier than when you know you can move over.
In practice, I think that's the best compromise, though I tend to wait until I've gone far enough ahead that I think I'm actually going to be able to move to the right. You never know when the guy to your right is going to turn out to be one of those jerks who accelerates to prevent you from coming over. That's happened to me plenty of times.
The old driver's ed way would have us wait even later but if you do that, BoySpeedRacer is going to try to slalom through the gap behind you.
There's no good solution except for the guy behind to stop tailgating; we know that'll never happen.
Absolutely never when conditions permit.
Unfortunately, my high-speed driving is on freeways in Houston where the early morning commute on Beltway 8 is at near-max capacity (all lanes must be in use) with packs of cars going 70-80mph, generally just one car length apart. That environment seems to breed an endless supply of folks who think that any vehicle moving less than 10 miles over the limit is just another cone on an autocross course, to be flown by at the closest possible distance.
True story: A couple of months ago, I was doing 70 in the left lane. A car comes flying up behind me so I increase speed a bit and look for a gap I can move into to my right. The dude behind me is so incensed that someone has the audacity to not ram his way into an unsafe gap to the right just to get out of his way, he pulls to the *left* and passes me on the shoulder. He uses the debris-littered, narrow, bumpy shoulder to hit about 90 mph.
With idiots like that running around, forgive me if I just decide to revert back to doing it the way they taught me in driver's ed 35 years ago. My attitude is less charitable than it used to be. I simply can't justify forcing myself to drive like a dangerous idiot just to keep from pissing off someone who thinks the rules of the road should apply to everyone *except* them.
Actually, I do. I tend to turn on the signal about halfway between the time I move past the car on my right and the time I anticipate moving over. Unfortunately, that means there's usually about a car length plus a foot or two between my rear bumper and the front bumper of the car to my right. That's about the time that boy speed racer hits the gas, closes to within six inches of my rear bumper, and jerks to the right.
There's just no winning. A little thought toward helping *everyone* maintain a safe cushion around their vehicle is pooh-poohed by the jerks on the road. And there seems to be an endless supply of jerks.
Please stop talking about things you obviously haven't thought through and don't understand.
If I pass then move over after just two car lengths, I've pretty much demonstrated the classic definition of cutting someone off. The only result is that they are then caused to either tailgate me or unexpectedly slow down, potentially causing a problem for the person behind them. Just because the guy flying up my butt is anxious is no reason for me to be a dick. His tailgating means we have two cars in an unsafe relationship and if we have a wreck we can at least have a hope of confining it to one lane. But if I try to get out of Mr. Speedracer's way by cutting off the guy in the lane next to me, we now have two unsafe maneuvers happening at the same time instead of one and I've involved another car and another lane in our potential accident. Bad news. Just because the guy behind me is stupid doesn't mean I want to join him in endangering my fellow motorists.
When I pass, I wait until I can see both headlights of the car I passed in my rearview mirror. Then I signal and move over. Anyone who thinks I wait too long to move over or who, worse, tries to shoot through the gap between us is an incompetent menace.
I've done a bit more reading about it and it will be useful. It's not the all-in-one solution I need, but it will certainly help. Thanks for your thoughts.
I'm happy your eyes are still good. Presbyopia hit me like a hammer a couple of years ago (I'm 48) and, to the extent possible, I need pretty much everything to be as big and readable as possible. I can no longer work with high resolutions unless the screens are gigantic or I'm willing to strain hard for short periods, as might be the case when I'm editing a photo.
You will not see the need for a large monitor with lower resolution in 11 months. But someday you'll find yourself squinting at your display and you'll realize "Oh, so this is what those old farts were talking about. Now I understand."
From your article:
Did you ever find anything better? Fdupes, according to their web page, requires the user to specify directories. I need something that searches the entire machine and defines dupes carefully, giving me a choice to move or delete individual files or groups of files or their directories when the files are verified as dupes by name, date, size, and checksum or any combination thereof. Something that would also do some fuzzy searching via file and directory name would be even better. So far, I've found nothing.
Nice article, btw. I hope the followup reports continuing success.
It's about time they made 20" LCD's with a 1280x1024 resolution for people over the age of 40 who use it as a tool and not a hobby.
This is some smart thinking. As much as I'd like to have a one of those 24" NEC monitors that's optimized for photographers (I used to be a photographer and am very critical about displays for photographs. Everything I can afford sucks.), my ideal would be a three-monitor setup: one for photos, one for dual-use gaming and productivity apps, and one as you describe just for getting my work done. I'd prefer they all be 24-inchers, though.
There are lots of 19-inch monitors with 1280x1024 native resolution. Check pricewatch.com to find lots of really cheap refurbs. Newegg has plenty of new ones.
Frankly, I don't know if this is a bad thing. We've been saying for years that everyone needs to encrypt everything by default and it hasn't happened because "normal" people don't see the need for their "normal" traffic.
Take Freenet as an example. It's never reached critical mass and there's little worthwhile content (as of the last time I checked; I gave up on it some time back). But what happens if people can't get their torrents to work and all their mules and limes and kazaas stop working? Freenet with Frost needs just a decent installer package and enough users so that it scales up to reasonable speed. If that happened, how would that get filtered? Would the govt demand the blocking of everything that's encrypted? I can imagine some big players in the e-commerce game might have a thought or two on that subject.
I don't use bittorrent or any emule/kazaa-like applications, but I think I've read that they all can be configured to encrypt all transfers.
If governments want to stop "bad" traffic, they should realize that the tools are available for it to all go underground and flourish in ways the govt can't effectively monitor, much less censor. Are governments really stupid enough to hasten that situation?
I think so. Whether it's Freenet, some other encrypted environment, or just encryption on top of currently popular protocols, part of me welcomes the censorship because I know it will finally start moving people to protect their communications. I think that's a good thing that will come from all this censorsip silliness.
And to think - If the music industry had just bought out Napster and and used it to its potential, how many man-millenia of labor could have been put to productive use instead of wasted in stupid cat 'n mouse games?
How long ago was this? And were the people doing the work Revenue Agents, Revenue Officers, or Special Agents?
I don't mean to be arcane, but there's a big difference between a tax audit, even an intrusive one, and the kinds of things that require "rummaging through the house." Rummaging through the house == a lot more than an audit. I can think of only a few things that warrant that sort of treatment.
1. Many, many years ago if you wanted to compromise a tax liability, you had to submit a financial statement that was fully verified. Verification included having a Revenue Officer rummage through the house looking for hidden assets. That practice ended decades ago.
2. The collection of taxes by seizing personal property, including going through your house looking for assets, can happen. It requires a judge to grant an entry order and a pre-existing liability. That sort of thing can happen year after year to delinquents for as long as they remain delinquent. But times have changed. A writ of entry to enter a private home (as opposed to the premises of a business) was always incredibly rare; I haven't heard of one being granted in the last decade.
3. Special Agents can rummage through the house in pursuit of a criminal investigation, pursuant to a search warrant. That's about as far from a simple tax audit as you can imagine.
I don't have enough information to make a judgement, but it certainly sounds like your uncle had more going on than just an audit. If he has any old paperwork, take a look at it. If the noob you refer to had the title of "Revenue Agent" then maybe it was an audit and something was happening that I've never heard of. But if said noob bore the title "Revenue Officer" or "Special Agent," then it wasn't an audit.
Because it is a troll.
You forgot to add "by wackjobs, flim-flam men, and the self-deluded."
In all honesty, because I really mean this: Good luck with that. Actually repealing the amendment is the only real, legal way to destroy income taxes and if that's your goal and you can be successful, more power to you. But for the gp to just declare the the IRS is illegal is not just trolling, it's not even smart trolling.
At the IRS, we keenly appreciate such irony, especially where audits are concerned. Everyone who works here is audited; it's part of the hiring process. If you're hired right out of college, there's a substantial chance your audit will consist of someone looking at your returns, concluding there's nothing worth looking at, and re-filing them. Thus, some new employees don't even realize they've been audited. But it happens to everyone. When I came aboard, I'd just closed down a Schedule C business with a big loss for the last year of operation. I got the fine-toothed comb treatment.
Everyone at the IRS has empathy for people being audited. That empathy can get a little rusty after years of dealing with bad people. But it's there, nevertheless.
You've managed to (fail to) make an obtuse (frankly, opaque) point about the BATFE by conflating political history from nearly 100 years ago with present-day network design. That's really impressive.