I certainly don't agree with the ethics of specific members of the government. Some of them I might describe personally as being "evil" or "unethical", though in the majority of cases I suspect "misguided", "paranoid" or "incompetent" would probably be a fairer assessment. But I think you have to consider that even central government is made up of individuals, and even a corrupt and/or broken system is ultimately designed by one or more individuals, though other individuals are later called upon to be the agents of its enforcement.
When you start getting collective decision-making then sometimes the views and preferences of some of the individuals involved are going to be suppressed, and while they may still be expected to take collective responsibility for their collective decisions, it doesn't make much sense to judge them as individuals based only on such criteria. Central government is a fine example of this: while I do not personally agree with all of the policies of any of the major political parties in my country, I have great respect for certain specific members of several of those parties (even some drawn from parties that are natural adversaries on the political landscape) because of the personal views they have expressed on issues that I consider important, and because of the way that they have conducted themselves in accordance with those views as much as they can within the practical limitations of the current system (or, occasionally, left that system if they felt they could not conduct themselves in reasonable accordance with their views).
On the flip side, there are also specific individuals in our central government who I believe are so screwed up in their stated values and intent that I would prefer them not to be in any position of authority regardless of their affiliation to any particular political party, even if I agree with the party's collective opinion on a certain issue. Collective decision-making can suppress opinions I disagree with as well as those I agree with, and again, I think we must consider the individuals on their own merits when making ethical judgements.
So I think we have to separate judgements on the system that has been produced collectively (which is just an objective situation, with no ethics in its own right; it merely is) from judgements on the people who are the architects of the system (who have their own personal morals and values, some of which may be suppressed by the groupthink, whether for better or for worse).
That was a charming rant, but you seem to have misunderstood my argument. I am not claiming that the government is evil. A corporate body like that arguably cannot in itself be evil. I merely claim that they are systemically incompetent, including by allowing fear and paranoia to cloud their judgement. This has resulted in the creation of a legal system and official bodies to enforce it that are not in the interests of the people the government is supposedly there to represent.
As for the use of the word "murder"... A systematic operation was underway, involving large numbers of agents of the system who have powers in law that most of us do not, in which clearly there was an assumption that lethal force might be required. It was hardly an accident that people went out with guns and an evident willingness to use them. Moreover, that operation resulted in an innocent man being shot repeatedly in the head at point blank range, ending his life. No one individual was responsible or committed murder in their own right — I am not arguing that the officers who fired were committing murder, for example — but a broken system murdered a man as surely as if you or I had gone out in the street and shot him ourselves. While individuals involved must be held accountable for their personal role in what happened — and that may or may not imply that any degree of penalty is appropriate — the most important thing is that the broken system must be fixed.
What really nauseates me is the number of officials who have been attempting to justify that broken system based on fear and paranoia in recent weeks. Almost the only officers who have given evidence at the inquest and retained any dignity appear to be those who fired the fatal shots or in the immediate vicinity, who seemed to show genuine remorse. The senior officers, in contrast, have uttered little but CYA sound-bites and weasel words, just like the government use when arguing for further broken systems.
So yes, in both my argument and the government's, there was biased language. I don't know how you think anyone can make any serious argument in a totally emotionally detached way with completely neutral language. The difference is that the key facts in my case are not in dispute: an innocent man is dead, because the official system and its agents killed him. The "facts" used by the government to justify the existence of that system and those agents are very much in dispute. And that is sufficient to justify outright opposition to any further steps that would break the system even more, regardless of any ethical basis there might be for calling the government or anyone in it "evil".
But, in many respects, software today is in a different world to 20 years ago. Programming languages have moved on immensely, both in theory and in practice. Usability of end user software has improved greatly in many respects. The Internet was barely a dream at that time.
Plenty of scope for improvement has been identified in the old-style text editors, OS models and DB theory as well, but for some reason possibly connected with a small number of very large software businesses, the world seems stuck in a time warp in these areas.
It would be tragic to think that bad habits from 20 years ago would be inflicted on a new generation.
The tragic thing is that the new generation are still using 20-year-old ideas for operating systems, databases, text editors and the like, because nothing that's coming along since has managed to do much better.
I hate to break this to you, but V wasn't exactly the first person to say that...
Personally, I would like to think that we are still some way from needing to blow up the Palace of Westminster or physically attack Downing Street, but I do look forward to watching the current lot get the boot at the next general election.
On the one hand, I fear that Conservatives will end up doing just as bad things sooner or later. But they have said they will scrap the compulsory National ID card and database system - if Labour get in next election, that's here to stay for certain.
I doubt it, but if Labour get in next election and are stupid enough to try to push it through I suspect we will see mass violence on our streets for the first time in a generation. I get the feeling that there really are enough people who feel strongly enough about these issues to stand up, be counted, and if need be, literally fight for their freedom. No matter how authoritarian the government may think it can be, you can't arrest and lock up a few million angry citizens, assuming the individuals in the police and court services even supported the government under such circumstances.
The political system in the UK is broken, there is no choice, there are two main parties, neither of which are interested in the country or the population.
As unrepresentative as our first-past-the-post system can be, your vote for a smaller party can still count for something here (unlike places like the US, which really does seem to be a 99.9% two-party system). The whole "I live in a safe seat, my vote doesn't count" argument is bunk.
For one thing, there is no such thing as a safe seat: where I live, the Labour MP had a very strong margin, but lost most of her majority the following time after stabbing a significant chunk of her electorate in the back, and then got removed by a huge margin the time after that. She was not removed by a Tory, either. There are several parties in the UK with a surprisingly large amount of popular support for the relatively few seats where they come first: the Lib Dems, Scottish National Party, etc. Sometimes, first-past-the-post does work in their favour, because a relatively small swing away from one of the larger parties might be all it takes to change the colour of a seat in Parliament.
This is because you don't get any roll over from votes at the past election. Everyone starts from zero, every time. Sure, the incumbent often attracts some additional weight simply by being the incumbent, but that only counts if their supporters show up and vote. (On this basis, I consider that political parties that send around election advertising claiming that "Only X and Y parties can win this seat!" should be held accountable for making a false claim under the misleading advertising rules just as anyone else would be.)
One need only look at the US election results to see how unrealistic this "safe" idea is: how many "safe" states changed colour (color?;-)) earlier this week, after many years of voting the other way?
The sad thing is that people like you, who don't like status quo but refuse to vote to change it, are the reason why the "safe seat" myths persist. For noble reasons, you are doing exactly the wrong thing. Instead, may I suggest that you at least show up on election day and spoil your ballot if you really see no-one you wish to vote for? This prevents claptrap about how the government of the day has the implicit support of anyone who didn't show up and the like, and makes it very clear to potential future candidates that there was someone willing to cast a vote who found no-one to represent their views this time.
I generally do vote for someone in any major election, but for the locals there are sometimes only a few candidates who aren't as strongly aligned with their given party's principles as candidates for the major positions (primarily MPs in this country). In these cases, I have sometimes disagreed strongly enough with the position of each candidate that I would not vote for any of them, but I still showed up, and wrote a suitable one-liner across my ballot expressing my displeasure and the fact that someone could have had this vote, which I know party reps at the counting will have seen.
Trouble is, the idiots won't listen to sense, so we'll have to wait until the next election to vote in another lot of idiots who may or may not be as stupid as this lot.
It's hard to believe that even the current lot of Tories would be as odious and unprincipled at the current Labour lot. At least a few of the top-rankers under Cameron appear to have some sense of integrity and decency left that isn't just written into their scripts by spin doctors.
Compare and contrast with the likes of Geoff "I'd undermine civil liberties quite a long way actually" Hoon, Tony "don't help an old lady being beaten up in the street, just call the police" McNulty, and the most authoritarian succession of Home Secretaries in living memory, and it really is hard to see how anything Cameron's lot are planning could make things worse without outright reneging on fundamental promises. Even Jack Straw doesn't seem so bad, looking at who came after him.
The tragic thing is that there have been a few individuals at the top of both of the largest parties who actually did seem to have real principles, and even if you didn't always agree with their politics, you could respect them for trying to do the right thing with good intentions. Most of them have resigned from the front bench or died before their time.
But isn't this what legal systems call "assuming facts not in evidence"?
I graduated from a well-known university, and I met some very clever people there, far smarter than I am. I expect that some of those people were at least approached by the security services, and maybe some of them actually joined. However, I rather doubt that those of them who remained in academia have suddenly become less smart than those who signed up. If the academic community hasn't developed and published research into, say, breaking well-established encryption algorithms other than by brute force, then I'm inclined to think that the government hasn't developed such techniques either, certainly not for all of the algorithms in use. It's just not credible that even a secretive government intelligence organisation with its hands in many pies could silence the entire academic community without any leak. Governments just aren't that competent.
In any case, the evidence against them is pretty damning. Look at the picture of systematic incompetence that has emerged over the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in recent weeks. Recall that the biggest terrorist attacks in recent history occurred just a few years ago and no-one picked up all the warning signs. Notice that while serving government ministers and senior figures in the police and security services are quick to claim the need for these sweeping powers, they have plenty of critics who have also been in privileged positions and would have had access to the same secret information about the real picture that the government has but we as average citizens do not. Look at the results of trials of the technology the government are actually installing in places like airports, or planning to use with the ID card scheme. Do we really believe that this is all an elaborate ruse to hide the true capabilities, and remarkably not a single person involved in the process at any level has leaked even a hint to the contrary?
If the threat were really as great as the government makes out and the government really had reliable means to fight it, these sorts of things wouldn't be happening. But of course it's very easy to claim that they have secret knowledge none of us have, and we mere citizens don't understand what terrible things might happen, and we should just trust them. Such is the politics of fear, which must be opposed at every turn of the dark path down which it leads us.
This sounds like typical hyperbole in a Slashdot summary based on a typical Daily Mail scare article. Try reading a more balanced report from the Beeb.
If you follow that link, you will find that the data was all encrypted, and the memory stick should never have been removed from the contractor's premises. According to the official statements, security was never compromised (though access to the government service's web interface was temporarily suspended). And it's not some nasty central database to spy on everyone, it's a useful system that allows you to do things like filing your tax return on-line rather than messing around with lots of paperwork — one of the few IT projects our government actually seems to have got right!
This was just one guy working for a contractor who screwed up by not following protocol, and assuming the data really was properly encrypted, the security procedures have done their job to mitigate the damage. There is nothing to see here. Please move along, and spend your time worrying about the numerous cases where data really has been compromised and the numerous databases that really don't need to exist.
And yet, by exactly the same argument, common sense should revolt at the idea that I can't walk from my own back yard through to the shops via my neighbours' back yards, nor they to the main road through mine. In days long ago, man had no concept of private property, and anyone was free to walk to the river to fetch water or walk to the woods to go hunting by the most convenient route. At some point, society started to recognise the concepts of private property, a home, a personal space. It is actually rather disappointing that a non-argument based on unspecified public good and "common sense" is the basis for such a fundamental court judgement.
Copyright infringement is not theft, is not "piracy", and file-sharing is not automatically copyright infringement
The term "piracy" has been used to refer to this sort of behaviour since centuries before computers were invented. Instead of spending your time writing incorrect comments on Slashdot, may I recommend consulting an etymological dictionary and learning something?
Please be careful in the descriptions you give here. There are (at least, to my knowledge) two kinds of permission you would need to run the sorts of businesses you're talking about in the UK. There are the copyright-related ones (typically handled via blanket licensing through PPL and/or PRS) and the local ones like planning permission and public entertainment licensing (typically handled by your local council).
As someone with extensive experience running a very large local dance club, I know that neither the PPL nor the PRS fees are likely to be a significant barrier to a local business of the kind you're describing: for the kind of thing you're talking about, you could probably cover the annual fees with a single night's bar takings, which considering that you have no music night or dance class at all without using lots of someone else's work (the music) doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
The sort of thing you're talking about sounds more like a greedy local authority extorting cash via public entertainment licensing or something similar. That sucks, but it's nothing to do with the various copyright licensing agencies.
You know you are getting old when your instinct is to argue with that.
Actually, the older I get, the more strongly I believe in opposing measures like that [the curfew].
Whether or not any one person enjoys or otherwise benefits from something is not the point, and must never be allowed to become the point. The important thing is that everyone should be free, by default, to do absolutely anything they like. Restrictions should only ever be imposed by law on behaviour that is actually harmful in some way, and any restrictions that are imposed should only ever be proportionate to the harm that would be done.
This is probably the important principle of any fair justice system, because without it, governments are free to set arbitrary laws for their own political (or worse) purposes. This leads to blanket laws, such as (to pick some common, controversial examples): speed limits and banning mobile phones while driving, instead of prosecuting dangerous or inconsiderate driving; trying to ban whole electronic communications networks, rather than either going after people who abuse those networks to infringe copyright or mandating restrictions on the networks that are reasonable and consistent with prohibiting just the illegal behaviour; or, as in this case, restricting the freedoms of a whole group of people on account of the unacceptable behaviour of a small minority (which is effectively guilt by association).
In each of those cases, the law probably does do some good, in the sense that it does inhibit harmful behaviour by some people. The problem is the collateral damage: the law also catches people whose behaviour would not have been harmful and punishes them anyway, which is unjust. Of course, it's easier to impose blanket laws, both for enforcement (increasingly mechanically; whatever happened to "man shall not be judged by machine"?) and for scoring political points ("Speed kills! Look, we imposed a new low limit to make the road safer outside your home, so now your kids don't have to stop, look and listen before they cross").
Let us not set the rules of our society based on the pathology of the lowest of the low.
OK, I picked an obviously extreme example to try to make the point, but I happen to agree with your principle above, so let us consider some more subtle but still rather damaging forms of speech.
Do you believe one business should be able to pass off its goods as those of another, trading on their reputation? For example, do you believe trademarks should not be legally protected?
What about defamation? If someone maliciously circulates false information about a high profile public figure, and the public figure then loses their job and sees their reputation suffer through no fault of their own, do you believe the person who circulated the information is innocent of all wrong-doing?
What about false advice? We have established credentials for those who practice in fields such as medicine and engineering. Should someone who has not earned the usual qualifications be allowed to pretend they have and practise accordingly?
Those three examples coincidentally all relate to disseminating false information, as does the classic "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" example, but we could also consider issues like harassment, so the deception part isn't the only problem.
These are all things that are illegal in most jurisdictions that I know about, and for good reasons. And yet, all of them probably violate an absolute principle of free speech. Personally, I don't have a problem with that.
I do believe in protecting certain forms of speech. For example, I believe anyone must be free to criticise the state without fear of retaliation by any element of the state, and I have no problem with enshrining that particular right in law. I have grave reservations about things like barring political speech by certain people who are declared arbitrarily by the government to be the bad guys. But this freedom of political speech is more specific than allowing anyone to say anything without regard to the negative consequences for any other private individual or organisation.
Please be careful: you're reading things into my post that aren't there.
I didn't say that anonymity is never appropriate, nor that anyone should be able to access details about everyone just because they want to. Unless something I write here actually breaks the law, no-one needs to know who I really am, for example. Likewise, in your scenario, there is no reason someone who blows the whistle on a company with the appropriate legal authorities need necessarily be identified automatically, though one has to be very careful with the idea of allowing anonymous evidence in court for the same basic reasons on which I'm basing my whole argument.
But that's different to saying that, in a specific case, having established reasonable grounds for proceeding, a court of competent authority should not be able to hold me to account for my actions as they would in any other medium.
(And for the record, that is again different from saying that any executive branch of the government should have either a database they can trawl arbitrarily or the right to secure such information from other sources without appropriate independent oversight.)
While I may not agree with what you say I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
Well, on that absolute principle, there is nothing wrong with someone making a public offer of a reward for shooting you dead, so "to the death" is perhaps an apt summary.
I don't believe that in our current semi-police sate it is feasible to exercise the right to free speech without at least the option of anonymity.
If that is true, then perhaps the time has come to move onto the next of the four boxes. This is, IME, usually the point where my opinions seem to diverge from the "purist" (for lack of a better word) free speech advocates: if you are in a culture where political words can no longer be spoken freely and with attribution because of fear of reprisals by the state, then I tend to think that merely speaking words is probably insufficient to fix the problem.
Was his personal information in that file? Did he have reason to believe that the school district was not properly protecting his personal information?
If he has legitimate reason to believe that, then he should be approaching the relevant authorities with his concerns. But "I tried to crack your network and succeeded" isn't exactly legitimate grounds.
If so, was he testing to make sure nobody else could steal his identity?
I don't know. Neither do you, I suspect, and neither would the court hearing his case.
Does it matter anyway? What was he going to do if he really was testing for this purpose and discovered that his information was vulnerable, shout and stamp his foot? If you couldn't trust the relevant authorities enough to act on reasonable suspicions as above, why would you expect to get any better result just because you cracked their network?
If there's not an exception for stuff like that in computer crime laws, there should be.
Why? What possible practical benefit could it bring?
There are useful things the law can do in cases like this, but I submit that penalising those who are insufficiently careful with data should be the priority.
I've somehow got my name in a database of a realty company that I've never used here in the city, and I know for a fact that they have a WEP encrypted network, because I've warned them about it before.
It's intriguing that you know the networking protocols and database contents of a local company you've never dealt with. Would you like to explain to the rest of us how you came to know those things through some legitimate mechanism?
You never had fair use rights in the US. You only ever had an affirmative defence. The distinction is rather significant in cases like this.
Not that I agree with the anti-circumvention principle, but if you're going to make an argument about the legal situation, I suggest that it will normally be more credible if you start from where we are and not where you'd like us to be.
The fact that is dissociates action from responsibility, and in this context, allows the speaker to break the law with impunity.
I don't believe in absolute free speech either — and neither does any contemporary legal system that I know of — but in any case, if something is important enough to broadcast to the world like this, then it is important enough to put your name to.
Forget that this kid was doing a service to report the flaw, they are more concerned with why the kid was trying to access the site in the first place.
OK, I know Slashdot is collectively in holier-than-thou rage over this poor, "innocent" kid, but why was the kid trying to access the site in the first place?
It seems to me that he's not being punished for reporting something, he'd being dealt with because he probably broke the law.
Of course, the officials responsible for the shoddy security and data protection should also be dealt with under whatever laws apply in that jurisdiction. But that doesn't excuse a kid who actively went on a fishing expedition. The end cannot be allowed to justify the means in cases like this, or you undermine the basic principle of the laws: you give carte blanche to crackers to have a go at whatever they like, since if they get in, they can just report it and pretend they were doing the world a favour.
Yes you overly cynical fools, there is a big difference and you know it. You're not going to be jailed or beaten for speaking out against the government, provided you don't actively call for violence. This is not the case in much of the world.
It is an absolute. Either you have it 100%, or you don't have it at all.
Indeed. And absolute free speech is a very dangerous thing, hence the numerous laws in place in most jurisdictions that restrict it in cases as diverse as defamation, copyright, incitement to commit murder, and national security. Maybe absolute free speech isn't really what we should be protecting after all?
Yeah, the can of whoop-ass I just opened in Supreme Commander would probably have been considered bad form in real life, too. Admittedly, if I did have the option of flying half a dozen Continentals loaded with Titans and Percivals into the front yard of my nation's current leadership and then letting the bots do their thing, I might have to think long and hard about the ethics of the situation.;-)
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I certainly don't agree with the ethics of specific members of the government. Some of them I might describe personally as being "evil" or "unethical", though in the majority of cases I suspect "misguided", "paranoid" or "incompetent" would probably be a fairer assessment. But I think you have to consider that even central government is made up of individuals, and even a corrupt and/or broken system is ultimately designed by one or more individuals, though other individuals are later called upon to be the agents of its enforcement.
When you start getting collective decision-making then sometimes the views and preferences of some of the individuals involved are going to be suppressed, and while they may still be expected to take collective responsibility for their collective decisions, it doesn't make much sense to judge them as individuals based only on such criteria. Central government is a fine example of this: while I do not personally agree with all of the policies of any of the major political parties in my country, I have great respect for certain specific members of several of those parties (even some drawn from parties that are natural adversaries on the political landscape) because of the personal views they have expressed on issues that I consider important, and because of the way that they have conducted themselves in accordance with those views as much as they can within the practical limitations of the current system (or, occasionally, left that system if they felt they could not conduct themselves in reasonable accordance with their views).
On the flip side, there are also specific individuals in our central government who I believe are so screwed up in their stated values and intent that I would prefer them not to be in any position of authority regardless of their affiliation to any particular political party, even if I agree with the party's collective opinion on a certain issue. Collective decision-making can suppress opinions I disagree with as well as those I agree with, and again, I think we must consider the individuals on their own merits when making ethical judgements.
So I think we have to separate judgements on the system that has been produced collectively (which is just an objective situation, with no ethics in its own right; it merely is) from judgements on the people who are the architects of the system (who have their own personal morals and values, some of which may be suppressed by the groupthink, whether for better or for worse).
That was a charming rant, but you seem to have misunderstood my argument. I am not claiming that the government is evil. A corporate body like that arguably cannot in itself be evil. I merely claim that they are systemically incompetent, including by allowing fear and paranoia to cloud their judgement. This has resulted in the creation of a legal system and official bodies to enforce it that are not in the interests of the people the government is supposedly there to represent.
As for the use of the word "murder"... A systematic operation was underway, involving large numbers of agents of the system who have powers in law that most of us do not, in which clearly there was an assumption that lethal force might be required. It was hardly an accident that people went out with guns and an evident willingness to use them. Moreover, that operation resulted in an innocent man being shot repeatedly in the head at point blank range, ending his life. No one individual was responsible or committed murder in their own right — I am not arguing that the officers who fired were committing murder, for example — but a broken system murdered a man as surely as if you or I had gone out in the street and shot him ourselves. While individuals involved must be held accountable for their personal role in what happened — and that may or may not imply that any degree of penalty is appropriate — the most important thing is that the broken system must be fixed.
What really nauseates me is the number of officials who have been attempting to justify that broken system based on fear and paranoia in recent weeks. Almost the only officers who have given evidence at the inquest and retained any dignity appear to be those who fired the fatal shots or in the immediate vicinity, who seemed to show genuine remorse. The senior officers, in contrast, have uttered little but CYA sound-bites and weasel words, just like the government use when arguing for further broken systems.
So yes, in both my argument and the government's, there was biased language. I don't know how you think anyone can make any serious argument in a totally emotionally detached way with completely neutral language. The difference is that the key facts in my case are not in dispute: an innocent man is dead, because the official system and its agents killed him. The "facts" used by the government to justify the existence of that system and those agents are very much in dispute. And that is sufficient to justify outright opposition to any further steps that would break the system even more, regardless of any ethical basis there might be for calling the government or anyone in it "evil".
But, in many respects, software today is in a different world to 20 years ago. Programming languages have moved on immensely, both in theory and in practice. Usability of end user software has improved greatly in many respects. The Internet was barely a dream at that time.
Plenty of scope for improvement has been identified in the old-style text editors, OS models and DB theory as well, but for some reason possibly connected with a small number of very large software businesses, the world seems stuck in a time warp in these areas.
It would be tragic to think that bad habits from 20 years ago would be inflicted on a new generation.
The tragic thing is that the new generation are still using 20-year-old ideas for operating systems, databases, text editors and the like, because nothing that's coming along since has managed to do much better.
I hate to break this to you, but V wasn't exactly the first person to say that...
Personally, I would like to think that we are still some way from needing to blow up the Palace of Westminster or physically attack Downing Street, but I do look forward to watching the current lot get the boot at the next general election.
On the one hand, I fear that Conservatives will end up doing just as bad things sooner or later. But they have said they will scrap the compulsory National ID card and database system - if Labour get in next election, that's here to stay for certain.
I doubt it, but if Labour get in next election and are stupid enough to try to push it through I suspect we will see mass violence on our streets for the first time in a generation. I get the feeling that there really are enough people who feel strongly enough about these issues to stand up, be counted, and if need be, literally fight for their freedom. No matter how authoritarian the government may think it can be, you can't arrest and lock up a few million angry citizens, assuming the individuals in the police and court services even supported the government under such circumstances.
The political system in the UK is broken, there is no choice, there are two main parties, neither of which are interested in the country or the population.
As unrepresentative as our first-past-the-post system can be, your vote for a smaller party can still count for something here (unlike places like the US, which really does seem to be a 99.9% two-party system). The whole "I live in a safe seat, my vote doesn't count" argument is bunk.
For one thing, there is no such thing as a safe seat: where I live, the Labour MP had a very strong margin, but lost most of her majority the following time after stabbing a significant chunk of her electorate in the back, and then got removed by a huge margin the time after that. She was not removed by a Tory, either. There are several parties in the UK with a surprisingly large amount of popular support for the relatively few seats where they come first: the Lib Dems, Scottish National Party, etc. Sometimes, first-past-the-post does work in their favour, because a relatively small swing away from one of the larger parties might be all it takes to change the colour of a seat in Parliament.
This is because you don't get any roll over from votes at the past election. Everyone starts from zero, every time. Sure, the incumbent often attracts some additional weight simply by being the incumbent, but that only counts if their supporters show up and vote. (On this basis, I consider that political parties that send around election advertising claiming that "Only X and Y parties can win this seat!" should be held accountable for making a false claim under the misleading advertising rules just as anyone else would be.)
One need only look at the US election results to see how unrealistic this "safe" idea is: how many "safe" states changed colour (color? ;-)) earlier this week, after many years of voting the other way?
The sad thing is that people like you, who don't like status quo but refuse to vote to change it, are the reason why the "safe seat" myths persist. For noble reasons, you are doing exactly the wrong thing. Instead, may I suggest that you at least show up on election day and spoil your ballot if you really see no-one you wish to vote for? This prevents claptrap about how the government of the day has the implicit support of anyone who didn't show up and the like, and makes it very clear to potential future candidates that there was someone willing to cast a vote who found no-one to represent their views this time.
I generally do vote for someone in any major election, but for the locals there are sometimes only a few candidates who aren't as strongly aligned with their given party's principles as candidates for the major positions (primarily MPs in this country). In these cases, I have sometimes disagreed strongly enough with the position of each candidate that I would not vote for any of them, but I still showed up, and wrote a suitable one-liner across my ballot expressing my displeasure and the fact that someone could have had this vote, which I know party reps at the counting will have seen.
Trouble is, the idiots won't listen to sense, so we'll have to wait until the next election to vote in another lot of idiots who may or may not be as stupid as this lot.
It's hard to believe that even the current lot of Tories would be as odious and unprincipled at the current Labour lot. At least a few of the top-rankers under Cameron appear to have some sense of integrity and decency left that isn't just written into their scripts by spin doctors.
Compare and contrast with the likes of Geoff "I'd undermine civil liberties quite a long way actually" Hoon, Tony "don't help an old lady being beaten up in the street, just call the police" McNulty, and the most authoritarian succession of Home Secretaries in living memory, and it really is hard to see how anything Cameron's lot are planning could make things worse without outright reneging on fundamental promises. Even Jack Straw doesn't seem so bad, looking at who came after him.
The tragic thing is that there have been a few individuals at the top of both of the largest parties who actually did seem to have real principles, and even if you didn't always agree with their politics, you could respect them for trying to do the right thing with good intentions. Most of them have resigned from the front bench or died before their time.
But isn't this what legal systems call "assuming facts not in evidence"?
I graduated from a well-known university, and I met some very clever people there, far smarter than I am. I expect that some of those people were at least approached by the security services, and maybe some of them actually joined. However, I rather doubt that those of them who remained in academia have suddenly become less smart than those who signed up. If the academic community hasn't developed and published research into, say, breaking well-established encryption algorithms other than by brute force, then I'm inclined to think that the government hasn't developed such techniques either, certainly not for all of the algorithms in use. It's just not credible that even a secretive government intelligence organisation with its hands in many pies could silence the entire academic community without any leak. Governments just aren't that competent.
In any case, the evidence against them is pretty damning. Look at the picture of systematic incompetence that has emerged over the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in recent weeks. Recall that the biggest terrorist attacks in recent history occurred just a few years ago and no-one picked up all the warning signs. Notice that while serving government ministers and senior figures in the police and security services are quick to claim the need for these sweeping powers, they have plenty of critics who have also been in privileged positions and would have had access to the same secret information about the real picture that the government has but we as average citizens do not. Look at the results of trials of the technology the government are actually installing in places like airports, or planning to use with the ID card scheme. Do we really believe that this is all an elaborate ruse to hide the true capabilities, and remarkably not a single person involved in the process at any level has leaked even a hint to the contrary?
If the threat were really as great as the government makes out and the government really had reliable means to fight it, these sorts of things wouldn't be happening. But of course it's very easy to claim that they have secret knowledge none of us have, and we mere citizens don't understand what terrible things might happen, and we should just trust them. Such is the politics of fear, which must be opposed at every turn of the dark path down which it leads us.
This sounds like typical hyperbole in a Slashdot summary based on a typical Daily Mail scare article. Try reading a more balanced report from the Beeb.
If you follow that link, you will find that the data was all encrypted, and the memory stick should never have been removed from the contractor's premises. According to the official statements, security was never compromised (though access to the government service's web interface was temporarily suspended). And it's not some nasty central database to spy on everyone, it's a useful system that allows you to do things like filing your tax return on-line rather than messing around with lots of paperwork — one of the few IT projects our government actually seems to have got right!
This was just one guy working for a contractor who screwed up by not following protocol, and assuming the data really was properly encrypted, the security procedures have done their job to mitigate the damage. There is nothing to see here. Please move along, and spend your time worrying about the numerous cases where data really has been compromised and the numerous databases that really don't need to exist.
And yet, by exactly the same argument, common sense should revolt at the idea that I can't walk from my own back yard through to the shops via my neighbours' back yards, nor they to the main road through mine. In days long ago, man had no concept of private property, and anyone was free to walk to the river to fetch water or walk to the woods to go hunting by the most convenient route. At some point, society started to recognise the concepts of private property, a home, a personal space. It is actually rather disappointing that a non-argument based on unspecified public good and "common sense" is the basis for such a fundamental court judgement.
Copyright infringement is not theft, is not "piracy", and file-sharing is not automatically copyright infringement
The term "piracy" has been used to refer to this sort of behaviour since centuries before computers were invented. Instead of spending your time writing incorrect comments on Slashdot, may I recommend consulting an etymological dictionary and learning something?
Please be careful in the descriptions you give here. There are (at least, to my knowledge) two kinds of permission you would need to run the sorts of businesses you're talking about in the UK. There are the copyright-related ones (typically handled via blanket licensing through PPL and/or PRS) and the local ones like planning permission and public entertainment licensing (typically handled by your local council).
As someone with extensive experience running a very large local dance club, I know that neither the PPL nor the PRS fees are likely to be a significant barrier to a local business of the kind you're describing: for the kind of thing you're talking about, you could probably cover the annual fees with a single night's bar takings, which considering that you have no music night or dance class at all without using lots of someone else's work (the music) doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
The sort of thing you're talking about sounds more like a greedy local authority extorting cash via public entertainment licensing or something similar. That sucks, but it's nothing to do with the various copyright licensing agencies.
You know you are getting old when your instinct is to argue with that.
Actually, the older I get, the more strongly I believe in opposing measures like that [the curfew].
Whether or not any one person enjoys or otherwise benefits from something is not the point, and must never be allowed to become the point. The important thing is that everyone should be free, by default, to do absolutely anything they like. Restrictions should only ever be imposed by law on behaviour that is actually harmful in some way, and any restrictions that are imposed should only ever be proportionate to the harm that would be done.
This is probably the important principle of any fair justice system, because without it, governments are free to set arbitrary laws for their own political (or worse) purposes. This leads to blanket laws, such as (to pick some common, controversial examples): speed limits and banning mobile phones while driving, instead of prosecuting dangerous or inconsiderate driving; trying to ban whole electronic communications networks, rather than either going after people who abuse those networks to infringe copyright or mandating restrictions on the networks that are reasonable and consistent with prohibiting just the illegal behaviour; or, as in this case, restricting the freedoms of a whole group of people on account of the unacceptable behaviour of a small minority (which is effectively guilt by association).
In each of those cases, the law probably does do some good, in the sense that it does inhibit harmful behaviour by some people. The problem is the collateral damage: the law also catches people whose behaviour would not have been harmful and punishes them anyway, which is unjust. Of course, it's easier to impose blanket laws, both for enforcement (increasingly mechanically; whatever happened to "man shall not be judged by machine"?) and for scoring political points ("Speed kills! Look, we imposed a new low limit to make the road safer outside your home, so now your kids don't have to stop, look and listen before they cross").
Let us not set the rules of our society based on the pathology of the lowest of the low.
OK, I picked an obviously extreme example to try to make the point, but I happen to agree with your principle above, so let us consider some more subtle but still rather damaging forms of speech.
Do you believe one business should be able to pass off its goods as those of another, trading on their reputation? For example, do you believe trademarks should not be legally protected?
What about defamation? If someone maliciously circulates false information about a high profile public figure, and the public figure then loses their job and sees their reputation suffer through no fault of their own, do you believe the person who circulated the information is innocent of all wrong-doing?
What about false advice? We have established credentials for those who practice in fields such as medicine and engineering. Should someone who has not earned the usual qualifications be allowed to pretend they have and practise accordingly?
Those three examples coincidentally all relate to disseminating false information, as does the classic "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" example, but we could also consider issues like harassment, so the deception part isn't the only problem.
These are all things that are illegal in most jurisdictions that I know about, and for good reasons. And yet, all of them probably violate an absolute principle of free speech. Personally, I don't have a problem with that.
I do believe in protecting certain forms of speech. For example, I believe anyone must be free to criticise the state without fear of retaliation by any element of the state, and I have no problem with enshrining that particular right in law. I have grave reservations about things like barring political speech by certain people who are declared arbitrarily by the government to be the bad guys. But this freedom of political speech is more specific than allowing anyone to say anything without regard to the negative consequences for any other private individual or organisation.
Please be careful: you're reading things into my post that aren't there.
I didn't say that anonymity is never appropriate, nor that anyone should be able to access details about everyone just because they want to. Unless something I write here actually breaks the law, no-one needs to know who I really am, for example. Likewise, in your scenario, there is no reason someone who blows the whistle on a company with the appropriate legal authorities need necessarily be identified automatically, though one has to be very careful with the idea of allowing anonymous evidence in court for the same basic reasons on which I'm basing my whole argument.
But that's different to saying that, in a specific case, having established reasonable grounds for proceeding, a court of competent authority should not be able to hold me to account for my actions as they would in any other medium.
(And for the record, that is again different from saying that any executive branch of the government should have either a database they can trawl arbitrarily or the right to secure such information from other sources without appropriate independent oversight.)
The article does say that he used someone else's credentials to access the system.
While I may not agree with what you say I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
Well, on that absolute principle, there is nothing wrong with someone making a public offer of a reward for shooting you dead, so "to the death" is perhaps an apt summary.
I don't believe that in our current semi-police sate it is feasible to exercise the right to free speech without at least the option of anonymity.
If that is true, then perhaps the time has come to move onto the next of the four boxes. This is, IME, usually the point where my opinions seem to diverge from the "purist" (for lack of a better word) free speech advocates: if you are in a culture where political words can no longer be spoken freely and with attribution because of fear of reprisals by the state, then I tend to think that merely speaking words is probably insufficient to fix the problem.
Was his personal information in that file? Did he have reason to believe that the school district was not properly protecting his personal information?
If he has legitimate reason to believe that, then he should be approaching the relevant authorities with his concerns. But "I tried to crack your network and succeeded" isn't exactly legitimate grounds.
If so, was he testing to make sure nobody else could steal his identity?
I don't know. Neither do you, I suspect, and neither would the court hearing his case.
Does it matter anyway? What was he going to do if he really was testing for this purpose and discovered that his information was vulnerable, shout and stamp his foot? If you couldn't trust the relevant authorities enough to act on reasonable suspicions as above, why would you expect to get any better result just because you cracked their network?
If there's not an exception for stuff like that in computer crime laws, there should be.
Why? What possible practical benefit could it bring?
There are useful things the law can do in cases like this, but I submit that penalising those who are insufficiently careful with data should be the priority.
I've somehow got my name in a database of a realty company that I've never used here in the city, and I know for a fact that they have a WEP encrypted network, because I've warned them about it before.
It's intriguing that you know the networking protocols and database contents of a local company you've never dealt with. Would you like to explain to the rest of us how you came to know those things through some legitimate mechanism?
You never had fair use rights in the US. You only ever had an affirmative defence. The distinction is rather significant in cases like this.
Not that I agree with the anti-circumvention principle, but if you're going to make an argument about the legal situation, I suggest that it will normally be more credible if you start from where we are and not where you'd like us to be.
What do you have against anonymous speech?
The fact that is dissociates action from responsibility, and in this context, allows the speaker to break the law with impunity.
I don't believe in absolute free speech either — and neither does any contemporary legal system that I know of — but in any case, if something is important enough to broadcast to the world like this, then it is important enough to put your name to.
Forget that this kid was doing a service to report the flaw, they are more concerned with why the kid was trying to access the site in the first place.
OK, I know Slashdot is collectively in holier-than-thou rage over this poor, "innocent" kid, but why was the kid trying to access the site in the first place?
It seems to me that he's not being punished for reporting something, he'd being dealt with because he probably broke the law.
Of course, the officials responsible for the shoddy security and data protection should also be dealt with under whatever laws apply in that jurisdiction. But that doesn't excuse a kid who actively went on a fishing expedition. The end cannot be allowed to justify the means in cases like this, or you undermine the basic principle of the laws: you give carte blanche to crackers to have a go at whatever they like, since if they get in, they can just report it and pretend they were doing the world a favour.
Yes you overly cynical fools, there is a big difference and you know it. You're not going to be jailed or beaten for speaking out against the government, provided you don't actively call for violence. This is not the case in much of the world.
Tell that to Walter Wolfgang.
Our countries have slid to the point that governments are abusing so-called anti-terror legislation for political purposes.
It is an absolute. Either you have it 100%, or you don't have it at all.
Indeed. And absolute free speech is a very dangerous thing, hence the numerous laws in place in most jurisdictions that restrict it in cases as diverse as defamation, copyright, incitement to commit murder, and national security. Maybe absolute free speech isn't really what we should be protecting after all?
Yeah, the can of whoop-ass I just opened in Supreme Commander would probably have been considered bad form in real life, too. Admittedly, if I did have the option of flying half a dozen Continentals loaded with Titans and Percivals into the front yard of my nation's current leadership and then letting the bots do their thing, I might have to think long and hard about the ethics of the situation. ;-)