"What about possible collateral damage: did any of SpamKing's neighbors' mail delivery get slowed down"
Well, postal services are prioritised. So when you get junkmail, that shouldn't interfere with anything more important. And as opposed to email, which also has a priority tag, this one is enforced financially. It also has human interaction, which is frequently more intelligent than a mailserver, and will often start asking questions if obvious attacks are mounted on a post-office's workload.
"Police have been known [statenews.com] to sieze computers that simply had data that might be used as evidence, even when the owners hadn't done anything wrong."
A similar case of this (Steve Jackson) led to the founding of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, to protect against such abuses in future.
"I've heard from people that the military actually microwave some media to make sure one can't recover the data that's stored on it."
No, microwaving recordable-CDs is commonplace amongst anyone who needs to securely delete a CDR. [4 seconds, put a glass of water in the microwave too, and make sure all your windows are open]
Anyone with more money (i.e. corporate, government, military) pays for someone to come and take their CDs and grind them up using special cutting machines.
Admittedly, the military do seem to have a thermite fetish, and perhaps many people here would be interested if they could buy a hard-drive with electronically-activated thermite pre-installed.
"Then you take one of these and put it over the border in Mexico at your friends house acroos the other side of the border. Who can press charges? Any answers anyone?"
"The small but relevant web sites who don't spend time "marketing" with good keywords / spamming with duplicate sites still find themselves lower down."
Google's problem at the moment seems to be coping with people who run a thousand webservers, then link from each of them to every other, using popular keywords. Scientology are famous for pioneering this attack, but Hotels, travel-agents, and inkjet cartridge sellers have all used this tactic to screw up access to information for the rest of us.
As an example, try searching for the name of any city, and the results will be cluttered with automatically-generated pages for hotels' meta-searches, in many cases, whole automatically-generated websites with their own sub-domain name.
Google is too important to have people with profit-motives involved in it; unfortunately, people don't tend to see this, and will do absolutely anything to get their chickenshit site (sometimes literally) on top of a google search, with little regard for the lack of interest in their site by anyone doing that particular search.
"Now if they could incorporate and Anti-AMD-processor -that-is-faster-for-less-money technology, they'd be all set!"
I suppose the issue is, and always was, that people who like high-performance computers never bought Intel products anyway. If someone wants to make their computer run faster, they'll buy an AMD chip and overclock it. If someone wants not only to overclock a chip, but to overclock an Intel chip, then they obviously have a customer who is paying for the "as advertised on TV" Pentium brand-name.
i.e. a corporate customer.
Of course, this neglects the group of people who overclock Pentiums just to prove "it can be done", but those people are probably too busy getting linux to run on a greetings card to notice.
It was another one of those "PANIC! PANIC! Anthrax will kill us all" laws -- people started posting flour-dusted envelopes to gullible voters who were watching the "Terror state red: pass this law or the world will collapse" television broadcasts, and thus not really of sound mind.
So they banned posting powders. I feel safer already. But they'll helpfully irradiate your mail for you as well.
"A lot of people order the kosher meal on a flight just because it tends to be better food"
Great, now we end up in the "Activist defending american rights by pretending to be a terrorist" category. Use cash, grow a beard, and take first-class flights with kosher meals. It's already illegal to post powders, how soon before a scared and clueless public votes to disallow acting in a similar manner to stereotype terrorists? Striped jersey and "SWAG" bag, anyone?
"There's got to be a bank out there that would be willing to go this route [anonymous visa]"
Unfortunately, laws designed to prevent money-laundering make people very nervous indeed about the idea of anyone being able to spend money anonymously.
"...but it wont be long [until] cash will look suspicious."
Probably one of the best reasons to continue using cash where possible. It's quite nice to have your bank statement only show "£50 at cashpoint x" every so often, rather than a detailed list of everything you bought.
Interestingly, you can track your past movements quite easily by reading bank statements and seeing which towns you've used your bank card in. Who needs GPS-enabled cellphones, when your bank has a near-perfect record of everywhere you've been?
"UK/European laws can not be applied to the USA, so what's your point?"
Airlines who implement such a system will be banned from using European airports. Read the article.
Data protection laws apply to the UK. If you don't abide by them, you can't do business in the UK, and that includes using our airports. European legislation applies to most of the rest of Europe, and unlike some areas of the world, Europe is trying to avoid becoming a police state. Something to do with the convention on human rights, I believe.
"Sad to say, Bush and a whole lot of well-intentioned Americans just don't see how what they're trying to accomplish might not be what actually happens."
police state n. A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force.
Uhh, if the police force has that much control, it's not exactly 'secret'.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm just wondering the about the legal issues surrounding the release of a 'feral' robot.."
Chilling effects alive and well I see. Stories of cool hacks greeted with "oooohhh. [sucking of breath]... wouldn't that be... somehow illegal?"
The hacker ethic is dead in maharg. Abandon his soul to the matrix.
" Based on this article, it would seem that Sony does not [like] people modding their robot dog"
Do we care? The ones that have been bought aren't Sony's dogs anymore, are they?
"What about possible collateral damage: did any of SpamKing's neighbors' mail delivery get slowed down"
Well, postal services are prioritised. So when you get junkmail, that shouldn't interfere with anything more important. And as opposed to email, which also has a priority tag, this one is enforced financially. It also has human interaction, which is frequently more intelligent than a mailserver, and will often start asking questions if obvious attacks are mounted on a post-office's workload.
"If you boot into an insecure OS, you will never notice the difference"
I think the phrase you're looking for is: If you boot into an uncrippled OS, you will never notice the difference.
Apart from, of course, financially.
"Those no-server TOS are a joke, anyway. I mean, what qualifies as a server?"
Some would say that a default installation of Windows qualifies as a server. After you open a few emails in Outlook, it'll qualify as several servers.
"The solution is to put the window manager into the toolkits like the buttons and everything else is."
This would also allow menus to be displayed in the title bar, finally removing the need for two 20-pixel bars across the screen-top when one would do.
p.s.
A 1-year subscription to Anonymizer is included when you join the EFF
"Police have been known [statenews.com] to sieze computers that simply had data that might be used as evidence, even when the owners hadn't done anything wrong."
A similar case of this (Steve Jackson) led to the founding of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, to protect against such abuses in future.
"In the case of encryption, you're just going to rot13 in jail until you give the key up."
Best make sure you've got a key that you can give up then...
"I've heard from people that the military actually microwave some media to make sure one can't recover the data that's stored on it."
No, microwaving recordable-CDs is commonplace amongst anyone who needs to securely delete a CDR. [4 seconds, put a glass of water in the microwave too, and make sure all your windows are open]
Anyone with more money (i.e. corporate, government, military) pays for someone to come and take their CDs and grind them up using special cutting machines.
Admittedly, the military do seem to have a thermite fetish, and perhaps many people here would be interested if they could buy a hard-drive with electronically-activated thermite pre-installed.
"Then you take one of these and put it over the border in Mexico at your friends house acroos the other side of the border. Who can press charges? Any answers anyone?"
Howabout we just put all of our hard drives in Mexico? Or Canada. Or the British West Indies.
"The small but relevant web sites who don't spend time "marketing" with good keywords / spamming with duplicate sites still find themselves lower down."
Google's problem at the moment seems to be coping with people who run a thousand webservers, then link from each of them to every other, using popular keywords. Scientology are famous for pioneering this attack, but Hotels, travel-agents, and inkjet cartridge sellers have all used this tactic to screw up access to information for the rest of us.
As an example, try searching for the name of any city, and the results will be cluttered with automatically-generated pages for hotels' meta-searches, in many cases, whole automatically-generated websites with their own sub-domain name.
Google is too important to have people with profit-motives involved in it; unfortunately, people don't tend to see this, and will do absolutely anything to get their chickenshit site (sometimes literally) on top of a google search, with little regard for the lack of interest in their site by anyone doing that particular search.
Obligatory dose of clue for columbine historians.
"Now if they could incorporate and Anti-AMD-processor -that-is-faster-for-less-money technology, they'd be all set!"
I suppose the issue is, and always was, that people who like high-performance computers never bought Intel products anyway. If someone wants to make their computer run faster, they'll buy an AMD chip and overclock it. If someone wants not only to overclock a chip, but to overclock an Intel chip, then they obviously have a customer who is paying for the "as advertised on TV" Pentium brand-name.
i.e. a corporate customer.
Of course, this neglects the group of people who overclock Pentiums just to prove "it can be done", but those people are probably too busy getting linux to run on a greetings card to notice.
It would be much more useful to display how fast your computer was SUPPOSED to be, and how fast it IS
Thankyou. This is exactly the sort of common-sense logic that is so obviously missing from the patent itself.
"what do you mean it's illegal to post powders?"
It was another one of those "PANIC! PANIC! Anthrax will kill us all" laws -- people started posting flour-dusted envelopes to gullible voters who were watching the "Terror state red: pass this law or the world will collapse" television broadcasts, and thus not really of sound mind.
So they banned posting powders. I feel safer already. But they'll helpfully irradiate your mail for you as well.
"A lot of people order the kosher meal on a flight just because it tends to be better food"
Great, now we end up in the "Activist defending american rights by pretending to be a terrorist" category. Use cash, grow a beard, and take first-class flights with kosher meals. It's already illegal to post powders, how soon before a scared and clueless public votes to disallow acting in a similar manner to stereotype terrorists? Striped jersey and "SWAG" bag, anyone?
"There's got to be a bank out there that would be willing to go this route [anonymous visa]"
Unfortunately, laws designed to prevent money-laundering make people very nervous indeed about the idea of anyone being able to spend money anonymously.
"...but it wont be long [until] cash will look suspicious."
Probably one of the best reasons to continue using cash where possible. It's quite nice to have your bank statement only show "£50 at cashpoint x" every so often, rather than a detailed list of everything you bought.
Interestingly, you can track your past movements quite easily by reading bank statements and seeing which towns you've used your bank card in. Who needs GPS-enabled cellphones, when your bank has a near-perfect record of everywhere you've been?
"UK/European laws can not be applied to the USA, so what's your point?"
Airlines who implement such a system will be banned from using European airports. Read the article.
Data protection laws apply to the UK. If you don't abide by them, you can't do business in the UK, and that includes using our airports. European legislation applies to most of the rest of Europe, and unlike some areas of the world, Europe is trying to avoid becoming a police state. Something to do with the convention on human rights, I believe.
"Another Sept 11th will be on its way if you continue."
Almost every year, I imagine...
"Sad to say, Bush and a whole lot of well-intentioned Americans just don't see how what they're trying to accomplish might not be what actually happens."
Drunk in charge of an army?
"now who is the terrorist in this case?"
Whoever was on the opposite side to the news agency.
police state
n. A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force.
Uhh, if the police force has that much control, it's not exactly 'secret'.
I'd second he who quoted on this very page: 'think a moment about who gets to define "wrong"'