Do we all need your advice on how fast we should go on each stretch of road in every weather and traffic condition at every time of the day? Do we need your wisdom so much that you should be able to use armed troops to force it on us -- threatening us with imprisonment or worse if we don't obey you?
Yes.
This is the reality: You are not the only person on the roads. If you overestimate your m4d sk1llz, the likelihood is that you're probably going to hit somebody else or somebody else's property.
I don't care how good of a driver you think you are. Hell, I don't even care how good of a driver you ACTUALLY are--and I can all but guarantee there is a substantial difference even between those two--because you can be the greatest driver in the world and all it takes is one asshat to wipe you out.
If speeding assholes only killed themselves, I'd be all for removing all speed limits. Hell, I'd even encourage speeding as a means of natural selection. But that isn't the reality. To protect everybody, we all agree to play by the same set of rules instead of going willy-nilly at whatever pace we feel we can maintain. This is called "society." We work together and play by the same rules so that, hopefully, everybody is better off than they would be otherwise. For whatever the faults of any societal implementation, it seems to work fairly well overall. You're free to hop back into a cave and not interact with the rest of the world if you don't approve of the concept.
We are all competent adults and must be assumed to know how to drive.
Look at the number of traffic FATALITIES--forget just accidents, let's just look at fatalities--every year in the United States alone. No, entirely too many people do not know how to drive regardless of what their driver's test may say. Assuming they're even licensed to begin with, which isn't exactly a concrete thing.
I'll give you an example from personal experience. The vast majority of people here could probably give you one of their own. A perfect indication of the reality of the situation.
Anyway, I was in the car with a couple of friends down in Tennessee a few years ago. (No, none of us were born there or live there so please save the redneck jokes.) We were driving along the highway and it was raining a bit. For some reason--I'm not sure if it was the rain or something else happened--the highway came to a complete stop. It wasn't an abrupt stop, it wasn't a dangerous and sudden stop. Nobody was jamming on their breaks. Anyway, we stopped. A few seconds later--which goes to show the idiocy involved--I see the driver looking in his rear view mirror and saying "please don't hit me, please don't hit me--he's going to hit me." And sure enough he did, and we bounced into a semi that had stopped ahead of us. The guy would have hit us regardless of whether or not it was raining, that's how utterly incompetent he was.
Nobody was hurt in our car, luckily. I'm fairly sure the driver of the other car was okay too, though his airbag did deploy and he looked a bit out of it. Thankfully it wasn't more serious than it was. That semi sure wasn't going to budge, and two or three innocent people literally caught in the middle could have died because somebody was just soo sure of his ability to judge speed, traffic, weather, road conditions and available light.
In short, here is an idiot with a valid drivers license who couldn't quite master the concept of a brake. Oopsiedoodle.
No thanks. I won't be assuming everybody knows how to drive just because they have a piece of paper saying they can. Everybody thinks they're great drivers and hardly any of them are. That's a major part of the problem.
We can judge speed, traffic, weather, road conditions and available light to choose our own speed.
Now go ahead and look at those full traffic accident numbers and try to say that with a
The double standard on Slashdot is amusing in a "oh my god is this pathetic" sort of way.
When it's said that Steven Colbert might be doing something illegal, everybody is up in arms about free speech and making posts laced with fake sarcasm about how the founding fathers must not have been talking about that.
When we're talking about real politicians? Oh fuck! Those bastards shouldn't be able to say a word unless it's on a government-paid-for block of time dolled out equally to all candidates, and all political contributions and PACs should be illegal. Oh yeah, and political parties too. Those fuckers just can't be trusted!
If Colbert really is trying to put his name on a ballot, with corporate sponsorship in violation of the law, he has gone well beyond satire or political commentary into doing the exact types of things we sit around bitching and moaning that real politicians do. He is becoming a politician, regardless of whether or not any of that is his intent.
Personally, I value free speech. I truly do. I don't value it to the point that it permits purchasing our republic, however. Campaign speech and campaign dollars should be held to a much higher standard. Corporate sponsorship of candidates should absolutely be prohibited.
In this case, if Colbert is becoming a politician by virtue of putting his name on a ballot, he should be held to that same standard. If not, no harm done.
The president, at the very least, and perhaps all of the Top Dudes in the Executive are immune from prosecution for any crimes that occur related to their jobs. IE, they wouldn't be immune from prosecution if they murdered somebody but if they, say, lied about WMDs in order to propagate a war that has killed thousands of US troops and many times more Iraqis, they're good to go. If they illegally spy on their citizens, they're good to go. Even if somebody had the balls (and jurisdiction) to want to prosecute.
He could be impeached, but that's a political issue that simply won't happen. Even if he was successfully removed from office, he still couldn't be charged for any of the things he did in office related to his job as president.
Well, all of that is true. However, times are changing. iTunes didn't exist 20 years ago, nor did Internet access for the average person. Even if somebody had Internet access, it was so painfully slow that downloading a single mp3, much less an entire album worth, would have been downright painful.
This whole music pricing/music downloading/music piracy issue--and make no mistake those are different angles of basically the same issue--is a lesson waiting to be learned. The Internet is changing the game. Unfortunately the record labels see the writing on the wall; they seem that they are less and less relevant, and that is why they have turned to suing people into the ground and trying to buy laws to maintain their relevancy.
Yes, Radiohead had the advantages of a record label that a record label provided 20 years ago, that without a vast reserve of your own money you couldn't have done without them. These days, however, all that is missing is a killer site to discover music with that goes mainstream.
Watch the local news. If yours is anything like mine, you'll probably see at least 3-4 nights a week a story mentioning some video on YouTube. In fact, locally, they even have a "Viral Videos" section for videos that are popular on the 'net at the moment. Most of these are from YouTube, though not all.
Shift locations. Imagine a site with that sort of penetration of the mainstream consciousness for music. Imagine radio stations telling the labels where to stick their payola schemes and their "oh no no no! You can't play the song you think is the best from our album, you have to play the single!" nonsense that is really relatively new even in the radio business. Radio play is really the only major hurdle that the average person has trouble jumping without the help of a record label. The problem, for the record labels, is the reason is really nostalgia and resistance to change. If radio stations really wanted to start featuring random, independent music--alongside or in replacement of music from artists with big label contracts--they can do so. Today.
There is still room in the music industry for agents and record labels; there is a lot for a somewhat successful band to think about and manage. The isn't room for people who take cuts bigger than the people making the music do. Their services aren't worth that price anymore. Whatever it is worth today, it will likely be worth less tomorrow and for many more tomorrows to come.
It's true that even once this sort of label-liberated scheme comes into full effect, the artists probably won't become as filthy rich as they could have if they had hit the music jackpot and became a major artist during the era of big record labels. It does, however, mean that more people will get a piece of the pie, more people will be able to make a living writing and performing the music that they love, and the availability and quality of music will likely increase with this sort of competition.
It's a brave new day. Things that were important 20 years ago aren't anymore.
For what it is worth, I am not necessarily a strict constuctionalist, but I agree with your interpretation of the second amendment: It permits people to own absolutely any weapon they want including a nuclear weapon. Of course I am not stupid enough to be blind to the incredible and unwarranted risk of such a situation.
If I were president, other than pushing for a constitutional amendment, I'm not sure what I would do about the issue. Would I sign legislation I believe to be unconstitutional? Or go by the text and take the risks? It would be a very tough decision for me. Principle is important, but so is practicality.
Do we go through the whole exercise of a constitutional amendment every time?
It depends on what the amendment that you pass is. You're right that there is absolutely no point in passing an amendment to ban a specific weapon, but there are other options. "The second amendment is hereby repealed" would be all-encompassing. It's likely too blunt to ever pass, but it would certainly do the trick. "The Congress shall have the right to determine which weaponry is protected by the second amendment" would probably have slightly higher support, but still isn't likely to pass. The best chance for success is probably some version of "your right to own a handgun, rifle or shotgun is protected, but Congress shall have the authority to ban any other weaponry. Congress shall define what 'handgun,' 'rifle' and 'shotgun' means."
Obviously the suggestions are nowhere near the legalese they would be if they were actually under consideration, but the point is that the amendment can simply reserve the authority to ban weapons (essentially nullifying or clarifying the second amendment) without banning (or allowing) any specific weaponry. Then reactions to scenarios like you described could be as swift as passing legislation in the first place.
Why do we allow them to advertise prescription only drugs to the public exactly?
I suppose the direct answer to your question would be that we consider it free speech, and do not see a consequence of allowing it that is so bad that we should curb that right to avoid it (as we do in the oft-cited "fire!" in a theater example).
More philosophically though, why not? If there is a drug that might be able to help me out with some problem, I'd like to know about it. And since it is prescription, I can't just go to the store blindly to try it out without thinking about consequence, adverse reactions, drug reactions or side effects; I have to discuss the issue with my doctor who has the ultimate authority of whether or not to prescribe that drug.
What bothers me more is the list of side effects on all drugs these days that we seem content to allow. For that matter, there is a drug out right now with ads running on TV--I'm pretty sure it's an allergy medication, but I can't remember the name; Veramyst maybe?--where among the fine print on the bottom is: "The way [this drug] works is not fully understood." If we don't know how a drug works, can we have enough confidence that it's not doing something bad that we should be approving it?
Watch, though.. those same hyperbolic partisan types will jump to defend Google using arguments that would work exactly as well for the NSA.
Even if you are right that the technical details or similar enough that the same defenses would apply to both sides (and I'm not conceding that, just not arguing it), it brings one simple thought to mind:
There is a difference between what a private company does and what the US government does. If you don't think that is so, check out that Constitution thing and the great length to which its authors went to describe and limit the powers of government. Then they went on to create that Bill of Rights majig that even though they had just mentioned what power Congress had, further went out to explicitly deny them the ability to do certain other things.
Besides which, I am not under any obligation to use Gmail if I disagree with their scanning my email to serve advertisements; there are dozens of companies that offer basically the same services. If I didn't like any of them, I could buy a domain and set up my own email services.
While I suppose technically speaking one isn't required to use AT&T, that's becoming less and less true in the US as they are allowed to reconstitute their monopoly. And it was done in secret. And they knew it was wrong and very possibly illegal to cooperate with the government in this manner, or they wouldn't suddenly by spending tens of thousands of dollars to lobby Congress to grant them immunity for it.
But really, the bottom line is this: Google can not kill me. Google can not take away my freedom. Nobody can force me to use Google, and they know only what I tell them in some way or another. The government can do all of this. They can, as we have seen, compel others to do the same--certainly with a warrant but in this case even without.
Stepping away from the particular example: If a person lives at home, their parents could read their mail. They could thumb through their drawers. They could read anything that was lying around. This isn't good, but the person may or may not care. Do you think the same level of disinterest would abound if some stranger came into the house to do exactly the same thing? Do you think students don't have different views on other students hearing them talk about things that maybe they shouldn't be talking about, versus teachers doing it?
The actor involved in a situation absolutely does matter even if the situations were otherwise technically identical.
And lest we forget, there are laws involved with what the NSA did. A federal court has struck the program down; while I wouldn't be surprised to see it reversed on appeal to what has become a conservative US Supreme Court, assuming they choose to hear the issue, that is currently the prevailing ruling in at least one federal district. It was struck down not only as an issue of privacy, but one of free speech, and separation of powers, and in violation of the requirements that were passed in the act that established the FISA court to begin with. In other words, it seems that what the NSA did was both illegal and unconstitutional.
(Incidentally, the NSA spying on US phone calls should turn any American's stomach. The NSA and CIA were always intended to be foreign intelligence gathering services, and were specifically enjoined from domestic spying. That was supposed to be done by the FBI according to established legal procedures, i.e. e.g. subpoenas and burdens of proof and evidence.)
the ability to boot and run win9x and winpx (pro, not home) either in a window or with individual programs running directly on-screen alongside X11 apps - no more dual-booting
I've been waiting for that to make it to linux. What technology is being used to virtualize applications in that way?
I do believe there is an ammendment in our constitution stating that "Fines and penalties should be fair and affordable".
Kind of. What you're looking for is the 8th amendment:
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
It definitely says nothing about affordable. In fact, any such requirement would very probably be unconstitutional as making some people pay more for the same crime would seem to me to be a fairly obvious violation of equal protection.
Regardless of whether the fine was actually appropriate (in either a moral or 8th Amendment sense), the judge and jury operated within the scope of the laws as defined by Congress. If the respondent in this case wants to challenge the constitutionality of the fine, she can do so on appeal. I personally find it excessive, but I find the punishment for a lot of crimes and civil torts to be excessive these days.
If you so desired, you could install IE 7 as your primary browser and use Multiple IE to install a standalone version of IE 6 for testing your webpages out.
However, SMTP is a protocol, just like TCP and IP are. Changing a protocol's specs _IS_ changing the internet. (At least IMO).
Without getting too network-geeky, while they are both protocols they operate on different levels of the OSI model.
SMTP operates at the highest level (Layer 7); it has absolutely no concern for how messages are delivered, it is only concerned with how to format those messages, how to parse and read them, etc. Once it has the message formatted as what you would recognize as email, it passes it down to lower OSI levels and stops caring. You can completely gut TCP/IP and SMTP will continue to function; likewise you can completely alter SMTP without TCP/IP even caring.
TCP, on the other hand, is a Layer 4 protocol. Layer 4 is where the actual work of sending data takes place once the connection is established, and ensures reliable transmission.
IP is a level lower, on the Network level (3). Basically speaking, it figures out how to send the data. It does the job of routing.
While it is a matter of semantics, the lower you go down the more of "the Internet" one could argue it is. I would consider it fair to say TCP and IP both make up "the Internet" (though they do not have to--this was by choice). Things like SMTP, FTP, HTTP, etc. are services that run on top.
(These explanations are greatly simplified of course.)
The problem is not taxes, it's that your chosen representatives in government are not always representing their constituents
I do agree to a point, but it reminds me of a great quote from West Wing:
"I don't know where you get the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for anything of which they disapprove. Lots of them don't like tanks. Even more don't like Congress."
All of us would like to keep more of our money, and all of us can come up with things we think are wholly unnecessary. Part of the problem is that we tend to pick different things; most of the/. crowd would probably get behind the so-called "Bridge to Nowehere" being a horrible idea, but I read an article recently about the state getting the money but calling off the project itself where a lot of people they talked to--including the representative from the area the bridge was to be built in, residents, mayors of towns there, etc--who were upset. Maybe it's political wrangling and all they wanted was the money, but maybe it's also that they legitimately feel they need this. The locals were essentially out-voted on an issue by people most of whom probably don't know enough about the issue to even make an informed decision.
I'm not saying there's not government waste or anything along those lines, nor am I trying to make a point about this particular spending project. I'm simply saying there's a danger in assuming people shouldn't have to pay for anything they don't want to pay for. In a country where we can't get a third of people to the polls at all and where most others vote party lines, I question whether any of us--heck, even including our representatives in a lot of cases--can truly understand the issues enough that we should have a voice in making the decisions.
Speaking as somebody who has never used eBay (well, I once bought something from half.com but that's it) and thus has no particular stake in this, what bothers me isn't so much that you're required to pay taxes on sales online. Technically speaking I believe you're required to do so in the United States right now and I believe you're even supposed to pay sales tax if the site doesn't handle that for you.
What bothers me is that the government seemingly got subpoenas for information on these people solely based on the fact that they're big sellers on eBay. They don't appear to be being accused of any particular crime at this point. There is no evidence that I saw that they have any reason to believe they have done anything wrong.
Further, now that they have this information how are they going to use it? Are they simply going to compare eBay sales numbers and reported income and go "yeah, that sounds about right?" Or are even reasonable numbers going to get these poor people an audit simply by virtue of being a big eBay seller?
If governments want to pass laws saying that eBay must pass along information at the end of the year that includes your name and address information as well as sales totals, I wouldn't mind that so much. This, however, seems to be exceptionally selective enforcement against a particular group of people they have no particular reason to believe have done anything wrong.
URL verification can be done with hashes and other techniques that do not invade privacy.
Yes, if you assume that the only active protection is a 1:1 URL-to-badness mapping. That may be accurate right now, I'm not sure, but it likely won't last very long.
For example, I probably wouldn't blacklist aol.com for some phishing pages on their domains because it's casting too large a net, but I might well do it for pages on evilhackerzphishingyourssn.com. It's trivial to set up anyrandomcombination.somedomain.com to show the same pages. Do I send a hash of the URL, then one of the domain, then one of the subdomain, then one of the sub-subdomain? Where do I stop? What about URLs with the same problems? Am I hashing just the domain, or a specific URL to a page on a domain?
Without a way to examine the incoming data in a more meaningful way than "yes, I have seen this before" your level of protection is going to drop. It would not be hard to generate a unique URL in every phishing email (another poster says this already happens) and if all we're sending back is hashes there's no way for Google or whoever is running a list to notice. If those hashes are reversible, then there's really no added privacy at all -- particularly since they would be un-hashing them automatically to check for these sorts of things anyway.
Like I said, I'm not sure that Google actually does any of this yet, but as with spam it is essentially an arms race. If the phishers haven't pushed them there yet, they likely will soon.
No, the evil comes from the data being taken without informed consent.
Would "informed consent" including checking the box next to "tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery," then ticking the radio button next to "Check by asking [_______] about each site I visit" and selecting Google? (As opposed to either not ticking the "tell me" box or choosing the first radio button, "check using a downloaded list of suspected sites."
Even the summary noted that this feature is off by default. I consider it fairly informed and definitely consent just by ticking those options, and if they want to be fully informed there is nothing stopping them from checking up on the privacy policies of any of the "ask [____]" options they might choose to use.
Because there's no contract controlling what happens to the private information, and because there is no technical reason to collect the private information, it is evil.
Well to use your smug bluntness: Wrong.
If you go out of your way to agree to let me do something, my doing it is not evil. If you require a contract controlling what happens to the private information, either I provide one or I don't and your opt-in to the service is still your choice. It is not evil in the slightest. If you don't like it, hey, cool. Don't opt in by checking the box or telling it to ask Google. The assumption that those who do must just be too stupid or are getting fleeced is pure arrogance.
Sounds like England might have the slightly better system in this regard.
I disagree, but it depends on what perspective you're looking at it from.
In this case, yes, if you're simply lying about somebody I would like to see you lose a lawsuit. That's in a vacuum though. On a large scale, I think it is a much more chilling restriction on free speech to tell people they have to be able to prove anything they say, even if it is ultimately true, or risk being sued into the dirt than it is to say that sometimes, people are going to lie and get away with it. It's kind of like the idea that yes, some guilty people will go free on technicalities in an attempt to preserve a standard of conduct and justice for everybody. It's unfortunate that it happens, but most people still consider it a reasonable price to pay to uphold the larger principles.
That said, I'm also not so sure the lawsuit would go your way in the US. I'm not intricately familiar with US tort law enough to speak authoritatively, but I imagine that since you have a right to confront your accusers and see their evidence in court, it might go something like this:
Him: Show me your evidence and I will disprove it.
You: Hm? Evidence? Who needs evidence? I don't have any evidence.
Judge: Yeah, you're an asshole. Pay up.
(At least assuming that he could also prove some sort of damages to income, reputation, etc.)
Ultimately, it is nearly impossible to prove you did not do something and I don't think judges or the legal system is so naive as to assume otherwise. The fact that you had no evidence would likely be what sinks you, in fact. If you DID have evidence which the other party then showed to be false, you might be safe; libel and slander in the US have requirements that what you said be knowingly false. If you actually have reason to believe what you say is true, that is a valid defense. If your evidence is particularly weak you may still be in a tough spot, but I digress.
In other words, while what the OP said probably is accurate overall, I think it's too oversimplified. It would be much more reasonable to say that it is much more difficult to get a libel/slander judgment in the US than the UK and stop there, I think.
A well-known government law enforcement agency comes to you and says "we need you do X, and it needs to be secret."
Maybe in some cases, but not in this one.
What this government agency asked me to do in this hypothetical is spy on peoples' traffic and pass them hints of who may be up to something. That would immediately set off my "illegal search" sensors, whether it turned out to be legal or not. My assumption would be exactly opposite of what you expected; I would assume it was illegal until somebody proved to me that it wasn't or handed me a subpoena.
I expect that the more realistic phrasing of your hypothetical would be, "[a] well-known government [spy] agency comes to you and says 'we need you do X, and it needs to be secret.' Wouldn't you be worried that you would lose those contracts if you didn't comply?" Yeah. Probably.
Has any controlling legal authority (to use former VP Gore's phrase) actually ruled that AT&T et. al. violated the law as opposed to having done something which smells bad?
Well, for starters: who? It's not likely to be the government, since the government is involved. Most of the courts are ignoring the issue by saying "since you can't know for sure if you were spied on in this secret government spy program, you don't have standing to sue. And whether or not you were spied on is a matter of national security." But luckily, despite that, the answer is still yes. A federal judge ruled the program unconstitutional. From the article: "She declared that the program 'violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III.'" I assume a federal judge would meet your definition of a controlling legal authority.
Naturally this is under appeal, and the way courts have been kowtowing to abuses of privacy since 9/11 I wouldn't be surprised to see it overturned. I don't think it has been yet, though, so for the moment it's the standing ruling.
Can you tell me, honestly, that would not piss you off?
It might, but you keep jumping between whatever arguments seem fun as a reply to a particular post. There is a vast difference between "would that not piss you off?" and "they are legally obligated to provide."
They're not. If their line is capable of delivering up to the speed they advertise, even if that is under ideal conditions with absolutely no competition on your segment and for a fraction of a second, they have delivered precisely what they advertised. That you or I or "the reasonable man" might assume or expect more is an issue of business, not one of false advertising.
You might have had a case back when companies were advertising "unlimited" Internet, but I haven't heard that terminology in quite some time.
4. The market leading authentication mechanism is now incompatible with the original BSD Kerberos; thus it has been effectively swallowed.
This seems fairly inevitable. I highly doubt that if these projects had been GPL instead, that Microsoft would have gone "shit! Now we have to play by their rules!" They would have just created their own proprietary authentication mechanism, and given their market position it would almost certainly have become the market leader anyway.
The only difference that I can see is their incompatible version is based on the BSD version instead of completely separate. "Swallowed" isn't the right word; "buried" is more accurate, and it's likely that it would have been buried regardless of license.
We did, and it was. The difference is that the missiles could hurt us, even if the Russians had no idea that we knew about them. If we made an attempt to attack them, there was a great chance we would miss some that may well then be launched. Similarly, they might see us coming to attack the missiles and launch. The only way to resolve that safely for the US was to get the missiles out, and we accomplished that with worldwide political pressure (and some backroom deals).
The only way a spy satellite hurts you is if it sees something it isn't supposed to. If we know where it is and can track it, we can ensure that it never does. We may even be able to ensure that it sees the opposite of what we're actually doing if we do want to get up to something. It may even help us directly; if the Chinese think they have a secret satellite to help get the drop on us and it turns out they don't, that is our advantage.
Telling them not only removes that advantage, it puts us at a disadvantage. Almost certainly, they would move the satellite and we would have to locate it again. The game loops again and again. In that sense it's the same as breaking an enemy's cipher; you don't want them to know because you want them to use a code you can read instead of developing a code you can't.
Any public relations position's job is to present their company in the best possible light given whatever policy is dictated to them from above. Sometimes you are given dickhead policies and if you want to keep your job, there's not much you can do to defend it short of lying or ignoring counter-arguments. (See pretty much all political discourse as a perfect example.)
In the past, and still in a handful of cases today, presenting your company in the best light was done by treating the consumer well. I think the iPhone rebate announced today is an example of that. (For the record: I am not an Apple fanboi and hate those who are. I do not own an iPod, iPhone or any Apple computer; I do not have iTunes installed and have never bought a track from them, etc.) The idea there is simple: Treat them right, give them a decent product and they will return to buy from you again in the future.
This is only necessarily in competitive markets where there are nearly identical replacements. Being an ass in that context will drive your customers away.
In limited circumstances--movies, music, Windows, and more--there are monopolies or cartels that make it much harder to switch away. Yes, there is a lot of music outside the control of the RIAA, but it's not what you tend to hear when you turn your radio on in the car and that's what people are going to want. It's also not a real replacement; if I want a song by an artist from a major record label I have to play by their rules, a song by a random indy artist isn't the same thing. (It may be better or worse or even the same level of enjoyment, but it is not the thing I wanted.) Yes, you can install OS X or Linux or some alternate operating system, but if your applications don't run on it or you don't want to relearn things you're a bit stuck. Movies are probably the worst, in part because we've become accustomed to big-budget flicks with huge special effects that can't really be duplicated in independent films.
Since there isn't such a clear-cut replacement in these cases, they can afford to dick their customers around. They have what we want, and our choices become buy it anyway, go without or turn to illegal means. Since increasingly people are choosing #3, you see a concerted effort by groups such as them to control the law (DMCA) to their advantage.
So, no, you don't have to be a dickhead as a PR guy necessarily. You do, however, have to be as big a dickhead as the decision-makers in your company are.
the privacy implied by the word locker is false, when school administrators and teachers are given free access without even having to justify why they looked.
Given that it is a private, Catholic school, they don't have to justify opening your real locker either.
It's plain and simply an way for teachers and admins to easier go through what the students write and think, without them even knowing.
Wow. You know, it's possible you're right -- but even if you are, you're still a fool for thinking that clearly shows anything. You're exactly the tinfoil-hat paranoid that the OP was talking about. People like you do far more harm to legitimate privacy concerns than you do good.
Moreover, it's basically the biggest fallacy ever that maintaining the celibacy of the priesthood perpetuates child sexual abuse. The decisions that those priests make are THEIRS, and theirs alone... not the Vatican's.
It's a correlation/causation issue. You are correct; maintaining celibacy does not create a child molester. However, the church pretty much admits itself that the policy induces a disproportionate number of gays into the church. The theory is it is because the Catholic Church is one of the few places a person can go, never get married or date or really talk about sex and not have people ask them why. I read it in an article on Yahoo! news well over a year ago and probably a bit more, it was a conclusion of a study done by catholic priests (bishops? Cardinals?) for the Catholic Church. It was very likely back when the sex abuse scandals were raging.
Now before anybody objects: I am NOT by any means saying that "gay = child molester" or even that gays are more likely to be child molesters. What I am saying is that it is very possible and even likely that would-be child molesters are more inclined to go into the church for similar reasons. I don't think that child molesters want to be child molesters; they are people with abnormal sexual urges who in all likelihood try to control them and fail. Again, I'm not defending it, but it could be a step in the "trying to control them" part.
All in all, while I am certain that there are many priests who are willing to give up sex for their religion and do their very best to adhere (successfully or not), I also do not think it is unreasonable to think that people who have other reasons than pure love of their religion for avoiding sex might find it an appealing option in disproportionate numbers.
If we're being picky, wouldn't it be proper to say that a hub passes packets verbatim from one place to all others it is connected to? "One place to another" makes it sound like it's making a decision.
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Yes.
This is the reality: You are not the only person on the roads. If you overestimate your m4d sk1llz, the likelihood is that you're probably going to hit somebody else or somebody else's property.
I don't care how good of a driver you think you are. Hell, I don't even care how good of a driver you ACTUALLY are--and I can all but guarantee there is a substantial difference even between those two--because you can be the greatest driver in the world and all it takes is one asshat to wipe you out.
If speeding assholes only killed themselves, I'd be all for removing all speed limits. Hell, I'd even encourage speeding as a means of natural selection. But that isn't the reality. To protect everybody, we all agree to play by the same set of rules instead of going willy-nilly at whatever pace we feel we can maintain. This is called "society." We work together and play by the same rules so that, hopefully, everybody is better off than they would be otherwise. For whatever the faults of any societal implementation, it seems to work fairly well overall. You're free to hop back into a cave and not interact with the rest of the world if you don't approve of the concept.
Look at the number of traffic FATALITIES--forget just accidents, let's just look at fatalities--every year in the United States alone. No, entirely too many people do not know how to drive regardless of what their driver's test may say. Assuming they're even licensed to begin with, which isn't exactly a concrete thing.
I'll give you an example from personal experience. The vast majority of people here could probably give you one of their own. A perfect indication of the reality of the situation.
Anyway, I was in the car with a couple of friends down in Tennessee a few years ago. (No, none of us were born there or live there so please save the redneck jokes.) We were driving along the highway and it was raining a bit. For some reason--I'm not sure if it was the rain or something else happened--the highway came to a complete stop. It wasn't an abrupt stop, it wasn't a dangerous and sudden stop. Nobody was jamming on their breaks. Anyway, we stopped. A few seconds later--which goes to show the idiocy involved--I see the driver looking in his rear view mirror and saying "please don't hit me, please don't hit me--he's going to hit me." And sure enough he did, and we bounced into a semi that had stopped ahead of us. The guy would have hit us regardless of whether or not it was raining, that's how utterly incompetent he was.
Nobody was hurt in our car, luckily. I'm fairly sure the driver of the other car was okay too, though his airbag did deploy and he looked a bit out of it. Thankfully it wasn't more serious than it was. That semi sure wasn't going to budge, and two or three innocent people literally caught in the middle could have died because somebody was just soo sure of his ability to judge speed, traffic, weather, road conditions and available light.
In short, here is an idiot with a valid drivers license who couldn't quite master the concept of a brake. Oopsiedoodle.
No thanks. I won't be assuming everybody knows how to drive just because they have a piece of paper saying they can. Everybody thinks they're great drivers and hardly any of them are. That's a major part of the problem.
Now go ahead and look at those full traffic accident numbers and try to say that with a
The double standard on Slashdot is amusing in a "oh my god is this pathetic" sort of way.
When it's said that Steven Colbert might be doing something illegal, everybody is up in arms about free speech and making posts laced with fake sarcasm about how the founding fathers must not have been talking about that.
When we're talking about real politicians? Oh fuck! Those bastards shouldn't be able to say a word unless it's on a government-paid-for block of time dolled out equally to all candidates, and all political contributions and PACs should be illegal. Oh yeah, and political parties too. Those fuckers just can't be trusted!
If Colbert really is trying to put his name on a ballot, with corporate sponsorship in violation of the law, he has gone well beyond satire or political commentary into doing the exact types of things we sit around bitching and moaning that real politicians do. He is becoming a politician, regardless of whether or not any of that is his intent.
Personally, I value free speech. I truly do. I don't value it to the point that it permits purchasing our republic, however. Campaign speech and campaign dollars should be held to a much higher standard. Corporate sponsorship of candidates should absolutely be prohibited.
In this case, if Colbert is becoming a politician by virtue of putting his name on a ballot, he should be held to that same standard. If not, no harm done.
They're all immune.
The president, at the very least, and perhaps all of the Top Dudes in the Executive are immune from prosecution for any crimes that occur related to their jobs. IE, they wouldn't be immune from prosecution if they murdered somebody but if they, say, lied about WMDs in order to propagate a war that has killed thousands of US troops and many times more Iraqis, they're good to go. If they illegally spy on their citizens, they're good to go. Even if somebody had the balls (and jurisdiction) to want to prosecute.
He could be impeached, but that's a political issue that simply won't happen. Even if he was successfully removed from office, he still couldn't be charged for any of the things he did in office related to his job as president.
Well, all of that is true. However, times are changing. iTunes didn't exist 20 years ago, nor did Internet access for the average person. Even if somebody had Internet access, it was so painfully slow that downloading a single mp3, much less an entire album worth, would have been downright painful.
This whole music pricing/music downloading/music piracy issue--and make no mistake those are different angles of basically the same issue--is a lesson waiting to be learned. The Internet is changing the game. Unfortunately the record labels see the writing on the wall; they seem that they are less and less relevant, and that is why they have turned to suing people into the ground and trying to buy laws to maintain their relevancy.
Yes, Radiohead had the advantages of a record label that a record label provided 20 years ago, that without a vast reserve of your own money you couldn't have done without them. These days, however, all that is missing is a killer site to discover music with that goes mainstream.
Watch the local news. If yours is anything like mine, you'll probably see at least 3-4 nights a week a story mentioning some video on YouTube. In fact, locally, they even have a "Viral Videos" section for videos that are popular on the 'net at the moment. Most of these are from YouTube, though not all.
Shift locations. Imagine a site with that sort of penetration of the mainstream consciousness for music. Imagine radio stations telling the labels where to stick their payola schemes and their "oh no no no! You can't play the song you think is the best from our album, you have to play the single!" nonsense that is really relatively new even in the radio business. Radio play is really the only major hurdle that the average person has trouble jumping without the help of a record label. The problem, for the record labels, is the reason is really nostalgia and resistance to change. If radio stations really wanted to start featuring random, independent music--alongside or in replacement of music from artists with big label contracts--they can do so. Today.
There is still room in the music industry for agents and record labels; there is a lot for a somewhat successful band to think about and manage. The isn't room for people who take cuts bigger than the people making the music do. Their services aren't worth that price anymore. Whatever it is worth today, it will likely be worth less tomorrow and for many more tomorrows to come.
It's true that even once this sort of label-liberated scheme comes into full effect, the artists probably won't become as filthy rich as they could have if they had hit the music jackpot and became a major artist during the era of big record labels. It does, however, mean that more people will get a piece of the pie, more people will be able to make a living writing and performing the music that they love, and the availability and quality of music will likely increase with this sort of competition.
It's a brave new day. Things that were important 20 years ago aren't anymore.
For what it is worth, I am not necessarily a strict constuctionalist, but I agree with your interpretation of the second amendment: It permits people to own absolutely any weapon they want including a nuclear weapon. Of course I am not stupid enough to be blind to the incredible and unwarranted risk of such a situation.
If I were president, other than pushing for a constitutional amendment, I'm not sure what I would do about the issue. Would I sign legislation I believe to be unconstitutional? Or go by the text and take the risks? It would be a very tough decision for me. Principle is important, but so is practicality.
It depends on what the amendment that you pass is. You're right that there is absolutely no point in passing an amendment to ban a specific weapon, but there are other options. "The second amendment is hereby repealed" would be all-encompassing. It's likely too blunt to ever pass, but it would certainly do the trick. "The Congress shall have the right to determine which weaponry is protected by the second amendment" would probably have slightly higher support, but still isn't likely to pass. The best chance for success is probably some version of "your right to own a handgun, rifle or shotgun is protected, but Congress shall have the authority to ban any other weaponry. Congress shall define what 'handgun,' 'rifle' and 'shotgun' means."
Obviously the suggestions are nowhere near the legalese they would be if they were actually under consideration, but the point is that the amendment can simply reserve the authority to ban weapons (essentially nullifying or clarifying the second amendment) without banning (or allowing) any specific weaponry. Then reactions to scenarios like you described could be as swift as passing legislation in the first place.
I suppose the direct answer to your question would be that we consider it free speech, and do not see a consequence of allowing it that is so bad that we should curb that right to avoid it (as we do in the oft-cited "fire!" in a theater example).
More philosophically though, why not? If there is a drug that might be able to help me out with some problem, I'd like to know about it. And since it is prescription, I can't just go to the store blindly to try it out without thinking about consequence, adverse reactions, drug reactions or side effects; I have to discuss the issue with my doctor who has the ultimate authority of whether or not to prescribe that drug.
What bothers me more is the list of side effects on all drugs these days that we seem content to allow. For that matter, there is a drug out right now with ads running on TV--I'm pretty sure it's an allergy medication, but I can't remember the name; Veramyst maybe?--where among the fine print on the bottom is: "The way [this drug] works is not fully understood." If we don't know how a drug works, can we have enough confidence that it's not doing something bad that we should be approving it?
Even if you are right that the technical details or similar enough that the same defenses would apply to both sides (and I'm not conceding that, just not arguing it), it brings one simple thought to mind:
There is a difference between what a private company does and what the US government does. If you don't think that is so, check out that Constitution thing and the great length to which its authors went to describe and limit the powers of government. Then they went on to create that Bill of Rights majig that even though they had just mentioned what power Congress had, further went out to explicitly deny them the ability to do certain other things.
Besides which, I am not under any obligation to use Gmail if I disagree with their scanning my email to serve advertisements; there are dozens of companies that offer basically the same services. If I didn't like any of them, I could buy a domain and set up my own email services.
While I suppose technically speaking one isn't required to use AT&T, that's becoming less and less true in the US as they are allowed to reconstitute their monopoly. And it was done in secret. And they knew it was wrong and very possibly illegal to cooperate with the government in this manner, or they wouldn't suddenly by spending tens of thousands of dollars to lobby Congress to grant them immunity for it.
But really, the bottom line is this: Google can not kill me. Google can not take away my freedom. Nobody can force me to use Google, and they know only what I tell them in some way or another. The government can do all of this. They can, as we have seen, compel others to do the same--certainly with a warrant but in this case even without.
Stepping away from the particular example: If a person lives at home, their parents could read their mail. They could thumb through their drawers. They could read anything that was lying around. This isn't good, but the person may or may not care. Do you think the same level of disinterest would abound if some stranger came into the house to do exactly the same thing? Do you think students don't have different views on other students hearing them talk about things that maybe they shouldn't be talking about, versus teachers doing it?
The actor involved in a situation absolutely does matter even if the situations were otherwise technically identical.
And lest we forget, there are laws involved with what the NSA did. A federal court has struck the program down; while I wouldn't be surprised to see it reversed on appeal to what has become a conservative US Supreme Court, assuming they choose to hear the issue, that is currently the prevailing ruling in at least one federal district. It was struck down not only as an issue of privacy, but one of free speech, and separation of powers, and in violation of the requirements that were passed in the act that established the FISA court to begin with. In other words, it seems that what the NSA did was both illegal and unconstitutional.
(Incidentally, the NSA spying on US phone calls should turn any American's stomach. The NSA and CIA were always intended to be foreign intelligence gathering services, and were specifically enjoined from domestic spying. That was supposed to be done by the FBI according to established legal procedures, i.e. e.g. subpoenas and burdens of proof and evidence.)
Ah. Drats. I guess I'm going to have to wait then.
Thanks for the reply.
I've been waiting for that to make it to linux. What technology is being used to virtualize applications in that way?
Kind of. What you're looking for is the 8th amendment:
It definitely says nothing about affordable. In fact, any such requirement would very probably be unconstitutional as making some people pay more for the same crime would seem to me to be a fairly obvious violation of equal protection.
Regardless of whether the fine was actually appropriate (in either a moral or 8th Amendment sense), the judge and jury operated within the scope of the laws as defined by Congress. If the respondent in this case wants to challenge the constitutionality of the fine, she can do so on appeal. I personally find it excessive, but I find the punishment for a lot of crimes and civil torts to be excessive these days.
If you so desired, you could install IE 7 as your primary browser and use Multiple IE to install a standalone version of IE 6 for testing your webpages out.
Without getting too network-geeky, while they are both protocols they operate on different levels of the OSI model.
SMTP operates at the highest level (Layer 7); it has absolutely no concern for how messages are delivered, it is only concerned with how to format those messages, how to parse and read them, etc. Once it has the message formatted as what you would recognize as email, it passes it down to lower OSI levels and stops caring. You can completely gut TCP/IP and SMTP will continue to function; likewise you can completely alter SMTP without TCP/IP even caring.
TCP, on the other hand, is a Layer 4 protocol. Layer 4 is where the actual work of sending data takes place once the connection is established, and ensures reliable transmission.
IP is a level lower, on the Network level (3). Basically speaking, it figures out how to send the data. It does the job of routing.
While it is a matter of semantics, the lower you go down the more of "the Internet" one could argue it is. I would consider it fair to say TCP and IP both make up "the Internet" (though they do not have to--this was by choice). Things like SMTP, FTP, HTTP, etc. are services that run on top.
(These explanations are greatly simplified of course.)
I do agree to a point, but it reminds me of a great quote from West Wing:
"I don't know where you get the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for anything of which they disapprove. Lots of them don't like tanks. Even more don't like Congress."
All of us would like to keep more of our money, and all of us can come up with things we think are wholly unnecessary. Part of the problem is that we tend to pick different things; most of the /. crowd would probably get behind the so-called "Bridge to Nowehere" being a horrible idea, but I read an article recently about the state getting the money but calling off the project itself where a lot of people they talked to--including the representative from the area the bridge was to be built in, residents, mayors of towns there, etc--who were upset. Maybe it's political wrangling and all they wanted was the money, but maybe it's also that they legitimately feel they need this. The locals were essentially out-voted on an issue by people most of whom probably don't know enough about the issue to even make an informed decision.
I'm not saying there's not government waste or anything along those lines, nor am I trying to make a point about this particular spending project. I'm simply saying there's a danger in assuming people shouldn't have to pay for anything they don't want to pay for. In a country where we can't get a third of people to the polls at all and where most others vote party lines, I question whether any of us--heck, even including our representatives in a lot of cases--can truly understand the issues enough that we should have a voice in making the decisions.
Speaking as somebody who has never used eBay (well, I once bought something from half.com but that's it) and thus has no particular stake in this, what bothers me isn't so much that you're required to pay taxes on sales online. Technically speaking I believe you're required to do so in the United States right now and I believe you're even supposed to pay sales tax if the site doesn't handle that for you.
What bothers me is that the government seemingly got subpoenas for information on these people solely based on the fact that they're big sellers on eBay. They don't appear to be being accused of any particular crime at this point. There is no evidence that I saw that they have any reason to believe they have done anything wrong.
Further, now that they have this information how are they going to use it? Are they simply going to compare eBay sales numbers and reported income and go "yeah, that sounds about right?" Or are even reasonable numbers going to get these poor people an audit simply by virtue of being a big eBay seller?
If governments want to pass laws saying that eBay must pass along information at the end of the year that includes your name and address information as well as sales totals, I wouldn't mind that so much. This, however, seems to be exceptionally selective enforcement against a particular group of people they have no particular reason to believe have done anything wrong.
Yes, if you assume that the only active protection is a 1:1 URL-to-badness mapping. That may be accurate right now, I'm not sure, but it likely won't last very long.
For example, I probably wouldn't blacklist aol.com for some phishing pages on their domains because it's casting too large a net, but I might well do it for pages on evilhackerzphishingyourssn.com. It's trivial to set up anyrandomcombination.somedomain.com to show the same pages. Do I send a hash of the URL, then one of the domain, then one of the subdomain, then one of the sub-subdomain? Where do I stop? What about URLs with the same problems? Am I hashing just the domain, or a specific URL to a page on a domain?
Without a way to examine the incoming data in a more meaningful way than "yes, I have seen this before" your level of protection is going to drop. It would not be hard to generate a unique URL in every phishing email (another poster says this already happens) and if all we're sending back is hashes there's no way for Google or whoever is running a list to notice. If those hashes are reversible, then there's really no added privacy at all -- particularly since they would be un-hashing them automatically to check for these sorts of things anyway.
Like I said, I'm not sure that Google actually does any of this yet, but as with spam it is essentially an arms race. If the phishers haven't pushed them there yet, they likely will soon.
Would "informed consent" including checking the box next to "tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery," then ticking the radio button next to "Check by asking [_______] about each site I visit" and selecting Google? (As opposed to either not ticking the "tell me" box or choosing the first radio button, "check using a downloaded list of suspected sites."
Even the summary noted that this feature is off by default. I consider it fairly informed and definitely consent just by ticking those options, and if they want to be fully informed there is nothing stopping them from checking up on the privacy policies of any of the "ask [____]" options they might choose to use.
Well to use your smug bluntness: Wrong.
If you go out of your way to agree to let me do something, my doing it is not evil. If you require a contract controlling what happens to the private information, either I provide one or I don't and your opt-in to the service is still your choice. It is not evil in the slightest. If you don't like it, hey, cool. Don't opt in by checking the box or telling it to ask Google. The assumption that those who do must just be too stupid or are getting fleeced is pure arrogance.
I disagree, but it depends on what perspective you're looking at it from.
In this case, yes, if you're simply lying about somebody I would like to see you lose a lawsuit. That's in a vacuum though. On a large scale, I think it is a much more chilling restriction on free speech to tell people they have to be able to prove anything they say, even if it is ultimately true, or risk being sued into the dirt than it is to say that sometimes, people are going to lie and get away with it. It's kind of like the idea that yes, some guilty people will go free on technicalities in an attempt to preserve a standard of conduct and justice for everybody. It's unfortunate that it happens, but most people still consider it a reasonable price to pay to uphold the larger principles.
That said, I'm also not so sure the lawsuit would go your way in the US. I'm not intricately familiar with US tort law enough to speak authoritatively, but I imagine that since you have a right to confront your accusers and see their evidence in court, it might go something like this:
Him: Show me your evidence and I will disprove it.
You: Hm? Evidence? Who needs evidence? I don't have any evidence.
Judge: Yeah, you're an asshole. Pay up.
(At least assuming that he could also prove some sort of damages to income, reputation, etc.)
Ultimately, it is nearly impossible to prove you did not do something and I don't think judges or the legal system is so naive as to assume otherwise. The fact that you had no evidence would likely be what sinks you, in fact. If you DID have evidence which the other party then showed to be false, you might be safe; libel and slander in the US have requirements that what you said be knowingly false. If you actually have reason to believe what you say is true, that is a valid defense. If your evidence is particularly weak you may still be in a tough spot, but I digress.
In other words, while what the OP said probably is accurate overall, I think it's too oversimplified. It would be much more reasonable to say that it is much more difficult to get a libel/slander judgment in the US than the UK and stop there, I think.
Maybe in some cases, but not in this one.
What this government agency asked me to do in this hypothetical is spy on peoples' traffic and pass them hints of who may be up to something. That would immediately set off my "illegal search" sensors, whether it turned out to be legal or not. My assumption would be exactly opposite of what you expected; I would assume it was illegal until somebody proved to me that it wasn't or handed me a subpoena.
I expect that the more realistic phrasing of your hypothetical would be, "[a] well-known government [spy] agency comes to you and says 'we need you do X, and it needs to be secret.' Wouldn't you be worried that you would lose those contracts if you didn't comply?" Yeah. Probably.
Well, for starters: who? It's not likely to be the government, since the government is involved. Most of the courts are ignoring the issue by saying "since you can't know for sure if you were spied on in this secret government spy program, you don't have standing to sue. And whether or not you were spied on is a matter of national security." But luckily, despite that, the answer is still yes. A federal judge ruled the program unconstitutional. From the article: "She declared that the program 'violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III.'" I assume a federal judge would meet your definition of a controlling legal authority.
Naturally this is under appeal, and the way courts have been kowtowing to abuses of privacy since 9/11 I wouldn't be surprised to see it overturned. I don't think it has been yet, though, so for the moment it's the standing ruling.
It might, but you keep jumping between whatever arguments seem fun as a reply to a particular post. There is a vast difference between "would that not piss you off?" and "they are legally obligated to provide."
They're not. If their line is capable of delivering up to the speed they advertise, even if that is under ideal conditions with absolutely no competition on your segment and for a fraction of a second, they have delivered precisely what they advertised. That you or I or "the reasonable man" might assume or expect more is an issue of business, not one of false advertising.
You might have had a case back when companies were advertising "unlimited" Internet, but I haven't heard that terminology in quite some time.
This seems fairly inevitable. I highly doubt that if these projects had been GPL instead, that Microsoft would have gone "shit! Now we have to play by their rules!" They would have just created their own proprietary authentication mechanism, and given their market position it would almost certainly have become the market leader anyway.
The only difference that I can see is their incompatible version is based on the BSD version instead of completely separate. "Swallowed" isn't the right word; "buried" is more accurate, and it's likely that it would have been buried regardless of license.
We did, and it was. The difference is that the missiles could hurt us, even if the Russians had no idea that we knew about them. If we made an attempt to attack them, there was a great chance we would miss some that may well then be launched. Similarly, they might see us coming to attack the missiles and launch. The only way to resolve that safely for the US was to get the missiles out, and we accomplished that with worldwide political pressure (and some backroom deals).
The only way a spy satellite hurts you is if it sees something it isn't supposed to. If we know where it is and can track it, we can ensure that it never does. We may even be able to ensure that it sees the opposite of what we're actually doing if we do want to get up to something. It may even help us directly; if the Chinese think they have a secret satellite to help get the drop on us and it turns out they don't, that is our advantage.
Telling them not only removes that advantage, it puts us at a disadvantage. Almost certainly, they would move the satellite and we would have to locate it again. The game loops again and again. In that sense it's the same as breaking an enemy's cipher; you don't want them to know because you want them to use a code you can read instead of developing a code you can't.
Any public relations position's job is to present their company in the best possible light given whatever policy is dictated to them from above. Sometimes you are given dickhead policies and if you want to keep your job, there's not much you can do to defend it short of lying or ignoring counter-arguments. (See pretty much all political discourse as a perfect example.)
In the past, and still in a handful of cases today, presenting your company in the best light was done by treating the consumer well. I think the iPhone rebate announced today is an example of that. (For the record: I am not an Apple fanboi and hate those who are. I do not own an iPod, iPhone or any Apple computer; I do not have iTunes installed and have never bought a track from them, etc.) The idea there is simple: Treat them right, give them a decent product and they will return to buy from you again in the future.
This is only necessarily in competitive markets where there are nearly identical replacements. Being an ass in that context will drive your customers away.
In limited circumstances--movies, music, Windows, and more--there are monopolies or cartels that make it much harder to switch away. Yes, there is a lot of music outside the control of the RIAA, but it's not what you tend to hear when you turn your radio on in the car and that's what people are going to want. It's also not a real replacement; if I want a song by an artist from a major record label I have to play by their rules, a song by a random indy artist isn't the same thing. (It may be better or worse or even the same level of enjoyment, but it is not the thing I wanted.) Yes, you can install OS X or Linux or some alternate operating system, but if your applications don't run on it or you don't want to relearn things you're a bit stuck. Movies are probably the worst, in part because we've become accustomed to big-budget flicks with huge special effects that can't really be duplicated in independent films.
Since there isn't such a clear-cut replacement in these cases, they can afford to dick their customers around. They have what we want, and our choices become buy it anyway, go without or turn to illegal means. Since increasingly people are choosing #3, you see a concerted effort by groups such as them to control the law (DMCA) to their advantage.
So, no, you don't have to be a dickhead as a PR guy necessarily. You do, however, have to be as big a dickhead as the decision-makers in your company are.
I haven't used it myself, but saw a link to it recently (on /. I believe) and thought it might be interesting:
http://www.sandboxie.com/
Given that it is a private, Catholic school, they don't have to justify opening your real locker either.
Wow. You know, it's possible you're right -- but even if you are, you're still a fool for thinking that clearly shows anything. You're exactly the tinfoil-hat paranoid that the OP was talking about. People like you do far more harm to legitimate privacy concerns than you do good.
It's a correlation/causation issue. You are correct; maintaining celibacy does not create a child molester. However, the church pretty much admits itself that the policy induces a disproportionate number of gays into the church. The theory is it is because the Catholic Church is one of the few places a person can go, never get married or date or really talk about sex and not have people ask them why. I read it in an article on Yahoo! news well over a year ago and probably a bit more, it was a conclusion of a study done by catholic priests (bishops? Cardinals?) for the Catholic Church. It was very likely back when the sex abuse scandals were raging.
Now before anybody objects: I am NOT by any means saying that "gay = child molester" or even that gays are more likely to be child molesters. What I am saying is that it is very possible and even likely that would-be child molesters are more inclined to go into the church for similar reasons. I don't think that child molesters want to be child molesters; they are people with abnormal sexual urges who in all likelihood try to control them and fail. Again, I'm not defending it, but it could be a step in the "trying to control them" part.
All in all, while I am certain that there are many priests who are willing to give up sex for their religion and do their very best to adhere (successfully or not), I also do not think it is unreasonable to think that people who have other reasons than pure love of their religion for avoiding sex might find it an appealing option in disproportionate numbers.
If we're being picky, wouldn't it be proper to say that a hub passes packets verbatim from one place to all others it is connected to? "One place to another" makes it sound like it's making a decision.