It's still pretty fucking stupid to charge them in the first place.
That's the real problem with this country. Somewhere along the way we became infatuated with law and not justice. If anybody in the chain, from the police to the prosecutor to the judge, dare to actually question whether ruining somebody's life over something stupid is the right thing to do they are labeled as "activist" -- codeword for not believing that some politicians somewhere that you've never met and who know nothing about the incident in question know better than you what's right.
If we could trust our public servants, if we could trust that the police and prosecutors and judges would exhibit common sense and consider justice for all parties, including the accused, then I would support laws like this. It would allow, for example, two 16-year-olds to exchange naked pictures if they want to without fear of having their lives ruined by the state and without some truly absurd requirement that they report each other to the authorities, while at the same time providing for consequences if they break up and decide that an awesome way to hurt each other is to start posting those pictures all over Facebook.
We can't, of course. Laws like this are proof enough of that. "We recognize how terrible our last law was so we'll give you a warning before we ruin your life for the exact same thing." That's moderation in our society, and I see no signs of it changing. The right thinks this is the greatest thing ever and the left lacks the balls to stand up against it.
Not all discrimination is wrong, much less detrimental. To prefer certains accents is not only acceptable but perfectly natural. Which accents those are will vary by person and culture, but trying to wipe out the preference not only won't happen, it is an attempt to strip something that makes us human.
Where it becomes an issue is when programs like this get into play and we try to force an accent. That much we definitely agree on.
Must I remind you of CDDB? When people work for a perceived common good that is in fact legally controlled by a for-profit, then there will eventually be mass-disappointment.
Except that there is no misperception. Everybody knows exactly how these translations will work: They will be placed into an app or game, available only to those who have installed that app or game -- which usually means paying for it. Unless you're really claiming that there are translators out there going "if I just finish this translation, the game will become freeeeee!"
That established, they're volunteers like any other. They're doing something they want to do because they want to do it. Their motives are their own, and I for one am uninterested in judging people for them.
I guess that depends on your vision and goal for the space program. Even if they go to the same places with the same goals, getting robotic probes somewhere is a different problem than getting humans there, with different challenges and different lessons to learn along the way.
More than anything else, I think NASA's problems are traced back to one thing: We've just become a culture intolerant of failure. There's no room for mistakes, especially at dollar values that, while disappointingly small portions of our budget, are large enough to make most Americans blanch. Nor does it particularly matter how much might be learned in failure; failure is failure and has to be avoided, increasing the scope, complexity, time and cost of the next project while reducing its functionality. And every second the timeline slips is filled by politicians hand-wringing about how little is getting done with so much time and money.
I'm not suggesting NASA should rush or not try to ensure their projects succeed, but they also can't be paralyzed by the fear of it. At some point it's not worth chasing down every infinitesimally small probability event; they need to keep moving -- yes, including with human projects. Some of that would definitely come with a more healthy budget, but better--and less risk-adverse--management would also go quite a ways. (A better Congress would help too, but that's a pipe dream.)
And this apparently universal fact was discovered by Sprint... yesterday? A customer will literally go to bed on October 1st paying $29.99/mo for unlimited data and wake up October 2nd paying $29.99/mo for 5GB of data. That's a huge fucking difference, well beyond the realm of any kind of feasible oversight or miscalculation and identifies it squarely as exactly what it is: Bait-and-switch.
But you know, that aside the truly annoying thing is less the existence of limits as the limits themselves. If tethering has any particular value to a consumer, 5GB is not likely to. And god forbid you go over that arbitrary limit you woke up to find, because then you'll be forced to pay 10 times more per MB-- you know, for your convenience. Honestly, the only thing that could top this off is if their solution to let you track your usage forced you to go online through the tether to eat more of your plan.
So let's see, we have a bait and switch that leads directly (do not pass Go) to price gouging. Yup, I must be in America.
So discuss them, but the discussion is: "Boy, this guy has a stupid-ass hobby." It still has nothing to do with his abilities as a security researcher. The closest argument you could make is something along the lines of "he'll get himself killed and then you have to find and integrate his replacement" -- which is still pretty weak.
unethical and immoral behavior eventually leads to ruin and it is better for everybody including yourself if you don't even start down that path.
It's more complicated than that. You yourself, in an attempt to illustrate that things are unethical even if you aren't caught, brought the reasoning back to how bad it is if you get caught. Had he not been caught, there would have been no ruin.
Now, I agree with you. What he did was wrong and he shouldn't have done it; that is according to my own particular set of ethics (though that particular one is shared by many people, I wager). At the same time, I could make an argument that he caused no harm. The original photographers released their photos to a stock photo company; they were paid for the work (probably when he downloaded a copy of it) in the same way they would have been otherwise. There is little to suggest that the original photographs would have even been up for the awards they won, much less still won them, so that's a specious or hypothetical argument at best. And though much harm has come to him--for being caught (yes, we're back here full circle)--a lot of good came as well, and only he can judge if it outweighed the bad.
Ethics are complicated things, particularly to explain. How wrong is something, really, that hurt nobody but (possibly) the one who did it, and who did it with full understanding of the possibility? And likewise, if the only real harm is in getting caught, then aren't we right back to the question of whether or not it is unethical or improper if you don't get caught?
As I said, I don't actually think so; I'm not defending him. My personal interpretation says it's wrong. But it is, at best, very complicated -- and that's probably why so many people never "learn" it. They've learned it, just not accepted it as truth. Philosophically I find that hard to fault even as I disagree.
But I suspect developers of FPS games aren't that interested in moral realism, just graphics and sound.
They aren't. By and large, that's a different genre -- which is why you had to reach for Elder Scrolls as an example.
I love Oblivion, and Skyrim and I have a date for release day. They're fantastic games, and a large part of the reason is the large amount of freedom the player has to play how they want: Good or evil, fight your way out of trouble or talk, etc. But that doesn't mean I don't also enjoy a game like Modern Warfare 2, nor does it necessarily mean I want to play some hybrid Modern Oblivion 2.
A video game is, first and foremost, a video game. If I'm playing an FPS, that means I want to shoot shit. If the developer wants there to be a penalty for shooting civilians, they can do (and have done) that -- fail and restart the level. A court martial? That serves what gameplay purpose, exactly? For that matter, what purpose does the penalty itself serve? If it's to ramp up the difficulty (you can't randomly shoot anything that moves), fine. If it's "moral realism," sorry -- wrong genre.
It sounds to me as though the respondents should be able to sue Warren Stevens.
One of the reasons that a judge will pierce the corporate veil is undercapitalization, particularly if it is intentional. $34,000 is a ton of money to you or me, but it's not a ton to a company and especially not one funded by a billionaire. "We lost a lawsuit and have to pay attorney fees in one case, we're bankrupt!" sounds undercapitalized to me. For what amounts to a legal group, that is one of the costs of doing business.
So what you're saying is that anybody should be able to get away with anything so long as they commit it with a computer, and you present that as sanity? After all, how are the circumstances different if we're talking about copyright infringement instead of hacking websites, stealing credit cards and committing credit card fraud, planning a murder, etc? The evidence is an IP address. Just don't live alone and you're golden. Investigators won't have enough evidence to bring a case and "sanity" dictates they don't have enough to go looking for more.
Hell, even if we limit it to just copyright infringement you're not going to find much support outside of Slashdot. Most people simply don't support you being able to download anything you want for free, regardless of whether or not their creators wanted compensation, and there be not only no consequences but no chance of consequences. Nor are courts going to make such a loophole for you even if it is technically correct from a legal standpoint.
And, unless someone makes it illegal to have an open wifi, you can't go around saying that there is any contributory negligence or anything like that.
Liability is nowhere near that simple. There would be a strong case for vicarious liability for an open WiFi, even if it's perfectly legal. There may be a case for strict liability as well. If you open your router because you want people to be able to use it, it's not hard to argue that you are permitting their use even if you don't know what it is. "I didn't know there was such a thing as securing my router" would be better, but probably not garner you much sympathy; ignorance is seldom a viable defense.
There's just been too much publicity of coercive practices for her to claim that there was any meaningful consent.
Traveling by air is consent. I understand that due to the circumstances (not being able to refuse or leave the security lines, etc) that you don't consider that "meaningful," but I doubt you're going to find a judge who is going to strike down the entirety of the TSA procedures -- and that's what it will take for this to matter.
Further, why is consent necessary? The TSA is an administrative agency, created by act of Congress. As such their decisions and policies, so long as they are within their Congressional mandate, creates what is called "administrative law" and has the full effect of any other law. Again, the only argument here is that the pat-downs themselves are an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, and good luck finding a judge to strike the entire system down.
It certainly won't happen in this case, incidentally, because the TSA agent is the plaintiff. The woman would have to sue the government to challenge the law since she is the one with standing to challenge it, and even still the agent would probably have immunity -- assuming, of course, that her actions were within the scope of the policy. Obviously if the accusations are true and she was sticking her fingers in a woman's vagina that would not be the case, but there's always two sides to every story. The TSA agent obviously feels strongly enough that they are false that she filed a lawsuit about it.
I'm sure that the defendant will have little to no trouble finding witnesses to support the claim of sexual assault if not rape.
Witnesses for what? Yeah, you can find no end of sexual assault experts who say that sticking a finger in somebody's vagina is sexual assault (and I agree with them), but it's only tangentially relevant. The question for a lawsuit is whether or not what she says is true, and the likelihood of their being any witnesses one way or another to support that is slim. Support for a patdown itself being sexual assault will be that much more slim, particularly if such policy is required under administrative law. You're not going to succeed in a lawsuit if the best you can claim is that the TSA agent was following policies which have the force of law.
What's worse, is that the TSA agents aren't law enforcement and lack the legal authority to conduct the searches in the first place.
Again, it's not relevant in defense of a libel suit. If the woman wants to sue to strike the program she can try and she can bring it up, but it has no bearing on the merits of the TSA agent's lawsuit.
Further, I disagree. They may not be law enforcement, but I still say TSA policies are administrative law and thus grant agents the authority to enforce them and qualified immunity while they do so.
Not a lawyer and all that. And don't get me wrong, I think the TSA is a fucking joke and these idiotic policies should go away -- but that has little to do how "[the lawsuit is] not going to go well for the TSA employee." Personally I think she has a pretty decent case if the penetration accusations are untrue.
I don't know what kind of anti-corporate nonsense rant this was supposed to be, but there is nothing unrealistic at all about providing a CD key you've been supplied when given proof of purchase of a graphics card, and certainly nothing unrealistic about securing those keys by not putting them in the fucking web root.
You could whip up a nicely secure front-end for getting a key in less than an hour, easy. How much more complicated it gets beyond that largely depends on how "proof of purchase" is determined and to what degree things are automated.
There's really no part of your post that is accurate.
1. She was a substitute teacher. Nothing at all says that this is the type of school or the type of student she typically deals with.
2. The laptop was not working. The article does not go into detail about what was wrong with it, but it does explicitly state she was told it was "messed up" and then "got it fixed." The second article states it was "non-functioning."
3. You state that you "guess it was one of those $250 specials or a couple years old," but don't seem to entertain the possibility that it is a couple years old version of one of those $250 specials. That would make $60 a good price but hardly enough to trigger "boy, I bet this is stolen!" in reasonable peoples' heads. Combine that with the fact that something about it was broken and needed repair and suddenly it's not unreasonable at all.
The specific legal merits of her case are, to quote the attorney for the respondents, "fascinating," and one he is (and I am) am eager to see a jury decide on. But all these people jumping up and down on this woman for buying a $60 laptop without even having the facts are getting disgusting.
More to the point, the Supreme Court looks for cases with a constitutional question and prefers cases in which lower courts have disagreed. This has neither.
Re:Hi, Kevin. I'm one of your victims.
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
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So I take it you didn't bother to take ten seconds to run a Google search about it before you went spouting off its falsehoods? One that would have provided numerous sources including the Wikipedia page on Netcom and, oh, about 35,199 others? (2,590 if you want to force the inclusion of "credit card" rather than simply "Netcom.")
Now I suppose it's possible that there is a decades-long, Internet-wide conspiracy to prepare for the day that somebody on Slashdot wanted to sound more clever than they are, spew pure speculation and use it to make some terrible joke about reach arounds, but I do have to admit that I find it rather unlikely. Slightly more likely is the possibility that Kevin Mitnick hacked 35,200 pages on the Internet to make you look bad. But all in all, I'm going to go all Occam's razor and assume that you probably just shouldn't go around acting like a stuck up prick unless you're very, very careful to be accurate.
Would you like a reach around with this? I'm easier than Netcom.
Well, you're right: Apple won't be tanking anytime soon, but the long-term success of the company is still in question.
The problem is, we won't really be able to evaluate it for a while. I'm sure they already have their next product or two down the road pretty much mapped out and all Tim has to do is point the rudder that direction. The real test will come in when Steve Jobs no longer plays an active role at Apple and there isn't a document somewhere laying out the path forward. In short, we have to get to a point where Tim Cook is actually the one creating the vision and the plan for the company rather than simply implementing it. This could quite literally take years, and we really won't even know when it starts.
For the most part, I do think Apple will be fine. They have a huge brand image that can buffer an awful lot of small missteps. When 35% of consumers say they will buy the iPhone 5 without knowing anything about it or seeing it, and 51% say they would buy it in the first year*,I think that's a pretty nice cushion. It would take some serious fucking up to erode all of that and then take the company into the tank -- not that it is not possible, of course.
* This was the result of an online survey and as such is not scientific, so I wouldn't take the numbers as absolutes in terms of extrapolating to the public at large. They're still damn impressive though. Companies kill for brand images like this.
And which budget shared web host supports file uploads using such protocols?
Dreamhost. Being able to SSH in and pull down something with their pipes using wget has come in handy a number of times as well.
The client thing, meh. If people are mucking around in command line FTP programs they're savvy enough to download one; if they're using a GUI an awful lot of them have SFTP support these days, including FileZilla (free/Free). I guess I could see an argument if they're just entering an FTP URL into their Explorer window.
P.S. I am an Australian and I find it sad that I know more about the US constitution than most Americans and the talking heads on TV.
It's because you don't; you have an incomplete understanding of the Constitution. Some people would call it pure--you know what the text says and that's about it--and some would call it naive. There is no simple answer as to how the Constitution should be construed; strict interpretation versus living document has been at the center of our constitutional debate for as long as this country has existed. The fact that it merited a revisiting from an appeals court should be evidence enough that it is not as cut-and-dry as you make it to be.
Reading and understanding the text is awesome, but ultimately useless. Regardless of which you support you can scream until you're blue in the face that these pesky judges and constitutional scholars are doing it wrong as they lead you off in handcuffs or garnish your wages to pay off a judgment to no effect. What matters is how it is applied in the real world. There are hundreds of years of precedent and case law and possibly more, sometimes reaching back to the precedent of our colonial masters.
If this same teacher had gone on a rant about how fantastic Christianity was, or began reach day reciting the Lords Prayer in front of his class, he very likely would have been reprimanded and probably would have lost any such lawsuit even though he is not "establishing religion" nor is he "prevent[ing] the free exercise thereof;" he's simply indulging in his own religious viewpoints in a non-neutral way. There is case law to this effect.
Going on an anti-religious rant would have been a more interesting case, frankly, but as others have pointed out it was more of a rant against dressing creationism or intelligent design up in the trappings of science -- a criticism I wholeheartedly agree with the teacher about.
There is a difference between talking about something and organizing something.
Do you know how they arrested Blackshaw? They showed up at his own fucking would-be riot and handcuffed him. That's a pretty good indication that he had every intention of doing exactly what he was talking about doing.
Talking about something is fine, even if that something is not fine. If you are planning it, if you are organizing it, if you are giving advice on how to get away with it, if you are, in short, giving evidence that you plan to ensure it happens, you should go to jail.
Blackshaw's sentence is well deserved. Sutcliffe-Keenan has an argument to make that his post was little more than a drunken rant and it should probably be knocked down to a few months and some probation.
For that matter, what is a search? With the instant results thing, it's not atypical at all for me to get a page of search results before I actually look at them. Perhaps I had paused in typing, or thought of another keyword I wanted to add. Perhaps I was interrupted by a firewall notification or something else. Is that two searches, one "ineffective" one?
I'm sorry, but the idea that a Slashdotter is willing to try a new search engine but can't be bothered to make the two total clicks it takes to change it in Firefox doesn't compute -- nor does the fact that that same user would use it if only Mozilla would change it for them. Maybe I'm giving people more credit than they deserve.
The majority of users--and the vast majority of Firefox users--are going to use the search engine they prefer. You'll catch a few stragglers who literally have no preference yet or who don't notice the change, but that's about it. People with a preference will use their preference. Change-adverse people will use the one they're familiar with. It's not a big deal for Google who, by the way, are still likely to give Mozilla some money and render this entire conversation moot.
I was going to buy Diablo III. I really enjoyed D1 and D2 and I had no problem whatsoever with the idea of giving them my money for D3. But now, I will pirate it. Guaranteed. Because I don't have a connection it can use? Because it's inconvenient? Nope. To shove it right in their fucking faces. Maybe I'll mail them a copy of my receipt for whatever game I choose to buy instead just for funsies.
How's that "anti-piracy measures that only hurt legitimate customers" thing working out for ya so far, Blizz?
Really? You're saying that the judge is willing to cause millions and millions of dollars of harm to somebody without believing their adversary has a good chance of winning?
The US has a lot of problems with its legal system, but that is not one of them. Here, a judge must make a determination not only about the potential harm somebody like Samsung might be causing, but about the likelihood that Apple has brought a winnable case (among other things).
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That's the real problem with this country. Somewhere along the way we became infatuated with law and not justice. If anybody in the chain, from the police to the prosecutor to the judge, dare to actually question whether ruining somebody's life over something stupid is the right thing to do they are labeled as "activist" -- codeword for not believing that some politicians somewhere that you've never met and who know nothing about the incident in question know better than you what's right.
If we could trust our public servants, if we could trust that the police and prosecutors and judges would exhibit common sense and consider justice for all parties, including the accused, then I would support laws like this. It would allow, for example, two 16-year-olds to exchange naked pictures if they want to without fear of having their lives ruined by the state and without some truly absurd requirement that they report each other to the authorities, while at the same time providing for consequences if they break up and decide that an awesome way to hurt each other is to start posting those pictures all over Facebook.
We can't, of course. Laws like this are proof enough of that. "We recognize how terrible our last law was so we'll give you a warning before we ruin your life for the exact same thing." That's moderation in our society, and I see no signs of it changing. The right thinks this is the greatest thing ever and the left lacks the balls to stand up against it.
Not all discrimination is wrong, much less detrimental. To prefer certains accents is not only acceptable but perfectly natural. Which accents those are will vary by person and culture, but trying to wipe out the preference not only won't happen, it is an attempt to strip something that makes us human.
Where it becomes an issue is when programs like this get into play and we try to force an accent. That much we definitely agree on.
Except that there is no misperception. Everybody knows exactly how these translations will work: They will be placed into an app or game, available only to those who have installed that app or game -- which usually means paying for it. Unless you're really claiming that there are translators out there going "if I just finish this translation, the game will become freeeeee!"
That established, they're volunteers like any other. They're doing something they want to do because they want to do it. Their motives are their own, and I for one am uninterested in judging people for them.
I guess that depends on your vision and goal for the space program. Even if they go to the same places with the same goals, getting robotic probes somewhere is a different problem than getting humans there, with different challenges and different lessons to learn along the way.
More than anything else, I think NASA's problems are traced back to one thing: We've just become a culture intolerant of failure. There's no room for mistakes, especially at dollar values that, while disappointingly small portions of our budget, are large enough to make most Americans blanch. Nor does it particularly matter how much might be learned in failure; failure is failure and has to be avoided, increasing the scope, complexity, time and cost of the next project while reducing its functionality. And every second the timeline slips is filled by politicians hand-wringing about how little is getting done with so much time and money.
I'm not suggesting NASA should rush or not try to ensure their projects succeed, but they also can't be paralyzed by the fear of it. At some point it's not worth chasing down every infinitesimally small probability event; they need to keep moving -- yes, including with human projects. Some of that would definitely come with a more healthy budget, but better--and less risk-adverse--management would also go quite a ways. (A better Congress would help too, but that's a pipe dream.)
And this apparently universal fact was discovered by Sprint... yesterday? A customer will literally go to bed on October 1st paying $29.99/mo for unlimited data and wake up October 2nd paying $29.99/mo for 5GB of data. That's a huge fucking difference, well beyond the realm of any kind of feasible oversight or miscalculation and identifies it squarely as exactly what it is: Bait-and-switch.
But you know, that aside the truly annoying thing is less the existence of limits as the limits themselves. If tethering has any particular value to a consumer, 5GB is not likely to. And god forbid you go over that arbitrary limit you woke up to find, because then you'll be forced to pay 10 times more per MB-- you know, for your convenience. Honestly, the only thing that could top this off is if their solution to let you track your usage forced you to go online through the tether to eat more of your plan.
So let's see, we have a bait and switch that leads directly (do not pass Go) to price gouging. Yup, I must be in America.
So discuss them, but the discussion is: "Boy, this guy has a stupid-ass hobby." It still has nothing to do with his abilities as a security researcher. The closest argument you could make is something along the lines of "he'll get himself killed and then you have to find and integrate his replacement" -- which is still pretty weak.
It's more complicated than that. You yourself, in an attempt to illustrate that things are unethical even if you aren't caught, brought the reasoning back to how bad it is if you get caught. Had he not been caught, there would have been no ruin.
Now, I agree with you. What he did was wrong and he shouldn't have done it; that is according to my own particular set of ethics (though that particular one is shared by many people, I wager). At the same time, I could make an argument that he caused no harm. The original photographers released their photos to a stock photo company; they were paid for the work (probably when he downloaded a copy of it) in the same way they would have been otherwise. There is little to suggest that the original photographs would have even been up for the awards they won, much less still won them, so that's a specious or hypothetical argument at best. And though much harm has come to him--for being caught (yes, we're back here full circle)--a lot of good came as well, and only he can judge if it outweighed the bad.
Ethics are complicated things, particularly to explain. How wrong is something, really, that hurt nobody but (possibly) the one who did it, and who did it with full understanding of the possibility? And likewise, if the only real harm is in getting caught, then aren't we right back to the question of whether or not it is unethical or improper if you don't get caught?
As I said, I don't actually think so; I'm not defending him. My personal interpretation says it's wrong. But it is, at best, very complicated -- and that's probably why so many people never "learn" it. They've learned it, just not accepted it as truth. Philosophically I find that hard to fault even as I disagree.
They aren't. By and large, that's a different genre -- which is why you had to reach for Elder Scrolls as an example.
I love Oblivion, and Skyrim and I have a date for release day. They're fantastic games, and a large part of the reason is the large amount of freedom the player has to play how they want: Good or evil, fight your way out of trouble or talk, etc. But that doesn't mean I don't also enjoy a game like Modern Warfare 2, nor does it necessarily mean I want to play some hybrid Modern Oblivion 2.
A video game is, first and foremost, a video game. If I'm playing an FPS, that means I want to shoot shit. If the developer wants there to be a penalty for shooting civilians, they can do (and have done) that -- fail and restart the level. A court martial? That serves what gameplay purpose, exactly? For that matter, what purpose does the penalty itself serve? If it's to ramp up the difficulty (you can't randomly shoot anything that moves), fine. If it's "moral realism," sorry -- wrong genre.
It sounds to me as though the respondents should be able to sue Warren Stevens.
One of the reasons that a judge will pierce the corporate veil is undercapitalization, particularly if it is intentional. $34,000 is a ton of money to you or me, but it's not a ton to a company and especially not one funded by a billionaire. "We lost a lawsuit and have to pay attorney fees in one case, we're bankrupt!" sounds undercapitalized to me. For what amounts to a legal group, that is one of the costs of doing business.
So what you're saying is that anybody should be able to get away with anything so long as they commit it with a computer, and you present that as sanity? After all, how are the circumstances different if we're talking about copyright infringement instead of hacking websites, stealing credit cards and committing credit card fraud, planning a murder, etc? The evidence is an IP address. Just don't live alone and you're golden. Investigators won't have enough evidence to bring a case and "sanity" dictates they don't have enough to go looking for more.
Hell, even if we limit it to just copyright infringement you're not going to find much support outside of Slashdot. Most people simply don't support you being able to download anything you want for free, regardless of whether or not their creators wanted compensation, and there be not only no consequences but no chance of consequences. Nor are courts going to make such a loophole for you even if it is technically correct from a legal standpoint.
Liability is nowhere near that simple. There would be a strong case for vicarious liability for an open WiFi, even if it's perfectly legal. There may be a case for strict liability as well. If you open your router because you want people to be able to use it, it's not hard to argue that you are permitting their use even if you don't know what it is. "I didn't know there was such a thing as securing my router" would be better, but probably not garner you much sympathy; ignorance is seldom a viable defense.
Traveling by air is consent. I understand that due to the circumstances (not being able to refuse or leave the security lines, etc) that you don't consider that "meaningful," but I doubt you're going to find a judge who is going to strike down the entirety of the TSA procedures -- and that's what it will take for this to matter.
Further, why is consent necessary? The TSA is an administrative agency, created by act of Congress. As such their decisions and policies, so long as they are within their Congressional mandate, creates what is called "administrative law" and has the full effect of any other law. Again, the only argument here is that the pat-downs themselves are an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, and good luck finding a judge to strike the entire system down.
It certainly won't happen in this case, incidentally, because the TSA agent is the plaintiff. The woman would have to sue the government to challenge the law since she is the one with standing to challenge it, and even still the agent would probably have immunity -- assuming, of course, that her actions were within the scope of the policy. Obviously if the accusations are true and she was sticking her fingers in a woman's vagina that would not be the case, but there's always two sides to every story. The TSA agent obviously feels strongly enough that they are false that she filed a lawsuit about it.
Witnesses for what? Yeah, you can find no end of sexual assault experts who say that sticking a finger in somebody's vagina is sexual assault (and I agree with them), but it's only tangentially relevant. The question for a lawsuit is whether or not what she says is true, and the likelihood of their being any witnesses one way or another to support that is slim. Support for a patdown itself being sexual assault will be that much more slim, particularly if such policy is required under administrative law. You're not going to succeed in a lawsuit if the best you can claim is that the TSA agent was following policies which have the force of law.
Again, it's not relevant in defense of a libel suit. If the woman wants to sue to strike the program she can try and she can bring it up, but it has no bearing on the merits of the TSA agent's lawsuit.
Further, I disagree. They may not be law enforcement, but I still say TSA policies are administrative law and thus grant agents the authority to enforce them and qualified immunity while they do so.
Not a lawyer and all that. And don't get me wrong, I think the TSA is a fucking joke and these idiotic policies should go away -- but that has little to do how "[the lawsuit is] not going to go well for the TSA employee." Personally I think she has a pretty decent case if the penetration accusations are untrue.
I don't know what kind of anti-corporate nonsense rant this was supposed to be, but there is nothing unrealistic at all about providing a CD key you've been supplied when given proof of purchase of a graphics card, and certainly nothing unrealistic about securing those keys by not putting them in the fucking web root.
You could whip up a nicely secure front-end for getting a key in less than an hour, easy. How much more complicated it gets beyond that largely depends on how "proof of purchase" is determined and to what degree things are automated.
There's really no part of your post that is accurate.
1. She was a substitute teacher. Nothing at all says that this is the type of school or the type of student she typically deals with.
2. The laptop was not working. The article does not go into detail about what was wrong with it, but it does explicitly state she was told it was "messed up" and then "got it fixed." The second article states it was "non-functioning."
3. You state that you "guess it was one of those $250 specials or a couple years old," but don't seem to entertain the possibility that it is a couple years old version of one of those $250 specials. That would make $60 a good price but hardly enough to trigger "boy, I bet this is stolen!" in reasonable peoples' heads. Combine that with the fact that something about it was broken and needed repair and suddenly it's not unreasonable at all.
The specific legal merits of her case are, to quote the attorney for the respondents, "fascinating," and one he is (and I am) am eager to see a jury decide on. But all these people jumping up and down on this woman for buying a $60 laptop without even having the facts are getting disgusting.
More to the point, the Supreme Court looks for cases with a constitutional question and prefers cases in which lower courts have disagreed. This has neither.
So I take it you didn't bother to take ten seconds to run a Google search about it before you went spouting off its falsehoods? One that would have provided numerous sources including the Wikipedia page on Netcom and, oh, about 35,199 others? (2,590 if you want to force the inclusion of "credit card" rather than simply "Netcom.")
Now I suppose it's possible that there is a decades-long, Internet-wide conspiracy to prepare for the day that somebody on Slashdot wanted to sound more clever than they are, spew pure speculation and use it to make some terrible joke about reach arounds, but I do have to admit that I find it rather unlikely. Slightly more likely is the possibility that Kevin Mitnick hacked 35,200 pages on the Internet to make you look bad. But all in all, I'm going to go all Occam's razor and assume that you probably just shouldn't go around acting like a stuck up prick unless you're very, very careful to be accurate.
Would you like a reach around with this? I'm easier than Netcom.
Well, you're right: Apple won't be tanking anytime soon, but the long-term success of the company is still in question.
The problem is, we won't really be able to evaluate it for a while. I'm sure they already have their next product or two down the road pretty much mapped out and all Tim has to do is point the rudder that direction. The real test will come in when Steve Jobs no longer plays an active role at Apple and there isn't a document somewhere laying out the path forward. In short, we have to get to a point where Tim Cook is actually the one creating the vision and the plan for the company rather than simply implementing it. This could quite literally take years, and we really won't even know when it starts.
For the most part, I do think Apple will be fine. They have a huge brand image that can buffer an awful lot of small missteps. When 35% of consumers say they will buy the iPhone 5 without knowing anything about it or seeing it, and 51% say they would buy it in the first year*,I think that's a pretty nice cushion. It would take some serious fucking up to erode all of that and then take the company into the tank -- not that it is not possible, of course.
* This was the result of an online survey and as such is not scientific, so I wouldn't take the numbers as absolutes in terms of extrapolating to the public at large. They're still damn impressive though. Companies kill for brand images like this.
The director of Playstation Home is focused on Playstation Home?
Gahh! The ignorant bastards!
Dreamhost. Being able to SSH in and pull down something with their pipes using wget has come in handy a number of times as well.
The client thing, meh. If people are mucking around in command line FTP programs they're savvy enough to download one; if they're using a GUI an awful lot of them have SFTP support these days, including FileZilla (free/Free). I guess I could see an argument if they're just entering an FTP URL into their Explorer window.
It's because you don't; you have an incomplete understanding of the Constitution. Some people would call it pure--you know what the text says and that's about it--and some would call it naive. There is no simple answer as to how the Constitution should be construed; strict interpretation versus living document has been at the center of our constitutional debate for as long as this country has existed. The fact that it merited a revisiting from an appeals court should be evidence enough that it is not as cut-and-dry as you make it to be.
Reading and understanding the text is awesome, but ultimately useless. Regardless of which you support you can scream until you're blue in the face that these pesky judges and constitutional scholars are doing it wrong as they lead you off in handcuffs or garnish your wages to pay off a judgment to no effect. What matters is how it is applied in the real world. There are hundreds of years of precedent and case law and possibly more, sometimes reaching back to the precedent of our colonial masters.
If this same teacher had gone on a rant about how fantastic Christianity was, or began reach day reciting the Lords Prayer in front of his class, he very likely would have been reprimanded and probably would have lost any such lawsuit even though he is not "establishing religion" nor is he "prevent[ing] the free exercise thereof;" he's simply indulging in his own religious viewpoints in a non-neutral way. There is case law to this effect.
Going on an anti-religious rant would have been a more interesting case, frankly, but as others have pointed out it was more of a rant against dressing creationism or intelligent design up in the trappings of science -- a criticism I wholeheartedly agree with the teacher about.
There is a difference between talking about something and organizing something.
Do you know how they arrested Blackshaw? They showed up at his own fucking would-be riot and handcuffed him. That's a pretty good indication that he had every intention of doing exactly what he was talking about doing.
Talking about something is fine, even if that something is not fine. If you are planning it, if you are organizing it, if you are giving advice on how to get away with it, if you are, in short, giving evidence that you plan to ensure it happens, you should go to jail.
Blackshaw's sentence is well deserved. Sutcliffe-Keenan has an argument to make that his post was little more than a drunken rant and it should probably be knocked down to a few months and some probation.
For that matter, what is a search? With the instant results thing, it's not atypical at all for me to get a page of search results before I actually look at them. Perhaps I had paused in typing, or thought of another keyword I wanted to add. Perhaps I was interrupted by a firewall notification or something else. Is that two searches, one "ineffective" one?
Then why don't you go try it?
I'm sorry, but the idea that a Slashdotter is willing to try a new search engine but can't be bothered to make the two total clicks it takes to change it in Firefox doesn't compute -- nor does the fact that that same user would use it if only Mozilla would change it for them. Maybe I'm giving people more credit than they deserve.
The majority of users--and the vast majority of Firefox users--are going to use the search engine they prefer. You'll catch a few stragglers who literally have no preference yet or who don't notice the change, but that's about it. People with a preference will use their preference. Change-adverse people will use the one they're familiar with. It's not a big deal for Google who, by the way, are still likely to give Mozilla some money and render this entire conversation moot.
If you can't recognize that it was a shell prompt and not PHP, you probably shouldn't be trying to seem too geeky for the language.
I was going to buy Diablo III. I really enjoyed D1 and D2 and I had no problem whatsoever with the idea of giving them my money for D3. But now, I will pirate it. Guaranteed. Because I don't have a connection it can use? Because it's inconvenient? Nope. To shove it right in their fucking faces. Maybe I'll mail them a copy of my receipt for whatever game I choose to buy instead just for funsies.
How's that "anti-piracy measures that only hurt legitimate customers" thing working out for ya so far, Blizz?
Really? You're saying that the judge is willing to cause millions and millions of dollars of harm to somebody without believing their adversary has a good chance of winning?
The US has a lot of problems with its legal system, but that is not one of them. Here, a judge must make a determination not only about the potential harm somebody like Samsung might be causing, but about the likelihood that Apple has brought a winnable case (among other things).