Please? I mean here are two perfectly innocent young children
Huh? One of them is sending unsolicited porn to a girl he knows, the other is spreading that porn to all her friends. Neither is "perfectly innocent."
just BEGGING to be thrown to the judicial wolves, torn apart, consumed, and eaten
One of them is reported to have been put on the list of people who have been accused of crimes. The other we don't know what happened to. Neither one is being charged with anything, neither one is being "thrown to the judicial wolves" or "eaten."
I'm pretty sure that a fourteen year old boy should know it isn't appropriate to send naked pictures of himself to others. That's what makes it a thrill to do, and that's why he used a system deliberately designed to delete images after a short period of time. If it was "perfectly normal" and "perfectly innocent" to send such pictures, why use a system that deletes them automatically?
The girl knew that it was revenge to distribute that picture once she had it. She even had to bypass the normal snapchat limits to save the image, so it's not like her having the image to distribute was some innocent mistake. She had to go out of her way to do it.
Sorry, but actions have consequences, even stupid actions.
Actually, you start paying with the first; $500 a pop.
No, you wouldn't. You'd get a check for $2500 instead of $3000. There is a difference. It wasn't your money to start with, so you aren't losing it when it isn't handed to you.
But I understand the confusion. Many people also buy the line that the government is "losing money" when there is a tax cut, when the truth is that people are getting to keep more of their money, not that they're being allowed to keep more of the government's money.
We won't have to do it. If the Ents ever find out that we've been cutting down the Entwives to use for paper to wipe our asses, they'll take care of killing all the humans for us.
So for the resident, it comes down to price vs. performance like any other consumer decision.
Except that the playing field is rigged in favor of the municipality. The "customer" is paying in taxes, and then is expected to make a free choice between the municipality service and a commercial company.
This is the same rigging that works against private schools. People who are already paying taxes to the public schools have less money and less incentive to buy a private education for their children, so private schools are the haven for rich kids.
Significantly, Comcast and AT&T seem to believe municipal broadband is a real threat since they are willing to spend bucketloads of money trying to kill it.
Of course it's a threat. A highly-regulated private company cannot compete against a government "company" that can set its own rules and dip into the general fund to cover any losses.
I believe in a functioning constitutional democracy. Where such exists, I support it.
Then you have no qualms with state DOMA laws. Ok.
The U.S. federal version seems to be dysfunctional ATM.
ATM? Automatic Teller Machine?
In any case, the US "federal version" is not a "constitutional democracy", it is a "democratic republic". Not even for the two national officeholders we elect is it a true democracy, we elect people who vote on our behalf.
Reverse the process. Give everyone $3,000 a year, but subtract $500 for each kid you have. You want 6 kids? Sure, go for it, but you're paying for them.
You wouldn't start "paying for them" under this system until you had seven, and then only if you forced payment on the negative balance. Most handouts don't work that way.
How strange, we were all told that capitalism solves every problem, through magic.
Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. I've never seen anyone saying this, but then, I don't wander the Internet looking for ways to castigate capitalism.
Apparently it's better at turning trees into toilet paper (see article above) than infrastructure. Which, btw., is also falling apart in the US.
You mean all those bridges and highways that are operated by greedy capitalistic monolithic multinational corporations? All the sewer and water lines run by monopolistic megalomaniacal corporate CEOs?
You might be interested to know that those signs along the road that say "This road adopted by MacDonalds' employees" doesn't mean MacDonalds actually maintains that bit of infrastructure, just that the employees come by every so often to pick up trash on the roadside. The road is actually maintained by the greedy multinational capitalistic city, county, or state road departments.
Claiming that publicly funded and maintained infrastructure failures are caused by capitalism is a bit of a stretch.
"Hmmm, let's see. I'm paying taxes now for a gigabit network connection I don't really need (but my neighbors wanted me to help them pay for) and I could use that, or I could pay taxes for a network I don't need AND pay Comcast for service I do want, too."
If you don't see the unfair competition side of that statement, then there is nothing to discuss.
What's the problem? The people there voted for it. Do you not believe in democracy?
De Tocquville (sp?) had the right idea. Something along the lines of "a democracy can exist only until the majority learns they can tax the minority to pay for free stuff."
You apparently believe that democracies cannot be wrong, and yet I suspect that you would denounce as wrong those democracies that have voted in things like mandatory sentences for drug possession and defense of marriage laws.
I was simply commenting on the fact that many businesses likely would want static addressing. Not all, but many.
No, most city-sized businesses are not going to worry about static addressing, because most businesses that size are not going to want to be saddled with managing their own servers. They'll hire that function out to a full-time data center that can offer higher reliability and better security. Yes, there are high-profile failures in security, but you're still more likely to have a more secure site if you hire someone to do it that does it on a large scale than if you say "Hey, Billy was the high school computer geek, let's hire him to be our IT department!".
Is this unfair competition? Well, let's see. A city says "big company, if you want to operate here these are all the rules you have to obey", and then the city creates their own rules and uses the power of the taxpayer wallet to undercut the big company they claim they wanted to provide the service. I'd say that would be "yes". You can't restrict a company from providing a service and then use that failure as an excuse to do it at taxpayer expense, at least not in a fair way.
That's your right. You have a right to be wrong. Even glaringly wrong, just like the student who said "1.0000" was the right answer.
Any student with half a brain or even less ego would haul your ass in front of the dean for such a stunt.
It wasn't a "stunt".
A) The student assured me he knew how to use the calculator, even after I told him it was an HP and not a TI/etc. "I didn't know how to use the calculator", which is never an excuse for wrong answers, is even less of an excuse here.
B) The answer was SEVEN ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE WRONG. That's off by a factor of TEN MILLION. Were he Mr. Gower making a prescription for you and instead of a concentration of medicine that was 1E-7 he gave you 1E0, you'd probably be dead.
C) The topic of quiz was buffers and pH. An answer of "1.0000" for a hydrogen ion concentration is so ridiculous in both value and precision that any "student with half a brain or even less" would have known the answer was wrong.
D) The prof thought it was the right thing to do.
You are there to teach and grade work.
I did both. That student will remember not to blindly trust the output of a computing device ever again. That's a lesson well learned. And I obviously graded his work, which included his failure to sanity check a simple answer.
They are customers.
They are buying an education. They are not traditional customers in that the phrase "the customer is always right" is patently absurd for them. He got an education.
You probably used to use futup to get data, and now access it all using hottop or hottopiss and earls pointing to hitmal at sites with names that start with "wuhwuhwuh", right?
Yeah, I read the moronic comments attached to that comic, too.
People become too reliant on "black box" functions and libraries where you simply pass in values and the output magically appears.
I loaned a student my HP calculator to take a quiz one time. I asked him if he knew how to use it and he said "of course". (Enter>=!). The question dealt with the concentration of hydrogen ions in a nearly-neutral solution of something. His answer was "1". "something enter something enter divide" where the second "enter" wasn't supposed to be was his mistake.
I gave him zero points for that answer, and deducted an additional point for not even thinking about whether the answer made sense.
If the act of operating outside of normal bands is already illegal than how does making a law with more restrictions to an already illegal act provide any extra law enforcement ability?
It doesn't. But it does prevent easy violations, whether accidental ("oops, I shouldn't have commented out that channel number test") or deliberate ("fuck you, it's my radio, I'm using one of those illegal channels") or malicious ("if I modify this code, I can interfere with licensed users of other services...").
It's like the laws that prohibit radio dealers from providing field programmable radios (47CFR 90.203 (e)) to their customers. It's already against the law for unlicensed use of certain frequencies, and 90.203 doesn't allow for "extra law enforcement ability", it just makes it harder for the violation to happen in the first place.
If the radio is licensed for channels 1-11, it shouldn't be capable of operating on channel 13 at all (also legal in the EU, btw). That would still allow us to flash the firmware
You've just moved the problem one level along. The cost of manufacturing a different radio for each regulatory jurisdiction would be prohibitive, so the operational limits will be either set in firmware (in the radio) or, as is very common in amateur radio gear, through jumpers. Others have already pointed out that the right place to lock a router down is in the radio firmware, but what about routers where the radio function is part of the overall router firmware? I.e., the selection of channel is tested in the router firmware before it is passed on to the radio? That reduces costs because the radio firmware doesn't need to have a way of being flashed to different limits, only the main router software (which has to be flashable for updates anyway).
The primary reason as I see it for this is that the HW manufacturers want it - they want to sell you a new $200 device to get a security update.
So you buy an $80 Odroid XU4 and a wireless dongle and make your own wireless router with whatever routing software you want on it. The wireless device has the locked down firmware the FCC requires, the rest of the hardware and software is whatever you want it to be.
You could even put a long-range antenna on the wireless and hide the device near a public wifi hotspot...
Yes, replacing the firmware on a device is modifying the firmware on the device. Do'h.
The argument that only DD-WRT makes routers usable is, well, limited. The law doesn't need to care that manufacturers won't make products with the specific features that you want so you have to be able to modify it yourself. The law also doesn't have to consider that an obsolete device can only be made secure by modifying the firmware through open source.
The vast majority of such devices are in use and usable by people who have no intention of modifying the firmware, and if your obsolete router no longer has manufacturer-provided updates then buying a new one is a solution to a law that says you can't do it yourself.
There are simply too many examples of laws that make obsolete equipment obsolete to claim that this one would be special. Ask any radio technician about the stream of obsolete equipment that passed through his shop when narrowbanding became the law. A lot of it went into amateur radio use, but that which couldn't be programmed or modified for ham use became landfill. "But the radio still works and we can just turn down the deviation" wasn't a sufficient justification to keep it authorized.
If someone not only takes but advocates a strong position in the culture wars and then themselves violates that view, they deserve to be ridiculed for it. The view or position also deserves to be ridiculed.
Emphasis mine. So no, you are not just judging him for being a hypocrite for his actions, but also judging the moral position that he was failing to meet.
He deserves to be judged as imperfect, but ridiculing people because they are imperfect is, I fear, being hypocritical if one is not perfect oneself.
That depends. Did you actually plan to go through with the bank robbery?
The analogy was to the difference between physically sleeping with someone and just talking sex to them over the Internet (with a computer!). So yes, you actually did "plan to rob the bank" (talk sex).
I'm sure there are people who believe that even playfully flirting with someone else while you are in a committed relationship is infidelity.
Yeah. Sex chat lines make money off of people who are "playfully flirting." Sorry, it's not just flirting when you get to that level.
But it is entirely possible that at least some subset of users did it without any intention of being physically unfaithful.
And the point I made was that it really doesn't matter that much to many people if you are "physically unfaithful" or just having sex chats with strangers. Both are being unfaithful.
If you will allow me a quote from the Bible, "Put not your trust in princes,"...
And "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." As in, human beings are imperfect creatures, and you'll find many of them that haven't perfectly obeyed every principle they value.
Except the perfect people on/. who ridicule not only the imperfect people who can't manage perfection in following a moral standard, but the moral standard as well because it is followed by those imperfect people.
Using the site, making a keyboard connection with someone is not the same as rubbing genitals together with the risk of disease and adverse social interactions,
There are still a large number of people who believe that cheating is cheating and whether you're just talking dirty to someone or doing the dirty with them in person doesn't matter. People who value fidelity still exist.
It's like, if you rob a bank for real it's bank robbery, if you plan to do it it's conspiracy and you've still broken the law.
The main point of high school in many places nowadays isn't to teach: it's too keep teenagers off the streets.
This is the main difference in education systems that makes other countries "free college" work for them. They require a bit more performance from their K-12 equivalent education system, so their colleges aren't just keeping Billy the potential dope dealer off the streets for four more years. They've got a prepared and ready occupant of that free college seat, and we've got people who need remedial math and English just to be able to perform at college freshman level.
Slashdot Mirror
Please? I mean here are two perfectly innocent young children
Huh? One of them is sending unsolicited porn to a girl he knows, the other is spreading that porn to all her friends. Neither is "perfectly innocent."
just BEGGING to be thrown to the judicial wolves, torn apart, consumed, and eaten
One of them is reported to have been put on the list of people who have been accused of crimes. The other we don't know what happened to. Neither one is being charged with anything, neither one is being "thrown to the judicial wolves" or "eaten."
I'm pretty sure that a fourteen year old boy should know it isn't appropriate to send naked pictures of himself to others. That's what makes it a thrill to do, and that's why he used a system deliberately designed to delete images after a short period of time. If it was "perfectly normal" and "perfectly innocent" to send such pictures, why use a system that deletes them automatically?
The girl knew that it was revenge to distribute that picture once she had it. She even had to bypass the normal snapchat limits to save the image, so it's not like her having the image to distribute was some innocent mistake. She had to go out of her way to do it.
Sorry, but actions have consequences, even stupid actions.
Actually, you start paying with the first; $500 a pop.
No, you wouldn't. You'd get a check for $2500 instead of $3000. There is a difference. It wasn't your money to start with, so you aren't losing it when it isn't handed to you.
But I understand the confusion. Many people also buy the line that the government is "losing money" when there is a tax cut, when the truth is that people are getting to keep more of their money, not that they're being allowed to keep more of the government's money.
So the solution is... to kill all the humans?
We won't have to do it. If the Ents ever find out that we've been cutting down the Entwives to use for paper to wipe our asses, they'll take care of killing all the humans for us.
So for the resident, it comes down to price vs. performance like any other consumer decision.
Except that the playing field is rigged in favor of the municipality. The "customer" is paying in taxes, and then is expected to make a free choice between the municipality service and a commercial company.
This is the same rigging that works against private schools. People who are already paying taxes to the public schools have less money and less incentive to buy a private education for their children, so private schools are the haven for rich kids.
Significantly, Comcast and AT&T seem to believe municipal broadband is a real threat since they are willing to spend bucketloads of money trying to kill it.
Of course it's a threat. A highly-regulated private company cannot compete against a government "company" that can set its own rules and dip into the general fund to cover any losses.
I believe in a functioning constitutional democracy. Where such exists, I support it.
Then you have no qualms with state DOMA laws. Ok.
The U.S. federal version seems to be dysfunctional ATM.
ATM? Automatic Teller Machine?
In any case, the US "federal version" is not a "constitutional democracy", it is a "democratic republic". Not even for the two national officeholders we elect is it a true democracy, we elect people who vote on our behalf.
Reverse the process. Give everyone $3,000 a year, but subtract $500 for each kid you have. You want 6 kids? Sure, go for it, but you're paying for them.
You wouldn't start "paying for them" under this system until you had seven, and then only if you forced payment on the negative balance. Most handouts don't work that way.
If you need a roof or wall, you have to start with a large straight tree.
Only if you want a wooden house and want to pay a premium for specialty products. Otherwise, you buy SCL.
Or you use concrete and steel, aluminum and stryrofoam and vinyl.
How strange, we were all told that capitalism solves every problem, through magic.
Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. I've never seen anyone saying this, but then, I don't wander the Internet looking for ways to castigate capitalism.
Apparently it's better at turning trees into toilet paper (see article above) than infrastructure. Which, btw., is also falling apart in the US.
You mean all those bridges and highways that are operated by greedy capitalistic monolithic multinational corporations? All the sewer and water lines run by monopolistic megalomaniacal corporate CEOs?
You might be interested to know that those signs along the road that say "This road adopted by MacDonalds' employees" doesn't mean MacDonalds actually maintains that bit of infrastructure, just that the employees come by every so often to pick up trash on the roadside. The road is actually maintained by the greedy multinational capitalistic city, county, or state road departments.
Claiming that publicly funded and maintained infrastructure failures are caused by capitalism is a bit of a stretch.
They also have the choice to use Comcast or AT&T,
"Hmmm, let's see. I'm paying taxes now for a gigabit network connection I don't really need (but my neighbors wanted me to help them pay for) and I could use that, or I could pay taxes for a network I don't need AND pay Comcast for service I do want, too." If you don't see the unfair competition side of that statement, then there is nothing to discuss.
What's the problem? The people there voted for it. Do you not believe in democracy?
De Tocquville (sp?) had the right idea. Something along the lines of "a democracy can exist only until the majority learns they can tax the minority to pay for free stuff."
You apparently believe that democracies cannot be wrong, and yet I suspect that you would denounce as wrong those democracies that have voted in things like mandatory sentences for drug possession and defense of marriage laws.
I was simply commenting on the fact that many businesses likely would want static addressing. Not all, but many.
No, most city-sized businesses are not going to worry about static addressing, because most businesses that size are not going to want to be saddled with managing their own servers. They'll hire that function out to a full-time data center that can offer higher reliability and better security. Yes, there are high-profile failures in security, but you're still more likely to have a more secure site if you hire someone to do it that does it on a large scale than if you say "Hey, Billy was the high school computer geek, let's hire him to be our IT department!".
Is this unfair competition? Well, let's see. A city says "big company, if you want to operate here these are all the rules you have to obey", and then the city creates their own rules and uses the power of the taxpayer wallet to undercut the big company they claim they wanted to provide the service. I'd say that would be "yes". You can't restrict a company from providing a service and then use that failure as an excuse to do it at taxpayer expense, at least not in a fair way.
I don't believe you.
That's your right. You have a right to be wrong. Even glaringly wrong, just like the student who said "1.0000" was the right answer.
Any student with half a brain or even less ego would haul your ass in front of the dean for such a stunt.
It wasn't a "stunt".
A) The student assured me he knew how to use the calculator, even after I told him it was an HP and not a TI/etc. "I didn't know how to use the calculator", which is never an excuse for wrong answers, is even less of an excuse here.
B) The answer was SEVEN ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE WRONG. That's off by a factor of TEN MILLION. Were he Mr. Gower making a prescription for you and instead of a concentration of medicine that was 1E-7 he gave you 1E0, you'd probably be dead.
C) The topic of quiz was buffers and pH. An answer of "1.0000" for a hydrogen ion concentration is so ridiculous in both value and precision that any "student with half a brain or even less" would have known the answer was wrong.
D) The prof thought it was the right thing to do.
You are there to teach and grade work.
I did both. That student will remember not to blindly trust the output of a computing device ever again. That's a lesson well learned. And I obviously graded his work, which included his failure to sanity check a simple answer.
They are customers.
They are buying an education. They are not traditional customers in that the phrase "the customer is always right" is patently absurd for them. He got an education.
Cool people say "squirrel".
Nah, cool people say "nosequel", but that only proves how uncool Hollywood execs are.
And "coding" is not being used as a synonym for "programming"? Funny how the article that quotes her seems to think it is.
Yeah, I read the moronic comments attached to that comic, too.
People become too reliant on "black box" functions and libraries where you simply pass in values and the output magically appears.
I loaned a student my HP calculator to take a quiz one time. I asked him if he knew how to use it and he said "of course". (Enter>=!). The question dealt with the concentration of hydrogen ions in a nearly-neutral solution of something. His answer was "1". "something enter something enter divide" where the second "enter" wasn't supposed to be was his mistake.
I gave him zero points for that answer, and deducted an additional point for not even thinking about whether the answer made sense.
She wants her web pages to be red. To her, this is "programming". What color does she want her database to be? Then she can be an SQL programmer!
If the act of operating outside of normal bands is already illegal than how does making a law with more restrictions to an already illegal act provide any extra law enforcement ability?
It doesn't. But it does prevent easy violations, whether accidental ("oops, I shouldn't have commented out that channel number test") or deliberate ("fuck you, it's my radio, I'm using one of those illegal channels") or malicious ("if I modify this code, I can interfere with licensed users of other services...").
It's like the laws that prohibit radio dealers from providing field programmable radios (47CFR 90.203 (e)) to their customers. It's already against the law for unlicensed use of certain frequencies, and 90.203 doesn't allow for "extra law enforcement ability", it just makes it harder for the violation to happen in the first place.
If the radio is licensed for channels 1-11, it shouldn't be capable of operating on channel 13 at all (also legal in the EU, btw). That would still allow us to flash the firmware
You've just moved the problem one level along. The cost of manufacturing a different radio for each regulatory jurisdiction would be prohibitive, so the operational limits will be either set in firmware (in the radio) or, as is very common in amateur radio gear, through jumpers. Others have already pointed out that the right place to lock a router down is in the radio firmware, but what about routers where the radio function is part of the overall router firmware? I.e., the selection of channel is tested in the router firmware before it is passed on to the radio? That reduces costs because the radio firmware doesn't need to have a way of being flashed to different limits, only the main router software (which has to be flashable for updates anyway).
The primary reason as I see it for this is that the HW manufacturers want it - they want to sell you a new $200 device to get a security update.
So you buy an $80 Odroid XU4 and a wireless dongle and make your own wireless router with whatever routing software you want on it. The wireless device has the locked down firmware the FCC requires, the rest of the hardware and software is whatever you want it to be.
You could even put a long-range antenna on the wireless and hide the device near a public wifi hotspot ...
The argument that only DD-WRT makes routers usable is, well, limited. The law doesn't need to care that manufacturers won't make products with the specific features that you want so you have to be able to modify it yourself. The law also doesn't have to consider that an obsolete device can only be made secure by modifying the firmware through open source.
The vast majority of such devices are in use and usable by people who have no intention of modifying the firmware, and if your obsolete router no longer has manufacturer-provided updates then buying a new one is a solution to a law that says you can't do it yourself.
There are simply too many examples of laws that make obsolete equipment obsolete to claim that this one would be special. Ask any radio technician about the stream of obsolete equipment that passed through his shop when narrowbanding became the law. A lot of it went into amateur radio use, but that which couldn't be programmed or modified for ham use became landfill. "But the radio still works and we can just turn down the deviation" wasn't a sufficient justification to keep it authorized.
Emphasis mine. So no, you are not just judging him for being a hypocrite for his actions, but also judging the moral position that he was failing to meet.
He deserves to be judged as imperfect, but ridiculing people because they are imperfect is, I fear, being hypocritical if one is not perfect oneself.
That depends. Did you actually plan to go through with the bank robbery?
The analogy was to the difference between physically sleeping with someone and just talking sex to them over the Internet (with a computer!). So yes, you actually did "plan to rob the bank" (talk sex).
I'm sure there are people who believe that even playfully flirting with someone else while you are in a committed relationship is infidelity.
Yeah. Sex chat lines make money off of people who are "playfully flirting." Sorry, it's not just flirting when you get to that level.
But it is entirely possible that at least some subset of users did it without any intention of being physically unfaithful.
And the point I made was that it really doesn't matter that much to many people if you are "physically unfaithful" or just having sex chats with strangers. Both are being unfaithful.
If you will allow me a quote from the Bible, "Put not your trust in princes," ...
And "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." As in, human beings are imperfect creatures, and you'll find many of them that haven't perfectly obeyed every principle they value.
Except the perfect people on /. who ridicule not only the imperfect people who can't manage perfection in following a moral standard, but the moral standard as well because it is followed by those imperfect people.
Using the site, making a keyboard connection with someone is not the same as rubbing genitals together with the risk of disease and adverse social interactions,
There are still a large number of people who believe that cheating is cheating and whether you're just talking dirty to someone or doing the dirty with them in person doesn't matter. People who value fidelity still exist.
It's like, if you rob a bank for real it's bank robbery, if you plan to do it it's conspiracy and you've still broken the law.
It ought to include more skilled trades, like plumbing, welding, construction, work that actually accomplishes something.
That's called "community college", and it already exists. And there's already moves to make that free.
It's not the job of a university to teach people how to weld or rewire their house to NEC standards.
The main point of high school in many places nowadays isn't to teach: it's too keep teenagers off the streets.
This is the main difference in education systems that makes other countries "free college" work for them. They require a bit more performance from their K-12 equivalent education system, so their colleges aren't just keeping Billy the potential dope dealer off the streets for four more years. They've got a prepared and ready occupant of that free college seat, and we've got people who need remedial math and English just to be able to perform at college freshman level.