Any urban environment is 9 meals away from anarchy (credit to Kevin Reeve, OnPoint Tactical). After three days with no food, you will find that civil order goes right out the window. People will form groups because a group is more effective. Those groups will take up arms because a group with weapons is more effective. Those groups will take what they want, and they will kill you without thinking twice if they believe that killing you will keep them alive. By the same token, killing them might keep you alive if they're coming for your a) food b) shelter c) family.
Man is not civilized. We have the veneer of culture and civilization, but it is tenuous. Without power you will quickly lose food and sanitation, and after 3 days of that you'll see how civilized man is. The concept is difficult to embrace - we all want our neighbors to be reasonable. We want ourselves to be reasonable. However, if you are unwilling to look at the avenue of anarchy as one of the scenarios for which you should prepare, then you will find yourself unprepared if those whom you hope are civilized in the face of death turn out to be something else.
There are two types of disaster for which one should prepare - short-term (up to two weeks) and long-term (one to six months). Anything longer than six months will likely result in a huge change as you adapt to your new life, so planning to "weather" that disaster type may be more difficult than planning to adapt to it permanently (think post-nuclear, health epidemic, other massive destruction on a global scale). A short-term disaster can be weathered in your home with adequate food, water, and security. There are specific skills you can learn that will make survival in an urban environment easier (again, see OnPoint link above), and if you have to escape the city, those skills are even more valuable. Once outside of the city, wilderness survival skills will be a necessity. A long-term disaster is one where civil order breaks down and your survival becomes paramount. For this you should have plans that include evacuation routes (don't take the freeway or you'll find yourself sitting there days later without fuel in your car), food/supply caches along those routes, and a plan for long-term survival in a location where you will be safe.
It is unfortunate, but those who are not able to protect themselves and their families will likely die. Protect doesn't mean only with weapons in the event of an attack. Protect means "find food when your local grocery is empty." Protect means "find shelter that will keep us warm in winter if there is no heating oil." Protect means "understand basic medical treatment" and "maintain calm in a situation of terrible stress." If you have not prepared for a disaster, then when the disaster strikes, what's your plan? To go to the shelter and wait for the government? Those in New Orleans who went to the Superdome found themselves the victims of gangs of thugs and rapists demanding payments for using the toilets. I'll leave discussion of the type of payments accepted as an exercise for the reader.
Japan is an interesting case because civil order has been maintained. I don't know the reason behind this - maybe it's cultural. Maybe it's the respect they have for one another. Maybe it's because there is no food for anyone to take because everything was wiped out. People are leaving the areas of destruction and going to other cities where they have family, so perhaps the local suffering is manageable. Japan's disaster response from the government also appears to have been well-executed. This post-disaster stability is the exception. It is not the norm. If your community handles its disasters with the same calm, then you are fortunate.
Unless you plan to not be a victim, then you will find yourself exactly where you planned to be.
To answer the OP's question, I currently live in Kraków, Poland and go back and forth between Kraków and New York. My wife and
I lived in two of those nice neighborhoods in Colorado Springs in 1998. At the time I was a Java developer for MCI working on their Local Care system. In one house I lived alone, and in the second house I had three hot goth girls as roommates. I'm 6'4" (190cm) tall, have long hair and tattoos, dress in all black w/ combat boots, ride a loud motorcycle, and at the time had a sports car with a loud audio system installed. On two separate occasions the police were dispatched to my house by anonymous tips from the neighbors about drug parties, the manufacture and sale of narcotics, prostitution and other lies. The truth was that I threatened their nice gated community by looking different. On one visit they sent a vice detective with two uniformed officers to ask if I would sign a waiver that would allow them to search my house. I politely declined.
Some neighborhoods have trash that needs to be cleaned up. Some people are just individuals. Anonymizing the reporting system opens it up for abuse and _does_ lend it towards spy-on-your-neighbor big brotherism. What if you see your neighbor smoking something from something that looks like a bong, but he's inside his house when you see him do it? What if you're naive and didn't realize that the "bong" was a vaporizer for asthma relief? I believe that people should be allowed to face their accusers and an online system that encourages reporting of neighborhood faults needs to have protection built in against false reporting. What if the graffiti is on my house, and I like it because I'm into urban art? Control over neighborhood issues isn't a wiki - it's wrong to expect that someone's mistake will be cleaned up by someone else. When one person's mistake is an uninformed retaliation against another person's innocent and legal behavior, the law and society tend to favor the one who made the knee-jerk reaction. Does this mean that more of society is uninformed and they're protecting their own? Or am I truly bad for the homeowner's association because I don't conform to their standard?
I can also confirm this behavior. Many sites have less anti-spam protection on their secondary (or tertiary, even), using it only to queue mail in the event that the primary is unreachable. Because it will likely accept mail without question, the secondary is the obvious target. Dump all the mail on to it as quickly as possible, and let it flounder about with struggling to deliver it, or bounce it, or double bounce it, and so on. Forcing spammers to deliver to the secondary by making the primary unreachable (making the secondary, in fact, the primary), will only slow the overall delivery of mail and make an already unmanageable situation even more convoluted.
Any IT employee who's been around a while will tell you that a temporary solution which is put into production becomes a permanent solution. The sacrifice of our civil liberties is no different.
People fail to realize that their time has value. The chump who got his $400 ipod in exchange for lots of pain with opening and closing accounts, shelling out some cash, arguing with vendors, using bunk email addresses so as not to drown beneath the deluge of spam, and so on, probably spent 40 hours overall. If you subtract the $75 from $400 and divide the remainder by 40, you end up with a cost per hour of about $8.13. I suppose that you could argue that taxes and such make the Ipod worth more, or the hours worth less, or something, but I would counter with the cost of the pain of having to deal with all of these issues.
Another way to look at it is to compare the cost of those hours against the cost of doing something else, from an overall well-being perspective. Perhaps instead of spending 40 hours fenagling a free Ipod from some shyster in Florida the chump would have a higher quality of life doing something he actually liked.
Maybe people just undervalue their time.
Maybe people just get obsessed with the idea of "free."
So who are the 50% of people who voted him back in?
There are some basic things going on here which are rooted in psychology. First of all, the amount of information which is being presented to people has grown exponentially over the last X years (pick any number > 5 and it's a true statement). Those of us who grew up in the information age have an easier time processing this than others who are older. (Not a slam on all people older than me, but I know that my parents have a tough time and my grandparents are hopeless...)
When presented with more information than it can handle, the human mind will panic and look for the easiest way to deal with it. For most people this starts out as denial and progresses into other states.
Government has come along and said, "You can't take care of yourself anymore because the whole world of evil and terror is standing outside of your doorstep. Let us handle it for you -- you can trust us," and people are willingly giving up anything that they can in order to feel safe.
This is the problem at hand. People feel powerless to protect themselves, so they'll give up everything to get a sense of security. Perhaps that is where people should be directing their efforts for change instead of at the brick wall of an administration who has openly said that they don't care what any of us think.
People here are starting to look like the Grunts in Halo, running around with their hands above their heads, screaming, "the demon is here!"
While I agree that the appointment is disturbing, it doesn't mean that the government is going to install spyware onto every machine and start doing as they see fit. How many of you use some technology (Norton, AdBlock) to limit the amount of advertisements and popups you receive during the day? How many people do you think sniff the traffic coming off of their machine and make sure it's all as expected?
The instant that something appears on your PC someone else will know about it and there will be an endless number of FAQs on how to make it benign.
Remember that we're in the US, but PCs are global. You may find yourself feeling grateful to the hacker/cracker/crypto community at large for the work they'll be doing in the future to protect your privacy.
The discussion had turned to deterrence. Is the person less likely to harass because they know that they'll get caught? Traditionally, by the time the activity has reached the restraining order state, there is a history of irrational behavior. Irrational people don't respond well to deterrence, or to many other logical processes for that matter.. Simple intimidation is one thing, but when you're dealing with the potential for violence, which is implied by the GPS being a "condition of probation," the violent act itself is the proof of the event happening.
What's the ratio of restraining orders being broken to not? Of the ones that are broken, what percentage turn into a debate on the actuality of the event? Of those, how many are actually the person holding the restraining order trying to screw the other party (rhetorical question). If you take figures from these questions and apply them to the cost of the GPS devices, management of the service, data recording, error checking, validation, and reporting in a fashion admissable to court, I speculate that you'll find the lion's share of the cost being wasted.
It's not going to prevent anything. People who want to harass those who have restraining orders against them will continue to do so. Being able to prove it because they're wearing a GPS device is only an additional expense that will be absorbed by taxpayers.
Also, please remember that felons != violent criminals. A felony can be for something non-violent, such as possession of marijuana. Voting and arms-bearing rights are left to the discretion of the states - in most cases the right to vote returns at the expiration of your sentence. Requests for reinstatement of the right to bear arms are no longer being heard by the ATF, so it falls by default to the state.
The problem with _this_ solution is with the validation of the complaints. Some people complain because they get emails from companies that they purchased items from after checking or not unchecking the "please keep me informed" box on the order form. User stupidity doesn't warrant blacklisting an entire ISP's network.
In my tenure as a network administrator at various locations I've seen the full scope of offenses, from those which are blatant violations of the AUP to those which are users complaining about emails they requested. I've seen one offender result in the blacklisting of an entire/19 netblock, and then I watched the RBL admins ignore all requests to have the block removed from the RBL.
RBLs with no oversight provide no real value to their subscribers. Again, it comes back to the issue of validation - who validates the complaints, and then who validates that the behavior of the ISP has changed, or that they've removed the offending party? This is no more than vigilantism, and the argument is that the RBL isn't doing anything other than providng something that their users have asked for.
In the same line as users being stupid and admins implementing mail systems with no real security, many people will subscribe to an RBL because they think it will solve a problem, failing to understand the ramifications and negative repurcussions associated with its use.
If the system generates a single false positive, then the system itself has failed.
I don't think that the average individual cares that ISP XYZ hosts spammers. If you were to take out an ad that told me the top 50 ISPs in Korea that supported spamming, not only would I not care, but Koreans wouldn't see your ad.
Who should fund the advertisements?
If you contract a person or an agency to develop an item for you, the item is the deliverable. You own that deliverable, and your contract with them should stipulate that. If it doesn't, then you're simply licensing the use of something, and they are not obligated to support it.
Check your contract with the agency and look for what your rights are according to the contract. If you don't have anything signed that clearly defines these things, then you should do one of the following:
Prepare for a legal/arbitration battle. Weigh the costs of this against the cost of dealing with a reliable organization to recode it.
Cut your losses and sign a contract with another reliable organization. Learn from your mistakes.
The fact that someone has provided you with a deliverable which doesn't give you access to the source code says a great deal about their perception of you and your relationship with them. They don't care about anything other than your money, and you have no leverage to change their opinion.
I recommend that you cut your losses and look for a reliable firm.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is often a larger felony than the crime that was committed. In Arizona, for example, conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor is a Class 2 Felony, punishable by 15+ years in prison.
The idea is that it is worse to plan to commit a crime, because it defines a particular character flaw. Those who do something spur of the moment are still guilty of being criminals, but the offense is handled differently.
Slashdot Mirror
Any urban environment is 9 meals away from anarchy (credit to Kevin Reeve, OnPoint Tactical). After three days with no food, you will find that civil order goes right out the window. People will form groups because a group is more effective. Those groups will take up arms because a group with weapons is more effective. Those groups will take what they want, and they will kill you without thinking twice if they believe that killing you will keep them alive. By the same token, killing them might keep you alive if they're coming for your a) food b) shelter c) family.
Man is not civilized. We have the veneer of culture and civilization, but it is tenuous. Without power you will quickly lose food and sanitation, and after 3 days of that you'll see how civilized man is. The concept is difficult to embrace - we all want our neighbors to be reasonable. We want ourselves to be reasonable. However, if you are unwilling to look at the avenue of anarchy as one of the scenarios for which you should prepare, then you will find yourself unprepared if those whom you hope are civilized in the face of death turn out to be something else.
There are two types of disaster for which one should prepare - short-term (up to two weeks) and long-term (one to six months). Anything longer than six months will likely result in a huge change as you adapt to your new life, so planning to "weather" that disaster type may be more difficult than planning to adapt to it permanently (think post-nuclear, health epidemic, other massive destruction on a global scale). A short-term disaster can be weathered in your home with adequate food, water, and security. There are specific skills you can learn that will make survival in an urban environment easier (again, see OnPoint link above), and if you have to escape the city, those skills are even more valuable. Once outside of the city, wilderness survival skills will be a necessity. A long-term disaster is one where civil order breaks down and your survival becomes paramount. For this you should have plans that include evacuation routes (don't take the freeway or you'll find yourself sitting there days later without fuel in your car), food/supply caches along those routes, and a plan for long-term survival in a location where you will be safe.
It is unfortunate, but those who are not able to protect themselves and their families will likely die. Protect doesn't mean only with weapons in the event of an attack. Protect means "find food when your local grocery is empty." Protect means "find shelter that will keep us warm in winter if there is no heating oil." Protect means "understand basic medical treatment" and "maintain calm in a situation of terrible stress." If you have not prepared for a disaster, then when the disaster strikes, what's your plan? To go to the shelter and wait for the government? Those in New Orleans who went to the Superdome found themselves the victims of gangs of thugs and rapists demanding payments for using the toilets. I'll leave discussion of the type of payments accepted as an exercise for the reader.
Japan is an interesting case because civil order has been maintained. I don't know the reason behind this - maybe it's cultural. Maybe it's the respect they have for one another. Maybe it's because there is no food for anyone to take because everything was wiped out. People are leaving the areas of destruction and going to other cities where they have family, so perhaps the local suffering is manageable. Japan's disaster response from the government also appears to have been well-executed. This post-disaster stability is the exception. It is not the norm. If your community handles its disasters with the same calm, then you are fortunate.
Unless you plan to not be a victim, then you will find yourself exactly where you planned to be.
To answer the OP's question, I currently live in Kraków, Poland and go back and forth between Kraków and New York. My wife and
I lived in two of those nice neighborhoods in Colorado Springs in 1998. At the time I was a Java developer for MCI working on their Local Care system. In one house I lived alone, and in the second house I had three hot goth girls as roommates. I'm 6'4" (190cm) tall, have long hair and tattoos, dress in all black w/ combat boots, ride a loud motorcycle, and at the time had a sports car with a loud audio system installed. On two separate occasions the police were dispatched to my house by anonymous tips from the neighbors about drug parties, the manufacture and sale of narcotics, prostitution and other lies. The truth was that I threatened their nice gated community by looking different. On one visit they sent a vice detective with two uniformed officers to ask if I would sign a waiver that would allow them to search my house. I politely declined.
Some neighborhoods have trash that needs to be cleaned up. Some people are just individuals. Anonymizing the reporting system opens it up for abuse and _does_ lend it towards spy-on-your-neighbor big brotherism. What if you see your neighbor smoking something from something that looks like a bong, but he's inside his house when you see him do it? What if you're naive and didn't realize that the "bong" was a vaporizer for asthma relief? I believe that people should be allowed to face their accusers and an online system that encourages reporting of neighborhood faults needs to have protection built in against false reporting. What if the graffiti is on my house, and I like it because I'm into urban art? Control over neighborhood issues isn't a wiki - it's wrong to expect that someone's mistake will be cleaned up by someone else. When one person's mistake is an uninformed retaliation against another person's innocent and legal behavior, the law and society tend to favor the one who made the knee-jerk reaction. Does this mean that more of society is uninformed and they're protecting their own? Or am I truly bad for the homeowner's association because I don't conform to their standard?
I can also confirm this behavior. Many sites have less anti-spam protection on their secondary (or tertiary, even), using it only to queue mail in the event that the primary is unreachable. Because it will likely accept mail without question, the secondary is the obvious target. Dump all the mail on to it as quickly as possible, and let it flounder about with struggling to deliver it, or bounce it, or double bounce it, and so on. Forcing spammers to deliver to the secondary by making the primary unreachable (making the secondary, in fact, the primary), will only slow the overall delivery of mail and make an already unmanageable situation even more convoluted.
Any IT employee who's been around a while will tell you that a temporary solution which is put into production becomes a permanent solution. The sacrifice of our civil liberties is no different.
People fail to realize that their time has value. The chump who got his $400 ipod in exchange for lots of pain with opening and closing accounts, shelling out some cash, arguing with vendors, using bunk email addresses so as not to drown beneath the deluge of spam, and so on, probably spent 40 hours overall. If you subtract the $75 from $400 and divide the remainder by 40, you end up with a cost per hour of about $8.13. I suppose that you could argue that taxes and such make the Ipod worth more, or the hours worth less, or something, but I would counter with the cost of the pain of having to deal with all of these issues.
Another way to look at it is to compare the cost of those hours against the cost of doing something else, from an overall well-being perspective. Perhaps instead of spending 40 hours fenagling a free Ipod from some shyster in Florida the chump would have a higher quality of life doing something he actually liked.
Maybe people just undervalue their time.
Maybe people just get obsessed with the idea of "free."
So who are the 50% of people who voted him back in?
There are some basic things going on here which are rooted in psychology. First of all, the amount of information which is being presented to people has grown exponentially over the last X years (pick any number > 5 and it's a true statement). Those of us who grew up in the information age have an easier time processing this than others who are older. (Not a slam on all people older than me, but I know that my parents have a tough time and my grandparents are hopeless...)
When presented with more information than it can handle, the human mind will panic and look for the easiest way to deal with it. For most people this starts out as denial and progresses into other states.
Government has come along and said, "You can't take care of yourself anymore because the whole world of evil and terror is standing outside of your doorstep. Let us handle it for you -- you can trust us," and people are willingly giving up anything that they can in order to feel safe.
This is the problem at hand. People feel powerless to protect themselves, so they'll give up everything to get a sense of security. Perhaps that is where people should be directing their efforts for change instead of at the brick wall of an administration who has openly said that they don't care what any of us think.
People here are starting to look like the Grunts in Halo, running around with their hands above their heads, screaming, "the demon is here!"
While I agree that the appointment is disturbing, it doesn't mean that the government is going to install spyware onto every machine and start doing as they see fit. How many of you use some technology (Norton, AdBlock) to limit the amount of advertisements and popups you receive during the day? How many people do you think sniff the traffic coming off of their machine and make sure it's all as expected?
The instant that something appears on your PC someone else will know about it and there will be an endless number of FAQs on how to make it benign.
Remember that we're in the US, but PCs are global. You may find yourself feeling grateful to the hacker/cracker/crypto community at large for the work they'll be doing in the future to protect your privacy.
The discussion had turned to deterrence. Is the person less likely to harass because they know that they'll get caught? Traditionally, by the time the activity has reached the restraining order state, there is a history of irrational behavior. Irrational people don't respond well to deterrence, or to many other logical processes for that matter.. Simple intimidation is one thing, but when you're dealing with the potential for violence, which is implied by the GPS being a "condition of probation," the violent act itself is the proof of the event happening.
What's the ratio of restraining orders being broken to not? Of the ones that are broken, what percentage turn into a debate on the actuality of the event? Of those, how many are actually the person holding the restraining order trying to screw the other party (rhetorical question). If you take figures from these questions and apply them to the cost of the GPS devices, management of the service, data recording, error checking, validation, and reporting in a fashion admissable to court, I speculate that you'll find the lion's share of the cost being wasted.
It's not going to prevent anything. People who want to harass those who have restraining orders against them will continue to do so. Being able to prove it because they're wearing a GPS device is only an additional expense that will be absorbed by taxpayers.
Also, please remember that felons != violent criminals. A felony can be for something non-violent, such as possession of marijuana. Voting and arms-bearing rights are left to the discretion of the states - in most cases the right to vote returns at the expiration of your sentence. Requests for reinstatement of the right to bear arms are no longer being heard by the ATF, so it falls by default to the state.
The problem with _this_ solution is with the validation of the complaints. Some people complain because they get emails from companies that they purchased items from after checking or not unchecking the "please keep me informed" box on the order form. User stupidity doesn't warrant blacklisting an entire ISP's network.
/19 netblock, and then I watched the RBL admins ignore all requests to have the block removed from the RBL.
In my tenure as a network administrator at various locations I've seen the full scope of offenses, from those which are blatant violations of the AUP to those which are users complaining about emails they requested. I've seen one offender result in the blacklisting of an entire
RBLs with no oversight provide no real value to their subscribers. Again, it comes back to the issue of validation - who validates the complaints, and then who validates that the behavior of the ISP has changed, or that they've removed the offending party? This is no more than vigilantism, and the argument is that the RBL isn't doing anything other than providng something that their users have asked for.
In the same line as users being stupid and admins implementing mail systems with no real security, many people will subscribe to an RBL because they think it will solve a problem, failing to understand the ramifications and negative repurcussions associated with its use.
If the system generates a single false positive, then the system itself has failed.
I don't think that the average individual cares that ISP XYZ hosts spammers. If you were to take out an ad that told me the top 50 ISPs in Korea that supported spamming, not only would I not care, but Koreans wouldn't see your ad. Who should fund the advertisements?
I own an outsourcing firm in New York.
If you contract a person or an agency to develop an item for you, the item is the deliverable. You own that deliverable, and your contract with them should stipulate that. If it doesn't, then you're simply licensing the use of something, and they are not obligated to support it.
Check your contract with the agency and look for what your rights are according to the contract. If you don't have anything signed that clearly defines these things, then you should do one of the following:
The fact that someone has provided you with a deliverable which doesn't give you access to the source code says a great deal about their perception of you and your relationship with them. They don't care about anything other than your money, and you have no leverage to change their opinion.
I recommend that you cut your losses and look for a reliable firm.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is often a larger felony than the crime that was committed. In Arizona, for example, conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor is a Class 2 Felony, punishable by 15+ years in prison.
The idea is that it is worse to plan to commit a crime, because it defines a particular character flaw. Those who do something spur of the moment are still guilty of being criminals, but the offense is handled differently.