Well, pretty much any web site that just takes a copyrighted work from one web site, rips it off and then puts it up on their own web site is, and always has been in danger.
Which, logically, means all search engines as they all do that to some extent. Searching for words in a page means that the entire page contents has to be stored and (indirectly) available to the outside.
The only real defense I can see either google or the Internet Archive raising is "Fair Use"
Copyright laws are an abomination and their internal inconsistencies and illogic are truly a tribute to power of greed over common sense. "Fair use" is a crude, hastily bolted on, escape hatch through which some of the most obvious and outrageous examples of the utterly unpallatable but logical conclusions of copyright are to escape to avoid the public from becoming too outraged and noticing the scam being perpetrated upon it. But as new technologies evolve and more and more faults appear in this ungainly monster, it is becoming more and more difficult to patch it up and more and more outrageous cases will have to be decided in favour of the Intellectual Property priesthood or else the whole thing is going to come crashing down, taking with it immense profits and power of these crooks. Only time will tell how will this all end, but I am not an optimist by nature when it comes to estimating chances of things just, fair and moral when they are made to combat avarice.
that a name is not copyrightable due to being too small a work.
Solution? Change your name legally to something really long.
Copyright laws (and Intellectual Property in general) are hopelessly internally inconsistent and illogical, contrary to science, and generally are a pile of stinking manure intended to obscure their real purpose undrerneath: corporatist attempts at profiting from the body of knowledge accumulated by past generations.
But there is no overwhelming public interest in robbing the original author of at least a period of time during which he/she can seek reasonable compensation.
There is an overwhelming interest indeed. For many reasons. Such as 90% (or close) of literature, music or movies published are complete, utter, useless, crap which should never seen the light of day and only did because some vast marketing organizations sought to sell donkey manure wrapped in shiney packaging to the sheep known as "consumers". Or that writing is supposed to be art, and not an industrial process, and as such it is supposed to be sponsored by wealthy patrons, voluntary donations and art foundations. If you are a "technical" writer, you are supposed to be doing it under auspicies of academia or technical organisations whose members are financing you. Copyright, Software Patents (and soon storyline patents) and similiar attempts at treating information as if it were capable of being "private property" are perversions of logic, law and artifacts of pure greed. Greed stronger then common sense, science and morality. An all-encompassing greed which threatens to strangle all progress and destroy the humanity itself.
Your reference to the "starving spouse" with fingers "worked to the bone" is a classic propagandist device designed to evoke sympathy for the "poor writer" who is toiling to manufacture yet another piece of mind-vomit in order to "score it big". Tough luck. If you are an artist and what you do is art, find a way to finance it. World could use far fewer inept amateur "artists" and more dedication and quality from those who remain. In case you did not notice, all the art before the age of copyright and even long after (as copyright did not apply to music and paintings for a long time) was produced this way. I'll take Shakespeare, Plato, Da Vinci and Mozart over the likes of Rolland and Britney any day. If you are in it for the money, screw you, find real work and stop lobbying for laws which attempt to rape us all for your benefit. I already consider anyone who thinks Intellectual Property laws are "beneficial" to be either confused beyond hope or a vicious enemy of humanity whose only agendas are his ego and wealth. In either case a mortal enemy of mine.
The irony of some of those critiques and sidewise shots coming from someone whose handle is IgnoramusMaximus is not lost on me....
My handle is even more ironic when you consider that it is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Socrates who said: "The more I learn, the more I realize how little do I know".
We hardly know all there is to know about Medicine. Many 'scientific' conclusions of medicine are based on a very restrictive scope of experimentation. How many times have we been told "Take this, its good for X" and then years later we're told "Okay, that wasn't such a good idea because of A, B and C"? Medical Science (and biochemistry and pharmacology) all come up short from time to time.
They do because their scope of research is also vastly complicated. Cellular chemistry is still dimly understood not to mention higher-order interactions in billion member sized hordes of various cells.
As the empirical evidence of use of a particular medical procedure or drug comes in from a large number of patients, statical data can be used then to evaluate the effectivness of the procedure. Sometimes that leads to its abandonment when the side-effects are found to outweigh the benefits. The fact that we cannot extrapolate the effects of a treatment from the laboratory, cell-level, experiments onto whole organisms is merely a testimony to our very limited understanding of these systems on macroscopic level, where complexity is vastly compounded by the cell numbers, in addition to already fantastically complicated inernal cellular reactions.
As to leeching, I understand you are probably criticizing the earlier tendency to prescribe leeching for just about anything (sometimes to the very great detriment of the patient).
Yes indeed, "leeching" used to be the standard quack reply to any aliment, from common cold to typhus. Same with "blood letting" (a close relative).
To blandly write off leeching in its entirety as some form of quackery is also rather dubious.
I am certain that very specific conditions exist where leeches or maggots could be of use. This was not a shot at poor leeches but at the wackos who had no clue what they were doing and thought that "demons" or "bad blood" or what not could be extracted from a victim... err... "patient" in this manner to cure nearly anything.
I share a certain skepticism when it comes to sociology and psychology, though perhaps not as virulent or vitriolic as yours appears to be.
And here I thought I was engaging in humorous hyperbole. I think I will defer my plans to become a full time stand-up comedian...
Some of them are probably quite sound.
It is my humble impression that the parts which are "sound" usually originate with the "common sense" division of applied sciences where from these tidbits of reason are carried away by giggling Psychologists into the Jungles of Delirium, inhabited by deliciously kooky specimens such as the famous Dr. Sigmund Freud.
We all know that science is only as good as the scientist and the methods he uses. In many instances, science can be perverted or the scientist can be sloppy.
Err... no. You see, this is only possible if other scientists do not pay attention. Which usually means research into the sexual habits of fleas. Or something. The whole apparatus of science depends on this simple premise: one has to be able to replicate the experiments and observations reliably, and the theoretical models have to be able to explain all of these observations. As soon as someone gets lazy, it does not take long for some other scientist will try to replicate the study and the jig is up. For more information see "cold fusion".
Even good science can be operating on a very limited scope, thus making inference beyond the available data problematic (thus the problem with many conclusions) or such conclusions can be correct, but incomplete
One could argue that our knowledge of the subject is so primitive that it is impossible to prove anything scientifically in physics unless one puts a million constraints around it.
You sir are confusing the accuracy of our models with the predictive powers of the already proven ones. That is at no point in time any of the models in physics (or chemistry etc) are allowed to incorrectly predict the already (experimentally, repeatably) established phenomena. They may fail to predict new phenomena and thus must be revised but in doing so we never revise them to not account for previous experiments.
To put it differently: the models in physics are quite adequate at proving the already provable and are somewhat capable of predicting things which we can test for in order to check the validity of these models. In contrast, no such thing is possible in Psychology for a miriad of reasons, one of them being the fact that there is no way to reliably separate various sub-systems of our minds and to test their functions separately.
Finally, there are things in psycology that can be "reliably and repeatably tested". In fact, this type of research is used in things like interrogation and management of PoWs. I went through PoW training. It's heavily psycologically influenced and they know EXACTLY how people react under different conditions. Sure, some break sooner than others, etc. but the results are known in advance. This type of research has been done so long that it's extremely reliable.
Riiight. You mean to tell me that every single person, reacted in the same exact way, to roughly, generally similiar conditions and in no way shape or form did the behaviour not fitting the theory get excused, explained away or manipulated in some other way to make the facts fit the model? If not, you would be the first bunch of Psychologists to ever do so! Lets get real for a moment and consider what you are saying. You interpreted (heavilly, subjectivelly, arbitrarily, with a pre-determined agenda) what these people were saying and behaving like -- as they were saying a lot of things, some of them in various relationships to their experience -- and made it fit the plan. You did some things you thought were in accordance with the plan and the people (with or without any relationship to the plan) did stuff which you, again, interpreted as "success". Excuse me while I regain my composure from being so completely underwhelmed.
In case you did not detect a whiff of sarcasm here, I would like you to contrast your example with something like measuring speed or temperature as a variable of time and comparing the results to a mathematical model.
Again, I do not deny that there are things in psycology that are pure theory. And there are certainly plenty of people who practice psycology who shouldn't, but to say that it's entirely guesswork and non-scientific is short-shrifting the whole profession especially when you consider how often we fuck up and think we know our "hard sciences" when we really don't.
If you cannot see the difference between the regimes of, say, physics and that of Psychology, the purposes, verifiablity and accuracy of physical models, the incremental, modular, discovery process versus the general mumbo-jumbo of the Psychology ones (mostly due to their pitiful inadequacy vs the complexity of the problem), I think it is far beyond me to try to explain to you the difference. I have not got a decade to do so. I will just say this, your insistence that because "hard" science is unable to predict every newly discovered phenomena in its domain with 100% accuracy, it somehow makes it no more valid then Astrology, is the sort of approach I would expect from a UFO conspiracy nut. If you truly believe that "nothing is provable" you should consider taking up Nihilism. Just dont buy any guns and alcohol at the same time. I hear its a lethal combination.
You "hard-science" people are just pissed because you can't program a model of the human brain
I fail to see how does the fact that the neurosciences are unable to produce a working model (so far) put the Psychologists in any better position. As far as I can tell they are much further away from any sort of plausible models.
Falsifiable hypothesis are created, experiments are created to test these hypothesis, and theories created from the succesful predictions of the hypothesis.
This is all fine and dandy, and kudos for trying, but because there is no way to separate the "phenomena" tested from all the other things going on in someone's head, we got a rather big problem. I know the methods you speak of, and some of the experiments are indeed well designed and thoroughly thought through, but -- and here is the rub -- the only ones which manage to do so are the ones dealing with but the most basic and simplistic angles of the research. As in experimentally determining that an "average" person is capable of holding 20 words in short-term memory, assuming we have a clue what "short term memory" is and assuming that the process of "testing" is in itself not influencing the number and assuming that "words" are an accurate unit of measure and not, for example, "sheep with numbers on them" and assuming that the process works the same for concepts rather then sounds -- something we cannot test -- and assuming... you get the idea. No such thing exists in other empirical sciences. The whole object of an experiment is to reduce and control the number of variables involved. We can do that (sometimes with great difficulty) in physics and chemisty but we cannot even hope to do anything remotely similiar when dealing with human minds. In short, the whole process of inqiuiry in Psychology is hopelessly bogged down by the direction of approach to the problem.
Clinical psychologists such as my father, who specializes in the psychology of the deaf and is head of Connecticut's psychological treatment program for the deaf, keep abreast of these developments in professional journals and modify their treatment methodology based on what has been proven through experiment to work best.
Not to bellitle your father, but UFO "researchers" also have journals as do the Parapsychologists, not to mention Homeopathic "Medicine".
We may be a long way from truely understanding human psychology in any kind of complete sense, but we do know what works and what doesn't in treating many kinds of psychological issues, and this is a long way from being Snake Oil, as you call it.
I do not deny that there could be some rare -- and lucky -- observations made of practical value, since one does not need to understand nuclear fusion to be able to get a suntan. But the way the problem (and the approach of attack) is formulated in Psychology is like researching the influence of sugar on politics, after having noticed (and undeniably, experimentally, confirmed) that, yes, there are politicians with a sweet tooth. Enter copious volumes of research on the relationship of number of spoons of sugar in cofee used by Democrats, Republicans and Independents, breakdown of various types of other beverages used, their sugar contents, historical trends of thereof followed by predictive patterns with learned discussion of sugar-substitutes and their influence on the processes involved (to be discussed at the 7th Saccharo-political Science Conference in Hawaii 2017).
There are certainly things about psycology that are not proven but there are many things that are. Does this remind anyone of something like...uh...physics perhaps??
I do not intend to defend the parent poster (and I find Scientology deliciously -- and dangerously -- nutty) but I must observe however a little problem with your comparison:
Physics, unlike psychology, offers us models with predictive powers, which can be reliably and repeatably tested. Psychology, Psychiatry, etc are dealing with systems vastly more complex then what Physics is concerned with (in fact as complex as the minds of the researchers themselves) for which we do not have any plausibly approximate models. To make things worse, Psychology has no means to divide the problem into smaller components to reduce the complexity of the study, which is a standard procedure in most other sciences.
To make a long story short, there is a wide-spread belief among students of "hard" (i.e. strictly empirical, reliable predictive powers, mathematical models etc) sciences -- such as Neuro-chemistry for example -- that directions of inquiry such as Psychology and Economics are dead ends at best and "voodoo science" at worst.
Things are of course not being helped by the fact that Psychologists are popular "get out of jail" court trial props and the "greatest minds" of Economics started -- jointly no less! -- massive hedge funds which promptly collapsed to the tune of billions of dollars.
While poking fun at the poor (at least the ones at the bottom) Scientologists is a sport I sometimes indulge in myself, I would like to point out that Psychology, Psychiatry and, say, Economics -- to mention a few -- are the bastard children of science proper. Unlike most other scientific disciplines, their predictive powers are somewhat lacking, to put it gently. There is a looooong way from simple reflexes and associations, such as the ones exhibited by Pavlov dogs, to processes so vastly complex that they exceed the complexity of the mind of the researcher himself. So while one can attept to formulate broad, coarse, inaccurate, imprecise approximations of models, it does little but produce mildly interesting observations about the workings of the mind with highly questionable practical value.
This of course does not stop adherents of these "disciplines" from claiming in-depth knowledge and understanding and to proceed to apply this "understanding" onto poor suckers, otherwise known as "patients". Lack of any clue however has never stopped people before. May I remind you about old-time "remedies" like blood-letting and leeches, and more modern renditions like homeopathy. Not to mention those old standbys: Astrology and Fortune Telling.
In this regard, I consider Psychologists -- and Economists -- to be in the same profession as the Scientologists: Snake Oil Sales, Cure-all Departament.
Neurology on the other hand, is a bona fide empirical science, although it is faced with the same problem of vast complexities. Unlike psychology however, the neuro-science investigators have an ability to reliably deconstruct the problem into smaller, simpler components and attempt to investigate those.
It's inconsistent with the corporation's fiduciary responsibility (look that one up, it's a rear thing) to act in that manner.
This "fiduciary responsibility" is in my opnion the main reason we should fear corporations -- like we do fear hungry lions. Amoral, besital and constantly looking for lunch.
Therefore, the problem of twisted language used to hide the truth from the victims of the hungry corporate greed and lust for power is only a minor one when compared to the corporate influence over governments.
I firmly believe that in order to save capitalism and the Western societies from themselves, one has to limit severely the size of businesses and remove the corporation as a structure from its current dominant place and restore it to its original purpose, as the "public charter" used to allow a group of small businesses to gang together temporarily to afford a large project.
Having a greedy, narcisstic and amoral "persons" -- as the corporations are treated by the law of their own design -- is not in the interest of society at large, nor it is in the interest of the economic system known as "capitalism" since its main fuel is "competition", but gigiantic corporations are contrary to that.
So, in theory, it keeps people from guessing a login and getting in, although that would never work in court anyway, unless the login was 'guest' or 'anonymous'. Asking for a 'password' is a pretty damn clear message.
Unless of course the password was posted by some hacker on some forum and you are logging in under the impression (which the hacker created to cause havoc) that it is a public shell account or some such. If the message reads "Employees only" and you are not one, this defense is removed.
Presenting a "password" prompt might be insufficient since one could claim he had obtained the password legitimately and thus was "authorized". By specifically enumerating the classes of authorized users you ensure that no doubt is possible.
My apologies for my former tirade, a close friend of mine was mugged last night in full view of 4 witnesses (lovely world isnt it?) who did _absolutely nothing_, not even call for help or just yell, and thankfully my friend only has a slight knock on the head for his troubles.
I am sorry to hear that. I should hope this would not be the case here, but like in every country, there are some neighbourhoods in Canada where I would not be so certain, including one or two in this city.
Well, it would seem we disagree only on some very minor issues although we do appear to have difficulties communicating this to each other.
My replies to you were all based on my impressions of what you were proposing, and in retrospect, perheaps coloured by my fear of our personal liberties being taken away from us by increasingly power hungry "securocracy" aided by some lusting for blood citizens belonging to the political school of thought by one Benito Mussolini. Citizens who seem to come to forefront and become very vocal in times like these. Sadly, these are the people whom I seem to run into everyday, it seems, lately.
They and their enablers scare me witless, for I dare not think what will happen if they get to control our lives.
Hence my rants about vigilantism, culture of fear and pre-emption.
I like to think I do a decent job of keeping my thoughts and actions rational and logical, except for intarweb message boards of course.
Ha! If it wasn't for places like Slashdot, many of us would explode from repressed anger at how things are around us. And we all tend to go way over the top when we open our pressure-relief valves. I think of it as a form of therapy!
people very polite, unlike here I'm very sad to say
I must say that this is becoming slowly a thing of the past here too, although many still are, we seem to have developed a mean streak, particularly since the vast liberal/right-wing chasm is beginning to take a serious toll on Canada. The western part of the country developed a significant right-wing slant in places, particularly the province of Alberta which is starting to resemble Texas. The rest of the country remains staunchly liberal but friction is growing daily. Even our crowning social achievement, the universal medical care, is starting to come under increasing attack from all sorts of wolves salivating at the prospect of untold billions to be made on the backs of sick and dying or misguided, selfish, greedy, sheep whom the wolves managed to convince to come to dinner.
In short, the American politics seems to have made an entrance here to some extent and is (I have reasons to believe) purposefuly sold to Canadians by various organizations who do wish us ill and who would profit greatly should we falter. The same groups -- I believe -- who are responsible for much of the troubles in your country.
Multinational businesses, ultra-rich, fanatical priests of "laissez faire" free-market economy to name a few.
Unfortunately for them, Canadians are, on average, very well educated and having grown up in liberal climate, tend to question motives and be suspicious of snakes bearing gifts. Unfortunately for us, the foes of liberty are focusing on destroying the education system and corrupting the media, by essentially purchasing them. Already, many people have been bamboozled by the commercial news channels into believing that the last remaining, reasonably accurate and unbiased network, the CBC (our version of the BBC and something like your PBS except much more mainstream) is "liberally biased", while it is merely "facts biased". You see, they are an old-school news channel who reports facts with minimal spin (in any direction). Which when compared to some vastly rightwards-spinned and opinioned commercial channels, radio hosts and newspapers (who all claim to be "balanced"), appears downright lefty. This sort of destruction of unbiased fact-finding media and replacement of it with propaganda channels is very frighteni
I'm done with you, you are a coward and have not accepted any of the resposibilities of living in a "civilized" "society".
[Followed by a looong list of self-justifications for vigilante crime-fighting, lacking only a description of a spandex costume, complete with a cape]
Ah. Yes the mask of tolerance and respect for liberty is coming off at last to reveal the true nature underneath. Mr. Batman, I presume? Spidey, is that you? Or is it the Tick?
Just so you know, I find vigilantes amusing and exciting where they belong, safely, on the pages of a comic book. In real life your kind is as dangerous as those you purport to fight. For every crime you claim to have prevented, I strongly suspect you committed abuse on "uncooperative" strangers, engaged in intimidation of your own neighbours who were insufficiently enthusiastic about your crusade, violated rights and personal liberties of others and in general made the life in your neighbourhood as miserable is your own private hell of suspicion, paranoia and violence.
I am sure this is completely lost on you but people like you are one of the reasons the crime is so high in America. It is the vigilantes who insist that guns be available to everyone for "self-defense". It is the vigilantes who insist that the "war on drugs" be fought, enriching drug lords and police equally and bringing pain and misery to everyone else, instead of the drug problem being treated by medical profession where it belongs. It is the vigilantes who run around the neighbourhood with knives, unhinged, investigating "suspicious" strangers which more often then not leads to violence. It is the vigilantes who shoot first and ask questions later. It is the vigilantes who insist on "tough sentences" but no attempts at any sort of rehabilitation which leads to USA having the highest proportion of population incarcerated in private, for-profit no less, prisons.
You called me a "coward", let me return you a (tongue in cheek) label: you Sir Batman are a Neighbourhood Vigilante Bully. Armed, dangerous and unpredictable. Woe onto anyone who makes a wrong turn into your alley for his fate is uncertain.
Your kind is unwelcome in my life. He who would not put his safety on the line for me or his firends, family, neighborsas I would for him is unwelcome.
You took it upon yourself, based on my defense of the foundations of the Western Civilization (i.e. our supposedly cherished and inalienable personal liberties) to prove that I would be unwilling to defend my neighbour if under assault. You are confusing -- again -- my unwilingness to go around pre-emptively in search of monsters to destroy, with a refusal to do the duty we all have to protect our neighbours from imminent harm. The duty which comes into effect only, and only if the neighbour or the stranger on the street is actually coming under assault. Not before!
Go live in your gated community where you would never need ask simple questions of your fellow man.
The whole point of this is to have a society where fear mentality does not rule us and where we don't have to build walled compounds complete with moats and draw bridges.
I am curious tho about many things. Do you own a home, how old are you, where do you live?
As you should have guessed, I live in Canada. In a medium sized (around 700 thousand people) city. I do have a condominium (I do not care for lawn care and such) and I am old enough for many Slashdotters think me their grandfather.
When was the last time YOU stepped up to help you fellow man?
Many a time but in my case, having lived in a country where there is little violent crime, these are minor occurrences involving spotting pick pockets, burglars and such.
I have also been a victim of crime but again it was confined to property damage (a car thief, burglary of my business, etc).
See, that is where your assumption falls down, you never DEMAND like you have authority over someone. You simply ask simple questions, be friendly. "Hi how are you, I'm St0rmShad0w, whats your name?" "How's it going, where are you headed today?" Civil people have no problem conversing with civil people, and if they respond "none of your business" then fair enough. And medical insurance? Please, around here if I did what you said _exactly_, people would get freaked, scurry off and call the cops on me, because then I would be exhibiting suspicious behavior.
It should have been:
It becomes you duty to notify authorities when you think something is going on, plain and simple.
I shall repeat to myself: Preview is my friend. Preview is my friend. Pre...
At the risk of getting modded "offtopic" again, what is sad is that the parties do not seem to stick to their "core principles" and are willing to shift over and become what used to be their "worst enemy". It speaks volumes to corruptibilty of politics and short memories of those involved.
If there is a crack house down the block, as there happens to be, should I ignore it? Little kids are finding needles on the sidewalk for crying out loud. But back on topic to the article, was the WAP owner a vigilante by phoning in his concern to the police? His other options are ignore it or take matters into his own hands, neither seems advisable.
A crack house is an entirely different situation. In that case you have a reason (evidence) to believe that a crime is being commited. I would have no problem whatsoever with you taking action then. But even if you know its a crackhouse, not every car stoping there is going to be a customer. One of them could be the distressed partents of a resident junkie or some other innocent/confused person.
I know of "citizen groups" who would videotape every license plate of every car stopping anywhere near the house and then publish the plates in the press to "discourage" addicts or johns. Should my plate ever appear in one of these, they will qiuckly regret they ever heard of a video camera.
See, that is where your assumption falls down, you never DEMAND like you have authority over someone. You simply ask simple questions, be friendly. "Hi how are you, I'm St0rmShad0w, whats your name?" "How's it going, where are you headed today?" Civil people have no problem conversing with civil people, and if they respond "none of your business" then fair enough. And medical insurance? Please, around here if I did what you said _exactly_, people would get freaked, scurry off and call the cops on me, because then I would be exhibiting suspicious behavior.
I dont know where you live but depending on the street, the response to your "kind" question would vary from amused replies, through cops being called for a "pervert proposing" to knives/guns being pulled and used.
Most people I know of would be rather unsympathetic and depending on the quality of the question, your appearance, the time of day and the area, their mood would range from mildly irritated to outright (violent) rage in perceived "self-defense".
Even the most innocuous "Hello I am St0rmShad0w, whats your name?" asked to a girl at 1:30 am while she waits for a bus alone would earn you a hefty dose of pepper spray in your eyes and/or burn marks from a taser and depending on her fittnes, your testicles possibly retaining the impression of her knee for a few days.
See, that is where your assumption falls down, you never DEMAND like you have authority over someone. You simply ask simple questions, be friendly. "Hi how are you, I'm St0rmShad0w, whats your name?" "How's it going, where are you headed today?" Civil people have no problem conversing with civil people, and if they respond "none of your business" then fair enough. And medical insurance? Please, around here if I did what you said _exactly_, people would get freaked, scurry off and call the cops on me, because then I would be exhibiting suspicious behavior.
No it is not because -- as I keep repeating and you keep ignoring -- your personal, subjective, arbitrary definition of "something going on" is nothing short of "I don't like his looks or the place he stands on in my kingdom, how dares he!". Even though no crime or evidence of thereof is taking place!
Crime doens't just happen in front of cops, someone has to let them know.
You are purposfully trying to blur and merge two completely different situations, one in which you dont like the looks of someone and the other in which you observed him commiting a crime and thus have evidence of his ill intent. In the first case, him just standing there, you do not have a right to get inquisitive to the point of "investigating" or calling authorities. In the second one you do. Please do not attempt to clump these together, they are light years apart. One involves you "pre-empting" (i.e. being a kind of a vigilante) a "crime" based on your own imaginings and wild suspicions and in the other you
This is were its just your fault for failing to defend your rights. If a cop wants to search your vehicle and you even briefly entertain saying yes you had better get him to write down what he is searching for, make him be specific, or say no to the search.
Yes it is within your rights to refuse an unwarranted search to even a cop (although in practice this will still land you in a cell and your car seized after that bag of dope magically appeared there - cops, corruption and pissing contests are inseparable). It is irrefutably within your rights to tell a self-appointed snoop to take a hike when he comes around "investigating" you being parked where he doesn't like.
Way to Godwin. And your checkpoint BS still doesn't wash. If in the amazingly unlikely event something like that would get passed, you still have every right to challenge it in court. What sucks these days is the very poor choices being appointed to the bench and the fact that juries are largely made up of complete idiots.
The self-contradictions in this statement are mind boggling. As to Godwin -- a very misguided and formed in kinder, gentler times, when it truly seemed that it "cannot happen here" -- "rule", I do not seem to recall it being passed into "law" by any country.
You are of course still missing the point. The very activity you engage into is vigilantism and if there is more then one of you, the terms are "mob rule" and "intimidation". The checkpoints and such appear when you manage to convince enough people that your way is the right one. So while it is indeed not the case, yet, I am merely ridiculing the direction of your march by pointing out its viable -- historically accurate -- destinations.
Questioning your fellow citizen is your right, as it is his to question you, or refuse to answer your questions.
Ok, since I am not breaking through at all here, let me make it as simple as conceivably possible for you: try this simple experiment to test your utterly ridiculous premise: Since you claim it is your "right" then approach people on the street at random and ask them (prefferrably in demanding and authoritative tone) "What are you doing?! Where are you going?! Whats your name?!". Just make sure you have your medical insurance fully paid up before you do it.
Asking the authorities to intercede when you suspect there is something not quite right going on is also your right, they'll ask the same questions you do and if the don't like the answer they'll say move along, if its all good they'll let you know that too, and hang about close if they're wrong.
Ok. Another simple thought experiment: when does it become your self-appointed authority to "notify" real authorities that you "think" something is going on? When the car is parked in front of your house and your lawn is mere 10 feet long? The car is parked on the same public road but your house is 100 feet away due to the large size of your property? Or you are living on a farm and the said road and the car are good 1.5 mile away from your front porch? How about 20 miles?
In your authoritarian world, there has to be some distance at which the car becomes "your" concern. In my view, the distance does not change anything, the car was never your concern since it is on a public road.
Its the freedom of local residents to ask questions of others.
The matter of fact is that they have no such "freedom". That "freedom" if it existed would require stripping the passers by from their personal rights of privacy and of use of common public areas. The moment these passers by engage in some sort of illegal activity, tersspassing amongst others, then you acquire a right to interfere. But before that occurs you are walking a very fine line between concern for your fellow man and harrasment.
Harassment is a pretty extreme definition for asking if you need help or what you are doing?
Approaching someone slumped in a front seat of a car and asking if he is doing ok and if does need any help might be quite acceptable (you are still running a risk of a confrontation even then, such is life) but asking "what are you doing?" is way past the red line. You have absolutely no authority to do so.
You were none of my business when you weren't sitting outside my house, now that you are I just might have questions.
Unless you have reason to be concerned about the person's health or you observed some illegal activity, you still have no business.
I am not guardian of the community, but I am most certainly guardian of me, so if you have a problem with it when your suspicious behavior is questioned, tough.
Then you should have no problem getting sued or shot at when it turns out that the target of your self-appointed "investigation" turns out to disagree with your arbitrary definiton of "suspicious" and your self-granted extension of your authority beyond the bounds of your private property as soon as he finds your actions "threatening".
And if anyone has some sort of issue with me asking why they are outside my house then I'd imagine they can find somewhere to sit where no one is interested in asking questions that they don't want to answer. Free country and all that.
To which the obvious response is: if you are to be harassed by people who appointed themselves "guardians" of the community as soon as you stop your car on a stretch of a public road, what kind of "freedom" is that? "Freedom" for them to harass you it seems, while your "freedom" to hang around on public land (for whatever reason) seems conspicuously missing from this scenario.
Traffic stops catch a lot of outstanding warrants, you know, people wanted for crimes for which they will face trial.
The difference is that a traffic stop is a legitimate law enforcement action, i.e. you commited a road code infraction in response to which you are being stopped. Following which your identity is sufficient to arrest you. Where this falls apart is when cops, having found no warrants on you, start nosing around in your car looking for any excuse to charge you with something. Like a 14-year old half-smoked joint found under the seat of your car with 4 previous owners, etc.
The entire point I am trying to make is that crime "pre-emption", be it by you or overzealous cops is a mortal enemy of justice. The fact that it does "work" is not an excuse. The results of ends-justify-the-means thinking is what I was demonstrating with my Taliban example. Ends-justify-the-means is what you were trying (and still are) to promote with your emotionally charged examples of child abductions and rape.
I was frankly hurting my head trying to figure out how requesting a policeman check out a suspicious vehicle logically turns into strip searches and checkpoints. It was MY REQUEST.
It is also at the request of most of the community members (who all happen to be white middle class bigots) that the cops set up their checkpoint operation, arresting anyone looking Mexican who tries to enter your paradise. It is by the request of good, law-obiding Germans that the Secret Service (a.k.a the Geheime
Staatspolitzei, affectionately known as the Gestapo) established its well-respected policy of questioning any suspicious individuals loitering in otherwise clean and orderly German cities.
If you need me to spell it out for you: the effort to "question" anyone showing up on a public steet and to involve police in it is nothing short of territorial agression, on the basis of which a lot of truly "fun" societies have been built. I gave you some examples, in case you had difficulties determining which societies. Very similiar to the one you are trying to build so desperately in your neck of woods. Why dont you just say it outright and move to a "gated" community where all the "undesirable riff-raff" can be kept out via means of a private army?
... or the never-been-around-before guy snooping for open WAPs?
He is simply employing the only logical way of finding such hubs... which is looking for them. And since many of them are expected to be found in residential areas, that is where he is.
... hurt himself while trying to tresspass on land I bought and pay taxes on...
I agree that in the case of clearly marked property, with a fence (does not even have to be a barbed wire one) and if the dude was performing some illegal act which threatened your safety (other then just being there), such lawsuit would be frivolous and unjustified. Had he stepped (while taking a short cut through a wide open, unfenced, unmarked property) on a set bear-trap you had "forgotten" laying around in the grass on your front lawn, it would be a different story.
In short, having private property does not make it into a feudal fiefdom and it does not grant you a power to be an absolute monarch while presiding on it. You are still subject to common sense laws protecting other people while they are on your property.
That said, weirdos hanging out in their car where they are the "stranger" should expect to be asked a few questions.
And you can expect to end up with some missing teeth when you suprise one of the "strangers" with his girlfriend in the back of his windowless van.
Joking aside, your attitude is one step removed from demanding an "internal passport" of anyone crossing a neighbourhood "they do not belong in". A fine "crime prevention" tactics employed (to great effect may I add) by some countries past.
Accessing a computer needs to default to legal. If access is not authorized, the computer contacted needs to indicate so in some way. All protocols delibrately have a way to indicate that access is not authorized. If you do not use that method, you cannot complain when people ask your computer to do things and it does them.
This appears to me as a perfectly logical and reasonable approach. This is why many systems indicate at the login prompt that their use is restricted and requires explicit permission.
But you should know by now that if it is "technological", the old-fashioned, "quaint" rules of logic do not apply any longer at the insistence of corporate charlatans. A Brave New World of We Make This Shit Up As We Go So It Makes Us A Lot Of Money is now in effect.
An amazing amount of crime is prevented and wanted criminals caught simply because someone felt uncomfortable and had the police check someone out.
An amazing amount of "crime" was also "prevented" by the Taliban Holy Warriors interrogating passers by, arresting those deemed suspicious, torturing them and then shooting anyone whose answers led them to believe he was a filthy, immoral, godless heretic. This policy has prevented, Allah willing, all sorts of villany such as pick-pocketing and drinking alcohol to nearly zero.
Please take a class on logic.
I could not help but notice that beside this cheerful proclamation, you did not attempt to dispute the actual argument.
I'm sorry, where exactly did I arrest and prosecute you?
In the case of the article we are discussing, the owner of the AP had no legitimate leg to stand on and yet the laptop user was arrested, mainly due to the AP owner's insistence. A solid basis for civil legal action if I ever saw one (and yes the cops are also responsible for this mis-application of law).
Oh, and if you say you're using my neighbor's wireless, my next visit is his house to see if he's ok with that.
Which even if he is not, does not grant him or you any right to attempt to get me arrested and prosecuted, since as I already discussed extensively in other posts, there is no physical distinction between an "open, public" and "open, by accident" hubs. All your neighbour is entitled to is to turn on encryption or turn off his hub. See, you are already crossing the line into malicious accusations/persecution by being a nosy busybody.
However, I'm worried that this actually became illegal the second the owner told the guy to stop. (Despite the fact there was no proof he was the owner.) Someone can't use the excuse 'There wasn't a no trepassing sign up' when you've explicitly told them not to come onto your land, so he might have broken the law there.
Unless the AP owner informed the dude in the SUV about his SSID, it is not the case, because for all he knows he is accessing an AP located somewhere else and the idiot in front of him is just confused or crazy. If the SSID was indeed mentioned, then the SUV man might have his argument weakened, assuming one can trust "he-said, she-said" type of exchange without any sort of independent confirmation.
OTOH, if I were that guy, I would have said 'Fine. Now please make your AP stop accessing my computer via SSID broadcasts.'. Hey, if he can order me to stop accessing his stuff via the public airwaves, I can order him to stop accessing mine.
Precisely. The whole idea of "ownership" of radio waves (a subset of a far bigger and more malicious idea of "ownership" of information, a.k.a. Intellectual Property) is just plainly insane and leads to all sorts of bizarre gems of unexpected consequences, such as the one you mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
Which, logically, means all search engines as they all do that to some extent. Searching for words in a page means that the entire page contents has to be stored and (indirectly) available to the outside.
The only real defense I can see either google or the Internet Archive raising is "Fair Use"
Copyright laws are an abomination and their internal inconsistencies and illogic are truly a tribute to power of greed over common sense. "Fair use" is a crude, hastily bolted on, escape hatch through which some of the most obvious and outrageous examples of the utterly unpallatable but logical conclusions of copyright are to escape to avoid the public from becoming too outraged and noticing the scam being perpetrated upon it. But as new technologies evolve and more and more faults appear in this ungainly monster, it is becoming more and more difficult to patch it up and more and more outrageous cases will have to be decided in favour of the Intellectual Property priesthood or else the whole thing is going to come crashing down, taking with it immense profits and power of these crooks. Only time will tell how will this all end, but I am not an optimist by nature when it comes to estimating chances of things just, fair and moral when they are made to combat avarice.
Solution? Change your name legally to something really long.
Copyright laws (and Intellectual Property in general) are hopelessly internally inconsistent and illogical, contrary to science, and generally are a pile of stinking manure intended to obscure their real purpose undrerneath: corporatist attempts at profiting from the body of knowledge accumulated by past generations.
There is an overwhelming interest indeed. For many reasons. Such as 90% (or close) of literature, music or movies published are complete, utter, useless, crap which should never seen the light of day and only did because some vast marketing organizations sought to sell donkey manure wrapped in shiney packaging to the sheep known as "consumers". Or that writing is supposed to be art, and not an industrial process, and as such it is supposed to be sponsored by wealthy patrons, voluntary donations and art foundations. If you are a "technical" writer, you are supposed to be doing it under auspicies of academia or technical organisations whose members are financing you. Copyright, Software Patents (and soon storyline patents) and similiar attempts at treating information as if it were capable of being "private property" are perversions of logic, law and artifacts of pure greed. Greed stronger then common sense, science and morality. An all-encompassing greed which threatens to strangle all progress and destroy the humanity itself.
Your reference to the "starving spouse" with fingers "worked to the bone" is a classic propagandist device designed to evoke sympathy for the "poor writer" who is toiling to manufacture yet another piece of mind-vomit in order to "score it big". Tough luck. If you are an artist and what you do is art, find a way to finance it. World could use far fewer inept amateur "artists" and more dedication and quality from those who remain. In case you did not notice, all the art before the age of copyright and even long after (as copyright did not apply to music and paintings for a long time) was produced this way. I'll take Shakespeare, Plato, Da Vinci and Mozart over the likes of Rolland and Britney any day. If you are in it for the money, screw you, find real work and stop lobbying for laws which attempt to rape us all for your benefit. I already consider anyone who thinks Intellectual Property laws are "beneficial" to be either confused beyond hope or a vicious enemy of humanity whose only agendas are his ego and wealth. In either case a mortal enemy of mine.
If true, say goodbye to Google Cache.
My handle is even more ironic when you consider that it is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Socrates who said: "The more I learn, the more I realize how little do I know".
We hardly know all there is to know about Medicine. Many 'scientific' conclusions of medicine are based on a very restrictive scope of experimentation. How many times have we been told "Take this, its good for X" and then years later we're told "Okay, that wasn't such a good idea because of A, B and C"? Medical Science (and biochemistry and pharmacology) all come up short from time to time.
They do because their scope of research is also vastly complicated. Cellular chemistry is still dimly understood not to mention higher-order interactions in billion member sized hordes of various cells.
As the empirical evidence of use of a particular medical procedure or drug comes in from a large number of patients, statical data can be used then to evaluate the effectivness of the procedure. Sometimes that leads to its abandonment when the side-effects are found to outweigh the benefits. The fact that we cannot extrapolate the effects of a treatment from the laboratory, cell-level, experiments onto whole organisms is merely a testimony to our very limited understanding of these systems on macroscopic level, where complexity is vastly compounded by the cell numbers, in addition to already fantastically complicated inernal cellular reactions.
As to leeching, I understand you are probably criticizing the earlier tendency to prescribe leeching for just about anything (sometimes to the very great detriment of the patient).
Yes indeed, "leeching" used to be the standard quack reply to any aliment, from common cold to typhus. Same with "blood letting" (a close relative).
To blandly write off leeching in its entirety as some form of quackery is also rather dubious.
I am certain that very specific conditions exist where leeches or maggots could be of use. This was not a shot at poor leeches but at the wackos who had no clue what they were doing and thought that "demons" or "bad blood" or what not could be extracted from a victim ... err ... "patient" in this manner to cure nearly anything.
I share a certain skepticism when it comes to sociology and psychology, though perhaps not as virulent or vitriolic as yours appears to be.
And here I thought I was engaging in humorous hyperbole. I think I will defer my plans to become a full time stand-up comedian ...
Some of them are probably quite sound.
It is my humble impression that the parts which are "sound" usually originate with the "common sense" division of applied sciences where from these tidbits of reason are carried away by giggling Psychologists into the Jungles of Delirium, inhabited by deliciously kooky specimens such as the famous Dr. Sigmund Freud.
We all know that science is only as good as the scientist and the methods he uses. In many instances, science can be perverted or the scientist can be sloppy.
Err ... no. You see, this is only possible if other scientists do not pay attention. Which usually means research into the sexual habits of fleas. Or something. The whole apparatus of science depends on this simple premise: one has to be able to replicate the experiments and observations reliably, and the theoretical models have to be able to explain all of these observations. As soon as someone gets lazy, it does not take long for some other scientist will try to replicate the study and the jig is up. For more information see "cold fusion".
Even good science can be operating on a very limited scope, thus making inference beyond the available data problematic (thus the problem with many conclusions) or such conclusions can be correct, but incomplete
You sir are confusing the accuracy of our models with the predictive powers of the already proven ones. That is at no point in time any of the models in physics (or chemistry etc) are allowed to incorrectly predict the already (experimentally, repeatably) established phenomena. They may fail to predict new phenomena and thus must be revised but in doing so we never revise them to not account for previous experiments.
To put it differently: the models in physics are quite adequate at proving the already provable and are somewhat capable of predicting things which we can test for in order to check the validity of these models. In contrast, no such thing is possible in Psychology for a miriad of reasons, one of them being the fact that there is no way to reliably separate various sub-systems of our minds and to test their functions separately.
Finally, there are things in psycology that can be "reliably and repeatably tested". In fact, this type of research is used in things like interrogation and management of PoWs. I went through PoW training. It's heavily psycologically influenced and they know EXACTLY how people react under different conditions. Sure, some break sooner than others, etc. but the results are known in advance. This type of research has been done so long that it's extremely reliable.
Riiight. You mean to tell me that every single person, reacted in the same exact way, to roughly, generally similiar conditions and in no way shape or form did the behaviour not fitting the theory get excused, explained away or manipulated in some other way to make the facts fit the model? If not, you would be the first bunch of Psychologists to ever do so! Lets get real for a moment and consider what you are saying. You interpreted (heavilly, subjectivelly, arbitrarily, with a pre-determined agenda) what these people were saying and behaving like -- as they were saying a lot of things, some of them in various relationships to their experience -- and made it fit the plan. You did some things you thought were in accordance with the plan and the people (with or without any relationship to the plan) did stuff which you, again, interpreted as "success". Excuse me while I regain my composure from being so completely underwhelmed.
In case you did not detect a whiff of sarcasm here, I would like you to contrast your example with something like measuring speed or temperature as a variable of time and comparing the results to a mathematical model.
Again, I do not deny that there are things in psycology that are pure theory. And there are certainly plenty of people who practice psycology who shouldn't, but to say that it's entirely guesswork and non-scientific is short-shrifting the whole profession especially when you consider how often we fuck up and think we know our "hard sciences" when we really don't.
If you cannot see the difference between the regimes of, say, physics and that of Psychology, the purposes, verifiablity and accuracy of physical models, the incremental, modular, discovery process versus the general mumbo-jumbo of the Psychology ones (mostly due to their pitiful inadequacy vs the complexity of the problem), I think it is far beyond me to try to explain to you the difference. I have not got a decade to do so. I will just say this, your insistence that because "hard" science is unable to predict every newly discovered phenomena in its domain with 100% accuracy, it somehow makes it no more valid then Astrology, is the sort of approach I would expect from a UFO conspiracy nut. If you truly believe that "nothing is provable" you should consider taking up Nihilism. Just dont buy any guns and alcohol at the same time. I hear its a lethal combination.
I fail to see how does the fact that the neurosciences are unable to produce a working model (so far) put the Psychologists in any better position. As far as I can tell they are much further away from any sort of plausible models.
This is all fine and dandy, and kudos for trying, but because there is no way to separate the "phenomena" tested from all the other things going on in someone's head, we got a rather big problem. I know the methods you speak of, and some of the experiments are indeed well designed and thoroughly thought through, but -- and here is the rub -- the only ones which manage to do so are the ones dealing with but the most basic and simplistic angles of the research. As in experimentally determining that an "average" person is capable of holding 20 words in short-term memory, assuming we have a clue what "short term memory" is and assuming that the process of "testing" is in itself not influencing the number and assuming that "words" are an accurate unit of measure and not, for example, "sheep with numbers on them" and assuming that the process works the same for concepts rather then sounds -- something we cannot test -- and assuming... you get the idea. No such thing exists in other empirical sciences. The whole object of an experiment is to reduce and control the number of variables involved. We can do that (sometimes with great difficulty) in physics and chemisty but we cannot even hope to do anything remotely similiar when dealing with human minds. In short, the whole process of inqiuiry in Psychology is hopelessly bogged down by the direction of approach to the problem.
Clinical psychologists such as my father, who specializes in the psychology of the deaf and is head of Connecticut's psychological treatment program for the deaf, keep abreast of these developments in professional journals and modify their treatment methodology based on what has been proven through experiment to work best.
Not to bellitle your father, but UFO "researchers" also have journals as do the Parapsychologists, not to mention Homeopathic "Medicine".
We may be a long way from truely understanding human psychology in any kind of complete sense, but we do know what works and what doesn't in treating many kinds of psychological issues, and this is a long way from being Snake Oil, as you call it.
I do not deny that there could be some rare -- and lucky -- observations made of practical value, since one does not need to understand nuclear fusion to be able to get a suntan. But the way the problem (and the approach of attack) is formulated in Psychology is like researching the influence of sugar on politics, after having noticed (and undeniably, experimentally, confirmed) that, yes, there are politicians with a sweet tooth. Enter copious volumes of research on the relationship of number of spoons of sugar in cofee used by Democrats, Republicans and Independents, breakdown of various types of other beverages used, their sugar contents, historical trends of thereof followed by predictive patterns with learned discussion of sugar-substitutes and their influence on the processes involved (to be discussed at the 7th Saccharo-political Science Conference in Hawaii 2017).
I do not intend to defend the parent poster (and I find Scientology deliciously -- and dangerously -- nutty) but I must observe however a little problem with your comparison:
Physics, unlike psychology, offers us models with predictive powers, which can be reliably and repeatably tested. Psychology, Psychiatry, etc are dealing with systems vastly more complex then what Physics is concerned with (in fact as complex as the minds of the researchers themselves) for which we do not have any plausibly approximate models. To make things worse, Psychology has no means to divide the problem into smaller components to reduce the complexity of the study, which is a standard procedure in most other sciences.
To make a long story short, there is a wide-spread belief among students of "hard" (i.e. strictly empirical, reliable predictive powers, mathematical models etc) sciences -- such as Neuro-chemistry for example -- that directions of inquiry such as Psychology and Economics are dead ends at best and "voodoo science" at worst.
Things are of course not being helped by the fact that Psychologists are popular "get out of jail" court trial props and the "greatest minds" of Economics started -- jointly no less! -- massive hedge funds which promptly collapsed to the tune of billions of dollars.
While poking fun at the poor (at least the ones at the bottom) Scientologists is a sport I sometimes indulge in myself, I would like to point out that Psychology, Psychiatry and, say, Economics -- to mention a few -- are the bastard children of science proper. Unlike most other scientific disciplines, their predictive powers are somewhat lacking, to put it gently. There is a looooong way from simple reflexes and associations, such as the ones exhibited by Pavlov dogs, to processes so vastly complex that they exceed the complexity of the mind of the researcher himself. So while one can attept to formulate broad, coarse, inaccurate, imprecise approximations of models, it does little but produce mildly interesting observations about the workings of the mind with highly questionable practical value.
This of course does not stop adherents of these "disciplines" from claiming in-depth knowledge and understanding and to proceed to apply this "understanding" onto poor suckers, otherwise known as "patients". Lack of any clue however has never stopped people before. May I remind you about old-time "remedies" like blood-letting and leeches, and more modern renditions like homeopathy. Not to mention those old standbys: Astrology and Fortune Telling.
In this regard, I consider Psychologists -- and Economists -- to be in the same profession as the Scientologists: Snake Oil Sales, Cure-all Departament.
Neurology on the other hand, is a bona fide empirical science, although it is faced with the same problem of vast complexities. Unlike psychology however, the neuro-science investigators have an ability to reliably deconstruct the problem into smaller, simpler components and attempt to investigate those.
This "fiduciary responsibility" is in my opnion the main reason we should fear corporations -- like we do fear hungry lions. Amoral, besital and constantly looking for lunch.
Therefore, the problem of twisted language used to hide the truth from the victims of the hungry corporate greed and lust for power is only a minor one when compared to the corporate influence over governments.
I firmly believe that in order to save capitalism and the Western societies from themselves, one has to limit severely the size of businesses and remove the corporation as a structure from its current dominant place and restore it to its original purpose, as the "public charter" used to allow a group of small businesses to gang together temporarily to afford a large project.
Having a greedy, narcisstic and amoral "persons" -- as the corporations are treated by the law of their own design -- is not in the interest of society at large, nor it is in the interest of the economic system known as "capitalism" since its main fuel is "competition", but gigiantic corporations are contrary to that.
Unless of course the password was posted by some hacker on some forum and you are logging in under the impression (which the hacker created to cause havoc) that it is a public shell account or some such. If the message reads "Employees only" and you are not one, this defense is removed.
Presenting a "password" prompt might be insufficient since one could claim he had obtained the password legitimately and thus was "authorized". By specifically enumerating the classes of authorized users you ensure that no doubt is possible.
I am sorry to hear that. I should hope this would not be the case here, but like in every country, there are some neighbourhoods in Canada where I would not be so certain, including one or two in this city.
Well, it would seem we disagree only on some very minor issues although we do appear to have difficulties communicating this to each other.
My replies to you were all based on my impressions of what you were proposing, and in retrospect, perheaps coloured by my fear of our personal liberties being taken away from us by increasingly power hungry "securocracy" aided by some lusting for blood citizens belonging to the political school of thought by one Benito Mussolini. Citizens who seem to come to forefront and become very vocal in times like these. Sadly, these are the people whom I seem to run into everyday, it seems, lately.
They and their enablers scare me witless, for I dare not think what will happen if they get to control our lives.
Hence my rants about vigilantism, culture of fear and pre-emption.
I like to think I do a decent job of keeping my thoughts and actions rational and logical, except for intarweb message boards of course.
Ha! If it wasn't for places like Slashdot, many of us would explode from repressed anger at how things are around us. And we all tend to go way over the top when we open our pressure-relief valves. I think of it as a form of therapy!
people very polite, unlike here I'm very sad to say
I must say that this is becoming slowly a thing of the past here too, although many still are, we seem to have developed a mean streak, particularly since the vast liberal/right-wing chasm is beginning to take a serious toll on Canada. The western part of the country developed a significant right-wing slant in places, particularly the province of Alberta which is starting to resemble Texas. The rest of the country remains staunchly liberal but friction is growing daily. Even our crowning social achievement, the universal medical care, is starting to come under increasing attack from all sorts of wolves salivating at the prospect of untold billions to be made on the backs of sick and dying or misguided, selfish, greedy, sheep whom the wolves managed to convince to come to dinner.
In short, the American politics seems to have made an entrance here to some extent and is (I have reasons to believe) purposefuly sold to Canadians by various organizations who do wish us ill and who would profit greatly should we falter. The same groups -- I believe -- who are responsible for much of the troubles in your country.
Multinational businesses, ultra-rich, fanatical priests of "laissez faire" free-market economy to name a few.
Unfortunately for them, Canadians are, on average, very well educated and having grown up in liberal climate, tend to question motives and be suspicious of snakes bearing gifts. Unfortunately for us, the foes of liberty are focusing on destroying the education system and corrupting the media, by essentially purchasing them. Already, many people have been bamboozled by the commercial news channels into believing that the last remaining, reasonably accurate and unbiased network, the CBC (our version of the BBC and something like your PBS except much more mainstream) is "liberally biased", while it is merely "facts biased". You see, they are an old-school news channel who reports facts with minimal spin (in any direction). Which when compared to some vastly rightwards-spinned and opinioned commercial channels, radio hosts and newspapers (who all claim to be "balanced"), appears downright lefty. This sort of destruction of unbiased fact-finding media and replacement of it with propaganda channels is very frighteni
[Followed by a looong list of self-justifications for vigilante crime-fighting, lacking only a description of a spandex costume, complete with a cape]
Ah. Yes the mask of tolerance and respect for liberty is coming off at last to reveal the true nature underneath. Mr. Batman, I presume? Spidey, is that you? Or is it the Tick?
Just so you know, I find vigilantes amusing and exciting where they belong, safely, on the pages of a comic book. In real life your kind is as dangerous as those you purport to fight. For every crime you claim to have prevented, I strongly suspect you committed abuse on "uncooperative" strangers, engaged in intimidation of your own neighbours who were insufficiently enthusiastic about your crusade, violated rights and personal liberties of others and in general made the life in your neighbourhood as miserable is your own private hell of suspicion, paranoia and violence.
I am sure this is completely lost on you but people like you are one of the reasons the crime is so high in America. It is the vigilantes who insist that guns be available to everyone for "self-defense". It is the vigilantes who insist that the "war on drugs" be fought, enriching drug lords and police equally and bringing pain and misery to everyone else, instead of the drug problem being treated by medical profession where it belongs. It is the vigilantes who run around the neighbourhood with knives, unhinged, investigating "suspicious" strangers which more often then not leads to violence. It is the vigilantes who shoot first and ask questions later. It is the vigilantes who insist on "tough sentences" but no attempts at any sort of rehabilitation which leads to USA having the highest proportion of population incarcerated in private, for-profit no less, prisons.
You called me a "coward", let me return you a (tongue in cheek) label: you Sir Batman are a Neighbourhood Vigilante Bully. Armed, dangerous and unpredictable. Woe onto anyone who makes a wrong turn into your alley for his fate is uncertain.
Your kind is unwelcome in my life. He who would not put his safety on the line for me or his firends, family, neighborsas I would for him is unwelcome.
You took it upon yourself, based on my defense of the foundations of the Western Civilization (i.e. our supposedly cherished and inalienable personal liberties) to prove that I would be unwilling to defend my neighbour if under assault. You are confusing -- again -- my unwilingness to go around pre-emptively in search of monsters to destroy, with a refusal to do the duty we all have to protect our neighbours from imminent harm. The duty which comes into effect only, and only if the neighbour or the stranger on the street is actually coming under assault. Not before!
Go live in your gated community where you would never need ask simple questions of your fellow man.
The whole point of this is to have a society where fear mentality does not rule us and where we don't have to build walled compounds complete with moats and draw bridges.
I am curious tho about many things. Do you own a home, how old are you, where do you live?
As you should have guessed, I live in Canada. In a medium sized (around 700 thousand people) city. I do have a condominium (I do not care for lawn care and such) and I am old enough for many Slashdotters think me their grandfather.
When was the last time YOU stepped up to help you fellow man?
Many a time but in my case, having lived in a country where there is little violent crime, these are minor occurrences involving spotting pick pockets, burglars and such.
I have also been a victim of crime but again it was confined to property damage (a car thief, burglary of my business, etc).
I wish you health and prosperity.
So do I wish you.
Instead of the second copy of
See, that is where your assumption falls down, you never DEMAND like you have authority over someone. You simply ask simple questions, be friendly. "Hi how are you, I'm St0rmShad0w, whats your name?" "How's it going, where are you headed today?" Civil people have no problem conversing with civil people, and if they respond "none of your business" then fair enough. And medical insurance? Please, around here if I did what you said _exactly_, people would get freaked, scurry off and call the cops on me, because then I would be exhibiting suspicious behavior.
It should have been:
It becomes you duty to notify authorities when you think something is going on, plain and simple.
I shall repeat to myself: Preview is my friend. Preview is my friend. Pre...
At the risk of getting modded "offtopic" again, what is sad is that the parties do not seem to stick to their "core principles" and are willing to shift over and become what used to be their "worst enemy". It speaks volumes to corruptibilty of politics and short memories of those involved.
A crack house is an entirely different situation. In that case you have a reason (evidence) to believe that a crime is being commited. I would have no problem whatsoever with you taking action then. But even if you know its a crackhouse, not every car stoping there is going to be a customer. One of them could be the distressed partents of a resident junkie or some other innocent/confused person.
I know of "citizen groups" who would videotape every license plate of every car stopping anywhere near the house and then publish the plates in the press to "discourage" addicts or johns. Should my plate ever appear in one of these, they will qiuckly regret they ever heard of a video camera.
See, that is where your assumption falls down, you never DEMAND like you have authority over someone. You simply ask simple questions, be friendly. "Hi how are you, I'm St0rmShad0w, whats your name?" "How's it going, where are you headed today?" Civil people have no problem conversing with civil people, and if they respond "none of your business" then fair enough. And medical insurance? Please, around here if I did what you said _exactly_, people would get freaked, scurry off and call the cops on me, because then I would be exhibiting suspicious behavior.
I dont know where you live but depending on the street, the response to your "kind" question would vary from amused replies, through cops being called for a "pervert proposing" to knives/guns being pulled and used.
Most people I know of would be rather unsympathetic and depending on the quality of the question, your appearance, the time of day and the area, their mood would range from mildly irritated to outright (violent) rage in perceived "self-defense".
Even the most innocuous "Hello I am St0rmShad0w, whats your name?" asked to a girl at 1:30 am while she waits for a bus alone would earn you a hefty dose of pepper spray in your eyes and/or burn marks from a taser and depending on her fittnes, your testicles possibly retaining the impression of her knee for a few days.
See, that is where your assumption falls down, you never DEMAND like you have authority over someone. You simply ask simple questions, be friendly. "Hi how are you, I'm St0rmShad0w, whats your name?" "How's it going, where are you headed today?" Civil people have no problem conversing with civil people, and if they respond "none of your business" then fair enough. And medical insurance? Please, around here if I did what you said _exactly_, people would get freaked, scurry off and call the cops on me, because then I would be exhibiting suspicious behavior.
No it is not because -- as I keep repeating and you keep ignoring -- your personal, subjective, arbitrary definition of "something going on" is nothing short of "I don't like his looks or the place he stands on in my kingdom, how dares he!". Even though no crime or evidence of thereof is taking place!
Crime doens't just happen in front of cops, someone has to let them know.
You are purposfully trying to blur and merge two completely different situations, one in which you dont like the looks of someone and the other in which you observed him commiting a crime and thus have evidence of his ill intent. In the first case, him just standing there, you do not have a right to get inquisitive to the point of "investigating" or calling authorities. In the second one you do. Please do not attempt to clump these together, they are light years apart. One involves you "pre-empting" (i.e. being a kind of a vigilante) a "crime" based on your own imaginings and wild suspicions and in the other you
Yes it is within your rights to refuse an unwarranted search to even a cop (although in practice this will still land you in a cell and your car seized after that bag of dope magically appeared there - cops, corruption and pissing contests are inseparable). It is irrefutably within your rights to tell a self-appointed snoop to take a hike when he comes around "investigating" you being parked where he doesn't like.
Way to Godwin. And your checkpoint BS still doesn't wash. If in the amazingly unlikely event something like that would get passed, you still have every right to challenge it in court. What sucks these days is the very poor choices being appointed to the bench and the fact that juries are largely made up of complete idiots.
The self-contradictions in this statement are mind boggling. As to Godwin -- a very misguided and formed in kinder, gentler times, when it truly seemed that it "cannot happen here" -- "rule", I do not seem to recall it being passed into "law" by any country.
You are of course still missing the point. The very activity you engage into is vigilantism and if there is more then one of you, the terms are "mob rule" and "intimidation". The checkpoints and such appear when you manage to convince enough people that your way is the right one. So while it is indeed not the case, yet, I am merely ridiculing the direction of your march by pointing out its viable -- historically accurate -- destinations.
Questioning your fellow citizen is your right, as it is his to question you, or refuse to answer your questions.
Ok, since I am not breaking through at all here, let me make it as simple as conceivably possible for you: try this simple experiment to test your utterly ridiculous premise: Since you claim it is your "right" then approach people on the street at random and ask them (prefferrably in demanding and authoritative tone) "What are you doing?! Where are you going?! Whats your name?!". Just make sure you have your medical insurance fully paid up before you do it.
Asking the authorities to intercede when you suspect there is something not quite right going on is also your right, they'll ask the same questions you do and if the don't like the answer they'll say move along, if its all good they'll let you know that too, and hang about close if they're wrong.
Ok. Another simple thought experiment: when does it become your self-appointed authority to "notify" real authorities that you "think" something is going on? When the car is parked in front of your house and your lawn is mere 10 feet long? The car is parked on the same public road but your house is 100 feet away due to the large size of your property? Or you are living on a farm and the said road and the car are good 1.5 mile away from your front porch? How about 20 miles?
In your authoritarian world, there has to be some distance at which the car becomes "your" concern. In my view, the distance does not change anything, the car was never your concern since it is on a public road.
The matter of fact is that they have no such "freedom". That "freedom" if it existed would require stripping the passers by from their personal rights of privacy and of use of common public areas. The moment these passers by engage in some sort of illegal activity, tersspassing amongst others, then you acquire a right to interfere. But before that occurs you are walking a very fine line between concern for your fellow man and harrasment.
Harassment is a pretty extreme definition for asking if you need help or what you are doing?
Approaching someone slumped in a front seat of a car and asking if he is doing ok and if does need any help might be quite acceptable (you are still running a risk of a confrontation even then, such is life) but asking "what are you doing?" is way past the red line. You have absolutely no authority to do so.
You were none of my business when you weren't sitting outside my house, now that you are I just might have questions.
Unless you have reason to be concerned about the person's health or you observed some illegal activity, you still have no business.
I am not guardian of the community, but I am most certainly guardian of me, so if you have a problem with it when your suspicious behavior is questioned, tough.
Then you should have no problem getting sued or shot at when it turns out that the target of your self-appointed "investigation" turns out to disagree with your arbitrary definiton of "suspicious" and your self-granted extension of your authority beyond the bounds of your private property as soon as he finds your actions "threatening".
To which the obvious response is: if you are to be harassed by people who appointed themselves "guardians" of the community as soon as you stop your car on a stretch of a public road, what kind of "freedom" is that? "Freedom" for them to harass you it seems, while your "freedom" to hang around on public land (for whatever reason) seems conspicuously missing from this scenario.
The difference is that a traffic stop is a legitimate law enforcement action, i.e. you commited a road code infraction in response to which you are being stopped. Following which your identity is sufficient to arrest you. Where this falls apart is when cops, having found no warrants on you, start nosing around in your car looking for any excuse to charge you with something. Like a 14-year old half-smoked joint found under the seat of your car with 4 previous owners, etc.
The entire point I am trying to make is that crime "pre-emption", be it by you or overzealous cops is a mortal enemy of justice. The fact that it does "work" is not an excuse. The results of ends-justify-the-means thinking is what I was demonstrating with my Taliban example. Ends-justify-the-means is what you were trying (and still are) to promote with your emotionally charged examples of child abductions and rape.
I was frankly hurting my head trying to figure out how requesting a policeman check out a suspicious vehicle logically turns into strip searches and checkpoints. It was MY REQUEST.
It is also at the request of most of the community members (who all happen to be white middle class bigots) that the cops set up their checkpoint operation, arresting anyone looking Mexican who tries to enter your paradise. It is by the request of good, law-obiding Germans that the Secret Service (a.k.a the Geheime Staatspolitzei, affectionately known as the Gestapo) established its well-respected policy of questioning any suspicious individuals loitering in otherwise clean and orderly German cities.
If you need me to spell it out for you: the effort to "question" anyone showing up on a public steet and to involve police in it is nothing short of territorial agression, on the basis of which a lot of truly "fun" societies have been built. I gave you some examples, in case you had difficulties determining which societies. Very similiar to the one you are trying to build so desperately in your neck of woods. Why dont you just say it outright and move to a "gated" community where all the "undesirable riff-raff" can be kept out via means of a private army?
He is simply employing the only logical way of finding such hubs ... which is looking for them. And since many of them are expected to be found in residential areas, that is where he is.
I agree that in the case of clearly marked property, with a fence (does not even have to be a barbed wire one) and if the dude was performing some illegal act which threatened your safety (other then just being there), such lawsuit would be frivolous and unjustified. Had he stepped (while taking a short cut through a wide open, unfenced, unmarked property) on a set bear-trap you had "forgotten" laying around in the grass on your front lawn, it would be a different story.
In short, having private property does not make it into a feudal fiefdom and it does not grant you a power to be an absolute monarch while presiding on it. You are still subject to common sense laws protecting other people while they are on your property.
That said, weirdos hanging out in their car where they are the "stranger" should expect to be asked a few questions.
And you can expect to end up with some missing teeth when you suprise one of the "strangers" with his girlfriend in the back of his windowless van.
Joking aside, your attitude is one step removed from demanding an "internal passport" of anyone crossing a neighbourhood "they do not belong in". A fine "crime prevention" tactics employed (to great effect may I add) by some countries past.
This appears to me as a perfectly logical and reasonable approach. This is why many systems indicate at the login prompt that their use is restricted and requires explicit permission.
But you should know by now that if it is "technological", the old-fashioned, "quaint" rules of logic do not apply any longer at the insistence of corporate charlatans. A Brave New World of We Make This Shit Up As We Go So It Makes Us A Lot Of Money is now in effect.
An amazing amount of "crime" was also "prevented" by the Taliban Holy Warriors interrogating passers by, arresting those deemed suspicious, torturing them and then shooting anyone whose answers led them to believe he was a filthy, immoral, godless heretic. This policy has prevented, Allah willing, all sorts of villany such as pick-pocketing and drinking alcohol to nearly zero.
Please take a class on logic.
I could not help but notice that beside this cheerful proclamation, you did not attempt to dispute the actual argument.
I'm sorry, where exactly did I arrest and prosecute you?
In the case of the article we are discussing, the owner of the AP had no legitimate leg to stand on and yet the laptop user was arrested, mainly due to the AP owner's insistence. A solid basis for civil legal action if I ever saw one (and yes the cops are also responsible for this mis-application of law).
Oh, and if you say you're using my neighbor's wireless, my next visit is his house to see if he's ok with that.
Which even if he is not, does not grant him or you any right to attempt to get me arrested and prosecuted, since as I already discussed extensively in other posts, there is no physical distinction between an "open, public" and "open, by accident" hubs. All your neighbour is entitled to is to turn on encryption or turn off his hub. See, you are already crossing the line into malicious accusations/persecution by being a nosy busybody.
Unless the AP owner informed the dude in the SUV about his SSID, it is not the case, because for all he knows he is accessing an AP located somewhere else and the idiot in front of him is just confused or crazy. If the SSID was indeed mentioned, then the SUV man might have his argument weakened, assuming one can trust "he-said, she-said" type of exchange without any sort of independent confirmation.
OTOH, if I were that guy, I would have said 'Fine. Now please make your AP stop accessing my computer via SSID broadcasts.'. Hey, if he can order me to stop accessing his stuff via the public airwaves, I can order him to stop accessing mine.
Precisely. The whole idea of "ownership" of radio waves (a subset of a far bigger and more malicious idea of "ownership" of information, a.k.a. Intellectual Property) is just plainly insane and leads to all sorts of bizarre gems of unexpected consequences, such as the one you mentioned.