I don't think you can leap to that conclusion quite so quickly. Postal mail was around then, yet they left that out of the 4th amendment.
No they did not. What you are trying here is pure sophistry. Postal mail falls clearly under the "papers" category in the constitution, unless of course you are going to argue that mail at the time was composed on stone tablets or sheets of metal.
Cool! So NOW, when the pervs get arrested with CP, they can use the "They sent it out of their own free will" argument! Nice loophole you've added in there pal.
If the "CP" was not produced via rape or abuse, or if the "pervs" did not pay for it (i.e. provided no material support to rape) = no crime. Mere "possession" being a "crime" is one of those bullshit arbitrary illogical turds you are so fond of, with a long, long list of most unreasonable and illogical implications.
Of course, if you close that loophole by saying "well, they can send it, but you can't receive it" NOW you are simply moving blame from the creator to the recipient. Nice way for a teenager to go after a teacher they don't like. Just get all their friends to send a nude cell-cam shot to the hated teacher's e-mail! Yeah!
Err, it is you who have created this idiotic black-mail condition with insistence on both parties being "criminals" even though no child abuse have occurred. Not me. I do not believe mere possession of evidence of a crime (if any crime actually occured) is a crime itself. Criminalizing everything they find "icky" is a hallmark of fanatic, lunatic zealots. I'd rather stick to logic. And logic says that no matter how you cut it, as soon as you criminalize pictures themselves irrespective of the free will of the subject, both the "producer" (i.e. the "child") and the recipient (irrespective of age or his consent in the receiving) are "criminals" and should end up in the ass-pound jail and on life-long child molester lists, in the case of the kid for the "crime" of molesting himself/herself (which is what you are clearly advocating). You can't have this shit-cake and eat it too, you know.
Some of us just want sane and reasonable laws, and are willing to work within the system to get them.
Since you keep insisting, vehemently, on things most unreasonable, just so that you get to "work within the system", I am merely pointing out to you that the motivations of most of the "law-makers" are anything but pure. Or reasonable.
Neither. What you actually presented is a logical fallacy known as "false dichotomy".
The third choice, the one you conveniently forgot to mention, is that a teenager sending pictures of himself/herself out of his/her free will should NOT be a crime of any sort, irrespective of where he/she sends them, puberty or not! You've seem to have already forgotten, in your mad rush to defend arbitrary bullshit, that the entire and only purpose of sane "child protection" laws is to prevent rape and abuse of children by adults. Controlling what the children do themselves out of their own free will is not the purported objective here, or else, inevitably you will have to define these children as the criminals and lock them up! But of course we all know that it is the real "stealth" objective stemming from the attempts at codifying in law of the dominant religious doctrine by all these self-appointed "child defenders" and you slipped and let it show in your "arguments".
And the rest of your "reasoning" goes down from here, beginning with the "meta data" idiocy, demonstrating your complete incomprehension of the fact that all that "meta data" is invariably lost in most mundane and common picture format conversions, not to mention that most webcams do not embed any sort of meta-data in the captured images and that most digital cameras do so only in their proprietary "raw" format. And not to mention that all of that meta-data, if existing, is, like all digital data, extremely easy to manipulate or remove.
My problem is that by doing what you suggest, we would be introducing murkiness and complexity into a situation where we need clarity and simplicity.
While the approach you are advocating attempts to introduce "clarity and simplicity" by means of arbitrary bullshit gross oversimplification... resulting in patently obvious increase of murkiness and complexity over what the other poster proposed. Not to mention illogic, injustice, abuses of power and on and on and on.
There needs to be a LINE drawn somewhere. That is what the Age of Consent is all about.
No, that is what puberty is all about. The biological mechanism came a few hundred millions of years before the idiotic attempts of various power hungry witch hunters to ignore it for their own profit, to which they fondly refer as "the clarity".
Don't you think that MILLIONS of people throughout time have been thinking about this problem?
There were also millions of people who burned "witches" on stakes, participated in wide-spread murder, raping (of children amongst others) and pillaging known as "wars", etc and so on. Quantity is no substitute for quality.
Incidentally, as a result of all these "deliberations" of these "millions" we have "age of consent" ranging from the age of 9 to 21 globally. Clearly the Enlightened Geniuses who set at 21 are only in minor disagreement with the Wizened Wizards who set it at 9, no? After all it is all about "drawing arbitrary lines" and "clarity" more than anything, no? Apparently, logic and reason are not welcome.
Because the change from Childhood to Adulthood is a process that varies wildly from person to person, and in order to have sanity we must have a simple method for societies to draw that line in the sand between Childhood and Adulthood.
No. Applying "one size fits all" rule to processes which, as you yourself even acknowledge, are varying from person to person is the very definition of insanity.
Using a variable and random ruler like the onset of puberty is just a recipe for disaster.
The ruler is not random. The test is merely applied based on the natural, biological mechanism which governs sex, as opposed to some arbitrary bullshit argumentation (usually religious) which somehow pretends to be related to sex (and usually is meant to enforce some religious dogma by means of controlling sex).
And it is such arbitrary crap which is not only the true recipe for disaster, the disaster is already happening, with thousands of "witches" in jails all over already and creeping thought control police action progressing apace, as this very Slashdot article illustrates.
I understand the idea you are trying to pursue, but the method just won't work.
The method of arbitrary bullshit "age of consent" is demonstrably not working, so at the worst the other method is just as ineffective but at least it has some resemblance of logic and justice, which cannot be said about all the arbitrary crap you are selling.
That would be true if the object was actually to catch any "perps" at this stage of the game. The object however is at this point only to sell gazillions of dollars of astronomically over-priced "security" equipment and "services" to various governments. And then endlessly "upgrade" them. The actual functionality is at the moment beside the point, all that counts is maintaining appropriate level of hysteria amongst the brainless public.
When the equipment becomes actually usable, then the object will be to cheerfully use it in implementing increasingly Orwellian/fascist policies. And all that will count then is maintaining appropriate level of hysteria amongst the brainless public.
Dark times ahead.
But then again most thinking people already sense that.
Right, linking to some revisionist history screed, of which I expect an increasing number to appear as times roll on, as is the standard procedure of all propagandists since Dr. Goebbels, whom I actually already mentioned, is really going to change my mind! After all, who am I going to believe, hundreds of independent news reports, video footage of the assault, witnesses, and on and on all the way to very admissions of Saakashvili himself when cornered which I watched live on TV... or some ideologically motivated post-facto drivel on some random website? A tough choice indeed.
But then again what you are trying is the traditional assault on reason deployed so often by various vicious ideologues... the classic "Who are you going to believe, me, the righteous angry blow-hard or your own lying eyes!?"
And though the truly sad thing is that Goebbels was right, it does work on many, the good news is that, unfortunately for you, it does not work on everyone.
Posts like this are a perfect example of why we need a "-1: Proudly ignorant" or "-1: Sanctimonious moron" or perhaps "-1: Dr. Goebbels" moderation.
As it is patently obvious to anyone who followed the Georgia/Russia conflagration to any degree, it was the Georgians who launched a surprise attack on South Ossetia in order to "reclaim it" from the local Russian-speaking population, an attack involving firing Grad missiles indiscriminately into civilian dwellings, not to mention that the advancing Georgian troops targeted specifically the Russian peacekeeping force deployed in the separatist region.
I am absolutely positive that this same very poster was whining with high histrionics about Serbian forces under Milosevich in Kosovo and jumped up and down on his sofa cheering on the NATO bombing of Belgrad. Not to mention that he likely had an erection when "Shock and Awe" started in Iraq.
We are putting ourselves in a competitive disadvantage by failing to understand that the high earning Linux SA is not seen sympathetically by HR people and managers trying to optimize depleting
budgets.
This is a non-sequitur. One highly paid Linux SA is still cheaper (and in most cases far more efficient) then 5 or 6 click-monkeys. And of course any company which measures everything strictly and exclusively by direct dollar cost is doomed to go tits up rather promptly anyway.
We know a Linux/UNIX SA is more cost effective in the long run because the technology he is experienced in is more cost efficient, but the cost of entry to a position (high salaries combined with the perception that Linux is more difficult) is something that should not be dismissed lightly.
See above. Companies too dumb to perform in depth cost/benefit analysis are not worth working for anyway, one would be more successful selling them "You too can be a System Administrator in 10 easy and fun steps!" manuals and seminars for $1999.99 a piece (and people are doing just that).
The comment above in the thread is very insightful: by being too complex, Linux fails to entice its natural constituencies: small and medium businesses.
Again your error lies in your unwarranted assumption that small and most medium businesses actually have their own IT staff. I make a living being a Linux SA (amongst many other things) for a number of just such businesses, none of whom have any on-site IT staff. Because I can be vastly more efficient administering Linux/Windows-thin-client based mixed environments (which I designed for just such a purpose) then 2 or 3 MSCEs (or someone's cousin, or some engineer who had delusions of grandeur just because of his unrelated degree, etc) in each of these businesses, the overall effect is cost savings for them and vastly improved reliability of their systems. In essence one person (me) has replaced a significant number of these lowly paid SA's and is doing all of their jobs at least as effectively as they did (and in most cases far more so, otherwise I would not be able to maintain the competitive advantage).
So your fundamental assumptions about small businesses are simply wrong. In vast majority of cases they have no love of their IT staff and you would be surprised how many would be willing to ditch their MSCEs when presented with a far superior alternative, some even if such a choice was more costly as long as productivity and reliability gains were impressive enough.
It is frankly a poor excuse to invoke flexibility as the reason to abandon simplicity. Something that is flexible should by extension be configurable in a simple way that will fit many common cases.
Which is precisely the case with the standard Unix/Linux multi-system administration methods which usually involve simply sharing a master security database (usually by means of common, read-only "/etc" directory mounted over an encrypted tunnel) and centralized "/home" similarly mounted over the network. Such native Unix solutions are orders of magnitude simpler then those of Microsoft.
You do forget that Kerberos/LDAP were never the primary choice for Unix admins, they were rather always considered as very heavy weight solutions for truly large institutions with hundreds of servers and extremely complicated (read: customized) deployment scenarios.
A system administrator, even a competent one, is faced with an uphill struggle when faced with the diabolic combination of kerberos/LDAP.
See above. LDAP is a huge overkill in a majority of typical deployment scenarios and that is the reason why Kerberos/LDAP are not in any way dumbed-down to the level of some cookie-cutter automated deployment. The people who have the need for LDAP/Kerberos are assumed to be prepared for the major effort in designing and deploying their massive, hugely complex scenario.
Everyone else needs not to go near the intensely complicated thing.
In essence you are complaining that atomic power plants are not made kabob-stand-owner-friendly. There is a good reason for that. Microsoft likes to pretend that it is possible to do so, for the purpose of being able to casually drop "elite" terms such as Kerberos and LDAP in reference to their product, but the results are sooner or later... err... lets say: radioactive.
The way this should work should be to get a basic install by means of a package install which works in simple, defined ways.Once this is done, the system administrator can configure things as needed, but for the time being he could show something that is up and running in a short time.
And as I keep telling you, there is no "basic" way to install Kerberos/LDAP. Microsoft chose one of many, many different ways of deploying these systems and decided to call it "the way". Which is of course total bullshit. If you look at LDAP standard, it is essentially a blank slate as far as actual data schema are concerned. Most of the schema that come with various LDAP implementations are merely "examples" meant to get you started developing your own! LDAP itself does not offer any guidance whatsoever in this. Microsoft simply designed a schema that suited them for their AD and pretends that "LDAP" is synonymous with that schema. Which again goes to show the whole Microsoft attitude.
We are short changing ourselves against the Windows based competition by erecting a high barrier of entry to a replacement to Windows AD.
So what would you have us do? Abandon all Unix-centric LDAP/Kerberos scenarios? Because that is what you are talking about. By creating a "replacement" for AD you must, by definition, adopt Microsoft LDAP schema which are of course in no way or shape compatible with what all of those people deploying LDAP in Unix world have been doing. This in fact is precisely what Microsoft wants, they want to create a scenario where "compatibility" means utter subjugation to Microsoft's ways of doing things, in which case people will choose Microsoft's "solutions" because in the end a forever-playing-catchup imitation is always inferior to the original, even if the original is a pile of stinking dung.
Companies all have the same needs when it comes to IT.
Bullshit. Every industry has its own unique requirements. Hospitality has its roaming staff, manufacturing has its CNC machinery, medical services have their wireless data entry and patient data access, etc and so on. And then each business has its own unique way of doing things, otherwise they cease to be competitive. You keep forgetting that the role of IT is to adapt to the business it serves! But instead, the Microsoft way is for business to adapt to IT! No wonder that Microsoft systems "integrators" soon come to the conclusion that all businesses are the same! That is because you forced them to become so!
This is why Microsoft is so hugely successful. They realised that people don't want to "do it themselves" unless it's a hobby.
Who says that businesses have to do it themselves? That is what competent Linux systems integrators are for. None of my customers would have the expertise, or the desire, to dabble in any of it themselves as their business is not IT but manufacturing, hospitality, service, etc and so on. You are telling me that my career as a Linux integrator did not happen. Who am I going to believe, you or my own lying eyes, eh?
So what people really need, are simple ways to migrate from windows to linux and achieve equivalent functionality. Yes, this will lose many of the benefits of linux, but it's a start. Once linux deployment is far more widespread, more people will be motivated to learn it and companies will see the benefits of using more highly skilled staff to set things up properly.
Unfortunately there is no way to do it. That is by trying to migrate the "functionality" of Windows to Linux one essentially has to... emulate all of the Microsoft "technologies", which destroys bulk of the advantages of Linux. Efforts in doing so invariably result in sad, crippled, barely compatible, unwieldy "solutions" which do not conform to even the most basic of the best practices of the Linux world, and which serve only as an aid to Microsoft's marketing drones in pointing out that Linux cannot even hope to match Microsoft in all the Microsoft's most drooling of idiocies.
Examples of these include things such as Mono, various mis-guided "Exchange replacements", "universal" Windows/Linux "management solutions", etc and so on.
The hard truth is that there is no practical way to "easily" migrate from Windows to Linux (or to anywhere else for that matter). And that is so by Microsoft's design. Your only viable option is to re-design the system from scratch to take full advantage of your new platform.
So what you're saying is that LInux isn't viable for small/medium sized businesses.
Only if small and medium businesses are restricted to hiring learning-impaired boneheads for all of their IT needs. A competent Linux admin can keep a far larger number of small businesses operational because as a reward for all the effort he spent learning how to do it he gets to automate and make reliable a far larger number of diverse systems then a Windows admin can, not to mention that his task is in the long run far less labour intensive (although there is a steep learning curve and up-front investment in good configurations and scripts).
I know this for a fact because I make a good living doing just that, having replaced a veritable horde of MSCEs over the years.
I haven't been able to find guide on deploying active directory-like system with free software which would offer group policy features. When I already have groups deployed in LDAP, why do I need to script installers instead just defining policy to install software to that group?
That is because of fundamental differences in the entire philosophy of Linux/FOSS vs. that of Microsoft. Microsoft aims to provide cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all "solutions" whereby some doofus MSCE can read "AD for Dummies" and then click his way through system administration. It works, to a degree, in homogeneous environments which do not deviate in any way from "Microsoft Approved" designs.
Linux on the other hand is built around small, specialized components out of which a competent admin is supposed to construct a solution tailored to a specific environment. And the glue which links all of these components, which can be combined in a very large number of ways, is scripting.
That is why one cannot be a competent Linux admin without being also competent with a number of scripting languages. That is the price, but it is also the advantage as more demanding the deployment parameters grow, the more such approach becomes superior over the one-size-fits-all method.
So in effect you are asking for Linux to abandon all of its advantages and become "like Windows" just because you are too lazy to learn how to deploy it properly. And by this I do not mean reading some idiotic 20-step "how to" which cannot cover even a fraction of the possible configurations. By "learning" I mean understanding all the fundamentals of the system operation, learning all the involved scripting languages and being able to modify all the essential system scripts with thorough understanding of all the involved components.
And that is why such "how tos" are of a very limited use. There are "shortcuts", some of which were already pointed out to you - such as Samba, but they are intended for simplified scenarios whereby the scope of possible configurations is very narrow.
Once any serious sized Linux deployment is considered, a huge number of possible scenarios exists, beginning with basic considerations such as if to run the client systems via network mounted root file systems (in which case no home directory "roaming" exists) or if to deploy terminal servers or X-terminals etc and so on, all of which have impact on how users are authenticated and how their resources are allocated on the network, not to mention that LDAP and Kerberos are amongst many other ways of maintaining centralized user information. No "how to" guide is going to cover all of these complexities.
How do you centrally manage software installs and permissions on thousands of machines with oss?
This is a joke, right?
Where the fuck do you think Microsoft stole Kerberos and LDAP for their AD from?! We've been using the stuff AD is made of years before it was even a wet dream in Microsoft's diseased minds.
As to automated installs, every damn Linux distro has a package management system capable of being remotely scripted, and designed for mirroring via localized caches!
Same thing really. Just lookie at some of them theories, them cotton pickin' high falutin' theorists came up with! I mean the Earth not being 6000 year old like the Bible says it must be and all that evolube...shion thing! Next thing them be trying to say that the Sun does not go round the Earth as the Lord intended! I say get them all commie theorizing terrorists in the Gitmo where they belong!
If we truly only wanted to kill brown people, Iraq would be glowing a pale shade of green by now.
True, the objectives are more subtle: killng all the brown people who are unwilling to accept US elites' rule. Otherwise known as "Standard Imperial Procedure". Nuking Iraq is incompatible with the doctrine of Pax Americana whereby the (mostly) US-centred economic feudal nobility gets to rule and own pretty much everything, including the natural resources of places like Iraq. All pretences of any other purpose were long abandoned with the return of pan-national oil conglomerates to Iraq.
Where's the electricity come from? If its like most US cities, its Natural Gas or Coal power plants...
The trains are to be built in Japan. Their grid is 30% nuclear with a plan to go to 60% nuclear in 2050, 20% Geothermal and the rest other renewable, its one of their "National Priority" plans.
I, for one, think that you are absolutely right about this, although defining these personalities as "disorders" is somewhat questionable. To define a "disorder" one has to establish what is "normal" or what constitutes "order". Unfortunately due to in large degree random process of evolutionary "trial and error" the brain functions and behavioural patterns of much of humanity are all over the map. The "dominance seeking", sociopathic types are simply one of many randomly occurring variants in this mindless semi-random process. Evolutionary pressures do not give a damn about societal order or peaceful life or even about large proportion of populations getting wiped out in torturous ways, as long as the genetic material propagates onward in more effective ways. In short a total sociopath born in an age of peace who destroys that peace, starts mass wars, commits unspeakable torture and genocide against all who dare to stand up to him but who rapes thousands of women, of whom even a small proportion produce offspring is a "winning" strategy, from the point of view of his genetic material. Even without mass rape, simply insuring that his offspring comes to be as a dominant life form is quite sufficient to "justify" his maniacal urges.
And there is the rub. We, the "sane" people, find his actions unacceptable because our sentience is no longer compatible with the mindless "goals" of the genetic code and therefore a conflict arises between the demands of sentience and those of the genes. Humanity has to at a certain point decide if it wishes to live as animals do, constantly at the whim of yet another disaster caused by some deranged selfish mutation, or to do something about it, which would require formulating a logical, sentient code of conduct and then re-engineering humans to make impossible any deviations from that code.
Unfortunately I think that it will take many centuries and many calamities before someone finally decided to take this bull by the horns, not to mention that this very process is also subject to great dangers from the very sociopathic jerks which it would seek to terminate, and of course not forgetting that there are many, many types of "order" which sentient beings might find optimal, this leading to further great complications.
But without drastic measures, nothing whatsoever will change, history simply playing itself out in a loop as if it were a broken record, presently falling head-first into the abyss of most vile totalitarianism in history yet, which we get to watch being created and installed in real time, knowing full well that the deal is alreay pretty much done and all that remains to play out is the genocides and torturous agony of millions and terror-filled, powerless slavery for billions of others, followed yet by agony and pain of the "liberation" to come, decades from now.... so that the cycle can start all over again.
There are no "restrictions" against paying cash. I could buy a $50,000 car with cash if I was so inclined. I might have to explain where I got that cash from but if I could produce a withdrawal
receipt from my bank I don't think I'd have many issues.
You are confused. The "restriction" is on not reporting such transactions, not on making them. By the way, the law does not require you to be informed that you are being reported on. So your "four digit cash transactions" are likely included in those 585,000+ reports of $2,000+ cash transactions made to the IRS in 2007 as indicated on the page I linked to. You simply are blissfully ignorant about it as no one has to tell you that you are being reported on. The banks and other businesses simply do so without your knowledge every time you show up with cash in excess of $2,000.
And I could walk right down to Circuit City and buy a $2,000 TV with cash if I was inclined to do so. Nobody is stopping me from doing that.
Again, we are talking about a loss of privacy not of rights to purchase. BestBuy will simply ask you for an ID (sometimes in a round about way, say, for "warranty purposes") and report you to the IRS. Without telling you that they are doing so.
Ergo, privacy lost. Which, again, was the entire point.
I think your tinfoil hat needs to be adjusted if you are worrying about terror databases related to rental applications.
Due to the "anti-terror" (and before them but to much lesser degree the "anti drug") regulations all such databases can be integrated and mined by whatever governmental "security" fetishists are inclined to do so. Which precludes this thing called "privacy". Which was the entire point of my post. For what supposed "purpose" that privacy is removed is quite irrelevant, be it "security" or "taxation" or "credit worthiness" or whatever, it matters not. The point is simply that privacy no longer exists.
So what you are saying is that the published regulations agree with the numbers that I said and the $1,000 limit that you've discussed isn't supported in the official literature?
The limit is $2,000. The $5,000 was a typo on my part. There is not much room between $1,000 and $2,000 when compared to typical capital expense. A TV set is these days commonly more then $2,000.
Also keep in mind that these numbers on the IRS site are incomplete and I am certain that in some areas the limit is $1,000 (in money transfers by companies such as Western Union for sure). But it is not my role to dig up all of the relevant regulations to quibble over a measly $1,000.
I've been involved in rentals for a long time and I've never had to submit any paperwork when I rent out one of my units. Maybe it's different in your city but that's an issue for local and maybe state government to fret about -- not the Feds.
It doesn't really matter as local, state and federal governments cross-pollinate the same "terror" databases these days.
Citation? I do consulting work on the side and get paid in cash for a few of my jobs. I've routinely made bank deposits and withdrawals in the four digit range. Nobody has ever questioned it or even looked at me strange.
The published by the IRS regulations vary between $5,000-10,000, although I am certain that I read somewhere about the new limit in some transactions being $1000 due to the Bad Guys Under Every Bed, but I have no time to go find it for you at the moment.
Well, I don't think the car analogy is a very good one.
I only listed that as an example of a typical capital purchase a person might make. The list is pretty much endless and a number of new items which fall below this new "suspicious" cost limit shrinks daily.
And "suspicious amounts of cash"? I don't know about you but my take home pay is a lot less than $10,000 a pay cycle
It's no longer $10,000, its $1000 these days.
I could live a cash lifestyle if I was willing to try hard enough -- it would be a PITA but very doable.
You would essentially have to adjust your life style to the level of the lowest ranks of the US society, essentially only a few steps removed from being homeless. And every year that distinction would grow smaller, until (given the current rates of inflation) you would have to become truly homeless in a decade or so.
Also, as you pointed out yourself, restrictions against paying cash is only one prong of the attack against privacy, many others exist like for example the vehicle registration and the paperwork your landlord has to submit to wherever.
If it bothers you that much then live without a bank account and just cash your payroll check every two weeks or whenever. They can track how much you make but can't track where you are spending it.
Err... to stop that they passed laws dealing with "suspicious amounts of cash". I.e. car dealers, real estate agents and even places like Best Buy are supposed to demand ID and report you if you use cash in amounts greater then a certain amount (I think it is $1000 these days during the War On Terror, thanks to which it has been lowered down from $10,000 during the War On Drugs). So no, cash is not going to get you anywhere unless you also plan to live under the bridge.
Oh, by the way. The law also forbids you from carrying the same amount of cash (as opposed to traceable traveller's cheques) while going abroad. As the original poster indicates, privacy is a distant historical curiosity from 17th century.
The alternative was worse. Go read about the Great Depression.
What?! Oh, the old worn-out canard of "There Is No Alternative!", "We Must Attack Iraq... err... Iran... err Bad Guys Before They Get Us!" etc and so on.
For your information, there were many alternatives, even within the "bailout" scheme itself - dealing with equity positions etc., and guess what? The absolute worst was picked: a scheme which throws away $850 billion to the very people who created the problem, without any meaningful supervision and with absolute guarantee of doing dick all to remedy the problem, which at the last count was estimated to be in the range of $45 Trillion (not Billion) dollars of Wall Street Gambling Debts, not to mention the entire Ponzi scheme of the eternally-expanding-credit funded US economy.
So would you kindly stop repeating us the crap from the ransom notes left behind by the dudes in balaclavas?
Slashdot Mirror
No they did not. What you are trying here is pure sophistry. Postal mail falls clearly under the "papers" category in the constitution, unless of course you are going to argue that mail at the time was composed on stone tablets or sheets of metal.
If the "CP" was not produced via rape or abuse, or if the "pervs" did not pay for it (i.e. provided no material support to rape) = no crime. Mere "possession" being a "crime" is one of those bullshit arbitrary illogical turds you are so fond of, with a long, long list of most unreasonable and illogical implications.
Err, it is you who have created this idiotic black-mail condition with insistence on both parties being "criminals" even though no child abuse have occurred. Not me. I do not believe mere possession of evidence of a crime (if any crime actually occured) is a crime itself. Criminalizing everything they find "icky" is a hallmark of fanatic, lunatic zealots. I'd rather stick to logic. And logic says that no matter how you cut it, as soon as you criminalize pictures themselves irrespective of the free will of the subject, both the "producer" (i.e. the "child") and the recipient (irrespective of age or his consent in the receiving) are "criminals" and should end up in the ass-pound jail and on life-long child molester lists, in the case of the kid for the "crime" of molesting himself/herself (which is what you are clearly advocating). You can't have this shit-cake and eat it too, you know.
Since you keep insisting, vehemently, on things most unreasonable, just so that you get to "work within the system", I am merely pointing out to you that the motivations of most of the "law-makers" are anything but pure. Or reasonable.
Neither. What you actually presented is a logical fallacy known as "false dichotomy".
The third choice, the one you conveniently forgot to mention, is that a teenager sending pictures of himself/herself out of his/her free will should NOT be a crime of any sort, irrespective of where he/she sends them, puberty or not! You've seem to have already forgotten, in your mad rush to defend arbitrary bullshit, that the entire and only purpose of sane "child protection" laws is to prevent rape and abuse of children by adults. Controlling what the children do themselves out of their own free will is not the purported objective here, or else, inevitably you will have to define these children as the criminals and lock them up! But of course we all know that it is the real "stealth" objective stemming from the attempts at codifying in law of the dominant religious doctrine by all these self-appointed "child defenders" and you slipped and let it show in your "arguments".
And the rest of your "reasoning" goes down from here, beginning with the "meta data" idiocy, demonstrating your complete incomprehension of the fact that all that "meta data" is invariably lost in most mundane and common picture format conversions, not to mention that most webcams do not embed any sort of meta-data in the captured images and that most digital cameras do so only in their proprietary "raw" format. And not to mention that all of that meta-data, if existing, is, like all digital data, extremely easy to manipulate or remove.
While the approach you are advocating attempts to introduce "clarity and simplicity" by means of arbitrary bullshit gross oversimplification ... resulting in patently obvious increase of murkiness and complexity over what the other poster proposed. Not to mention illogic, injustice, abuses of power and on and on and on.
No, that is what puberty is all about. The biological mechanism came a few hundred millions of years before the idiotic attempts of various power hungry witch hunters to ignore it for their own profit, to which they fondly refer as "the clarity".
There were also millions of people who burned "witches" on stakes, participated in wide-spread murder, raping (of children amongst others) and pillaging known as "wars", etc and so on. Quantity is no substitute for quality.
Incidentally, as a result of all these "deliberations" of these "millions" we have "age of consent" ranging from the age of 9 to 21 globally. Clearly the Enlightened Geniuses who set at 21 are only in minor disagreement with the Wizened Wizards who set it at 9, no? After all it is all about "drawing arbitrary lines" and "clarity" more than anything, no? Apparently, logic and reason are not welcome.
No. Applying "one size fits all" rule to processes which, as you yourself even acknowledge, are varying from person to person is the very definition of insanity.
The ruler is not random. The test is merely applied based on the natural, biological mechanism which governs sex, as opposed to some arbitrary bullshit argumentation (usually religious) which somehow pretends to be related to sex (and usually is meant to enforce some religious dogma by means of controlling sex).
And it is such arbitrary crap which is not only the true recipe for disaster, the disaster is already happening, with thousands of "witches" in jails all over already and creeping thought control police action progressing apace, as this very Slashdot article illustrates.
The method of arbitrary bullshit "age of consent" is demonstrably not working, so at the worst the other method is just as ineffective but at least it has some resemblance of logic and justice, which cannot be said about all the arbitrary crap you are selling.
That would be true if the object was actually to catch any "perps" at this stage of the game. The object however is at this point only to sell gazillions of dollars of astronomically over-priced "security" equipment and "services" to various governments. And then endlessly "upgrade" them. The actual functionality is at the moment beside the point, all that counts is maintaining appropriate level of hysteria amongst the brainless public.
When the equipment becomes actually usable, then the object will be to cheerfully use it in implementing increasingly Orwellian/fascist policies. And all that will count then is maintaining appropriate level of hysteria amongst the brainless public.
Dark times ahead.
But then again most thinking people already sense that.
Right, linking to some revisionist history screed, of which I expect an increasing number to appear as times roll on, as is the standard procedure of all propagandists since Dr. Goebbels, whom I actually already mentioned, is really going to change my mind! After all, who am I going to believe, hundreds of independent news reports, video footage of the assault, witnesses, and on and on all the way to very admissions of Saakashvili himself when cornered which I watched live on TV ... or some ideologically motivated post-facto drivel on some random website? A tough choice indeed.
But then again what you are trying is the traditional assault on reason deployed so often by various vicious ideologues ... the classic "Who are you going to believe, me, the righteous angry blow-hard or your own lying eyes!?"
And though the truly sad thing is that Goebbels was right, it does work on many, the good news is that, unfortunately for you, it does not work on everyone.
Posts like this are a perfect example of why we need a "-1: Proudly ignorant" or "-1: Sanctimonious moron" or perhaps "-1: Dr. Goebbels" moderation.
As it is patently obvious to anyone who followed the Georgia/Russia conflagration to any degree, it was the Georgians who launched a surprise attack on South Ossetia in order to "reclaim it" from the local Russian-speaking population, an attack involving firing Grad missiles indiscriminately into civilian dwellings, not to mention that the advancing Georgian troops targeted specifically the Russian peacekeeping force deployed in the separatist region.
I am absolutely positive that this same very poster was whining with high histrionics about Serbian forces under Milosevich in Kosovo and jumped up and down on his sofa cheering on the NATO bombing of Belgrad. Not to mention that he likely had an erection when "Shock and Awe" started in Iraq.
This is a non-sequitur. One highly paid Linux SA is still cheaper (and in most cases far more efficient) then 5 or 6 click-monkeys. And of course any company which measures everything strictly and exclusively by direct dollar cost is doomed to go tits up rather promptly anyway.
See above. Companies too dumb to perform in depth cost/benefit analysis are not worth working for anyway, one would be more successful selling them "You too can be a System Administrator in 10 easy and fun steps!" manuals and seminars for $1999.99 a piece (and people are doing just that).
Again your error lies in your unwarranted assumption that small and most medium businesses actually have their own IT staff. I make a living being a Linux SA (amongst many other things) for a number of just such businesses, none of whom have any on-site IT staff. Because I can be vastly more efficient administering Linux/Windows-thin-client based mixed environments (which I designed for just such a purpose) then 2 or 3 MSCEs (or someone's cousin, or some engineer who had delusions of grandeur just because of his unrelated degree, etc) in each of these businesses, the overall effect is cost savings for them and vastly improved reliability of their systems. In essence one person (me) has replaced a significant number of these lowly paid SA's and is doing all of their jobs at least as effectively as they did (and in most cases far more so, otherwise I would not be able to maintain the competitive advantage).
So your fundamental assumptions about small businesses are simply wrong. In vast majority of cases they have no love of their IT staff and you would be surprised how many would be willing to ditch their MSCEs when presented with a far superior alternative, some even if such a choice was more costly as long as productivity and reliability gains were impressive enough.
Which is precisely the case with the standard Unix/Linux multi-system administration methods which usually involve simply sharing a master security database (usually by means of common, read-only "/etc" directory mounted over an encrypted tunnel) and centralized "/home" similarly mounted over the network. Such native Unix solutions are orders of magnitude simpler then those of Microsoft.
You do forget that Kerberos/LDAP were never the primary choice for Unix admins, they were rather always considered as very heavy weight solutions for truly large institutions with hundreds of servers and extremely complicated (read: customized) deployment scenarios.
See above. LDAP is a huge overkill in a majority of typical deployment scenarios and that is the reason why Kerberos/LDAP are not in any way dumbed-down to the level of some cookie-cutter automated deployment. The people who have the need for LDAP/Kerberos are assumed to be prepared for the major effort in designing and deploying their massive, hugely complex scenario.
Everyone else needs not to go near the intensely complicated thing.
In essence you are complaining that atomic power plants are not made kabob-stand-owner-friendly. There is a good reason for that. Microsoft likes to pretend that it is possible to do so, for the purpose of being able to casually drop "elite" terms such as Kerberos and LDAP in reference to their product, but the results are sooner or later ... err ... lets say: radioactive.
And as I keep telling you, there is no "basic" way to install Kerberos/LDAP. Microsoft chose one of many, many different ways of deploying these systems and decided to call it "the way". Which is of course total bullshit. If you look at LDAP standard, it is essentially a blank slate as far as actual data schema are concerned. Most of the schema that come with various LDAP implementations are merely "examples" meant to get you started developing your own! LDAP itself does not offer any guidance whatsoever in this. Microsoft simply designed a schema that suited them for their AD and pretends that "LDAP" is synonymous with that schema. Which again goes to show the whole Microsoft attitude.
So what would you have us do? Abandon all Unix-centric LDAP/Kerberos scenarios? Because that is what you are talking about. By creating a "replacement" for AD you must, by definition, adopt Microsoft LDAP schema which are of course in no way or shape compatible with what all of those people deploying LDAP in Unix world have been doing. This in fact is precisely what Microsoft wants, they want to create a scenario where "compatibility" means utter subjugation to Microsoft's ways of doing things, in which case people will choose Microsoft's "solutions" because in the end a forever-playing-catchup imitation is always inferior to the original, even if the original is a pile of stinking dung.
Bullshit. Every industry has its own unique requirements. Hospitality has its roaming staff, manufacturing has its CNC machinery, medical services have their wireless data entry and patient data access, etc and so on. And then each business has its own unique way of doing things, otherwise they cease to be competitive. You keep forgetting that the role of IT is to adapt to the business it serves! But instead, the Microsoft way is for business to adapt to IT! No wonder that Microsoft systems "integrators" soon come to the conclusion that all businesses are the same! That is because you forced them to become so!
Who says that businesses have to do it themselves? That is what competent Linux systems integrators are for. None of my customers would have the expertise, or the desire, to dabble in any of it themselves as their business is not IT but manufacturing, hospitality, service, etc and so on. You are telling me that my career as a Linux integrator did not happen. Who am I going to believe, you or my own lying eyes, eh?
Unfortunately there is no way to do it. That is by trying to migrate the "functionality" of Windows to Linux one essentially has to ... emulate all of the Microsoft "technologies", which destroys bulk of the advantages of Linux. Efforts in doing so invariably result in sad, crippled, barely compatible, unwieldy "solutions" which do not conform to even the most basic of the best practices of the Linux world, and which serve only as an aid to Microsoft's marketing drones in pointing out that Linux cannot even hope to match Microsoft in all the Microsoft's most drooling of idiocies.
Examples of these include things such as Mono, various mis-guided "Exchange replacements", "universal" Windows/Linux "management solutions", etc and so on.
The hard truth is that there is no practical way to "easily" migrate from Windows to Linux (or to anywhere else for that matter). And that is so by Microsoft's design. Your only viable option is to re-design the system from scratch to take full advantage of your new platform.
Only if small and medium businesses are restricted to hiring learning-impaired boneheads for all of their IT needs. A competent Linux admin can keep a far larger number of small businesses operational because as a reward for all the effort he spent learning how to do it he gets to automate and make reliable a far larger number of diverse systems then a Windows admin can, not to mention that his task is in the long run far less labour intensive (although there is a steep learning curve and up-front investment in good configurations and scripts).
I know this for a fact because I make a good living doing just that, having replaced a veritable horde of MSCEs over the years.
That is because of fundamental differences in the entire philosophy of Linux/FOSS vs. that of Microsoft. Microsoft aims to provide cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all "solutions" whereby some doofus MSCE can read "AD for Dummies" and then click his way through system administration. It works, to a degree, in homogeneous environments which do not deviate in any way from "Microsoft Approved" designs.
Linux on the other hand is built around small, specialized components out of which a competent admin is supposed to construct a solution tailored to a specific environment. And the glue which links all of these components, which can be combined in a very large number of ways, is scripting.
That is why one cannot be a competent Linux admin without being also competent with a number of scripting languages. That is the price, but it is also the advantage as more demanding the deployment parameters grow, the more such approach becomes superior over the one-size-fits-all method.
So in effect you are asking for Linux to abandon all of its advantages and become "like Windows" just because you are too lazy to learn how to deploy it properly. And by this I do not mean reading some idiotic 20-step "how to" which cannot cover even a fraction of the possible configurations. By "learning" I mean understanding all the fundamentals of the system operation, learning all the involved scripting languages and being able to modify all the essential system scripts with thorough understanding of all the involved components.
And that is why such "how tos" are of a very limited use. There are "shortcuts", some of which were already pointed out to you - such as Samba, but they are intended for simplified scenarios whereby the scope of possible configurations is very narrow.
Once any serious sized Linux deployment is considered, a huge number of possible scenarios exists, beginning with basic considerations such as if to run the client systems via network mounted root file systems (in which case no home directory "roaming" exists) or if to deploy terminal servers or X-terminals etc and so on, all of which have impact on how users are authenticated and how their resources are allocated on the network, not to mention that LDAP and Kerberos are amongst many other ways of maintaining centralized user information. No "how to" guide is going to cover all of these complexities.
This is a joke, right?
Where the fuck do you think Microsoft stole Kerberos and LDAP for their AD from?! We've been using the stuff AD is made of years before it was even a wet dream in Microsoft's diseased minds.
As to automated installs, every damn Linux distro has a package management system capable of being remotely scripted, and designed for mirroring via localized caches!
What a dork.
Theorists? Terrorists?
Same thing really. Just lookie at some of them theories, them cotton pickin' high falutin' theorists came up with! I mean the Earth not being 6000 year old like the Bible says it must be and all that evolube...shion thing! Next thing them be trying to say that the Sun does not go round the Earth as the Lord intended! I say get them all commie theorizing terrorists in the Gitmo where they belong!
True, the objectives are more subtle: killng all the brown people who are unwilling to accept US elites' rule. Otherwise known as "Standard Imperial Procedure". Nuking Iraq is incompatible with the doctrine of Pax Americana whereby the (mostly) US-centred economic feudal nobility gets to rule and own pretty much everything, including the natural resources of places like Iraq. All pretences of any other purpose were long abandoned with the return of pan-national oil conglomerates to Iraq.
The trains are to be built in Japan. Their grid is 30% nuclear with a plan to go to 60% nuclear in 2050, 20% Geothermal and the rest other renewable, its one of their "National Priority" plans.
I, for one, think that you are absolutely right about this, although defining these personalities as "disorders" is somewhat questionable. To define a "disorder" one has to establish what is "normal" or what constitutes "order". Unfortunately due to in large degree random process of evolutionary "trial and error" the brain functions and behavioural patterns of much of humanity are all over the map. The "dominance seeking", sociopathic types are simply one of many randomly occurring variants in this mindless semi-random process. Evolutionary pressures do not give a damn about societal order or peaceful life or even about large proportion of populations getting wiped out in torturous ways, as long as the genetic material propagates onward in more effective ways. In short a total sociopath born in an age of peace who destroys that peace, starts mass wars, commits unspeakable torture and genocide against all who dare to stand up to him but who rapes thousands of women, of whom even a small proportion produce offspring is a "winning" strategy, from the point of view of his genetic material. Even without mass rape, simply insuring that his offspring comes to be as a dominant life form is quite sufficient to "justify" his maniacal urges.
And there is the rub. We, the "sane" people, find his actions unacceptable because our sentience is no longer compatible with the mindless "goals" of the genetic code and therefore a conflict arises between the demands of sentience and those of the genes. Humanity has to at a certain point decide if it wishes to live as animals do, constantly at the whim of yet another disaster caused by some deranged selfish mutation, or to do something about it, which would require formulating a logical, sentient code of conduct and then re-engineering humans to make impossible any deviations from that code.
Unfortunately I think that it will take many centuries and many calamities before someone finally decided to take this bull by the horns, not to mention that this very process is also subject to great dangers from the very sociopathic jerks which it would seek to terminate, and of course not forgetting that there are many, many types of "order" which sentient beings might find optimal, this leading to further great complications.
But without drastic measures, nothing whatsoever will change, history simply playing itself out in a loop as if it were a broken record, presently falling head-first into the abyss of most vile totalitarianism in history yet, which we get to watch being created and installed in real time, knowing full well that the deal is alreay pretty much done and all that remains to play out is the genocides and torturous agony of millions and terror-filled, powerless slavery for billions of others, followed yet by agony and pain of the "liberation" to come, decades from now .... so that the cycle can start all over again.
You are confused. The "restriction" is on not reporting such transactions, not on making them. By the way, the law does not require you to be informed that you are being reported on. So your "four digit cash transactions" are likely included in those 585,000+ reports of $2,000+ cash transactions made to the IRS in 2007 as indicated on the page I linked to. You simply are blissfully ignorant about it as no one has to tell you that you are being reported on. The banks and other businesses simply do so without your knowledge every time you show up with cash in excess of $2,000.
Again, we are talking about a loss of privacy not of rights to purchase. BestBuy will simply ask you for an ID (sometimes in a round about way, say, for "warranty purposes") and report you to the IRS. Without telling you that they are doing so.
Ergo, privacy lost. Which, again, was the entire point.
Due to the "anti-terror" (and before them but to much lesser degree the "anti drug") regulations all such databases can be integrated and mined by whatever governmental "security" fetishists are inclined to do so. Which precludes this thing called "privacy". Which was the entire point of my post. For what supposed "purpose" that privacy is removed is quite irrelevant, be it "security" or "taxation" or "credit worthiness" or whatever, it matters not. The point is simply that privacy no longer exists.
The limit is $2,000. The $5,000 was a typo on my part. There is not much room between $1,000 and $2,000 when compared to typical capital expense. A TV set is these days commonly more then $2,000.
Also keep in mind that these numbers on the IRS site are incomplete and I am certain that in some areas the limit is $1,000 (in money transfers by companies such as Western Union for sure). But it is not my role to dig up all of the relevant regulations to quibble over a measly $1,000.
Sorry, that was $2000-10,000 for those IRS regs, not $5000.
It doesn't really matter as local, state and federal governments cross-pollinate the same "terror" databases these days.
The published by the IRS regulations vary between $5,000-10,000, although I am certain that I read somewhere about the new limit in some transactions being $1000 due to the Bad Guys Under Every Bed, but I have no time to go find it for you at the moment.
I only listed that as an example of a typical capital purchase a person might make. The list is pretty much endless and a number of new items which fall below this new "suspicious" cost limit shrinks daily.
It's no longer $10,000, its $1000 these days.
You would essentially have to adjust your life style to the level of the lowest ranks of the US society, essentially only a few steps removed from being homeless. And every year that distinction would grow smaller, until (given the current rates of inflation) you would have to become truly homeless in a decade or so.
Also, as you pointed out yourself, restrictions against paying cash is only one prong of the attack against privacy, many others exist like for example the vehicle registration and the paperwork your landlord has to submit to wherever.
Err... to stop that they passed laws dealing with "suspicious amounts of cash". I.e. car dealers, real estate agents and even places like Best Buy are supposed to demand ID and report you if you use cash in amounts greater then a certain amount (I think it is $1000 these days during the War On Terror, thanks to which it has been lowered down from $10,000 during the War On Drugs). So no, cash is not going to get you anywhere unless you also plan to live under the bridge.
Oh, by the way. The law also forbids you from carrying the same amount of cash (as opposed to traceable traveller's cheques) while going abroad. As the original poster indicates, privacy is a distant historical curiosity from 17th century.
What?! Oh, the old worn-out canard of "There Is No Alternative!", "We Must Attack Iraq ... err ... Iran ... err Bad Guys Before They Get Us!" etc and so on.
For your information, there were many alternatives, even within the "bailout" scheme itself - dealing with equity positions etc., and guess what? The absolute worst was picked: a scheme which throws away $850 billion to the very people who created the problem, without any meaningful supervision and with absolute guarantee of doing dick all to remedy the problem, which at the last count was estimated to be in the range of $45 Trillion (not Billion) dollars of Wall Street Gambling Debts, not to mention the entire Ponzi scheme of the eternally-expanding-credit funded US economy.
So would you kindly stop repeating us the crap from the ransom notes left behind by the dudes in balaclavas?