In 8th grade I was in a school performance of the hideous travesty that is the musical version of The Hobbit. Leaving aside that school musical production values often leave a bit to be desired, the script is a literary turkey that makes the Rankin-Bass version look like a masterpiece. For starters, it includes a cameo by Frodo, who in Tolkein's work wasn't due to be born for another twenty-odd years.
It sounds like the LOTR musical merely fails to reach the full heights it grasps for, ending dwarfed by Jackson's cinematic masterpiece, but not by the earlier animated cinematic "efforts". You'd have to pay me to go and see the LOTR musical... but you couldn't pay me enough to sit through the Hobbit.
This kind of humor is really low and suggests that you (and others) think that rape (and sexually-transmitted diseases) is just punishment for something. There are thousands of people in prison who have committed no violence against anyone, stolen nothing, and they are raped.
Nope. Not just as in justice; perhaps effective. I merely hope that any others considering a course of action with widely distributed externalized marginal disutility would consider the risk of disproportionate consquent highly-personal internalized disutility a disinducement, and find the prospect of such risk becoming manifest such nicely ironic. Unfortunately, sociopaths don't consider consequences well.
I also note that the undeserved suffering of one group who have done nothing does not logically imply anything about the suffering of another group who have done something.
No, I am not a nice person; I'm far too pragmatic in my socio-political outlook. It's going to get me killed someday.
He didn't turn evil. He just turned greedy and stupid.
No; being greedy and stupid means you fall for 419 scams. Greedy and indifferent to the welfare of others is more accurate here; or, to oversimplify: Evil.
They regulate money -- and money is a store of your labor to be used as you please (a form of expression).
Not necessarily your labor; EG, an inherited fortune. It's also philisophically debateable as to what extent a return on investment represents a store of your labor per se. It's also more accurate to say that money is an accumulation of the benefit, not the labor itself... a subtle point the early communist theorists failed to understand, to their peril and the world's detriment. (Even "benefit" is an oversimplification....)
That the use of your "money" constitutes a form of expression isn't in question, but your right to do so is NOT unlimited in an election... or would you care to argue that direct buying of votes should be a protected form of expression??? I don't disagree that the FEC is at least symptomatic of a larger problem, but I don't think they are the root cause.
The problem with elections is that the seat one is trying to win has too much power. If you want to fix elections, fix the political seat -- reduce the power of government to where it should be under the Constitution. When the power is reduced, no amount of money will create protectionism, favoritism and cronyism.
I believe your thinking may be a little fuzzy. "Reduced" is not the right word; far too often reducing the power of something means that power is only moved to another entity, which is then the new focus for the struggle. What you need is for the power to be dissipated, so that it requires the united action of more individuals for it to be brought into play again.
I believe your solution also is an oversimplification that ignores the history which created the problem in the first place. Much of the government's increase in power during the 20th century was to challege the power accumulated by corporations towards the end of the 19th. The alternative was civil war and a likely ascendancy of communism... which we fortunately avoided, thanks in part to FDR. Simply dissippating governmental powers without addressing the problems which caused that initial accumulation means that you will either face the original problem again, or the power will immediately reaccumulate... possibly both.
If you want to do this right, you need to find an alternate solution to the problems of the inequities of corporate power before you weaken the government. I don't think your concerns are misdirected, but I think your analysis is flawed.
Of course, Brooks admits that his law is a gross oversimplification. The essential problem is that when you add manpower, it adds required man-hours that must be spent by everyone getting the new folk up to speed, causing an additional time loss greater than the effect of adding the intuitively needed amount of manpower.
You sometimes can get a late project back on track by adding manpower, but you need to add more than a first approximation would suggest, and the earlier you do it the better. It's remarkable if a PHB even makes the first approximation to add manpower, much less considers (or understands) the learning curve, and thus Brook's law may be relied on in modern practice.
For a web visit/purchase (pull-media), the transaction is presumed consummated at the server, much like sending a written order through the mail.
IAmNotALawyer, but I'm fairly certain your presumption there is flawed. In particular, I believe the analogous mail-order case you propose would be prosecutable.
Yes, but not in full since the SCOTUS appeal was declined; and again, IAmNotALawyer; I'm just a bright layman.
Thus my point about jurisdiction. Purposeful availment = some other interaction that lets you know that the person you're dealing with is coming from that community. It's pretty clearly more than just putting something on a website.
Thank you! The Toys & Zippo cases referenced by the 3rd C. are quite enlightening. On the plus side, they seems to imply to my lay ears that if you're running a free public gallery, with content available to anyone who visits, there is no purposeful jurisdictional availment; which ergo may benefit ars gratia artis (and porna gratia pornae).
On the minus side, it still seems to require that any adult e-commerce site become familiar with the particular local community standards for every person who asks to subscribe, since even one customer in the jurisdiction has the potential to meet the test. Thus, we go right back to the unknowable multiplicity of applications that the Nitke plaintiffs seem to be arguing.
As you originally said, it's a little bit of help, at least for those not out to make a buck. I've only rarely felt a need to pay for porn, given the free abundance. (Which may be tied to commercial market conditions, but anyway....) Also, given the unarousing crap that is becoming prevalent on many commercial sites, perhaps getting porn production back into purely amateur, er... hands?... might be a good thing. =P
Sure, its real tough to get an agent into a Cincinnati suburb with his/her laptop to do the download.
Yes, you're sarcastic, and yes, it's a very minor step... but it's legally critical. No download, no jurisdiction, no case, and if the trial judge doesn't call the prosecutor a moron, the appeals court will probably call both of them morons.
I give this example: if I created a picture that is completely moral/ethical/unobscene in Pennsylvania and put it on my web site or in my magazine, someone in, say Ohio (which, in this scenario, has stricter obscenity laws), could bring criminal charges against me even though my business in based in Pennsylvania and my web site is hosted in Florida.
The main precedent on such in the internet era is the Thomas AABBS case. Poking around, I've been unable to find a copy of their BBS terms of service (if they even had one). Many adult sites expressly set in the terms of service what the governing jurisdiction is; EG, AT Kingdom's TOS, part XVII. A. (SFW, unlike the rest of the site).
On the other hand, it's not clear that that would be sufficient to get around 18 USC 1465, given the appellate ruling from US v. Thomas.
On the gripping hand, IAmNotALawyer; it may be perfectly clear to your attorney. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't create any new legal tangles; it just fails to clear up the existing one, because there is no concrete case to nail the theory to. It sounds like the courts are saying "don't come back until you can point to a specific case of bad prosecution." They want a clear, non-hypothetical case, where the business was in one place, and the prosecution somewhere else. Until then, they have other non-hypothetical cases on other important matters to occupy their time.
As to your hypothetical example, the TOS ought to be linked to from any splash page. It would also not be unreasonably paranoid to redirect any http request indicating an outside referrer to the splash page (as is fairly standard), to make sure the TOS have been agreed to (as well as to cut down on bandwidth leeching).
All the Feds have to do is find the most conservative community in the country, file the obscenity charges from that community, and then when the court looks at that community's standards they will find that the web site is indeed obscene by law.
You missed a minor step: download the files to a computer in the community, and THEN file the charges.
Most botnets are being controlled by script-kiddies running code that they didn't write or possibly even read.
Formerly accurate; however, the trend has been increasingly that the botnets are run by professional criminals of increasing sophistication intent on extortion, spamming, and other lucrative criminal capers.
You can't be hauled into court in any particular jurisdiction unless you've "purposefully availed yourself" of that jurisdiction's legal privileges and protections. And other cases, some about pornography but most about plain old e-commerce, say that just posting something on the internet isn't "purposeful availment." You have to do something in that actual location - not necessarily be there physically, but send or sell something to someone there, or some other interaction that would let you know that someone there was using your site
Excellent in theory — although I'd be interested in an appelate e-commerce "purposeful availment" citation. Unfortunately, in practice your claim seems directly contradicted by the 6th Circuit's 1996 ruling on venue in US v. Thomas. Specifically:
To establish a Section 1465 violation, the Government must prove that a defendant knowingly used a facility or means of interstate commerce for the purpose of distributing obscene materials. Contrary to Defendants' position, Section 1465 does not require the Government to prove that Defendants had specific knowledge of the destination of each transmittal at the time it occurred.
So, in practice, this means you would need to find out the community standards before accepting any subscriber there. In fact, it's not even clear that it requires a subscription; the Thomas case implies that even making the material freely available for download might be reasonably feared by a potential defendant as constituting "purposeful availment" of any jurisdiction where the download occurs, if the prosecutor is so inclined.
And, as the Nitke plaintifs tried to argue, the number of possible venues and lack of clearly specified standards makes for an intolerable practical burden.
Absent a line of reasoning as to why concerns of adult site operators that arose from the Thomas AABBS case are mitigated by any apellate ruling since, "purposeful availment" arguments provide no useful help whatsoever.
I think what the SCOTUS (and the lower-level appeals courts) are looking for is an actual prosecution of an obscenity case based on this law, as opposed to just a hypothetical case concerning the text of the law.
So, the next step for the NCSF might be to set up a legal defense fund foand team available for any internet porn site that gets prosecuted on obscenity charges outside its physical jurisdiction (both for corporate office and server location) for material that would be acceptable under community standards of its physical jurisdiction(s).
Figure out what the most wildly tolerant community is in the country; set up a porn studio and servers there. Figure out who the most conservative federal prosecutor in the most conservative federal jurisdiction... and his email address. If you're willing to skirt conspiracy or spamming charges, make sure he gets nice regular ads for the site, detailing what sort of material is available. Repeat appeal process... with genuine case.
In short: insert stick in hornets nest; stir vigorously.
And with any decent botnet, you can make the things run arbitrary code.
Speaking as an Evil Genius with standards, and one who's read the Warhol Worm paper, I'd say any "decent" botnet doesn't take orders from just any old Bill, Fred, or Otto who wanders by waving an executable at it. A "decent" bot wouldn't run code handed to it unless the executable was cryptographically signed with a private key matching the public key it knows belongs to its One True Beloved Master.
So, all of your plans should work just fine... once you determine how to recover a GPG private key of the 4096-bit keypair needed to sign the RUNME code, using the public key taken from the sample bot.
HANGE. (Have A Nice Geologic Epoch.)
(Note: I have better projects to occupy my Evil Genius than botnets.)
Hopefully the SCOTUS has chosen this as a poster boy for the inanity of the current Patent system... The first thin wedge of peeling back the move to patent any and everything including software.
As a rule, getting the SCOTUS to grant certiorari for your case is usually the bulk of the battle; they more often choose to hear cases when they expect that the lower court's result was mistaken. According to here,
In 2001 a federal jury in Denver ruled against LabCorp, and the company was eventually ordered to pay $7.8 million in damages and attorneys' fees. The appeals court that handles patent cases affirmed the lower court decision in 2004.
So, in the Laboratory Corp. v. Metabolite Laboratories SCOTUS appeal, the "infringer" was ruled against at lower levels, and thus the patent holder is facing an uphill fight.
If I had known in 1990 that all my postings to Usenet would be publicly available many years after the fact, I might have thought twice before posting some of the articles I did
It could be worse. I usually show up fairly quickly as the author of one of the Alt.sex.* FAQ's. Ah, well; at least I never planned on a political career.
The CFCs used to expand styrofoam until the mid-1980s deplete ozone in the stratosphere. This causes an increase in UV radiation at ground level, not global warming.
Mostly correct. The additional UV contributes a trivial increase in surface recieved energy, which in turn contributes a trivial amount to retained energy near ground level. The ozone depletion in itself does not make CFC's a global warming concern. The problem of CFC's is that the C-F bond is a better infrared absorber than even the C=O bond, meaning CFC's have a much higher global warming potential (GWP) than CO2: easy-to-find Web page with CFC GWP table.
The good news is that increases in CFC GW contribution are falling since the ban of R-12 and others of the worst suspects; the bad news is that the CFCs put out before the ban will be contributing to global warming for a long time to come. The gripping hand is that the sheer volume of CO2 levels has always made it the #1 global warming contributor.
There's a bell curve, as with a lot of things. Some of the bad guys are extremely well educated, and experienced in their business. Some are dumb as bricks, and thereby keep somenews(?) reporters in beer money.
Usually I drink a bunch of hot liquids before now, it seems to get the most severe of the heat out.
Capsaicin is not very soluble in water, but is in oil or alcohol. Milk is traditionally suggested, but in this case I'd worry the lactose would increase risk of yeast infections. I'd try vodka (plain or vanilla) or a mouthwash (or just more time); however, I am neither a sex therapist nor a doctor. Your GF could ask her ObGyn for suggestions at her next checkup.
You ever think that we might ENJOY it and not bother to complain about it; hence no funny fellat-stories involving hot sauce?
Yes, which is why I mention the S&M possibility. I wasn't a fan of high-end hot sauce 2nd hand on my Mister Happy (CBT not being my schtick), but I've been told my tastes are "fucking vanilla". While I'd be suprised if that many guys were that into a "bottom" role, YMMV.
[...]I guess what bothers me most is a group of teenagers having sex sans any awkwardness whatsoever. [...] It appears that when these kids turned 16 the "hump like a porn star" gene was triggered. Did we all just go to the wrong high schools?
I just glanced at the video clip others have linked to. First point, it was mention that the party was at the house "where they usually are". This evidently wasn't the first party on these lines, even if it went further. The awkwardness you mention usually diminishes in favor of other forms of idiocy with experience.
Second, the whole orgy is shown as a memory sequence of one of the partygoers, which from a literary/cinematic standpoint may implies not everything is 100% accurate. The young are a lot more impressed by their peers' (and especially their own) savoir faire than an older or outside viewpoint might be. The students need not have been so smooth as portrayed to have been so remembered.
Also, from what I know from my (few) acquaintances who attended schools where these hijinks even came close to being practical: it may be more accurate to instead say that we all went to the right kind of high schools.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like the LOTR musical merely fails to reach the full heights it grasps for, ending dwarfed by Jackson's cinematic masterpiece, but not by the earlier animated cinematic "efforts". You'd have to pay me to go and see the LOTR musical... but you couldn't pay me enough to sit through the Hobbit.
Nope. Not just as in justice; perhaps effective. I merely hope that any others considering a course of action with widely distributed externalized marginal disutility would consider the risk of disproportionate consquent highly-personal internalized disutility a disinducement, and find the prospect of such risk becoming manifest such nicely ironic. Unfortunately, sociopaths don't consider consequences well.
I also note that the undeserved suffering of one group who have done nothing does not logically imply anything about the suffering of another group who have done something.
No, I am not a nice person; I'm far too pragmatic in my socio-political outlook. It's going to get me killed someday.
No; being greedy and stupid means you fall for 419 scams. Greedy and indifferent to the welfare of others is more accurate here; or, to oversimplify: Evil.
Not necessarily your labor; EG, an inherited fortune. It's also philisophically debateable as to what extent a return on investment represents a store of your labor per se. It's also more accurate to say that money is an accumulation of the benefit, not the labor itself... a subtle point the early communist theorists failed to understand, to their peril and the world's detriment. (Even "benefit" is an oversimplification....)
That the use of your "money" constitutes a form of expression isn't in question, but your right to do so is NOT unlimited in an election... or would you care to argue that direct buying of votes should be a protected form of expression??? I don't disagree that the FEC is at least symptomatic of a larger problem, but I don't think they are the root cause.
The problem with elections is that the seat one is trying to win has too much power. If you want to fix elections, fix the political seat -- reduce the power of government to where it should be under the Constitution. When the power is reduced, no amount of money will create protectionism, favoritism and cronyism.
I believe your thinking may be a little fuzzy. "Reduced" is not the right word; far too often reducing the power of something means that power is only moved to another entity, which is then the new focus for the struggle. What you need is for the power to be dissipated, so that it requires the united action of more individuals for it to be brought into play again.
I believe your solution also is an oversimplification that ignores the history which created the problem in the first place. Much of the government's increase in power during the 20th century was to challege the power accumulated by corporations towards the end of the 19th. The alternative was civil war and a likely ascendancy of communism... which we fortunately avoided, thanks in part to FDR. Simply dissippating governmental powers without addressing the problems which caused that initial accumulation means that you will either face the original problem again, or the power will immediately reaccumulate... possibly both.
If you want to do this right, you need to find an alternate solution to the problems of the inequities of corporate power before you weaken the government. I don't think your concerns are misdirected, but I think your analysis is flawed.
You sometimes can get a late project back on track by adding manpower, but you need to add more than a first approximation would suggest, and the earlier you do it the better. It's remarkable if a PHB even makes the first approximation to add manpower, much less considers (or understands) the learning curve, and thus Brook's law may be relied on in modern practice.
Yes, but since HAL would agree, using FPS programmers in this context leaves me a with a edge of nervousness.
I clearly can, for I do not presume two wrongs make a right. Clearly, RMS can as well.
IAmNotALawyer, but I'm fairly certain your presumption there is flawed. In particular, I believe the analogous mail-order case you propose would be prosecutable.
Yes, but not in full since the SCOTUS appeal was declined; and again, IAmNotALawyer; I'm just a bright layman.
Thus my point about jurisdiction. Purposeful availment = some other interaction that lets you know that the person you're dealing with is coming from that community. It's pretty clearly more than just putting something on a website.
Thank you! The Toys & Zippo cases referenced by the 3rd C. are quite enlightening. On the plus side, they seems to imply to my lay ears that if you're running a free public gallery, with content available to anyone who visits, there is no purposeful jurisdictional availment; which ergo may benefit ars gratia artis (and porna gratia pornae).
On the minus side, it still seems to require that any adult e-commerce site become familiar with the particular local community standards for every person who asks to subscribe, since even one customer in the jurisdiction has the potential to meet the test. Thus, we go right back to the unknowable multiplicity of applications that the Nitke plaintiffs seem to be arguing.
As you originally said, it's a little bit of help, at least for those not out to make a buck. I've only rarely felt a need to pay for porn, given the free abundance. (Which may be tied to commercial market conditions, but anyway....) Also, given the unarousing crap that is becoming prevalent on many commercial sites, perhaps getting porn production back into purely amateur, er... hands?... might be a good thing. =P
Yes, you're sarcastic, and yes, it's a very minor step... but it's legally critical. No download, no jurisdiction, no case, and if the trial judge doesn't call the prosecutor a moron, the appeals court will probably call both of them morons.
The main precedent on such in the internet era is the Thomas AABBS case. Poking around, I've been unable to find a copy of their BBS terms of service (if they even had one). Many adult sites expressly set in the terms of service what the governing jurisdiction is; EG, AT Kingdom's TOS, part XVII. A. (SFW, unlike the rest of the site).
On the other hand, it's not clear that that would be sufficient to get around 18 USC 1465, given the appellate ruling from US v. Thomas.
On the gripping hand, IAmNotALawyer; it may be perfectly clear to your attorney. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't create any new legal tangles; it just fails to clear up the existing one, because there is no concrete case to nail the theory to. It sounds like the courts are saying "don't come back until you can point to a specific case of bad prosecution." They want a clear, non-hypothetical case, where the business was in one place, and the prosecution somewhere else. Until then, they have other non-hypothetical cases on other important matters to occupy their time.
As to your hypothetical example, the TOS ought to be linked to from any splash page. It would also not be unreasonably paranoid to redirect any http request indicating an outside referrer to the splash page (as is fairly standard), to make sure the TOS have been agreed to (as well as to cut down on bandwidth leeching).
You missed a minor step: download the files to a computer in the community, and THEN file the charges.
BZZT!!!
Formerly accurate; however, the trend has been increasingly that the botnets are run by professional criminals of increasing sophistication intent on extortion, spamming, and other lucrative criminal capers.
Excellent in theory — although I'd be interested in an appelate e-commerce "purposeful availment" citation. Unfortunately, in practice your claim seems directly contradicted by the 6th Circuit's 1996 ruling on venue in US v. Thomas. Specifically:
So, in practice, this means you would need to find out the community standards before accepting any subscriber there. In fact, it's not even clear that it requires a subscription; the Thomas case implies that even making the material freely available for download might be reasonably feared by a potential defendant as constituting "purposeful availment" of any jurisdiction where the download occurs, if the prosecutor is so inclined.And, as the Nitke plaintifs tried to argue, the number of possible venues and lack of clearly specified standards makes for an intolerable practical burden.
Absent a line of reasoning as to why concerns of adult site operators that arose from the Thomas AABBS case are mitigated by any apellate ruling since, "purposeful availment" arguments provide no useful help whatsoever.
So, the next step for the NCSF might be to set up a legal defense fund foand team available for any internet porn site that gets prosecuted on obscenity charges outside its physical jurisdiction (both for corporate office and server location) for material that would be acceptable under community standards of its physical jurisdiction(s).
Figure out what the most wildly tolerant community is in the country; set up a porn studio and servers there. Figure out who the most conservative federal prosecutor in the most conservative federal jurisdiction... and his email address. If you're willing to skirt conspiracy or spamming charges, make sure he gets nice regular ads for the site, detailing what sort of material is available. Repeat appeal process... with genuine case.
In short: insert stick in hornets nest; stir vigorously.
Speaking as an Evil Genius with standards, and one who's read the Warhol Worm paper, I'd say any "decent" botnet doesn't take orders from just any old Bill, Fred, or Otto who wanders by waving an executable at it. A "decent" bot wouldn't run code handed to it unless the executable was cryptographically signed with a private key matching the public key it knows belongs to its One True Beloved Master.
So, all of your plans should work just fine... once you determine how to recover a GPG private key of the 4096-bit keypair needed to sign the RUNME code, using the public key taken from the sample bot.
HANGE. (Have A Nice Geologic Epoch.)
(Note: I have better projects to occupy my Evil Genius than botnets.)
Wait — we're civilized?
As a rule, getting the SCOTUS to grant certiorari for your case is usually the bulk of the battle; they more often choose to hear cases when they expect that the lower court's result was mistaken. According to here,
So, in the Laboratory Corp. v. Metabolite Laboratories SCOTUS appeal, the "infringer" was ruled against at lower levels, and thus the patent holder is facing an uphill fight.It could be worse. I usually show up fairly quickly as the author of one of the Alt.sex.* FAQ's. Ah, well; at least I never planned on a political career.
Mostly correct. The additional UV contributes a trivial increase in surface recieved energy, which in turn contributes a trivial amount to retained energy near ground level. The ozone depletion in itself does not make CFC's a global warming concern. The problem of CFC's is that the C-F bond is a better infrared absorber than even the C=O bond, meaning CFC's have a much higher global warming potential (GWP) than CO2: easy-to-find Web page with CFC GWP table.
The good news is that increases in CFC GW contribution are falling since the ban of R-12 and others of the worst suspects; the bad news is that the CFCs put out before the ban will be contributing to global warming for a long time to come. The gripping hand is that the sheer volume of CO2 levels has always made it the #1 global warming contributor.
Martin Bishop : Organized crime?
Cosmo : Hah. Don't kid yourself. It's not that organized.
There's a bell curve, as with a lot of things. Some of the bad guys are extremely well educated, and experienced in their business. Some are dumb as bricks, and thereby keep some news(?) reporters in beer money.
Capsaicin is not very soluble in water, but is in oil or alcohol. Milk is traditionally suggested, but in this case I'd worry the lactose would increase risk of yeast infections. I'd try vodka (plain or vanilla) or a mouthwash (or just more time); however, I am neither a sex therapist nor a doctor. Your GF could ask her ObGyn for suggestions at her next checkup.
Yes, which is why I mention the S&M possibility. I wasn't a fan of high-end hot sauce 2nd hand on my Mister Happy (CBT not being my schtick), but I've been told my tastes are "fucking vanilla". While I'd be suprised if that many guys were that into a "bottom" role, YMMV.
I just glanced at the video clip others have linked to. First point, it was mention that the party was at the house "where they usually are". This evidently wasn't the first party on these lines, even if it went further. The awkwardness you mention usually diminishes in favor of other forms of idiocy with experience.
Second, the whole orgy is shown as a memory sequence of one of the partygoers, which from a literary/cinematic standpoint may implies not everything is 100% accurate. The young are a lot more impressed by their peers' (and especially their own) savoir faire than an older or outside viewpoint might be. The students need not have been so smooth as portrayed to have been so remembered.
Also, from what I know from my (few) acquaintances who attended schools where these hijinks even came close to being practical: it may be more accurate to instead say that we all went to the right kind of high schools.