I don't think you are way off base, in that you are starting from a free market model, and recognizing the importance of market laws. However, the real situation is already far from a theoretically frictionless free market, as I'll try to show.
First, the smaller stations CAN be forced to sell. Publicly owned ones have to accept offers if they are large enough, as their stockholders can require it, both by legal penalty and by lawsuit. Privately owned radio stations such as schools, often can't afford the fees to upgrade liscences, and the FCC has sometimes allowed a commercial owner to preferentially buy up a frequency that is already in non-commercial use, even where empty bands abound.
Supply and demand doesn't work very quickly in these cases. There are a number of markets where the demand for more of your typical clear channel type broadcasts seems understated to non-existent, but until advertisers stop believing more of that broadcasting will work for them, supply can grow to greatly exceed real demand.
This also ties into the RIAA debate. Sales may slump because people stop buying what they perceive as crap, but no record company exec ever kept his job by saying "Sales are down because I promoted nothing but garbage.". On the other hand, some of them can keep their jobs by saying "Sales are down because of Piracy.", at least for the short run. In the same way, the broadcast megacorps can make money (in the short run) by convincing advertisers the market is there, even if the market really isn't.
There's a rule in the advertising business, that says "90% of all advertising is wasted, but you never know which 10% will produce your profit." That describes a very inefficient process, and a correlary in scientific circles for that situation would be "response lags are going to be large, changes will be small and come slowly". Now try convincing the Nation's advertisers they are in a situation where any change they think is reasonable will in fact (a.) be too small, and (b.) needed three to ten years ago.
Again, that's what theoreticians call market friction. Advertisers are going to be reluctant to stop advertising to over-saturated markets, because the actual decision makers are afraid of losing their jobs by not following the conventional wisdom. It's a sort of "Nobody ever got fired for targeting their advertising budget at the 14-27 year old female demographic, like this big station says they own." rule. Yeah, this will change in the long run, but with government already involved, that long run is pretty stretched out.
You used the word 'everyone" in your post. I'd submit that's where the problem comes in. If you had said "a sizeable majority", you might have reached a different conclusion, and would definitely be phrasing things more accurately. If a sizable majority likes Brittany, and a small minority likes Cobham, Matsui, and Ella, then you would expect there would be lots of stations playing lots of Brittany, and a few playing Jazz, but it would look unnatural to see no jazz stations, or no country, or no classical, or no talk radio without Howard Stern, or whatever. 5,000 people in an overall market of 500,000 is a niche market, but somebody should be able to make some money targeting that 5,000, and if that has stopped happening in many places, there is something besides the free market causing that.
Great, I actually just moved a big UPS to the top of the christmas wish list. I can get by without plasma screens and multiple 200 Gb drives in raid 5 array for a while longer, but I realized reading this thread that I've given up trying to get tech support over the phone for eveything possible, and don't want to go back to it.
It's sad though, I'm doing what looks smart and putting infrastructure before bells and whistles, but if I thought more people would do that on a larger scale, I'd feel less need to take it that seriously. It's because I'm confident that the overwhelming majority of people will continue not to fix up the power grid, the phone lines, or for that matter the sewage treatment plants, air traffic control networks, and highways, that I decided it was worth the effort to be a contrarian.
The life expectancy in Russia has been falling for a while, and last year dropped to age 59, which put it lower than anywhere else in Europe. Guess what nations scored just above them in the lists? Liberia and Biafra. Those are both about as third world as you can get, and are also way, way above the bronze age averages (about 22 years)(although Liberia may drop a bit when the next set of results comes out, what with their own civil war and the spillover from the Hutu/Tutsi clash). There are some African and Asian countries that are still seriously lousy, but it's surprising how many places aren't even down to age 40, despite HIV, war, and incredibly corrupt governments.
Some pro-grade body builders have complained that they were competitive in bodybuilding itself, but made changes in their regimin, such as going more to cross training, running, and so on for overall fitness, and stopped winning.
For example, Former 3 time Mr. Olympia Frank Zane quit competeing because he started emphasizing overall fitness, with increaseing distance running, gymnastics, and the like, and stopped looking like what the Olympia judges wanted. What chiefly surprised him, was, he was was not only scoring better on cardio-vascular measures, flexability, and endurance, but his actual strength was higher, at least as measured using such methods as bench press and ovehead lift.
Since some adult males in their 70's have managed to father children, there is some amount of what you can call evolutionary pressure from diseases that don't hit males until their 50's, 60's and so on. It's smaller than the pressure from something like schizophrenia, that hits at an average age of 23-25 or so, but it's not non-existant. In the same way, since humans raise their kids for often many years, there are some evolutionary disadvantages to a disease that kills post menopausal women, for at least the next 12 years or so, as it is harder for the offspring to reach reproductive age.
So no, this would not be a major upset to evolutionary theory. What would be upsetting would be if this gene had a drawback that apparently only manefested itself at age 50 or so, but was somehow being selected against with greater frequency and vehemence on the part of nature than genes like the ones causing progeria or cystic fibrosis, which tend to kill by about age 13-14.
Or maybe it's an advantage now, in an industrialized society where there's plenty of food, but hasn't been an advantage for much in our history and prehistory, when famine was much more likely. Maybe, until recently, the chance one of the support systems wouldn't be able to keep up during lean times was that major downside, so the gene hasn't spread much until modern times. Possibly, that major downside has been mitigated or rendered moot.
Hey, when this little guy grows up, he could have a real interest in supporting a society stable enough to protect his geneticly vulnerable to famine uber-offspring. Once he has a few kids, it will make sense if he gets out there and fights for truth, justice, and the German way, and even before he reproduces, he might want to take a not too risky but socially consious job like crusading reporter for a major metropolitan daily.
First, I am not a lawyer. This is a lay opinion only. Second, I am not a particularly vengeful person, or at least I don't really want spammers to face the death penalty, castration, or other such suggested punishments.
Jason Smathers has been charged with theft and fired by AOL. I'm assuming the actual charge is something like felony grand theft, and that the amount his co-conspirator got for the lists will be all the proof AOL will need to offer for a grand jury to agree with that charge.
According to the article, he also used another employee's ID in the act. That's probably either a separate charge or at least an aggrevating factor to the first charge. Among lots of other effects, this employee probably has standing to sue both men and a fair chance of winning, regardless of whether AOL does (with "winning" limited by the condition that they must somehow have forfitable assets after their prosecution).
It also looks like there was possibly more than one actual theft, as the article mentions the men either actually obtaining or conspiring to obtain an updated version of the list, which would imply an older version also existed in their posession. One or both men may have made fraudulent promises to a person or persons who bought the list, representing it as legally obtained.
So, Smathers could well be inditeable with three or more felonies (three strikes rules may apply), and it's possible with multiple persons accused that the whole thing could fall under RICO, either of which could easily make the overall sentence 30 years or more. Even with the usual time off for good behavior type clauses, that means serving a good solid 18 years or so.
AOL probably wants the whole thing to go away. Since they can't really get that, the next best thing is to get seriously Neolithic on his ass, and hope it has a deterrent effect.
I can't say this isn't stuff that matters, as it matters a great deal to some of us, but it looks like stories like this will be posted every couple of months for the forseeable future.
That being the case, I'd like to see the post itself contain some distinguishing marks, like a mention of what round in the series this is, or a comment on overall trends. This is the 4th round of these suits, right? (or is it the 5th?)
I know, people should read the article, and google for basic questions, and all that. However, this subject is becoming almost like SCO. There are just so many repetitious elements that it is extra easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.
Also, we can't expect the other media to convert data to knowledge. I doubt most press releases on this are going to keep track of whether the numbers per round have increased, decreased, or fluctuated both ways, for example. As another example, would you want to rely on Wired to tell you whether these clusters of suits start comeing closer together? (That's not to criticise Wired in particular, but to say that the press tends to become complacent the umpty-umpth time they are covering what sounds like the same story.).
The ACLU has typically refused to get involved in some 2nd amendment cases, and has said they interpret the 2nd amendment in terms of a right to have a government accepted militia, rather than individual posession of firearms. They haven't actively campaigned for more firearms laws, just refused to oppose some, such as the Brady act.
The ACLU has often taken the position that rights are inherent in being human, so that even people who aren't US citizens should have those rights under US law. Some people see reasons why some rights shouldn't be applied to non-citizens, but it doesn't hurt to remember, a group that wants even non-citizens to be protected against something, such as being detained without formal charges being specified, is likely to also fight to protect that same right for citizens.
These two positions make some people (vocal here on slashdot) not want to support the ACLU. My point is, first, there are levels of disagreement. If the organization doesn't support a right as you think it exists, it is still somewhat better than if they actively support taking that right away, by lobbying for new laws against it.
Also, I'm argueing that a lot of alternatives to the ACLU are likely to be less responsive. If all a person feels they can do is contibute 25 dollars and write three letters to various organizations, they could have more or less impact. Letters to RIAA members are unlikely to influence them much as they are either heavily comitted to the opposite perspective, or are thinking in unrealistic terms to begin with, and will only realize they might be wrong when their business model costs them billions.
Letters to congressmen may or may not be taken seriously, depending on the congressman and whether he or she is your congresman, plus the policy on what letters get to what level of a congressman's support staff is not public, so you don't even know if you are being heard or not. Giving money to congressmen is more reliable, but you have to give a lot.
Letters and money to the an organization such as the EFF may focus your resources on a particular issue such as free speech, but those organizations are generally smaller and have less extensive contacts among the politicians, so there are tradeoffs even there.
As usual, several areas of math that are widely considered "pure" rather than "applied" turn out to have real world implications. The relationship of something as apparently trivial as folding paper to compressing and encoding data is a remarkable example of isomorphism in itself, beyond that:
If you're funding education or pure research, you never know when something will unexpectedly prove useful, or even valuable.
If you're the NSA, the RIAA, or any regulator you never know when or where the djinni will get out of the bottle.
(Insert pithy saying about chinese ideograms for danger and opportunity being isomorphic)
Many people here on slashdot don't like the ACLU's stand on gun control legislation. You know what? - that's 1 amendment out of 10. If you look at how many laws are being passed or proposed, the odds are probably even better, as we haven't seen nearly 1 gun control law for every 10 that threaten the 9th and 10th amendments, and some of the worst legislation has mostly impacted the 1st, and sometimes the 5th.
Plus, which is more likely to work?
1. Supporting something that thinks it has an obligation to all people, even non-citizens, and that you are probably in 80-90% agreement with, and writing letters to try and convince them to change their policy on the other 10-20%,
or 2. writing those same letters to a congressman who sees things differently than you at least half the time and probably ignores everything from outside his or her district anyway.
Just like you can be compelled to give fingerprints, hair samples, and such if you are actually charged with a crime. Your own fingers, voiceprint, or secretions can testify against you, and that doesn't violate the 5th.
It's up to juries to decide most of the limitations on this. One of the reasons OJ got off was the jury was told by prosecution both that repeated requests for more hair samples after a first sample didn't match anything were justified, and that seeking larger numbers of hairs in each sample would not change the odds of a match. Another jury decided to throw out a case on learning that the prosecution had demanded a semen sample from a man charged only with accounting fraud. Get a dumb jury, and there goes even that protection.
The Star Trek franchise is one of the worst on this issue. For example, looking at the back of the paperbacks reveals even the term USS Enterprise is TM'ed. I know it's pretty fundamental to the series, but it's so far from distinctive unless you at least spell out what the USS stands for. Fortunately Trademark law isn't going to let them sue the US Navy or NASA successfully.
Putting it back in the context of the main discussion, isn't all this TM'ing a sign that the series is solidly NOT in the hands of people who will do it right? Why expect them to play fair with somebody like JMS even if he (or some other writer) could save their bacon, or listen to the fans, or show any respect for the taste of the general public? They're already showing they put much more emphasis on protecting their property than developing it.
I don't really think anything like this will be accepted by enough people to become widespread enough to be seriously useful, but for the sake of arguement, let's assume it will, and someone with big money wants to implement it immediately, and solutions can quickly be found to such problems as where to store all the info on users (it can't be on the individual user's machine, obviously, as the worst offenders will never get around to downloading the patch or upgrade needed, and yet the scoring system is going to have to trigger something or someone reaching into clueless machines and turn on firewall software and such.).
In that case, there's still one thing needed. The value has to decrement under certain conditions, e.g. every month the user goes without a new virus, reduce the count by 1. Nearly all social control systems need something like this, and what you're describing IS a social control system.
I can't make you a list of universally trustworthy entities using that criteria checklist you suggest, but then, I can't make you a list of funny commedians, good authors, or healthy breakfasts using those same limits either. In fact, I can only think of one list that can fit your criteria and still have more than zero entries: Safe answers to "Do these jeans make me look fat?"
Re:I know it's not tin foil, but....
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For trivia buffs: The reason aluminum foil has a shiny side and a flatter side is that it is rolled into shape. The process involves passing what starts as an ingot through many sets of rollers, each set spaced closer together than the last. When the rollers get very close, they tend to flatten out against each other and jam. Someone had the bright idea to fold two sheets together and run them both through the last set of rollers at once, then peel them apart. Thes lets the last set of rollers be spaced as far apart as the next-to-last set. Nowdays, it is likely that precision controllers and better manufacturing tolerances would let us make aluminum foil with both sides shiny, but why bother?
Don't get me started about Oreo cookies and what the little points are for.
Good point. So maybe we should be trying to spread Linux and such just as fast as they can acquire an educated userbase, and not as fast as they might spread if they become as simple to install and use as MS Windows. Now where were all those posters bemoaning how Free Software Hackers don't like to work on some of those projects that would help FreeBSD/Linux/BeOS/whatever get a bigger userbase?
One of the things holding this back in the middle east is the massive ammount of power needed to desalinate that much sea water. Initial designs for such systems assumed Nuclear power would be used. A lot of other governments would prefer it if that power came from non-nuclear sources, at least for Palestine, Libya, Iran, and Syria, and Iraq until it settles down (yeah, right). So poverty in the area limits people's options directly - "We can't afford a 200 Mw power plant!", and indirectly - "... and you wouldn't trust us with it anyway.".
Popularity is a factor, but it's far from the only one. FreeBSD isn't very popular, but it is still essentially a UNIX. UNIX based systems include some very high profile targets, like banks and mega-corporations. Even if there are a lot fewer script kiddees trying to target FreeBSD, there are some very skilled pros trying to steal literally millions of dollars via UNIX exploits. Yet somehow there aren't nearly as many exploits out there.
If popularity is behind Microsoft's history of vulnerability, then there aren't any black hats above the level of the ones who brag to their friends about their L33T'ness and do lame ass social engineering exploits.
All this speculation about really malicious viruses, designed to cause billions in damage and act as weapons in unconventional warfare, all the stories of black hats professional not to brag to their high school friends, and of ones in it for serious money are just hot air. There will never be a Warhol worm, a terrorist cell committing a computer crime, or any retired black hats owning their own tropical islands. It's all just pimply faced nerds driven by the desire to kill some time picking on the most popular OS while they wait for their photoshopped images of Natalie Portman's head on someone else's body to download.
Or, just maybe, there are some real badasses out there, but UNIX's security model is actually better than Windows.
Bookmark the site, set up a counter to remind me to visit again in N days, then download after the slashdot croud has thinned out. I could tell you my formula for incrementing the delay counter, but then it would become worthless.
There's plenty of places we can practice. What happens if we pump desalinated seawater into Death Valley USA? How could we establish a timetable for re-shaping Mars when we don't really know much time it would take the Brazilian rain forest to reclaim the land at its current fringes if it started being protected now?
If we're betting we can establish new species on Mars, wouldn't it make sense to first restablish some more Earthly species in ranges we have wiped them from right here? A hundred or so years ago, we failed in attempts to reestablish the Passenger Pigeon to the wild or keep it alive in zoos. We've just now gotten pretty good with the American Buffalo, and results on the Eastern Red Wolf and the Giant Panda are still mixed at best. Looking at the endangered species list, I'd say until things come off of it (in a positive direction only) at least as fast as they go on, we are not ready for Mars.
Of course the early Spanish and such knew that European diseases could be fatal to the "Indians". But, they didn't have a germ theory of disease or other modern explanations, and they didn't know about immunity mechanisms at all. They were genuinely surprised to see diseases that had a relatively small mortality rate in Europe, or that generally took months to kill, spread so fast among the indiginous peoples, and often kill within a day or two. This is confirmed by the many letters and messages they wrote relating how remarkable it was. Most of these were sent by Roman Catholic monks, who it appears often genuinely tried to help, but by gathering Native Americans into crowded conditions usually made things worse.
The Bio-warfare attacks with smallpox laden blankets and such generally happened in the 1700's to 1750's, not the 1500's. Those people's ethics probably weren't any better than the Conquistadores, but they understood a bit more about the technical end of handleing Smallpox and other diseases. One of the most notable of these was Lord Amherst's decision to distribute blankets known to be full of smallpox, an attack which he justified in his letters and memoirs on Biblical grounds, although the second most well documented use of smallpox was at the order of a mercenary garrison commander near what is now Chicago ILL, who was a freethinker and justified it on the grounds of European racial superiority. While these two attacks are the only ones with extensive documentation made at the time by the chief perpetrators, it seems probably that there were more, ranging from a low estimate of about 10 to more than 100 depending on the historian's best guess.
The historical trend is to define "worthy of preservation" more broadly, at least in western culture. Not only have we seen a general repugnance against racism and euginecism develop that would probably surprise the hell out of our bloody minded ancestors, but there have even been words such as speciesist introduced to extend that repugnance to at least the abuse of the higher animals. Of course, these are far from universal.
If you think of it as us taking territory from bacteria, it sounds oh-so-hypersensitive and politically uber-correct to think we should care, but if you think of it as though there must be a minimum value to any whole, complete ecology, even one made up entirely of simple life forms, it makes more sense.
If Mars even has bacteria, and it turns out there is nothing exceptional about them, we will probably terraform the planet eventually. But the first thing we should conclude on finding a bacterium not native to our own world is not that Mars has nothing but bacteria, but that it has an ecoystem, and the only other example of an ecosystem we know is a complex and marvelous thing indeed.
It's scary you think I think that. We really should talk about reading comprehension.
It's easy to say selective enforcement is a travesty, but what was it used for in the first example? Is stopping a defendant in a civil suit from making false claims and imposing all the burdens of those claims on innocent people previously uninvolved in the suit a travesty? Really? I agreed that it would have been better not to use selective enforcement in that case, but would it have been better to have done nothing?
And what's this "sodomy laws, if selectively enforced would be applicable to everyone"? One of the points of condemnation about sodomy laws is that they are often selectively enforced just aginst the homosexual minority. Applyng them to everyone is UN-selective enforcement. To the best of my knowledge, not a single state has overturned its old sodomy laws because they were being abused re. heterosexuals, but precisely because they weren't.
The real point is, you don't have an answer to the core topic of this thread, which was originally about Hate Speech laws. What sort of law should the EU (or the USA) have, that presumably isn't open to so much selective enforcement? If the hate speech law has some practical use, such as stopping some organization from falsely claiming to be non-profit in an effort to make it tougher to prove Libel or Fraud, then I agree likely it would be better to overturn the precident that lets them exploit the system than to use a law that is subject to such selective enforcement. Now what's the mistaken precident, one of (or maybe both) the ones contained in the definitions of non-profit vrs. commercial, or the one that recognizes more limits on commercial speech?
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I don't think you are way off base, in that you are starting from a free market model, and recognizing the importance of market laws. However, the real situation is already far from a theoretically frictionless free market, as I'll try to show.
First, the smaller stations CAN be forced to sell. Publicly owned ones have to accept offers if they are large enough, as their stockholders can require it, both by legal penalty and by lawsuit. Privately owned radio stations such as schools, often can't afford the fees to upgrade liscences, and the FCC has sometimes allowed a commercial owner to preferentially buy up a frequency that is already in non-commercial use, even where empty bands abound.
Supply and demand doesn't work very quickly in these cases. There are a number of markets where the demand for more of your typical clear channel type broadcasts seems understated to non-existent, but until advertisers stop believing more of that broadcasting will work for them, supply can grow to greatly exceed real demand.
This also ties into the RIAA debate. Sales may slump because people stop buying what they perceive as crap, but no record company exec ever kept his job by saying "Sales are down because I promoted nothing but garbage.". On the other hand, some of them can keep their jobs by saying "Sales are down because of Piracy.", at least for the short run. In the same way, the broadcast megacorps can make money (in the short run) by convincing advertisers the market is there, even if the market really isn't.
There's a rule in the advertising business, that says "90% of all advertising is wasted, but you never know which 10% will produce your profit." That describes a very inefficient process, and a correlary in scientific circles for that situation would be "response lags are going to be large, changes will be small and come slowly". Now try convincing the Nation's advertisers they are in a situation where any change they think is reasonable will in fact (a.) be too small, and (b.) needed three to ten years ago.
Again, that's what theoreticians call market friction. Advertisers are going to be reluctant to stop advertising to over-saturated markets, because the actual decision makers are afraid of losing their jobs by not following the conventional wisdom. It's a sort of "Nobody ever got fired for targeting their advertising budget at the 14-27 year old female demographic, like this big station says they own." rule. Yeah, this will change in the long run, but with government already involved, that long run is pretty stretched out.
You used the word 'everyone" in your post. I'd submit that's where the problem comes in. If you had said "a sizeable majority", you might have reached a different conclusion, and would definitely be phrasing things more accurately. If a sizable majority likes Brittany, and a small minority likes Cobham, Matsui, and Ella, then you would expect there would be lots of stations playing lots of Brittany, and a few playing Jazz, but it would look unnatural to see no jazz stations, or no country, or no classical, or no talk radio without Howard Stern, or whatever. 5,000 people in an overall market of 500,000 is a niche market, but somebody should be able to make some money targeting that 5,000, and if that has stopped happening in many places, there is something besides the free market causing that.
Great, I actually just moved a big UPS to the top of the christmas wish list. I can get by without plasma screens and multiple 200 Gb drives in raid 5 array for a while longer, but I realized reading this thread that I've given up trying to get tech support over the phone for eveything possible, and don't want to go back to it.
It's sad though, I'm doing what looks smart and putting infrastructure before bells and whistles, but if I thought more people would do that on a larger scale, I'd feel less need to take it that seriously. It's because I'm confident that the overwhelming majority of people will continue not to fix up the power grid, the phone lines, or for that matter the sewage treatment plants, air traffic control networks, and highways, that I decided it was worth the effort to be a contrarian.
The life expectancy in Russia has been falling for a while, and last year dropped to age 59, which put it lower than anywhere else in Europe. Guess what nations scored just above them in the lists? Liberia and Biafra. Those are both about as third world as you can get, and are also way, way above the bronze age averages (about 22 years)(although Liberia may drop a bit when the next set of results comes out, what with their own civil war and the spillover from the Hutu/Tutsi clash). There are some African and Asian countries that are still seriously lousy, but it's surprising how many places aren't even down to age 40, despite HIV, war, and incredibly corrupt governments.
Some pro-grade body builders have complained that they were competitive in bodybuilding itself, but made changes in their regimin, such as going more to cross training, running, and so on for overall fitness, and stopped winning.
For example, Former 3 time Mr. Olympia Frank Zane quit competeing because he started emphasizing overall fitness, with increaseing distance running, gymnastics, and the like, and stopped looking like what the Olympia judges wanted. What chiefly surprised him, was, he was was not only scoring better on cardio-vascular measures, flexability, and endurance, but his actual strength was higher, at least as measured using such methods as bench press and ovehead lift.
Since some adult males in their 70's have managed to father children, there is some amount of what you can call evolutionary pressure from diseases that don't hit males until their 50's, 60's and so on. It's smaller than the pressure from something like schizophrenia, that hits at an average age of 23-25 or so, but it's not non-existant. In the same way, since humans raise their kids for often many years, there are some evolutionary disadvantages to a disease that kills post menopausal women, for at least the next 12 years or so, as it is harder for the offspring to reach reproductive age.
So no, this would not be a major upset to evolutionary theory. What would be upsetting would be if this gene had a drawback that apparently only manefested itself at age 50 or so, but was somehow being selected against with greater frequency and vehemence on the part of nature than genes like the ones causing progeria or cystic fibrosis, which tend to kill by about age 13-14.
Or maybe it's an advantage now, in an industrialized society where there's plenty of food, but hasn't been an advantage for much in our history and prehistory, when famine was much more likely. Maybe, until recently, the chance one of the support systems wouldn't be able to keep up during lean times was that major downside, so the gene hasn't spread much until modern times. Possibly, that major downside has been mitigated or rendered moot.
Hey, when this little guy grows up, he could have a real interest in supporting a society stable enough to protect his geneticly vulnerable to famine uber-offspring. Once he has a few kids, it will make sense if he gets out there and fights for truth, justice, and the German way, and even before he reproduces, he might want to take a not too risky but socially consious job like crusading reporter for a major metropolitan daily.
First, I am not a lawyer. This is a lay opinion only.
Second, I am not a particularly vengeful person, or at least I don't really want spammers to face the death penalty, castration, or other such suggested punishments.
Jason Smathers has been charged with theft and fired by AOL. I'm assuming the actual charge is something like felony grand theft, and that the amount his co-conspirator got for the lists will be all the proof AOL will need to offer for a grand jury to agree with that charge.
According to the article, he also used another employee's ID in the act. That's probably either a separate charge or at least an aggrevating factor to the first charge. Among lots of other effects, this employee probably has standing to sue both men and a fair chance of winning, regardless of whether AOL does (with "winning" limited by the condition that they must somehow have forfitable assets after their prosecution).
It also looks like there was possibly more than one actual theft, as the article mentions the men either actually obtaining or conspiring to obtain an updated version of the list, which would imply an older version also existed in their posession. One or both men may have made fraudulent promises to a person or persons who bought the list, representing it as legally obtained.
So, Smathers could well be inditeable with three or more felonies (three strikes rules may apply), and it's possible with multiple persons accused that the whole thing could fall under RICO, either of which could easily make the overall sentence 30 years or more. Even with the usual time off for good behavior type clauses, that means serving a good solid 18 years or so.
AOL probably wants the whole thing to go away. Since they can't really get that, the next best thing is to get seriously Neolithic on his ass, and hope it has a deterrent effect.
I can't say this isn't stuff that matters, as it matters a great deal to some of us, but it looks like stories like this will be posted every couple of months for the forseeable future.
That being the case, I'd like to see the post itself contain some distinguishing marks, like a mention of what round in the series this is, or a comment on overall trends. This is the 4th round of these suits, right? (or is it the 5th?)
I know, people should read the article, and google for basic questions, and all that. However, this subject is becoming almost like SCO. There are just so many repetitious elements that it is extra easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.
Also, we can't expect the other media to convert data to knowledge. I doubt most press releases on this are going to keep track of whether the numbers per round have increased, decreased, or fluctuated both ways, for example. As another example, would you want to rely on Wired to tell you whether these clusters of suits start comeing closer together? (That's not to criticise Wired in particular, but to say that the press tends to become complacent the umpty-umpth time they are covering what sounds like the same story.).
I'm not sure, depends on what you are missing.
The ACLU has typically refused to get involved in some 2nd amendment cases, and has said they interpret the 2nd amendment in terms of a right to have a government accepted militia, rather than individual posession of firearms. They haven't actively campaigned for more firearms laws, just refused to oppose some, such as the Brady act.
The ACLU has often taken the position that rights are inherent in being human, so that even people who aren't US citizens should have those rights under US law. Some people see reasons why some rights shouldn't be applied to non-citizens, but it doesn't hurt to remember, a group that wants even non-citizens to be protected against something, such as being detained without formal charges being specified, is likely to also fight to protect that same right for citizens.
These two positions make some people (vocal here on slashdot) not want to support the ACLU. My point is, first, there are levels of disagreement. If the organization doesn't support a right as you think it exists, it is still somewhat better than if they actively support taking that right away, by lobbying for new laws against it.
Also, I'm argueing that a lot of alternatives to the ACLU are likely to be less responsive. If all a person feels they can do is contibute 25 dollars and write three letters to various organizations, they could have more or less impact. Letters to RIAA members are unlikely to influence them much as they are either heavily comitted to the opposite perspective, or are thinking in unrealistic terms to begin with, and will only realize they might be wrong when their business model costs them billions.
Letters to congressmen may or may not be taken seriously, depending on the congressman and whether he or she is your congresman, plus the policy on what letters get to what level of a congressman's support staff is not public, so you don't even know if you are being heard or not. Giving money to congressmen is more reliable, but you have to give a lot.
Letters and money to the an organization such as the EFF may focus your resources on a particular issue such as free speech, but those organizations are generally smaller and have less extensive contacts among the politicians, so there are tradeoffs even there.
As usual, several areas of math that are widely considered "pure" rather than "applied" turn out to have real world implications. The relationship of something as apparently trivial as folding paper to compressing and encoding data is a remarkable example of isomorphism in itself, beyond that:
If you're funding education or pure research, you never know when something will unexpectedly prove useful, or even valuable.
If you're the NSA, the RIAA, or any regulator you never know when or where the djinni will get out of the bottle.
(Insert pithy saying about chinese ideograms for danger and opportunity being isomorphic)
Many people here on slashdot don't like the ACLU's stand on gun control legislation. You know what? - that's 1 amendment out of 10. If you look at how many laws are being passed or proposed, the odds are probably even better, as we haven't seen nearly 1 gun control law for every 10 that threaten the 9th and 10th amendments, and some of the worst legislation has mostly impacted the 1st, and sometimes the 5th.
Plus, which is more likely to work?
1. Supporting something that thinks it has an obligation to all people, even non-citizens, and that you are probably in 80-90% agreement with, and writing letters to try and convince them to change their policy on the other 10-20%,
or
2. writing those same letters to a congressman who sees things differently than you at least half the time and probably ignores everything from outside his or her district anyway.
Just like you can be compelled to give fingerprints, hair samples, and such if you are actually charged with a crime. Your own fingers, voiceprint, or secretions can testify against you, and that doesn't violate the 5th.
It's up to juries to decide most of the limitations on this. One of the reasons OJ got off was the jury was told by prosecution both that repeated requests for more hair samples after a first sample didn't match anything were justified, and that seeking larger numbers of hairs in each sample would not change the odds of a match. Another jury decided to throw out a case on learning that the prosecution had demanded a semen sample from a man charged only with accounting fraud. Get a dumb jury, and there goes even that protection.
It's the Centauri Hair thing, right?
The Star Trek franchise is one of the worst on this issue. For example, looking at the back of the paperbacks reveals even the term USS Enterprise is TM'ed. I know it's pretty fundamental to the series, but it's so far from distinctive unless you at least spell out what the USS stands for. Fortunately Trademark law isn't going to let them sue the US Navy or NASA successfully.
Putting it back in the context of the main discussion, isn't all this TM'ing a sign that the series is solidly NOT in the hands of people who will do it right? Why expect them to play fair with somebody like JMS even if he (or some other writer) could save their bacon, or listen to the fans, or show any respect for the taste of the general public? They're already showing they put much more emphasis on protecting their property than developing it.
I don't really think anything like this will be accepted by enough people to become widespread enough to be seriously useful, but for the sake of arguement, let's assume it will, and someone with big money wants to implement it immediately, and solutions can quickly be found to such problems as where to store all the info on users (it can't be on the individual user's machine, obviously, as the worst offenders will never get around to downloading the patch or upgrade needed, and yet the scoring system is going to have to trigger something or someone reaching into clueless machines and turn on firewall software and such.).
In that case, there's still one thing needed. The value has to decrement under certain conditions, e.g. every month the user goes without a new virus, reduce the count by 1. Nearly all social control systems need something like this, and what you're describing IS a social control system.
I can't make you a list of universally trustworthy entities using that criteria checklist you suggest, but then, I can't make you a list of funny commedians, good authors, or healthy breakfasts using those same limits either. In fact, I can only think of one list that can fit your criteria and still have more than zero entries: Safe answers to "Do these jeans make me look fat?"
For trivia buffs: The reason aluminum foil has a shiny side and a flatter side is that it is rolled into shape. The process involves passing what starts as an ingot through many sets of rollers, each set spaced closer together than the last. When the rollers get very close, they tend to flatten out against each other and jam. Someone had the bright idea to fold two sheets together and run them both through the last set of rollers at once, then peel them apart. Thes lets the last set of rollers be spaced as far apart as the next-to-last set. Nowdays, it is likely that precision controllers and better manufacturing tolerances would let us make aluminum foil with both sides shiny, but why bother?
Don't get me started about Oreo cookies and what the little points are for.
Good point. So maybe we should be trying to spread Linux and such just as fast as they can acquire an educated userbase, and not as fast as they might spread if they become as simple to install and use as MS Windows. Now where were all those posters bemoaning how Free Software Hackers don't like to work on some of those projects that would help FreeBSD/Linux/BeOS/whatever get a bigger userbase?
One of the things holding this back in the middle east is the massive ammount of power needed to desalinate that much sea water. Initial designs for such systems assumed Nuclear power would be used. A lot of other governments would prefer it if that power came from non-nuclear sources, at least for Palestine, Libya, Iran, and Syria, and Iraq until it settles down (yeah, right). So poverty in the area limits people's options directly - "We can't afford a 200 Mw power plant!", and indirectly - "... and you wouldn't trust us with it anyway.".
Popularity is a factor, but it's far from the only one. FreeBSD isn't very popular, but it is still essentially a UNIX. UNIX based systems include some very high profile targets, like banks and mega-corporations. Even if there are a lot fewer script kiddees trying to target FreeBSD, there are some very skilled pros trying to steal literally millions of dollars via UNIX exploits. Yet somehow there aren't nearly as many exploits out there.
If popularity is behind Microsoft's history of vulnerability, then there aren't any black hats above the level of the ones who brag to their friends about their L33T'ness and do lame ass social engineering exploits.
All this speculation about really malicious viruses, designed to cause billions in damage and act as weapons in unconventional warfare, all the stories of black hats professional not to brag to their high school friends, and of ones in it for serious money are just hot air. There will never be a Warhol worm, a terrorist cell committing a computer crime, or any retired black hats owning their own tropical islands. It's all just pimply faced nerds driven by the desire to kill some time picking on the most popular OS while they wait for their photoshopped images of Natalie Portman's head on someone else's body to download.
Or, just maybe, there are some real badasses out there, but UNIX's security model is actually better than Windows.
Bookmark the site, set up a counter to remind me to visit again in N days, then download after the slashdot croud has thinned out. I could tell you my formula for incrementing the delay counter, but then it would become worthless.
There's plenty of places we can practice. What happens if we pump desalinated seawater into Death Valley USA? How could we establish a timetable for re-shaping Mars when we don't really know much time it would take the Brazilian rain forest to reclaim the land at its current fringes if it started being protected now?
If we're betting we can establish new species on Mars, wouldn't it make sense to first restablish some more Earthly species in ranges we have wiped them from right here? A hundred or so years ago, we failed in attempts to reestablish the Passenger Pigeon to the wild or keep it alive in zoos. We've just now gotten pretty good with the American Buffalo, and results on the Eastern Red Wolf and the Giant Panda are still mixed at best. Looking at the endangered species list, I'd say until things come off of it (in a positive direction only) at least as fast as they go on, we are not ready for Mars.
Of course the early Spanish and such knew that European diseases could be fatal to the "Indians". But, they didn't have a germ theory of disease or other modern explanations, and they didn't know about immunity mechanisms at all. They were genuinely surprised to see diseases that had a relatively small mortality rate in Europe, or that generally took months to kill, spread so fast among the indiginous peoples, and often kill within a day or two. This is confirmed by the many letters and messages they wrote relating how remarkable it was. Most of these were sent by Roman Catholic monks, who it appears often genuinely tried to help, but by gathering Native Americans into crowded conditions usually made things worse.
The Bio-warfare attacks with smallpox laden blankets and such generally happened in the 1700's to 1750's, not the 1500's. Those people's ethics probably weren't any better than the Conquistadores, but they understood a bit more about the technical end of handleing Smallpox and other diseases. One of the most notable of these was Lord Amherst's decision to distribute blankets known to be full of smallpox, an attack which he justified in his letters and memoirs on Biblical grounds, although the second most well documented use of smallpox was at the order of a mercenary garrison commander near what is now Chicago ILL, who was a freethinker and justified it on the grounds of European racial superiority. While these two attacks are the only ones with extensive documentation made at the time by the chief perpetrators, it seems probably that there were more, ranging from a low estimate of about 10 to more than 100 depending on the historian's best guess.
The historical trend is to define "worthy of preservation" more broadly, at least in western culture. Not only have we seen a general repugnance against racism and euginecism develop that would probably surprise the hell out of our bloody minded ancestors, but there have even been words such as speciesist introduced to extend that repugnance to at least the abuse of the higher animals. Of course, these are far from universal.
If you think of it as us taking territory from bacteria, it sounds oh-so-hypersensitive and politically uber-correct to think we should care, but if you think of it as though there must be a minimum value to any whole, complete ecology, even one made up entirely of simple life forms, it makes more sense.
If Mars even has bacteria, and it turns out there is nothing exceptional about them, we will probably terraform the planet eventually. But the first thing we should conclude on finding a bacterium not native to our own world is not that Mars has nothing but bacteria, but that it has an ecoystem, and the only other example of an ecosystem we know is a complex and marvelous thing indeed.
It's scary you think I think that. We really should talk about reading comprehension.
It's easy to say selective enforcement is a travesty, but what was it used for in the first example? Is stopping a defendant in a civil suit from making false claims and imposing all the burdens of those claims on innocent people previously uninvolved in the suit a travesty? Really? I agreed that it would have been better not to use selective enforcement in that case, but would it have been better to have done nothing?
And what's this "sodomy laws, if selectively enforced would be applicable to everyone"? One of the points of condemnation about sodomy laws is that they are often selectively enforced just aginst the homosexual minority. Applyng them to everyone is UN-selective enforcement. To the best of my knowledge, not a single state has overturned its old sodomy laws because they were being abused re. heterosexuals, but precisely because they weren't.
The real point is, you don't have an answer to the core topic of this thread, which was originally about Hate Speech laws. What sort of law should the EU (or the USA) have, that presumably isn't open to so much selective enforcement? If the hate speech law has some practical use, such as stopping some organization from falsely claiming to be non-profit in an effort to make it tougher to prove Libel or Fraud, then I agree likely it would be better to overturn the precident that lets them exploit the system than to use a law that is subject to such selective enforcement. Now what's the mistaken precident, one of (or maybe both) the ones contained in the definitions of non-profit vrs. commercial, or the one that recognizes more limits on commercial speech?