Same reason everyone uses *zilla to describe something big. Its part of modern culture.
Watergate was a huge scandal that, IIRCC, started with a low key investigation by a reporter into a burglary at the Watergate building that also happened to house an office of the Democratic party. It started small and ended up with a US President being forced to resign in order to avoid being impeached. Until that time most Americans trusted the government to follow the laws of the land.
Same thing has happened in regards to the antennae issues of the iPhone, it started with a few comments and has mushroomed into a real mess.
And please, anyone who wants to correct/amend my recollection of Watergate please do, I am feeling to lazy to Google it at the moment.
Please note that I did not say anything about restricting the ownership of guns or their use, only weather a person can carry them in public places.
I am a firm believer in the Second Amendment. I think that, except in cases of someone who is a danger to society (violent felons, psychotics, etc.), anyone should be able to own as many guns as they want and use them as they wish on private land or at public gun ranges. The only place I think there should be any regulation is in who can carry, open or concealed, in public places where the use of a gun would be a danger to the public. In my mind the concept of requiring a permit is the same as requiring a drivers license.
A DL does not prevent you from owning a car or operating it on private land, it only restricts your ability to use it on public roads where an unlicensed driver would pose a threat to others. The purpose of a drivers license is to safeguard the public by ensuring that anyone driving on the roads with everyone else has shown a minimum level of competency. The same should apply to carrying a gun.
I know personally of a case where a person failed a Police firearms course when he not only failed to safe a pistol but managed to discharge it (thankfully it was pointing down range). This was a person who had been shown less than 5 minutes before exactly what to do and he still managed to fuck it up. If he had screwed up again in a public place someone could have been killed. And his performance in the course went down hill from there. If I knew that that idiot was allowed to carry a gun in public I would fear for the safety of those around him. I would however defend his right to own a gun, and use it in designated locations. And nothing prevented him from trying to pass the course again, for as many time as it took for him to pass.
I would prefer that the need for any sort of permit/regulation on the carrying of a gun would be unnecessary, but this is one of those times when the safety of the public should take precedent. As you say, most would train up, but lets face it, some people are idiots who would never be able to handle a gun safely. Those are the ones who would be prevented from carrying, but not owning, a gun.
We can hope that this ruling will make some progress towards requiring a warrant to get GPS/location information from anyone. And once that requirement is in place it might only be a short time before someone sues their cell company for invading their privacy by giving their location without due process.
New technology always leads to new laws or reinterpretations of existing laws to narrow or widen their scope to include the abilities of that new tech.. We can only hope that in regards to any information concerning a persons location or communications the courts will uphold interpretations that expand protections of personal privacy rather than diminish it.
To anyone who would trot out the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument I would ask that you included your cell phone #, name, credit card # (including CVN & expr date) and its billing address in your comment. After all, you have nothing you want to hide, right?
I think there are two other factors to consider as well that make GPS tracking bad.
A GPS would be able to track you while on private property, a ranch maybe, a couple of agents couldn't do that so in such a case a GPS is more invasive of a person privacy.
Another factor is if someone else drove the car that had the GPS attached, they would be tracked even though they are not "a person of interest". This would be problematic if you tried to use a GPS track of someones car to place a specific person at a location at any time.
In regards to Police, in their minds EVERYONE is guilty of something and its their job to catch you, and they feel its alright to use every trick in the book to get you to say something they can use against you.
Remember its "Anything you say can and will be used used against you".
I consider marksmanship to be part of any basic course and didn't think it needed to be mentioned explicitly, my bad. If someone can't hit a target they should not have a weapon no mater how well they do on the exams. Just like a drivers test, a person may be able to pass the written exam and drivers ed class with perfect scores but still not be someone you want behind the wheel of a car.
There would still be factors like fear, rapid breathing, poor light, etc. that would affect a person ability to hit center mass, but the same factors apply to even trained police to an extent.
I would also like to add that the test/(re)certification should be annual, maybe even bi-annual depending on time required.
So, did you handle your second ethics dilemma any differently?
Not trying to preach and I understand that sometimes it comes down to "keep silent==eat/pay rent" but even an anonymous tip to the right people might have helped, maybe not in that case but the next time something like that happened involving that lead someone with some clout might have gone "Hang on a sec".
"The greatest Evil is when the Good do nothing." May be simplistic but its a good place to start.
I would advocate allowing both open and concealed carry.
If only open carry is allowed those who choose not to carry, or are not allowed, would be easy to spot and become preferred targets of muggers, etc.. By also allowing concealed carry there would always be the deterrent factor to a mugger that even though their potential victim was not openly armed they might still be carrying.
I would also advocate that no one be issued a permit of any kind without first passing a weapons safety course and displaying an understanding of not only how to fire a gun but the laws regulating when you can/can not use it and the legal responsibilities involved.
Anyone can use a gun, being able to use one effectively is another matter entirely and their are some people who flat out should not handle a gun because they are a danger to not just those around them but to themselves as well.
it can also send emails or SMS messages and execute a script/command when it detects motion.
A little parallel/serial port programing and you could have it activate an alarm, call the police, energize the grid under the carpet with 50,000 volts, etc..
Motion is a great little program available in the Debian repositories and works with any Video4Linux supported device (off the shelf USB web cams and video capture cards).
I've used it a few times, easy to install and configure.
It can do time lapse, motion sense and round robin on multiple devices. Even supports a streaming function with Apache and can upload the latest image to a remote FTP server on the Internet.
Doesn't need much as far as hardware either, one of the systems I set up was a 450MHz celeron with 128M RAM. Over all the hardest part of using it was hiding the camera.
A few things;
First, there are pedophiles who have never actually done anything other than collect photographs of children in both suggestive poses and sexual situations that other pedophiles have made available. They may not have access to children or the photos may be enough and they never go beyond that.
Second, I would highly recomend that you watch "Witch Hunt", its about a flurry of child molestation cases in Bakersfield CA. It is both tragic and interesting when you see how "protect the children" is over used and hurts innocent people.
Third, the issues raised by the images that these full body scanners goes way beyond child porn. Looking back at my comment I realize that I used the "Think of the Children" card to a limited degree when my intent was to highlight how the images can be misused in general.
The thing is that its not the image that matters, its how it is seen and interpreted by the mind of the viewer. Even a fuzzy black and white scanner image could be enough for someone to get their jollies, or deeply offend them. Consider that a man has been sentenced to 20 years for possession of "child porn" in Iowa,Link, only thing is the images were all drawings, Manga. Got a copy of "Evangelion, Life, Death, Rebirth" in your video collection? The Hospital scene with Asuka topless would get you jail time in some jurisdictions. It wasn't the content of the images that caused the trouble, it was how it was, and is, interpreted and presented to the jury/press.
As soon as one scanner image of a child is found on a pedophiles computer the way those images are interpreted and responded to will alter radically against the scanners, might even be a good thing.
I wonder how many of those ~35,000 images are of people under the age of 18.
Its just a matter of time before some images of children from these perv-scanners end up on some pedos computer.
I for one am going to start wearing shielded undergarments. I'm fine with being strip searched, I'll just keep up a running dialog asking the TSA reps if there getting off on it. I expect I'll end up on the No-Fly list.
I'm not taking about a blank CD/DVD-R. I'm talking about the one you have to buy from the dealer if you didn't burn a reset disc when you first fired your system up.
if your Network Admin knows nothing about network admin.
Or doesn't know anything about how to lock down a network. Last place I worked had so many holes in the firewall when I took over it made chicken wire look like a brick wall.
I barely notice them, just long enough to hit "skip to next".
It is one of the many advantages of using Linux I really like.
I mean come on, I paid for a movie on DVD and they expect me sit and watch a "Coming soon to DVD" previews for movies that hit the DVD budget bin years ago?
Having to sit through adds at the theater is bad enough.
Your job may be over but you are still bound by the NDA you signed and if said NDA states "Tho shall not give out the password to those not authorized to have it." and your contract said only the Mayor is authorized to ask for the password your kind of stuck.
That, or something like it, was what I heard was the case with Childs. Whether it is accurate I don't know, and I don't care. I lost any real interest in this case long ago.
Agreement on the opinion of/., recently it seems to have lost it's Mojo.
I like the MS icon. It recalls the days when MS really was something to worry about and is way better than one of Balmer photoshoped to look like Bozo the Clown, which would be my choice.
To describe MS's current managment as "the three stooges after a weekend bender." is overrating MS's managment and insulting the three stooges. The Stoogies were way more innovative.
The fact that "anybody had access" does not give Verizon the right (unless there is something in the TOS/LA not mentioned in TFA) to mess with hardware not owned by them.
As I understand your comment your saying that it would be all right for me to enter your home and replace all the locks with better ones because the old ones were easy to pick. I would be doing you a favor by improving the security on your possessions but I think you would still be kind of ticked if I wasn't your landlord. And a landlord has to give you notice before doing something like that, at least in the jurisdiction I live in.
Zombie systems cause trouble for other people, like your neighbor who blasts music at 2:00am.
A router with a weak password only puts that network at risk, until the systems behind it get pwnd and become spambots. The guy was careless and stupid for having such a weak password. Verizon was arrogant and intrusive in how they helped.
I think his concern is that Verizon was able to change it from the outside.
That he left it with such a weak password is beside the point. The routers I've worked with will not allow administration level access over the outside port or wireless connection unless explicitly allowed by the admin, so Verizon being able to do just that should raise a few questions.
He owns the router, right, and yet Verizon thought they had the right to log in and change his password.
Makes me wonder if they have a firmware coded backdoor/admin password into the router.
Slashdot Mirror
If Watergate was a simulation then it begs the question of what a real scandal would be, and whether there has been a real one in our lifetimes.
Thank you for the book recommendation, I'll check the library for it Monday. It sounds like it might be an interesting read.
LOL
Perhaps they are rendered speechless by it's *zillaishness
Same reason everyone uses *zilla to describe something big. Its part of modern culture.
Watergate was a huge scandal that, IIRCC, started with a low key investigation by a reporter into a burglary at the Watergate building that also happened to house an office of the Democratic party. It started small and ended up with a US President being forced to resign in order to avoid being impeached. Until that time most Americans trusted the government to follow the laws of the land.
Same thing has happened in regards to the antennae issues of the iPhone, it started with a few comments and has mushroomed into a real mess.
And please, anyone who wants to correct/amend my recollection of Watergate please do, I am feeling to lazy to Google it at the moment.
Please note that I did not say anything about restricting the ownership of guns or their use, only weather a person can carry them in public places.
I am a firm believer in the Second Amendment. I think that, except in cases of someone who is a danger to society (violent felons, psychotics, etc.), anyone should be able to own as many guns as they want and use them as they wish on private land or at public gun ranges. The only place I think there should be any regulation is in who can carry, open or concealed, in public places where the use of a gun would be a danger to the public. In my mind the concept of requiring a permit is the same as requiring a drivers license.
A DL does not prevent you from owning a car or operating it on private land, it only restricts your ability to use it on public roads where an unlicensed driver would pose a threat to others. The purpose of a drivers license is to safeguard the public by ensuring that anyone driving on the roads with everyone else has shown a minimum level of competency. The same should apply to carrying a gun.
I know personally of a case where a person failed a Police firearms course when he not only failed to safe a pistol but managed to discharge it (thankfully it was pointing down range). This was a person who had been shown less than 5 minutes before exactly what to do and he still managed to fuck it up. If he had screwed up again in a public place someone could have been killed. And his performance in the course went down hill from there. If I knew that that idiot was allowed to carry a gun in public I would fear for the safety of those around him. I would however defend his right to own a gun, and use it in designated locations. And nothing prevented him from trying to pass the course again, for as many time as it took for him to pass.
I would prefer that the need for any sort of permit/regulation on the carrying of a gun would be unnecessary, but this is one of those times when the safety of the public should take precedent. As you say, most would train up, but lets face it, some people are idiots who would never be able to handle a gun safely. Those are the ones who would be prevented from carrying, but not owning, a gun.
Thanks for the feed back.
Cell phones. Many have GPS capabilities.
You make an excellent point.
We can hope that this ruling will make some progress towards requiring a warrant to get GPS/location information from anyone. And once that requirement is in place it might only be a short time before someone sues their cell company for invading their privacy by giving their location without due process.
New technology always leads to new laws or reinterpretations of existing laws to narrow or widen their scope to include the abilities of that new tech.. We can only hope that in regards to any information concerning a persons location or communications the courts will uphold interpretations that expand protections of personal privacy rather than diminish it.
To anyone who would trot out the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument I would ask that you included your cell phone #, name, credit card # (including CVN & expr date) and its billing address in your comment. After all, you have nothing you want to hide, right?
I think there are two other factors to consider as well that make GPS tracking bad.
A GPS would be able to track you while on private property, a ranch maybe, a couple of agents couldn't do that so in such a case a GPS is more invasive of a person privacy.
Another factor is if someone else drove the car that had the GPS attached, they would be tracked even though they are not "a person of interest". This would be problematic if you tried to use a GPS track of someones car to place a specific person at a location at any time.
In regards to Police, in their minds EVERYONE is guilty of something and its their job to catch you, and they feel its alright to use every trick in the book to get you to say something they can use against you.
Remember its "Anything you say can and will be used used against you".
Interesting to Watch.
I consider marksmanship to be part of any basic course and didn't think it needed to be mentioned explicitly, my bad. If someone can't hit a target they should not have a weapon no mater how well they do on the exams. Just like a drivers test, a person may be able to pass the written exam and drivers ed class with perfect scores but still not be someone you want behind the wheel of a car.
There would still be factors like fear, rapid breathing, poor light, etc. that would affect a person ability to hit center mass, but the same factors apply to even trained police to an extent.
I would also like to add that the test/(re)certification should be annual, maybe even bi-annual depending on time required.
So, did you handle your second ethics dilemma any differently?
Not trying to preach and I understand that sometimes it comes down to "keep silent==eat/pay rent" but even an anonymous tip to the right people might have helped, maybe not in that case but the next time something like that happened involving that lead someone with some clout might have gone "Hang on a sec".
"The greatest Evil is when the Good do nothing." May be simplistic but its a good place to start.
I would advocate allowing both open and concealed carry.
If only open carry is allowed those who choose not to carry, or are not allowed, would be easy to spot and become preferred targets of muggers, etc.. By also allowing concealed carry there would always be the deterrent factor to a mugger that even though their potential victim was not openly armed they might still be carrying.
I would also advocate that no one be issued a permit of any kind without first passing a weapons safety course and displaying an understanding of not only how to fire a gun but the laws regulating when you can/can not use it and the legal responsibilities involved.
Anyone can use a gun, being able to use one effectively is another matter entirely and their are some people who flat out should not handle a gun because they are a danger to not just those around them but to themselves as well.
it can also send emails or SMS messages and execute a script/command when it detects motion.
A little parallel/serial port programing and you could have it activate an alarm, call the police, energize the grid under the carpet with 50,000 volts, etc..
Motion is a great little program available in the Debian repositories and works with any Video4Linux supported device (off the shelf USB web cams and video capture cards).
I've used it a few times, easy to install and configure.
It can do time lapse, motion sense and round robin on multiple devices. Even supports a streaming function with Apache and can upload the latest image to a remote FTP server on the Internet.
Doesn't need much as far as hardware either, one of the systems I set up was a 450MHz celeron with 128M RAM. Over all the hardest part of using it was hiding the camera.
And best of all, Its free!!
its funny.
Line 1; question
line 2; observation
line 3; statement of personal intent
my post was simple enough and yet there is a break down in communications between it and this post. Seems to be typical of Slashdot lately.
prediction; you'll reply to have the last word, either way it doesn't mater.
A few things; First, there are pedophiles who have never actually done anything other than collect photographs of children in both suggestive poses and sexual situations that other pedophiles have made available. They may not have access to children or the photos may be enough and they never go beyond that.
Second, I would highly recomend that you watch "Witch Hunt", its about a flurry of child molestation cases in Bakersfield CA. It is both tragic and interesting when you see how "protect the children" is over used and hurts innocent people.
Third, the issues raised by the images that these full body scanners goes way beyond child porn. Looking back at my comment I realize that I used the "Think of the Children" card to a limited degree when my intent was to highlight how the images can be misused in general.
The thing is that its not the image that matters, its how it is seen and interpreted by the mind of the viewer. Even a fuzzy black and white scanner image could be enough for someone to get their jollies, or deeply offend them. Consider that a man has been sentenced to 20 years for possession of "child porn" in Iowa,Link, only thing is the images were all drawings, Manga. Got a copy of "Evangelion, Life, Death, Rebirth" in your video collection? The Hospital scene with Asuka topless would get you jail time in some jurisdictions. It wasn't the content of the images that caused the trouble, it was how it was, and is, interpreted and presented to the jury/press.
As soon as one scanner image of a child is found on a pedophiles computer the way those images are interpreted and responded to will alter radically against the scanners, might even be a good thing.
With matching carry bag for the family jewels.
IIRCC you don't have a choice in the UK, its scan or you don't fly.
I wonder how many of those ~35,000 images are of people under the age of 18.
Its just a matter of time before some images of children from these perv-scanners end up on some pedos computer.
I for one am going to start wearing shielded undergarments. I'm fine with being strip searched, I'll just keep up a running dialog asking the TSA reps if there getting off on it. I expect I'll end up on the No-Fly list.
Just to clarify.
I'm not taking about a blank CD/DVD-R. I'm talking about the one you have to buy from the dealer if you didn't burn a reset disc when you first fired your system up.
For some people the answer to that is a big "Yes".
.
if your Network Admin knows nothing about network admin.
Or doesn't know anything about how to lock down a network. Last place I worked had so many holes in the firewall when I took over it made chicken wire look like a brick wall.
I barely notice them, just long enough to hit "skip to next".
It is one of the many advantages of using Linux I really like.
I mean come on, I paid for a movie on DVD and they expect me sit and watch a "Coming soon to DVD" previews for movies that hit the DVD budget bin years ago?
Having to sit through adds at the theater is bad enough.
Damn!! I just paid rent this morning!
Your job may be over but you are still bound by the NDA you signed and if said NDA states "Tho shall not give out the password to those not authorized to have it." and your contract said only the Mayor is authorized to ask for the password your kind of stuck.
That, or something like it, was what I heard was the case with Childs. Whether it is accurate I don't know, and I don't care. I lost any real interest in this case long ago.
Agreement on the opinion of /., recently it seems to have lost it's Mojo.
I like the MS icon. It recalls the days when MS really was something to worry about and is way better than one of Balmer photoshoped to look like Bozo the Clown, which would be my choice.
To describe MS's current managment as "the three stooges after a weekend bender." is overrating MS's managment and insulting the three stooges. The Stoogies were way more innovative.
Apples and Oranges.
The fact that "anybody had access" does not give Verizon the right (unless there is something in the TOS/LA not mentioned in TFA) to mess with hardware not owned by them.
As I understand your comment your saying that it would be all right for me to enter your home and replace all the locks with better ones because the old ones were easy to pick. I would be doing you a favor by improving the security on your possessions but I think you would still be kind of ticked if I wasn't your landlord. And a landlord has to give you notice before doing something like that, at least in the jurisdiction I live in.
Zombie systems cause trouble for other people, like your neighbor who blasts music at 2:00am.
A router with a weak password only puts that network at risk, until the systems behind it get pwnd and become spambots. The guy was careless and stupid for having such a weak password. Verizon was arrogant and intrusive in how they helped.
I think his concern is that Verizon was able to change it from the outside.
That he left it with such a weak password is beside the point. The routers I've worked with will not allow administration level access over the outside port or wireless connection unless explicitly allowed by the admin, so Verizon being able to do just that should raise a few questions.
He owns the router, right, and yet Verizon thought they had the right to log in and change his password.
Makes me wonder if they have a firmware coded backdoor/admin password into the router.