I owned (and had read) first editions of all five (or four and a half) of his novels before the first story about him, so I don't think that he's that obscure. There are plenty of more popular authors whose books aren't as good. And now, because of a felony "non-compliance" conviction, he will be unable to enter the United States again. That's quite a hefty punishment for getting out of your car at a border checkpoint (especially with a superfluous beatdown in the bargain). Is that the result of a "good" law? You might see him at WorldCon 2010, but he'll be SOL if he wins a Hugo in 2011 (Nevada). A felony conviction will fuck over an American citizen.
Most importantly (for slashdot), he has released all of his novels and a number of shorts for free on the web under a Creative Commons license. That makes him as slashdot-worthy as Hans Reiser.
I find it incredibly unlikely that kids would go to this camp at the expense of some sort of athletic opportunity. That said, what recommends a camp where kids play games on mainstream game systems? I call that singularly uninspired. How does the "camp" aspect even improve the experience? I guess it lets you play non-networked multiplayer console games without friends...and you get to interview video game developers on a field trip ("it would be the best job in the world if only I made money, too..."). The rest of the time, though, there is a serious dearth of novel experience.
Before high school, I had attended summer day camps with the theme of model rocketry and (once) taxidermy (We dissected and stuffed roadkill squirrels. I recall now that I had convinced my fifth-grade classmate--the son of an ENT surgeon!--to come along, but unfortunately taxidermy camp may not be for everyone; he was unable to continue). I also went to week-long Huntsville Space Camp (which was surprisingly banal--the best part was probably playing "Lander" and the shuttle landing simulator in the space museum) and Boy Scout summer camp (hellish, unlike other recreational camping--I've never had so many bug bites in my life, to say nothing of the primitive sanitation facilities). The only one of those that involved any exercise was BSA camp, and (imho) we don't need more of that.
My last camp was actually after the ninth grade (I think); it was one-week Policy Debate (my "sport" then) camp at Indiana University. This cleverly combined critical intellectual activity (policy research & debate) with exercise in the great outdoors (attendees had to walk from the dorm to the library, after all). Oddly enough that camp influenced my life considerably for ten years at least: I read my roommate's copy of Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) and Virtual Light (William Gibson). I know now that he (a guy named Mark, I think...) was a fan of cyber-punk. Unfortunately, I have never had any sort of memory for proper nouns or numbers, so it was not until my first year of college that I finally found a copy of Snow Crash in a B&N, remembered the title and author, and read the rest of Stephenson's books, followed by most of the "great" works of science fiction (and quite a few that were not so great). Around the same time I switched majors from Electrical Engineering to...Computer Science. I still love debating--and reading about!--policy, too. Most of my posts get a lot more research than this one, I promise. I could certainly argue that that experience was a summer camp success. At the very least it was more convivial than BSA camp. The IU program doesn't appear to be extant, but I'm sure sending your children to Stanford's summer program would be more effective anyway.
If people want to bitch about the summer camps that children are sent to, why not bitch about the lack of critical thinking at camps. Even at NASA space camp, you won't find much critical thinking (or novelty, or fun...damn you, NASA!). Maybe "Space Academy" or "Advanced Space Academy" is more fun (when I was there I'm pretty sure they just had "Aviation Challenge," for which I was too young), but waiting until kids are into high school (or college: awkward) to offer interesting, creative and intellectual activity seems to risk being too late altogether.
I (tearfully) deleted around 400 words about my modest (but awesome) proposal for spelunking summer camp (or corporate team building exercise). I just couldn't imagine the average (or the uncommon)/. reader plowing through it. Suffice it so say that it combined exercise (belly-crawl through muddy half-submerged caves), fun (belly-crawl through muddy half-submerged caves), and education (studying geology and applying it to explain cave formations found on aforementioned belly-crawls) with motivation (abandoning campers/clients who fail to successfully apply geology to cave formations). The only aspect I hadn't quite worked out yet was liability, but maybe there are some good caves in Somalia...
In the theater, instead of DRM gone awry you had hundreds of operators trying to get their chosen brands of 3-D systems to work correctly. There were various levels of success. I watched it on RealD and (mini) iMax--for the sake of science!--and it was out of focus the entire time with iMax (though interestingly one out of the two people I sat next two claimed that it was totally in focus). I wouldn't see any point in viewing it at home without 3-D technology, but by the time home releases support that (and I buy a Sony "shutter glasses" 3D TV) there'll be a movie with CGI as good as Avatar's and a decent plot as well that I can buy to demo it.
If this problem (mentioned in TFS) is really in the DRM, then it is unlikely to affect DVDs, which still use CSS. Key revocation is possible (apparently) with CSS, but the majority of DVD players don't support constant key updates over the internet so it is not used.
The "story" (Yahoo entertainment "journalism") doesn't mention DVDs at all, and instead speculates that the people affected did not download the latest updates to their firmware to get non-revoked keys (the centerpiece of the AACS system!). If you bought a blu-ray player not knowing that...you deserve everything you get.
The guy in TFA claims to have three BD players, two of which are standalone. Even if his standalone players aren't connected (or have never been subject to a device revocation before), surely his computer software will update itself. Perhaps he's putting in it upside-down...
The only information I could find about problems with the DVD was a Y! Answers thread indicating that "layer lag" may occur in scene 18 (with crappy DVD players, presumably).
There is no new news in this article whatsoever; it serves only as an excuse for everyone to bitch about AACS (again).
That's really not fair. Were you going to watch it for the plot? All it had to offer was technological innovation in film making, something which it certainly did not steal from earlier movies.
To be fair, I'm sure Obama has never posted to his "own" Twitter page (I remember a published statement to that effect about his Facebook account, at least). It is actually some minor staffer who is the guilty party here: Obama is maybe only transitively guilty for trusting Rahm Emmanuel, who trusted the staffer (or the staffer's immediate boss). That stands in contrast to Sarah Palin's personal email account and the personal Twitter accounts of the celebrities involved in the other incident, the obvious passwords of which reflect much more directly on the intelligence (or lack thereof) of the account owners.
This is why I never seriously answer password reminder questions. Unfortunately there seem to be two uses: the first, where it is used in lieu of a valid email address to reset a password, and the second, where (mostly) banks decide that asking for what amounts to two passwords constitutes "two factor" authentication. Both methods have little upside (for the user) if the questions are answered with personal information.
Or (even accepting arbitrary human classifications), only one: it fell in the Panthalassa.
I'm not a panspermian, but consider what will happen if humanity is currently the only intelligent life in this galaxy or even small area of the galaxy. In a thousand years (if the computers don't exterminate the meatbags and/or have an interest in planets), most planets (in this area) will have received (organic) life from outer space. Personally, I have no desire to colonize other (uninhabited) planets, and would be perfectly happy just to live in solar space (around our sun or another, if it were possible), but I think it will be unlikely that all of humanity will agree with me on that. Even if they agree, they'll at least take a look, and it is notoriously difficult to eradicate bacterial (or archaean) spores in sterilization procedures (our hypothetical non-organic successors may have an easier time, though)...
Consider what would happen if someone seeds moderately Earthlike planets with primitive Earth lifeforms and then leaves it to mature for a billion years. The intelligent life that might evolve could turn into a bunch of unimaginative panspermians, or it could figure out how life could have arisen on its own planets (and did...probably...on Earth).
The TFS implication that (many) people are excited about this from a panspermia perspective is misleading. The thrust of TFA #1 is that it is more difficult for organic compounds to form on an asteroid. The thrust of TFA #2 is that scientists apparently wonder how the Earth came to be covered with water after a catastrophic collision formed the Moon and the surface was superheated. Apparently the water on this asteroid is more similar (in deuterium concentration? TFA is horribly misleading and vague) to the oceans than the water generally found in comets.
I leave you with Christian Science Monitor "science" reporting (not that it's worse than CNN, NYT, PhysOrg, etc.).
But the forms of hydrogen in water molecules bound in asteroids are a closer match to those found in seawater than are those found in water comets carry.
I eventually gave in and read TFA; they actually describe the winning algorithm...in the contest description. The contest was just to implement it (sort of). And (apparently) no one attempted to use the valid unicode characters as well. They just avoided them (like the contest bloggers) because they weren't sure that there wasn't some arbitrary string of characters that would mess up the message.
I suppose that the contest could continue on that basis alone: how many more bits can you encode by using the printable characters, without choking on arbitrary data? It is more likely that it will vanish in a poof of apathy instead, since no one bothered to do that this time.
You've caught me red-handed. I was investigating the controlling decisions on drunk driving checkpoints, and noticed the references to immigration checkpoints, producing that post. I had not yet got around to seriously reading SB1070 (along with the near entirety of the media, apparently), and so the cases I highlighted would indeed be largely irrelevant (though they do outline what constitutes "reasonable suspicion" that an individual is an illegal alien).
Now that I have studied the infamous paragraph, however (and the less infamous ones), the phrase lawful contact, seems intentionally ambiguous. In the Arizona seat belt law, it states that no one shall be stopped unless "the peace officer has reasonable cause to believe there is another alleged violation of a motor vehicle law of this state." A similar construction, only omitting the "motor vehicle law" phrase, could have been employed in SB1070 in the service of greater clarity.
It further seems like it would only be "practicable" to make a "reasonable attempt" to verify a person's immigration status pursuant to 8 U.S.C. 1373(c) if the person had already been arrested (for another cause). In that case, the effect of this law would only be to compel police officers to make an effort to enforce immigration laws on all the people already in the local lockup (a purpose explicitly borne out by language elsewhere in the law, e.g. in (2)(F)). But if that were the only intent of the law, why use such expansive language? The Arizona legislature certainly appears to be up to something, perhaps inviting the courts to let them get away with as much as the courts will allow, rather than trying to craft an inherently and rigorously constitutional law.
The discussion of this law has been widely hysterical and uninformed (and I was complicit), but I think there is still a reasonable argument to be made for a malign (well, unconstitutional) intent, albeit a more subtle and cautious one than has been generally claimed.
That reasoning applies only to driving, and the police still can't conduct a search, only speak (briefly) to the driver to determine sobriety. This is a result of the 6-3 (Stevens dissenting) Sitzdecision.
More relevant here is probably United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, in which the court held (7-2, Stevens concurring) that fixed traffic checkpoints for illegal immigrants on roads near the border were legal, as long as the search is limited to (again, brief) questioning. This law would go far beyond what the court allowed in Martinez-Fuerte. Also, the justification for those stops (that there was no time to gather more probable cause in heavy traffic) would not apply to this law at all.
Finally, in United States v. Ortiz, the court held (9-0) that random border patrol suspicionless traffic stops with searches were unconstitutional. Of course, Justice Rehnquist opines on how he feels that the flood of illegal aliens and drugs across the Mexican border makes quite a lot of searches "reasonable."
Still, between those decisions and the more recent Hiibel, I think the justices would have to be considerably more insane than usual to uphold the Arizona law in full, even without Stevens. They are always attuned to the emotional implications of law, especially when it amounts to "papers, please."
I think this article encapsulates the difference nicely. Cincinnati Police pulled over a black man for a traffic infraction, and tased his (black, female) passenger for no reason. The story would have ended there, except it turns out she was the daughter of a city councilman! Whoops! Even then, there was no "lawsuit lottery," however.
They also (of course) defensively charged her with an open container violation and obstruction.
The FOP claims it was justified. (Legally impotent) Chief Tom Streicher tells us that the officer was already fired for similar incidents, but they can't actually fire officers in Cincinnati, because the FOP controls the arbitration. This is nothing new; in 2001 the shooting of an unarmed (black) suspect spurred the Cincinnati Race Riots. Yeeehaw! They actually declared a curfew (for white people too--not that you could find any downtown--theater attendance was suffering already). In particular, read about the results of the lawsuit against the police, and then consider the current situation.
I'm not saying that legal action is futile, just that I think the situation is a little more complex than you are crediting. Also, are you seriously defending the Arizona law? The whole reason that it is so objectionable is that evidence of some crime is not required.
Read the article (I know, I know...); the juror leading the charge in this case was another sysadmin. It is no wonder that this happens: to determine criminal guilt, you must make a probabilistic judgment, based on unreliable evidence.
Research has revealed that judging probability accurately is extremely difficult for human. Beyond that, since all the evidence can be unreliable, there is really no place for reliable deductive logic. Whenever people come to an inductive conclusion, however, there is very little "logic" involved. The brain weights everything with emotion. When someone is experiencing depression or mania, things seems perfectly and absolutely logical that would seem totally absurd at another time. What someone believes at most times is not, therefore, "logical," it's just...normal.
If the defendant is extremely unsympathetic, it can be extremely difficult to deliberate independently of that fact.
The article doesn't mention what, if any, instructions the judge issued to the jury. He may have ruled on who constituted an "authorized user," and thus practically decided the case, since the facts were not really in dispute, only their interpretation. The jury could have still found "not guilty," of course (based on, say, whether there was any criminal intent), but why would they do so when it was so easy to return the guilty verdict that they wanted anyway?
This is the law, California Penal Code 502(c)(5), which he was charged with violating.
(c) Except as provided in subdivision (h), any person who commits
any of the following acts is guilty of a public offense: ...
(5) Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the
disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of
computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer
system, or computer network. ...
(h) (1) Subdivision (c) does not apply to punish any acts which
are committed by a person within the scope of his or her lawful
employment. For purposes of this section, a person acts within the
scope of his or her employment when he or she performs acts which are
reasonably necessary to the performance of his or her work
assignment.
So you see, it was actually extremely relevant whether the acts were "reasonably necessary" for his job. The jury had to decide if following the written policy in that case was "reasonable," but they thought (perhaps rightly) that Childs was a paranoid whackjob. I don't think there is any question that he thought it was reasonable, though. Depending on what the judge said about this, Childs may have grounds for appeal...assuming he can afford it now. Since he's already spent two years in jail, he may very well be sentenced to time served, which is going to make appeal even less...appealing.
Regardless of whether he is guilty or not, consider that he has now been jailed for two years for having a snit with his boss. Laws really do cover nearly anything; "computer crime" laws seems particularly heinous in this regard (e.g. "sexting," or felony prosecution for violating the MySpace EULA). We are all at the mercy of prosecutorial discretion. God help us (metaphorically, of course).
One juror, Jason Chilton, also a network engineer, said the law Childs was accused of breaking -- knowingly disrupting computer services or denying those services to an authorized user -- is "very specific," and though no services were actually disrupted, "he denied that access."
Chilton, however, said Childs' supervisors at the Department of Technology were also to blame. He said they "did everything wrong that they possibly could," citing "ineffective management and no formalized policies and procedures" for dealing with employees in such situations.
"If the city were on trial, they'd probably be guilty of a lot of stuff too," Chilton said.
Ultimately, Chilton said, Childs "didn't follow the law, which was the basic thing that it came down to."
Telling the police the passwords wouldn't have changed anything, the deed was already done when he was arrested. And I guess we can dismiss all the Slashdot "Well, if they selected technical people for juries," arguments as well. It sounds like Childs came across as such an asshole that the jury crucified him. It would hardly be the first time that happened.
Another juror, Amy Heine, said Childs seemed both egotistical and "paranoid."
"He was intelligent enough to know what he was doing, was heading in a very dangerous direction," she said.
Thankfully, the Senators can "tell" anyone anything they want, but no one has to listen. They're apparently asking the FTC to make rules, but if this isn't illegal already I don't think there is much the FTC can realistically do about it. They don't have magical extra-legal rulemaking authority, only that granted by existing legislation.
The Senators do have the authority to propose new legislation, but unfortunately Chuck Schumer is leading the charge in this case, so I guarantee it wouldn't be anything that a civil libertarian (or really, anyone whose top priority isn't Thinking of The Children) would want to see. This time there is probably no cause for alarm, since it is clear that he only wants to posture and make headlines, not actually do something.
If Facebook arbitrarily changes its privacy policy, and then doesn't give users a chance to opt out (by deleting their data in lieu of accepting the new policy), we already have a legal remedy for that. Lawsuits. Class-action lawsuits. Bring it on! Hell, this is just the sort of thing that would appeal to another headline-seeking, ambitious New York politician, AG Andrew Cuomo. His similarly ambitious, headline-grabbing predecessor, the now-former Governor Elliot Spitzer, obtained a settlement from AOL over making it exceedingly difficult to cancel its service. If a lawsuit isn't viable in this case, I can only believe that the users are indeed bringing it on themselves.
I'm no lawyer either, but if the warrant were entirely invalidated, then any evidence later procured as a result of the search would also be thrown out. Fruits of the poisoned tree, you know. Otherwise the Fourth Amendment would have no meaning.
As I have thought more about this, Apple has become increasingly unsympathetic to me. From reading the warrant, I think it is clear that the search was done at Apple's instigation, since it was issued to this group of special California "computer police" (REACT). An Apple employee loses their prototype, someone finds it, publishes, and returns it, and now Apple is going to punish everyone involved using the threat of criminal prosecution so that everyone else will be too frightened to ever do such a thing again. Is that really how we want things to work?
Even if it is all legal in California (based on this lost items law, which I'm sure no one had ever heard of until this happened), it's abundantly clear that Apple will pursue their interests as brutally as is legally possible, because they can (apparently) get away with it in the court of public opinion. Slashdot is overwhelmingly anti-RIAA/MPAA, but I think the RIAA and MPAA are on much firmer legal ground than Apple is here, and they are only pursuing lawsuits. The only argument against RIAA tactics is basically that piracy is abundant and they should accept that and work around it with new business models. No one is actually under the impression that downloading movies is legal. Here, we have the police enforcing a strict interpretation of obscure California criminal law on a journalist (of sorts) only because he embarrassed Apple by reporting on their next product. If I lost my phone in a bar, then ultimately had it returned to me a few weeks later, you can be sure that the police could not hang up on me fast enough if I claimed that the delay in its return constituted a theft.
I agree completely about the Section 1070 and PPA arguments; none of that would apply if Chen himself is being investigated for a felony, and they would certainly have probable cause to search for such evidence.
The United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing Inc. opinion is worth a read. The police seized all computer equipment on the premises, while the warrant in that case instructed them to make a reasonable effort to determine that it was pertinent to the investigation, and to undertake other safeguards, because of the legal requirements set forth in the 1982 Tamura opinion (apparently). None of those requirements were observed in this case, where the warrant specifically directs that every bit of electronic equipment be seized, and examined off-site for as long as the investigators deem necessary. Tamara may very well represent a valid legal challenge to this warrant.
There is, however, a major difference between the cases: CDT Inc. was not actually suspected of criminal wrongdoing. The EFF (or Matt Zimmerman) may be wrong about that as well. Still, Chen is only a suspect (maybe), and the warrant was ridiculously broad and punitive, so everyone should at least hope that a challenge on those grounds will be upheld.
We should also keep in mind that everyone involved may still get away totally clean, since after all they did return the device to Apple as soon as it was requested (and allegedly informed Apple before the sale and publication). There can be no receipt of stolen goods if no goods were stolen in the first place. While that is certainly closer to the law than I would like to tread and then publicly crow about, it is only the intervening financial transaction which muddies the waters (and put off other more cautious potential takers like Wired). If everything had occurred just like it did, except without the payoff to the original finder, then we would just have the REACT police harassing and punishing those who reported on Apple's breach of their own secrecy, and that would seem unjust indeed.
I agree that everyone involved in this business is a complete moron, since they apparently thought that they would get away with receiving stolen property, fencing it, etc. In their defense, they cite a law that pertains to publishing information from confidential sources. Good luck with that.
The warrant is still interesting though; in these electronic times, the police will take all your computers, hard drives, phones, cameras, and routers, because there "might" be relevant data secreted on them. Yeah, right. The copy of the check they seized and Chen's work laptop with his correspondence are enough to prove the whole case. In this instance Chen is certainly guilty, but in general those kind of warrants can be used to harass suspects whose guilt is far from certain.
The list of seized property is also notable for being filled with atrocious misspellings. Det. Matthew Broad is either a borderline illiterate, or he just doesn't give a shit.
Would you catch an image attachment that exploits a buffer overrun in your image viewer of choice if it appeared to be part of a legitimate email? It should easily be possible to tell who you swap photos with by analyzing facebook content.
If you had enough friends who would send such a thing, you might get owned.
N.Y.S. Penal Code
240.50 Falsely reporting an incident in the third degree.
A person is guilty of falsely reporting an incident in the third
degree when, knowing the information reported, conveyed or circulated to
be false or baseless, he:
1. Initiates or circulates a false report or warning of an alleged
occurrence or impending occurrence of a crime, catastrophe or emergency
under circumstances in which it is not unlikely that public alarm or
inconvenience will result; or
2. Reports, by word or action, to an official or quasi-official agency
or organization having the function of dealing with emergencies
involving danger to life or property, an alleged occurrence or impending
occurrence of a catastrophe or emergency which did not in fact occur or
does not in fact exist; or
3. Gratuitously reports to a law enforcement officer or agency (a) the
alleged occurrence of an offense or incident which did not in fact
occur; or (b) an allegedly impending occurrence of an offense or
incident which in fact is not about to occur; or (c) false information
relating to an actual offense or incident or to the alleged implication
of some person therein; or
4. Reports, by word or action, to the statewide central register of
child abuse and maltreatment, as defined in title six of article six of
the social services law, an alleged occurrence or condition of child
abuse or maltreatment which did not in fact occur or exist.
Falsely reporting an incident in the third degree is a class A
misdemeanor.
I guess they'll attempt to prove that he "[i]nitiate[d] or circulate[d] a false report or warning of an...impending occurrence of a crime...under circumstances in which it is not unlikely that public...inconvenience will result." Or they would if he doesn't plea bargain. This law seems to have awfully wide applicability.
If you read TFA, you might note that the it was actually a different guy, not arrested by the police, who sliced the ball. And whether all of the people (security researchers) involved were assholes or not, that doesn't change the law, and the requirement for the police to follow it.
I think that the video demonstrates that the cop may have very well believed that his request was legal, but I hardly think refusing to comply with his actually illegal request means that the subject was to blame in any way. They were quite civil until he refused to produce ID. Then the cop escalates first, bolstered by his ignorant beliefs about his authority.
The case alluded to in the article is Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, in which the supreme court ruled that Nevada's stop and identify law, which requires only that someone suspected of a crime give his or her name, was constitutional. It was 7-2, with Stevens and Breyer dissenting. In that case, there was a Nevada law explicitly allowing a request for identification (and requiring a response), a situation which does not obtain in Washington.
Let us consider another example. At first glance, New York's law on this seems particularly heinous, allowing that an officer "may demand of him his name, address and an explanation of his conduct." It doesn't actually say whether the subject is required to respond, however. In fact, New York's law merely limits the scope of questioning to which an officer may subject a suspect before arrest. If other probable cause to arrest is not found, refusal to answer those questions is not grounds.
So, in New York and most states, you really can refuse to answer police questions. That doesn't make you a "douchebag." On the contrary, because Rachner had been following his state court decisions, he was able to upgrade himself from "drunken nerfball golfer" to "American Hero."
You are incorrect. While the Washington Supreme Court has ruled that in Washington, people are not required to identify themselves to the police, this is not true nationally. You are not required to produce ID, but in most states you can be required to state your name.
Rachner impressively knew about this rights in Washington, but you should be careful to be as informed as he was before challenging the police in another state.
As for obstruction, I agree; the only obstacle is finding a prosecutor to enforce the law against the police.
It turns out that "the data" are measurements of petrified tree rings, which were collected in the course of (presumably) a government grant-funded study. Now Queen's University researchers must compile the data for release because of the (UK) Freedom of Information Act. The scientists quoted in TFA apparently did not use the ring data for anything relating to climate studies, but Keenan has that purpose in mind.
Phil Willis, a Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Science and Technology Select Committee, said that scientists now needed to work on the presumption that if research is publicly funded, the data ought to be made publicly available.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Appendices with raw data are often included already in the online editions of journals. Of course, if the ruling applies to all data generated in the course of a study, whether it is used in publications or not, it could be onerous indeed.
The premise of his post is that uTorrent doesn't have adequate features to automatically avoid swamping TCP reply latency and nuking your personal connection. It may be true that some users are ignorant about this, and do not adequately throttle their connections. But the only people that suffer because of that are those users themselves, because the ISPs already impose an upload cap on every user. If they prioritized their traffic better, they would still be using the same amount of bandwidth and having the same effect on the network in general.
This is why it is absolutely fucking astonishing that after trying to establish that the average user screws up his own VoIP/gaming latency with unthrottled bittorent, the author puts forward ISP-imposed QoS as the solution. Presumably deep packet inspection based QoS, or else how are they to identify what connections really constitute VoIP or gaming or other "legitimate" traffic? He also condescendingly proposes this like it is some kind of original idea. Perhaps he actually thinks it is; that brings us to the next observation.
He is totally wrong on a technical level, and his solution would not work. When you trash your own connection with BT or any other bulk upload, you are the victim of your own router. It can only send out so many bits a second, and it naively queues packets in the order they are received. As a result, acks can be delayed by 100s of milliseconds, which effectively mauls (TCP) downstream bandwidth. Your ISP can give acks absolute priority, but that won't matter a whit if they don't get out of your own office for half a second!
Now, ISPs could possibly ameliorate the ignorance of their users by including better firmware on the combined router/modems that they sometimes dole out to users, but that would have absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. The author of that post (George Ou, apparently) uses this ridiculous strawman to finally justify these remarks:
This type of solution is what I referred to as “true neutrality” where low bandwidth jitter sensitive applications are protected from other aggressive applications. It is obviously the best solution to the problem where all applications get the most performance possible and coexist in harmony. Yet the hard line Net Neutrality advocates like Free Press and Public Knowledge want us to buy into their religion of the dumb “First In First Out” (FIFO) networks.
Wow. Those hard line Net Neutrality advocates are just preventing people from enjoying their own VoIP and gaming applications! It is possible for rational people to disagree on net neutrality based on basic principles, yet here this blogger dismisses them all out of hand, and advocates traffic shaping based on a completely incorrect and even absurd technical basis.
This comment may have been somewhat strident in tone, but I would hate to believe that a slashdotter could actually find that post worthwhile, much less "excellent." The best case is that the parent AC is George Ou, shamelessly astroturfing his ignorant blog.
I will note, however, that you could make the argument that the total upstream available to users on certain ISP networks becomes saturated, increasing latency for everyone. That is not the argument made in the blog linked above. I would also argue that the best solution to that problem isn't to arbitrarily impose QoS on users' traffic, but rather to promote a system in which users actually pay for what they get (and get what they pay for). Currently, consumers have the option of paying a small monthly fee for total crapshoot service, or paying an order-of-magnitude more massive fee for a T1 which actually offers much less (theoretical) bandwidth. That is not an efficient market. And because of their monopoly or near-monopoly statuses, large ISPs have no incentive to make the market more efficient.
Cutting corporate income tax may not have fueled purely domestic growth, but surely you wont't deny that countless tech companies (e.g. Microsoft) from the U.S. and elsewhere used Ireland as a tax shelter for their IP profits. Even if that didn't bring (many) more jobs to Ireland, it surely helped national tax revenues, at least while the companies were still posting quarterly profits that could be taxed. How can you claim that raising the corporate income tax would have alleviated the crisis? It can be 100%, but if no one is making a profit it won't bring in a dime (and all those tax-shelter subsidiaries would leave immediately).
This strikes me as a totally separate issue than Dell, etc. closing factories. Ireland was never the place for cheap labor, though I think a number of small tech companies--too small to become multinational for tax purposes--did site there in preference to other areas of similar or greater labor cost, like the UK, because of the tax law.
The ability of the United States to lessen the domestic crisis and avoid total financial/credit market meltdown (by ~$2T bailout of the financial sector, between TARP and the Fed) has nothing whatsoever to do with corporate income tax receipts. The Treasury Dept.'s estimate for this year's U.S. corporate income tax receipts is only $156 billion! Compare that to $935 Billion (estimated) from individual income tax (not including payroll taxes). The U.S. can bail and bail just because it has a massive GDP and thus much more credit than Ireland. Perhaps you could make the argument that Ireland depended too much on corporate income tax (which plunges during recessions as individual tax does not) for filling out the budget.
If you do a little research, you see that in 2009, total tax receipts were €34.4 billion, with €3.74 billion (~10.9%) from corporate tax. In 2007, receipts were over €47.2 billion, with €6.39 billion (~13.5%) from corporate tax. The recession took a chunk of corporate receipts to be sure, but the revenue problems are a lot deeper than that. And despite everything, 2009 Irish corporate tax receipts were 13.9% of income tax and VAT receipts combined, while in the U.S. in 2009 corporate tax receipts were 15% of income tax receipts alone, only 7.8% of individual income tax combined with payroll tax (Social Security & Medicare). I think that is actually a pretty strong argument in favor of low corporate tax rates, at least in the current competitive multinational environment (certainly for Ireland, which has a much smaller GDP and thus can benefit more, percentage-wise, from tax competition).
You'd have to have raised the "corporation tax" by 350% (to over 55%) just to make the total tax receipts of 2009 equal to 2007, but of course that would have triggered a massive corporate exodus, the revenue wouldn't have equalized anyway, and there would be higher unemployment as well.
It isn't even going that far. Apparently the system will be applied to youths who have already been sentenced, and will be used to separate the "salvageable" ones into lighter rehabilitation programs, while all the gang members and other hopeless cases continue to live lord of the flies style in juvie hall.
That sounds pretty callous, but remember that previously the same thing was happening, only the slots were being assigned more arbitrarily, likely raising the recidivism rate in consequence, when "young but stupid" offenders were traumatized and further criminalized by their more experienced peers.
If we really wanted to slash juvenile (and adult) offense (and maybe generally improve life in inner cities in the bargain), we might consider ending the "War" on Drugs, but I don't think IBM will be able to help with that.
Slashdot Mirror
I owned (and had read) first editions of all five (or four and a half) of his novels before the first story about him, so I don't think that he's that obscure. There are plenty of more popular authors whose books aren't as good. And now, because of a felony "non-compliance" conviction, he will be unable to enter the United States again. That's quite a hefty punishment for getting out of your car at a border checkpoint (especially with a superfluous beatdown in the bargain). Is that the result of a "good" law? You might see him at WorldCon 2010, but he'll be SOL if he wins a Hugo in 2011 (Nevada). A felony conviction will fuck over an American citizen.
Most importantly (for slashdot), he has released all of his novels and a number of shorts for free on the web under a Creative Commons license. That makes him as slashdot-worthy as Hans Reiser.
I find it incredibly unlikely that kids would go to this camp at the expense of some sort of athletic opportunity. That said, what recommends a camp where kids play games on mainstream game systems? I call that singularly uninspired. How does the "camp" aspect even improve the experience? I guess it lets you play non-networked multiplayer console games without friends...and you get to interview video game developers on a field trip ("it would be the best job in the world if only I made money, too..."). The rest of the time, though, there is a serious dearth of novel experience.
/. reader plowing through it. Suffice it so say that it combined exercise (belly-crawl through muddy half-submerged caves), fun (belly-crawl through muddy half-submerged caves), and education (studying geology and applying it to explain cave formations found on aforementioned belly-crawls) with motivation (abandoning campers/clients who fail to successfully apply geology to cave formations). The only aspect I hadn't quite worked out yet was liability, but maybe there are some good caves in Somalia...
Before high school, I had attended summer day camps with the theme of model rocketry and (once) taxidermy (We dissected and stuffed roadkill squirrels. I recall now that I had convinced my fifth-grade classmate--the son of an ENT surgeon!--to come along, but unfortunately taxidermy camp may not be for everyone; he was unable to continue). I also went to week-long Huntsville Space Camp (which was surprisingly banal--the best part was probably playing "Lander" and the shuttle landing simulator in the space museum) and Boy Scout summer camp (hellish, unlike other recreational camping--I've never had so many bug bites in my life, to say nothing of the primitive sanitation facilities). The only one of those that involved any exercise was BSA camp, and (imho) we don't need more of that.
My last camp was actually after the ninth grade (I think); it was one-week Policy Debate (my "sport" then) camp at Indiana University. This cleverly combined critical intellectual activity (policy research & debate) with exercise in the great outdoors (attendees had to walk from the dorm to the library, after all). Oddly enough that camp influenced my life considerably for ten years at least: I read my roommate's copy of Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) and Virtual Light (William Gibson). I know now that he (a guy named Mark, I think...) was a fan of cyber-punk. Unfortunately, I have never had any sort of memory for proper nouns or numbers, so it was not until my first year of college that I finally found a copy of Snow Crash in a B&N, remembered the title and author, and read the rest of Stephenson's books, followed by most of the "great" works of science fiction (and quite a few that were not so great). Around the same time I switched majors from Electrical Engineering to...Computer Science. I still love debating--and reading about!--policy, too. Most of my posts get a lot more research than this one, I promise. I could certainly argue that that experience was a summer camp success. At the very least it was more convivial than BSA camp. The IU program doesn't appear to be extant, but I'm sure sending your children to Stanford's summer program would be more effective anyway.
If people want to bitch about the summer camps that children are sent to, why not bitch about the lack of critical thinking at camps. Even at NASA space camp, you won't find much critical thinking (or novelty, or fun...damn you, NASA!). Maybe "Space Academy" or "Advanced Space Academy" is more fun (when I was there I'm pretty sure they just had "Aviation Challenge," for which I was too young), but waiting until kids are into high school (or college: awkward) to offer interesting, creative and intellectual activity seems to risk being too late altogether.
I (tearfully) deleted around 400 words about my modest (but awesome) proposal for spelunking summer camp (or corporate team building exercise). I just couldn't imagine the average (or the uncommon)
In the theater, instead of DRM gone awry you had hundreds of operators trying to get their chosen brands of 3-D systems to work correctly. There were various levels of success. I watched it on RealD and (mini) iMax--for the sake of science!--and it was out of focus the entire time with iMax (though interestingly one out of the two people I sat next two claimed that it was totally in focus). I wouldn't see any point in viewing it at home without 3-D technology, but by the time home releases support that (and I buy a Sony "shutter glasses" 3D TV) there'll be a movie with CGI as good as Avatar's and a decent plot as well that I can buy to demo it.
If this problem (mentioned in TFS) is really in the DRM, then it is unlikely to affect DVDs, which still use CSS. Key revocation is possible (apparently) with CSS, but the majority of DVD players don't support constant key updates over the internet so it is not used.
The "story" (Yahoo entertainment "journalism") doesn't mention DVDs at all, and instead speculates that the people affected did not download the latest updates to their firmware to get non-revoked keys (the centerpiece of the AACS system!). If you bought a blu-ray player not knowing that...you deserve everything you get.
The guy in TFA claims to have three BD players, two of which are standalone. Even if his standalone players aren't connected (or have never been subject to a device revocation before), surely his computer software will update itself. Perhaps he's putting in it upside-down...
The only information I could find about problems with the DVD was a Y! Answers thread indicating that "layer lag" may occur in scene 18 (with crappy DVD players, presumably).
There is no new news in this article whatsoever; it serves only as an excuse for everyone to bitch about AACS (again).
That's really not fair. Were you going to watch it for the plot? All it had to offer was technological innovation in film making, something which it certainly did not steal from earlier movies.
To be fair, I'm sure Obama has never posted to his "own" Twitter page (I remember a published statement to that effect about his Facebook account, at least). It is actually some minor staffer who is the guilty party here: Obama is maybe only transitively guilty for trusting Rahm Emmanuel, who trusted the staffer (or the staffer's immediate boss). That stands in contrast to Sarah Palin's personal email account and the personal Twitter accounts of the celebrities involved in the other incident, the obvious passwords of which reflect much more directly on the intelligence (or lack thereof) of the account owners.
This is why I never seriously answer password reminder questions. Unfortunately there seem to be two uses: the first, where it is used in lieu of a valid email address to reset a password, and the second, where (mostly) banks decide that asking for what amounts to two passwords constitutes "two factor" authentication. Both methods have little upside (for the user) if the questions are answered with personal information.
I'm not a panspermian, but consider what will happen if humanity is currently the only intelligent life in this galaxy or even small area of the galaxy. In a thousand years (if the computers don't exterminate the meatbags and/or have an interest in planets), most planets (in this area) will have received (organic) life from outer space. Personally, I have no desire to colonize other (uninhabited) planets, and would be perfectly happy just to live in solar space (around our sun or another, if it were possible), but I think it will be unlikely that all of humanity will agree with me on that. Even if they agree, they'll at least take a look, and it is notoriously difficult to eradicate bacterial (or archaean) spores in sterilization procedures (our hypothetical non-organic successors may have an easier time, though)...
Consider what would happen if someone seeds moderately Earthlike planets with primitive Earth lifeforms and then leaves it to mature for a billion years. The intelligent life that might evolve could turn into a bunch of unimaginative panspermians, or it could figure out how life could have arisen on its own planets (and did...probably...on Earth).
The TFS implication that (many) people are excited about this from a panspermia perspective is misleading. The thrust of TFA #1 is that it is more difficult for organic compounds to form on an asteroid. The thrust of TFA #2 is that scientists apparently wonder how the Earth came to be covered with water after a catastrophic collision formed the Moon and the surface was superheated. Apparently the water on this asteroid is more similar (in deuterium concentration? TFA is horribly misleading and vague) to the oceans than the water generally found in comets.
I leave you with Christian Science Monitor "science" reporting (not that it's worse than CNN, NYT, PhysOrg, etc.).
But the forms of hydrogen in water molecules bound in asteroids are a closer match to those found in seawater than are those found in water comets carry.
I eventually gave in and read TFA; they actually describe the winning algorithm...in the contest description. The contest was just to implement it (sort of). And (apparently) no one attempted to use the valid unicode characters as well. They just avoided them (like the contest bloggers) because they weren't sure that there wasn't some arbitrary string of characters that would mess up the message.
I suppose that the contest could continue on that basis alone: how many more bits can you encode by using the printable characters, without choking on arbitrary data? It is more likely that it will vanish in a poof of apathy instead, since no one bothered to do that this time.
You've caught me red-handed. I was investigating the controlling decisions on drunk driving checkpoints, and noticed the references to immigration checkpoints, producing that post. I had not yet got around to seriously reading SB1070 (along with the near entirety of the media, apparently), and so the cases I highlighted would indeed be largely irrelevant (though they do outline what constitutes "reasonable suspicion" that an individual is an illegal alien).
Now that I have studied the infamous paragraph, however (and the less infamous ones), the phrase lawful contact, seems intentionally ambiguous. In the Arizona seat belt law, it states that no one shall be stopped unless "the peace officer has reasonable cause to believe there is another alleged violation of a motor vehicle law of this state." A similar construction, only omitting the "motor vehicle law" phrase, could have been employed in SB1070 in the service of greater clarity.
It further seems like it would only be "practicable" to make a "reasonable attempt" to verify a person's immigration status pursuant to 8 U.S.C. 1373(c) if the person had already been arrested (for another cause). In that case, the effect of this law would only be to compel police officers to make an effort to enforce immigration laws on all the people already in the local lockup (a purpose explicitly borne out by language elsewhere in the law, e.g. in (2)(F)). But if that were the only intent of the law, why use such expansive language? The Arizona legislature certainly appears to be up to something, perhaps inviting the courts to let them get away with as much as the courts will allow, rather than trying to craft an inherently and rigorously constitutional law.
The discussion of this law has been widely hysterical and uninformed (and I was complicit), but I think there is still a reasonable argument to be made for a malign (well, unconstitutional) intent, albeit a more subtle and cautious one than has been generally claimed.
That reasoning applies only to driving, and the police still can't conduct a search, only speak (briefly) to the driver to determine sobriety. This is a result of the 6-3 (Stevens dissenting) Sitz decision.
More relevant here is probably United States v. Martinez-Fuerte , in which the court held (7-2, Stevens concurring) that fixed traffic checkpoints for illegal immigrants on roads near the border were legal, as long as the search is limited to (again, brief) questioning. This law would go far beyond what the court allowed in Martinez-Fuerte. Also, the justification for those stops (that there was no time to gather more probable cause in heavy traffic) would not apply to this law at all.
Finally, in United States v. Ortiz , the court held (9-0) that random border patrol suspicionless traffic stops with searches were unconstitutional. Of course, Justice Rehnquist opines on how he feels that the flood of illegal aliens and drugs across the Mexican border makes quite a lot of searches "reasonable."
Still, between those decisions and the more recent Hiibel, I think the justices would have to be considerably more insane than usual to uphold the Arizona law in full, even without Stevens. They are always attuned to the emotional implications of law, especially when it amounts to "papers, please."
I think this article encapsulates the difference nicely. Cincinnati Police pulled over a black man for a traffic infraction, and tased his (black, female) passenger for no reason. The story would have ended there, except it turns out she was the daughter of a city councilman! Whoops! Even then, there was no "lawsuit lottery," however.
They also (of course) defensively charged her with an open container violation and obstruction.
The FOP claims it was justified. (Legally impotent) Chief Tom Streicher tells us that the officer was already fired for similar incidents, but they can't actually fire officers in Cincinnati, because the FOP controls the arbitration. This is nothing new; in 2001 the shooting of an unarmed (black) suspect spurred the Cincinnati Race Riots. Yeeehaw! They actually declared a curfew (for white people too--not that you could find any downtown--theater attendance was suffering already). In particular, read about the results of the lawsuit against the police, and then consider the current situation.
I'm not saying that legal action is futile, just that I think the situation is a little more complex than you are crediting. Also, are you seriously defending the Arizona law? The whole reason that it is so objectionable is that evidence of some crime is not required.
Research has revealed that judging probability accurately is extremely difficult for human. Beyond that, since all the evidence can be unreliable, there is really no place for reliable deductive logic. Whenever people come to an inductive conclusion, however, there is very little "logic" involved. The brain weights everything with emotion. When someone is experiencing depression or mania, things seems perfectly and absolutely logical that would seem totally absurd at another time. What someone believes at most times is not, therefore, "logical," it's just...normal.
If the defendant is extremely unsympathetic, it can be extremely difficult to deliberate independently of that fact.
The article doesn't mention what, if any, instructions the judge issued to the jury. He may have ruled on who constituted an "authorized user," and thus practically decided the case, since the facts were not really in dispute, only their interpretation. The jury could have still found "not guilty," of course (based on, say, whether there was any criminal intent), but why would they do so when it was so easy to return the guilty verdict that they wanted anyway?
This is the law, California Penal Code 502(c)(5), which he was charged with violating.
(c) Except as provided in subdivision (h), any person who commits any of the following acts is guilty of a public offense:
...
...
(5) Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer system, or computer network.
(h) (1) Subdivision (c) does not apply to punish any acts which are committed by a person within the scope of his or her lawful employment. For purposes of this section, a person acts within the scope of his or her employment when he or she performs acts which are reasonably necessary to the performance of his or her work assignment.
So you see, it was actually extremely relevant whether the acts were "reasonably necessary" for his job. The jury had to decide if following the written policy in that case was "reasonable," but they thought (perhaps rightly) that Childs was a paranoid whackjob. I don't think there is any question that he thought it was reasonable, though. Depending on what the judge said about this, Childs may have grounds for appeal...assuming he can afford it now. Since he's already spent two years in jail, he may very well be sentenced to time served, which is going to make appeal even less...appealing.
Regardless of whether he is guilty or not, consider that he has now been jailed for two years for having a snit with his boss. Laws really do cover nearly anything; "computer crime" laws seems particularly heinous in this regard (e.g. "sexting," or felony prosecution for violating the MySpace EULA). We are all at the mercy of prosecutorial discretion. God help us (metaphorically, of course).
I leave you with the Megan Miers Cyberbullying Prevention Act, introduced by a representative from California. So short. So broad.
One juror, Jason Chilton, also a network engineer, said the law Childs was accused of breaking -- knowingly disrupting computer services or denying those services to an authorized user -- is "very specific," and though no services were actually disrupted, "he denied that access."
Chilton, however, said Childs' supervisors at the Department of Technology were also to blame. He said they "did everything wrong that they possibly could," citing "ineffective management and no formalized policies and procedures" for dealing with employees in such situations.
"If the city were on trial, they'd probably be guilty of a lot of stuff too," Chilton said.
Ultimately, Chilton said, Childs "didn't follow the law, which was the basic thing that it came down to."
Telling the police the passwords wouldn't have changed anything, the deed was already done when he was arrested. And I guess we can dismiss all the Slashdot "Well, if they selected technical people for juries," arguments as well. It sounds like Childs came across as such an asshole that the jury crucified him. It would hardly be the first time that happened.
Another juror, Amy Heine, said Childs seemed both egotistical and "paranoid."
"He was intelligent enough to know what he was doing, was heading in a very dangerous direction," she said.
Thankfully, the Senators can "tell" anyone anything they want, but no one has to listen. They're apparently asking the FTC to make rules, but if this isn't illegal already I don't think there is much the FTC can realistically do about it. They don't have magical extra-legal rulemaking authority, only that granted by existing legislation.
The Senators do have the authority to propose new legislation, but unfortunately Chuck Schumer is leading the charge in this case, so I guarantee it wouldn't be anything that a civil libertarian (or really, anyone whose top priority isn't Thinking of The Children) would want to see. This time there is probably no cause for alarm, since it is clear that he only wants to posture and make headlines, not actually do something.
If Facebook arbitrarily changes its privacy policy, and then doesn't give users a chance to opt out (by deleting their data in lieu of accepting the new policy), we already have a legal remedy for that. Lawsuits. Class-action lawsuits. Bring it on! Hell, this is just the sort of thing that would appeal to another headline-seeking, ambitious New York politician, AG Andrew Cuomo. His similarly ambitious, headline-grabbing predecessor, the now-former Governor Elliot Spitzer, obtained a settlement from AOL over making it exceedingly difficult to cancel its service. If a lawsuit isn't viable in this case, I can only believe that the users are indeed bringing it on themselves.
Just don't encourage Schumer, please.
I'm no lawyer either, but if the warrant were entirely invalidated, then any evidence later procured as a result of the search would also be thrown out. Fruits of the poisoned tree, you know. Otherwise the Fourth Amendment would have no meaning.
As I have thought more about this, Apple has become increasingly unsympathetic to me. From reading the warrant, I think it is clear that the search was done at Apple's instigation, since it was issued to this group of special California "computer police" (REACT). An Apple employee loses their prototype, someone finds it, publishes, and returns it, and now Apple is going to punish everyone involved using the threat of criminal prosecution so that everyone else will be too frightened to ever do such a thing again. Is that really how we want things to work?
Even if it is all legal in California (based on this lost items law, which I'm sure no one had ever heard of until this happened), it's abundantly clear that Apple will pursue their interests as brutally as is legally possible, because they can (apparently) get away with it in the court of public opinion. Slashdot is overwhelmingly anti-RIAA/MPAA, but I think the RIAA and MPAA are on much firmer legal ground than Apple is here, and they are only pursuing lawsuits. The only argument against RIAA tactics is basically that piracy is abundant and they should accept that and work around it with new business models. No one is actually under the impression that downloading movies is legal. Here, we have the police enforcing a strict interpretation of obscure California criminal law on a journalist (of sorts) only because he embarrassed Apple by reporting on their next product. If I lost my phone in a bar, then ultimately had it returned to me a few weeks later, you can be sure that the police could not hang up on me fast enough if I claimed that the delay in its return constituted a theft.
I agree completely about the Section 1070 and PPA arguments; none of that would apply if Chen himself is being investigated for a felony, and they would certainly have probable cause to search for such evidence.
The United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing Inc. opinion is worth a read. The police seized all computer equipment on the premises, while the warrant in that case instructed them to make a reasonable effort to determine that it was pertinent to the investigation, and to undertake other safeguards, because of the legal requirements set forth in the 1982 Tamura opinion (apparently). None of those requirements were observed in this case, where the warrant specifically directs that every bit of electronic equipment be seized, and examined off-site for as long as the investigators deem necessary. Tamara may very well represent a valid legal challenge to this warrant.
There is, however, a major difference between the cases: CDT Inc. was not actually suspected of criminal wrongdoing. The EFF (or Matt Zimmerman) may be wrong about that as well. Still, Chen is only a suspect (maybe), and the warrant was ridiculously broad and punitive, so everyone should at least hope that a challenge on those grounds will be upheld.
We should also keep in mind that everyone involved may still get away totally clean, since after all they did return the device to Apple as soon as it was requested (and allegedly informed Apple before the sale and publication). There can be no receipt of stolen goods if no goods were stolen in the first place. While that is certainly closer to the law than I would like to tread and then publicly crow about, it is only the intervening financial transaction which muddies the waters (and put off other more cautious potential takers like Wired). If everything had occurred just like it did, except without the payoff to the original finder, then we would just have the REACT police harassing and punishing those who reported on Apple's breach of their own secrecy, and that would seem unjust indeed.
I agree that everyone involved in this business is a complete moron, since they apparently thought that they would get away with receiving stolen property, fencing it, etc. In their defense, they cite a law that pertains to publishing information from confidential sources. Good luck with that.
The warrant is still interesting though; in these electronic times, the police will take all your computers, hard drives, phones, cameras, and routers, because there "might" be relevant data secreted on them. Yeah, right. The copy of the check they seized and Chen's work laptop with his correspondence are enough to prove the whole case. In this instance Chen is certainly guilty, but in general those kind of warrants can be used to harass suspects whose guilt is far from certain.
The list of seized property is also notable for being filled with atrocious misspellings. Det. Matthew Broad is either a borderline illiterate, or he just doesn't give a shit.
Would you catch an image attachment that exploits a buffer overrun in your image viewer of choice if it appeared to be part of a legitimate email? It should easily be possible to tell who you swap photos with by analyzing facebook content.
If you had enough friends who would send such a thing, you might get owned.
The same goes for PDF exploits, etc.
N.Y.S. Penal Code
240.50 Falsely reporting an incident in the third degree.
A person is guilty of falsely reporting an incident in the third degree when, knowing the information reported, conveyed or circulated to be false or baseless, he:
1. Initiates or circulates a false report or warning of an alleged occurrence or impending occurrence of a crime, catastrophe or emergency under circumstances in which it is not unlikely that public alarm or inconvenience will result; or
2. Reports, by word or action, to an official or quasi-official agency or organization having the function of dealing with emergencies involving danger to life or property, an alleged occurrence or impending occurrence of a catastrophe or emergency which did not in fact occur or does not in fact exist; or
3. Gratuitously reports to a law enforcement officer or agency (a) the alleged occurrence of an offense or incident which did not in fact occur; or (b) an allegedly impending occurrence of an offense or incident which in fact is not about to occur; or (c) false information relating to an actual offense or incident or to the alleged implication of some person therein; or
4. Reports, by word or action, to the statewide central register of child abuse and maltreatment, as defined in title six of article six of the social services law, an alleged occurrence or condition of child abuse or maltreatment which did not in fact occur or exist.
Falsely reporting an incident in the third degree is a class A misdemeanor.
I guess they'll attempt to prove that he "[i]nitiate[d] or circulate[d] a false report or warning of an...impending occurrence of a crime...under circumstances in which it is not unlikely that public...inconvenience will result." Or they would if he doesn't plea bargain. This law seems to have awfully wide applicability.
An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.
SEC employees of all walks of life and genders are united in their quest for superior porn while at work!
If you read TFA, you might note that the it was actually a different guy, not arrested by the police, who sliced the ball. And whether all of the people (security researchers) involved were assholes or not, that doesn't change the law, and the requirement for the police to follow it.
I think that the video demonstrates that the cop may have very well believed that his request was legal, but I hardly think refusing to comply with his actually illegal request means that the subject was to blame in any way. They were quite civil until he refused to produce ID. Then the cop escalates first, bolstered by his ignorant beliefs about his authority.
The case alluded to in the article is Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, in which the supreme court ruled that Nevada's stop and identify law, which requires only that someone suspected of a crime give his or her name, was constitutional. It was 7-2, with Stevens and Breyer dissenting. In that case, there was a Nevada law explicitly allowing a request for identification (and requiring a response), a situation which does not obtain in Washington.
Let us consider another example. At first glance, New York's law on this seems particularly heinous, allowing that an officer "may demand of him his name, address and an explanation of his conduct." It doesn't actually say whether the subject is required to respond, however. In fact, New York's law merely limits the scope of questioning to which an officer may subject a suspect before arrest. If other probable cause to arrest is not found, refusal to answer those questions is not grounds.
So, in New York and most states, you really can refuse to answer police questions. That doesn't make you a "douchebag." On the contrary, because Rachner had been following his state court decisions, he was able to upgrade himself from "drunken nerfball golfer" to "American Hero."
You are incorrect. While the Washington Supreme Court has ruled that in Washington, people are not required to identify themselves to the police, this is not true nationally. You are not required to produce ID, but in most states you can be required to state your name.
Rachner impressively knew about this rights in Washington, but you should be careful to be as informed as he was before challenging the police in another state.
As for obstruction, I agree; the only obstacle is finding a prosecutor to enforce the law against the police.
Phil Willis, a Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Science and Technology Select Committee, said that scientists now needed to work on the presumption that if research is publicly funded, the data ought to be made publicly available.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Appendices with raw data are often included already in the online editions of journals. Of course, if the ruling applies to all data generated in the course of a study, whether it is used in publications or not, it could be onerous indeed.
This is why it is absolutely fucking astonishing that after trying to establish that the average user screws up his own VoIP/gaming latency with unthrottled bittorent, the author puts forward ISP-imposed QoS as the solution. Presumably deep packet inspection based QoS, or else how are they to identify what connections really constitute VoIP or gaming or other "legitimate" traffic? He also condescendingly proposes this like it is some kind of original idea. Perhaps he actually thinks it is; that brings us to the next observation.
He is totally wrong on a technical level, and his solution would not work. When you trash your own connection with BT or any other bulk upload, you are the victim of your own router. It can only send out so many bits a second, and it naively queues packets in the order they are received. As a result, acks can be delayed by 100s of milliseconds, which effectively mauls (TCP) downstream bandwidth. Your ISP can give acks absolute priority, but that won't matter a whit if they don't get out of your own office for half a second!
Now, ISPs could possibly ameliorate the ignorance of their users by including better firmware on the combined router/modems that they sometimes dole out to users, but that would have absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. The author of that post (George Ou, apparently) uses this ridiculous strawman to finally justify these remarks:
This type of solution is what I referred to as “true neutrality” where low bandwidth jitter sensitive applications are protected from other aggressive applications. It is obviously the best solution to the problem where all applications get the most performance possible and coexist in harmony. Yet the hard line Net Neutrality advocates like Free Press and Public Knowledge want us to buy into their religion of the dumb “First In First Out” (FIFO) networks.
Wow. Those hard line Net Neutrality advocates are just preventing people from enjoying their own VoIP and gaming applications! It is possible for rational people to disagree on net neutrality based on basic principles, yet here this blogger dismisses them all out of hand, and advocates traffic shaping based on a completely incorrect and even absurd technical basis.
This comment may have been somewhat strident in tone, but I would hate to believe that a slashdotter could actually find that post worthwhile, much less "excellent." The best case is that the parent AC is George Ou, shamelessly astroturfing his ignorant blog.
I will note, however, that you could make the argument that the total upstream available to users on certain ISP networks becomes saturated, increasing latency for everyone. That is not the argument made in the blog linked above. I would also argue that the best solution to that problem isn't to arbitrarily impose QoS on users' traffic, but rather to promote a system in which users actually pay for what they get (and get what they pay for). Currently, consumers have the option of paying a small monthly fee for total crapshoot service, or paying an order-of-magnitude more massive fee for a T1 which actually offers much less (theoretical) bandwidth. That is not an efficient market. And because of their monopoly or near-monopoly statuses, large ISPs have no incentive to make the market more efficient.
Insofar as Cable and
Cutting corporate income tax may not have fueled purely domestic growth, but surely you wont't deny that countless tech companies (e.g. Microsoft) from the U.S. and elsewhere used Ireland as a tax shelter for their IP profits. Even if that didn't bring (many) more jobs to Ireland, it surely helped national tax revenues, at least while the companies were still posting quarterly profits that could be taxed. How can you claim that raising the corporate income tax would have alleviated the crisis? It can be 100%, but if no one is making a profit it won't bring in a dime (and all those tax-shelter subsidiaries would leave immediately).
This strikes me as a totally separate issue than Dell, etc. closing factories. Ireland was never the place for cheap labor, though I think a number of small tech companies--too small to become multinational for tax purposes--did site there in preference to other areas of similar or greater labor cost, like the UK, because of the tax law.
The ability of the United States to lessen the domestic crisis and avoid total financial/credit market meltdown (by ~$2T bailout of the financial sector, between TARP and the Fed) has nothing whatsoever to do with corporate income tax receipts. The Treasury Dept.'s estimate for this year's U.S. corporate income tax receipts is only $156 billion! Compare that to $935 Billion (estimated) from individual income tax (not including payroll taxes). The U.S. can bail and bail just because it has a massive GDP and thus much more credit than Ireland. Perhaps you could make the argument that Ireland depended too much on corporate income tax (which plunges during recessions as individual tax does not) for filling out the budget.
If you do a little research, you see that in 2009, total tax receipts were €34.4 billion, with €3.74 billion (~10.9%) from corporate tax. In 2007, receipts were over €47.2 billion, with €6.39 billion (~13.5%) from corporate tax. The recession took a chunk of corporate receipts to be sure, but the revenue problems are a lot deeper than that. And despite everything, 2009 Irish corporate tax receipts were 13.9% of income tax and VAT receipts combined, while in the U.S. in 2009 corporate tax receipts were 15% of income tax receipts alone, only 7.8% of individual income tax combined with payroll tax (Social Security & Medicare). I think that is actually a pretty strong argument in favor of low corporate tax rates, at least in the current competitive multinational environment (certainly for Ireland, which has a much smaller GDP and thus can benefit more, percentage-wise, from tax competition).
You'd have to have raised the "corporation tax" by 350% (to over 55%) just to make the total tax receipts of 2009 equal to 2007, but of course that would have triggered a massive corporate exodus, the revenue wouldn't have equalized anyway, and there would be higher unemployment as well.
It isn't even going that far. Apparently the system will be applied to youths who have already been sentenced, and will be used to separate the "salvageable" ones into lighter rehabilitation programs, while all the gang members and other hopeless cases continue to live lord of the flies style in juvie hall.
That sounds pretty callous, but remember that previously the same thing was happening, only the slots were being assigned more arbitrarily, likely raising the recidivism rate in consequence, when "young but stupid" offenders were traumatized and further criminalized by their more experienced peers.
If we really wanted to slash juvenile (and adult) offense (and maybe generally improve life in inner cities in the bargain), we might consider ending the "War" on Drugs, but I don't think IBM will be able to help with that.