Capital is allowed to act transnationally, but tools available to the people are not
You find that you are unable to exchange your dollars for other currencies? The only think unable to act here is your sense of reality. Just because you don't choose to put your efforts towards an activity that happens to involve overseas reach or the need to do business across borders doesn't mean you can't. "Capial" only acts transnationally in the sense that there are mechanisms in place to exchange things of value as they cross borders. Your attempt to compare that to DNS services created in, and still run with in the US is just... silly. Though I expect you know that, and you're just hoping for Teh Eeeeevil Corporate Plutocrats Are Corporately Doing Corporate Things That I Can't Do Because I Don't Actually Do Anything Of Fiscal Consequence Anyway street cred. It's not working.
Trying to get a computer to do something that it should not do, especially if it doesn't do it, has nothing meaningfully in common with trying to kill someone.
Is that like trying to get a deer rifle or an ice pick to do something (like kill a person) that it's not meant to do? Let's leave murder out of it, then. How about using tools (say, a bulldozer) to attempt to push a bunch of parked cars into a pile in front of a a business you don't like, but they manage to clear the debris away before their doors open in the morning, and you only cost them some money to clean it up, and to install bigger parking lot pylons to prevent the next clown from doing the same thing. No crime, right? Just a bunch of mis-used tools and extra security money spent, right? Beside, they should have put up something that could stop a bulldozer from entering their parking lot anyway, so it's really all their fault, so of course there's no crime.
Quit making excuses for malicious morons, especially the extra stupid ones.
I think you're being dishonest if you think all he can do is flip burgers.
I didn't say that, which you know, because you at least pretended to respond to what I actually wrote. What I said was that he can't complain if he's not trusted in the very area where he's shown himself to be an untrustworthy fool.
So, what are you saying? That when LS/Anonymous crack into people's system, DDoS sites, etc., that there are no vicitims because... what, only Eeeeeevil groups of people called "businesses" are impacted? Or that because it's only the CIA's web site, it doesn't matter, since it's only tax dollars that get wrapped up in that sort of thing?
What are you referring to, in the context of this story?
A very small number of people will be dicks just to be dicks, but the vast majority of people engage in unethical behavior because it has a benefit to them.
Which is exactly why the GP said what he said. This guy was living on the dole, and not making money or even trying to as part of LS. He was doing it to be a dick. That's why he's not going to be offered a job where he's going to be asked to not involve what is clearly his entire personality and world view. Which part of him is some IT shop going to hire? The part that he's shown has no influence over his judgement?
You do realize that by denying people access to employment after their jail term has ended, you're leaving them only one option: Criminal activity
Not offering someone a job doing what they've shown they should not be doing isn't "denying access to employment." He can dig ditches, flip burgers, sell shoes, start an interior decorating business, write a book... whatever he can muster the energy to get off the couch and do. But he can't complain that people won't trust him with the keys to their IT castle.
When governments can quickly lock down groups like this- government has too much power.
How do you define "quickly?" So, it takes them months to get this step done. Is that "quickly?" If a group of politically motivated people vandalized other things to make a point (say, like the eco-wackos that burn down housing construction projects or torch/vandalize car dealerships), and it took months to shut those people down, would you say that government has too much power? Why? Be specific.
I trusted those lying bastards in their coverage of Iraq--WMD
Which lying bastards, now? The BBC? CNN? NPR? The AP? The state departments of several nations? CBS? MSNBC? The Clinton administration? Nancy Pelosi? Reuters? The NYT? In what fevered, Fox-fetishist way are you imagining that only Fox reported what was being said by people from all sorts of governmental organizations? Are you saying that Saddam was allowing free inspections of the sites where he used to keep tons of VX gas (for example), but that Fox was saying otherwise?
The FBI is always cutting off the head of some criminal organization or another. After you've heard it for the nth time, it gets old . ..
So, something that law enforcement has to do regularly is boring to you, and thus when the fact they did so is reported by a news outlet you don't like, it obviously didn't happen? What a strange life you must lead. Enjoy it, but please don't do anything important like voting, OK?
So, attempted murder should not be a crime? Say, you know, if you miss with the gun you use, and just hit the brick wall next to the person you were trying to kill? No victim! No crime.
So, deliberately setting out to destroy a business (say, by DDoSing a seasonally traffic-spikey web site during the one week a year when they make all of the cash they need to pay for the year's payroll and other's costs) and actually succeeding... there's a victim, and thus a crime, right? But when you just aren't technically good enough to completely ruin them, but try your hardest to do so... no crime?
Give it a rest. There's a reason that the term theft of services is used. It's distinctly different than the theft of goods.Do you consider shoplifting to be fraud? I make no implicit promise to pay when I walk in a store. Have a defrauded someone when I walk out with something they're in the business of providing, having never intereacted with them in any way? Never mind. You know you're just making a fuss about this because it helps to make people numb to the notion that ripping off other stuff (like people's creative works) is also a bad thing.
No, but you are if you think that large scale theft of services isn't a crime. Fine: argue that you think re-selling a bundle of debt racked up by people who signed up for mortgages they couldn't possibly pay back should be a crime. But that doesn't make ripping off services providers a not-crime.
I mean -- 20 years for a simple financial fraud thing.
It's not "a simple financial fraud thing." It's complicity in the theft of services. On a huge, deliberate scale. Akin to having a chef and his staff set aside space and supplies for you, and spend time to make you dinner, and then you slipping out the door without paying. Regularly. Thousands of times.
Some punishments are about the deliberateness of the crime.
In other countries, murder is less.
Yes, many countries think that little of someone taking another person's life. Which is odd, really.
he only led an effort to make the leaked documents available to the world.
Which may well have involved him and his group working directly with the guy who stole the files in order to give him a way to handle the dump of humdreds of thousands of them. People keep glossing over that little annoying detail.
Your rant seems to assume that all online activity morally sound. The problem is, peoplep do use it - in huge numbers - to rip things off. It is used as a vector or fraud, crime, identity theft, piracy, cracking, and all sorts of other activities by unsavory sorts. Sometimes a crackdown really is a crackdown. Some people characterize summer night curfews in particular areas to be "oppression," but in spots with epidemics of late-night, gang-related violence, robberies, murder and such, the motivation for clearing the loiterers and 15-year-old gang recruits off of notoriously dangerous blocks, to break the violent rhythm, isn't oppression. But shooting Syrian political protesters in the street... that's oppression.
Just as there are real differences between cracking down on a violent mob/gang and preventing a peaceful protest march, there's more than on thing going on online, and some it absolutely does need cracking-down-upon. Not because it's online, but becase it's humans behving criminally, regardess of then venue.
You do understand, right, that you're completely incorrect on the facts? Private investors that used to own GM (some of which may have been employees or even union pension funds) LOST their investments in the bankruptcy. The unions were then given, by executive order, the gift of a large share of the company. The people who had money invested got no such consideration (mostly because they didn't organize to give the executive issuing such orders large amounts of political support during the campaign season).
So would you consider the editorial process at a newspaper (say, the fact that a human being, with editorial authority, sits in between the web-based letter-to-the-editor form and the web-based display of letters-to-the-editor that the newspaper site's public visitors see) is censorship? Is deleting forum spam censorship?
If someone posts a comment and you delete it for whatever reason, you're censoring them, period. Censorship doesn't require government involvement
In any meaningful use of the word, yes it does. Nobody is stopping you from saying what you want to say. But they may, on their own web site, decide it's a not a good fit for how they run the place. You are not censored. You are, though, subject to someone else's whims when you make free use of their stuff. The slashdot editors have absolutely no influence over your free speech - only over the content of their own web site. Just like you can and should have (if you want it) influence over your own, should you decide to set one up. At no point is your liberty threatened by having a web site owner run a web site according to their own editorial policies. Suggesting otherwise utterly trivializes real censorship - of which there are many and horrifying examples in the world.
Libraries mean you need never compensate an author for his work
Why is that - because the libraries have ripped off the copies they keep on their shelves? Do they have an inside contact at the publisher who sneaks them out in a backpack during lunch?
Encyclopedia Britannica sues to have Wikipedia taken down could be a future headline IMO.
So, your opinion is based on... a complete misunderstanding of the case at hand, of Wikipedia, and of the Britannica? The Trifecta Of Not Getting It! Congratulations.
Slashdot Mirror
Capital is allowed to act transnationally, but tools available to the people are not
You find that you are unable to exchange your dollars for other currencies? The only think unable to act here is your sense of reality. Just because you don't choose to put your efforts towards an activity that happens to involve overseas reach or the need to do business across borders doesn't mean you can't. "Capial" only acts transnationally in the sense that there are mechanisms in place to exchange things of value as they cross borders. Your attempt to compare that to DNS services created in, and still run with in the US is just ... silly. Though I expect you know that, and you're just hoping for Teh Eeeeevil Corporate Plutocrats Are Corporately Doing Corporate Things That I Can't Do Because I Don't Actually Do Anything Of Fiscal Consequence Anyway street cred. It's not working.
Trying to get a computer to do something that it should not do, especially if it doesn't do it, has nothing meaningfully in common with trying to kill someone.
Is that like trying to get a deer rifle or an ice pick to do something (like kill a person) that it's not meant to do? Let's leave murder out of it, then. How about using tools (say, a bulldozer) to attempt to push a bunch of parked cars into a pile in front of a a business you don't like, but they manage to clear the debris away before their doors open in the morning, and you only cost them some money to clean it up, and to install bigger parking lot pylons to prevent the next clown from doing the same thing. No crime, right? Just a bunch of mis-used tools and extra security money spent, right? Beside, they should have put up something that could stop a bulldozer from entering their parking lot anyway, so it's really all their fault, so of course there's no crime.
Quit making excuses for malicious morons, especially the extra stupid ones.
I think you're being dishonest if you think all he can do is flip burgers.
I didn't say that, which you know, because you at least pretended to respond to what I actually wrote. What I said was that he can't complain if he's not trusted in the very area where he's shown himself to be an untrustworthy fool.
So, what are you saying? That when LS/Anonymous crack into people's system, DDoS sites, etc., that there are no vicitims because ... what, only Eeeeeevil groups of people called "businesses" are impacted? Or that because it's only the CIA's web site, it doesn't matter, since it's only tax dollars that get wrapped up in that sort of thing?
What are you referring to, in the context of this story?
Where's my +1 ironic/sarcastic mod?
A very small number of people will be dicks just to be dicks, but the vast majority of people engage in unethical behavior because it has a benefit to them.
Which is exactly why the GP said what he said. This guy was living on the dole, and not making money or even trying to as part of LS. He was doing it to be a dick. That's why he's not going to be offered a job where he's going to be asked to not involve what is clearly his entire personality and world view. Which part of him is some IT shop going to hire? The part that he's shown has no influence over his judgement?
You do realize that by denying people access to employment after their jail term has ended, you're leaving them only one option: Criminal activity
Not offering someone a job doing what they've shown they should not be doing isn't "denying access to employment." He can dig ditches, flip burgers, sell shoes, start an interior decorating business, write a book ... whatever he can muster the energy to get off the couch and do. But he can't complain that people won't trust him with the keys to their IT castle.
When governments can quickly lock down groups like this- government has too much power.
How do you define "quickly?" So, it takes them months to get this step done. Is that "quickly?" If a group of politically motivated people vandalized other things to make a point (say, like the eco-wackos that burn down housing construction projects or torch/vandalize car dealerships), and it took months to shut those people down, would you say that government has too much power? Why? Be specific.
I trusted those lying bastards in their coverage of Iraq--WMD
Which lying bastards, now? The BBC? CNN? NPR? The AP? The state departments of several nations? CBS? MSNBC? The Clinton administration? Nancy Pelosi? Reuters? The NYT? In what fevered, Fox-fetishist way are you imagining that only Fox reported what was being said by people from all sorts of governmental organizations? Are you saying that Saddam was allowing free inspections of the sites where he used to keep tons of VX gas (for example), but that Fox was saying otherwise?
The FBI is always cutting off the head of some criminal organization or another. After you've heard it for the nth time, it gets old . . .
So, something that law enforcement has to do regularly is boring to you, and thus when the fact they did so is reported by a news outlet you don't like, it obviously didn't happen? What a strange life you must lead. Enjoy it, but please don't do anything important like voting, OK?
No victim = no crime
So, attempted murder should not be a crime? Say, you know, if you miss with the gun you use, and just hit the brick wall next to the person you were trying to kill? No victim! No crime.
... there's a victim, and thus a crime, right? But when you just aren't technically good enough to completely ruin them, but try your hardest to do so ... no crime?
So, deliberately setting out to destroy a business (say, by DDoSing a seasonally traffic-spikey web site during the one week a year when they make all of the cash they need to pay for the year's payroll and other's costs) and actually succeeding
You can't steal services, ever.
Give it a rest. There's a reason that the term theft of services is used. It's distinctly different than the theft of goods.Do you consider shoplifting to be fraud? I make no implicit promise to pay when I walk in a store. Have a defrauded someone when I walk out with something they're in the business of providing, having never intereacted with them in any way? Never mind. You know you're just making a fuss about this because it helps to make people numb to the notion that ripping off other stuff (like people's creative works) is also a bad thing.
I'm tired of "stealing" getting applied to every instance of "underhandedly doing something you weren't supposed to".
So, when the "thing you're not supposed to do" is being invovled instealing services, you don't think the word "stealing" should trotted out?
... killing someone who's going to tell the authorities about your racket is just ... what? An End Of Life decision?
What's next
Is the law blind?
No, but you are if you think that large scale theft of services isn't a crime. Fine: argue that you think re-selling a bundle of debt racked up by people who signed up for mortgages they couldn't possibly pay back should be a crime. But that doesn't make ripping off services providers a not-crime.
I mean -- 20 years for a simple financial fraud thing.
It's not "a simple financial fraud thing." It's complicity in the theft of services. On a huge, deliberate scale. Akin to having a chef and his staff set aside space and supplies for you, and spend time to make you dinner, and then you slipping out the door without paying. Regularly. Thousands of times.
Some punishments are about the deliberateness of the crime.
In other countries, murder is less.
Yes, many countries think that little of someone taking another person's life. Which is odd, really.
Meds. Get back on them. Before you get out of high school and have to try doing something of value.
he only led an effort to make the leaked documents available to the world.
Which may well have involved him and his group working directly with the guy who stole the files in order to give him a way to handle the dump of humdreds of thousands of them. People keep glossing over that little annoying detail.
Senator, Representative, President, are all job titles. No longer have the job? You don't get the honorific.
Which would be true, except for the fact that the custom has been exactly to the contrary for, oh, a couple of centuries now.
the 99%
Please. Just stop that.
For christ's sake, use the correct term
Ugh, the irony.
... that's oppression.
Your rant seems to assume that all online activity morally sound. The problem is, peoplep do use it - in huge numbers - to rip things off. It is used as a vector or fraud, crime, identity theft, piracy, cracking, and all sorts of other activities by unsavory sorts. Sometimes a crackdown really is a crackdown. Some people characterize summer night curfews in particular areas to be "oppression," but in spots with epidemics of late-night, gang-related violence, robberies, murder and such, the motivation for clearing the loiterers and 15-year-old gang recruits off of notoriously dangerous blocks, to break the violent rhythm, isn't oppression. But shooting Syrian political protesters in the street
Just as there are real differences between cracking down on a violent mob/gang and preventing a peaceful protest march, there's more than on thing going on online, and some it absolutely does need cracking-down-upon. Not because it's online, but becase it's humans behving criminally, regardess of then venue.
because the unions both owned and managed GM
You do understand, right, that you're completely incorrect on the facts? Private investors that used to own GM (some of which may have been employees or even union pension funds) LOST their investments in the bankruptcy. The unions were then given, by executive order, the gift of a large share of the company. The people who had money invested got no such consideration (mostly because they didn't organize to give the executive issuing such orders large amounts of political support during the campaign season).
So would you consider the editorial process at a newspaper (say, the fact that a human being, with editorial authority, sits in between the web-based letter-to-the-editor form and the web-based display of letters-to-the-editor that the newspaper site's public visitors see) is censorship? Is deleting forum spam censorship?
If someone posts a comment and you delete it for whatever reason, you're censoring them, period. Censorship doesn't require government involvement
In any meaningful use of the word, yes it does. Nobody is stopping you from saying what you want to say. But they may, on their own web site, decide it's a not a good fit for how they run the place. You are not censored. You are, though, subject to someone else's whims when you make free use of their stuff. The slashdot editors have absolutely no influence over your free speech - only over the content of their own web site. Just like you can and should have (if you want it) influence over your own, should you decide to set one up. At no point is your liberty threatened by having a web site owner run a web site according to their own editorial policies. Suggesting otherwise utterly trivializes real censorship - of which there are many and horrifying examples in the world.
Libraries mean you need never compensate an author for his work
Why is that - because the libraries have ripped off the copies they keep on their shelves? Do they have an inside contact at the publisher who sneaks them out in a backpack during lunch?
I have 3 books at home which aren't mine
And did you scan them, run them through OCR, and then make some money off of "sharing" them with millions of your closest personal friends? No?
So, your point is that you have no sense of what the discussion is actually about, right? Right.
Encyclopedia Britannica sues to have Wikipedia taken down could be a future headline IMO.
So, your opinion is based on ... a complete misunderstanding of the case at hand, of Wikipedia, and of the Britannica? The Trifecta Of Not Getting It! Congratulations.
Does it actually hurt, physically, to make such a bad analogy? Is it sort of like passing a kidney stone?