No, they installed chat software on their machines. Installing your own stuff on the machines was a complete no-no, since that sort of activity is exactly how stuff gets corrupted, infected, etc. Even if it's hard to get your Mac infected, you can still just plain install malware. It's a lot easier for IT in a public school setting to be able to rule out, for ALL support scenarios, the presence of unexpected software. More to the point, though, these kids are using the machines on the school network. They don't want packet sniffers, or other magic h@xxor tools running around - since that's like a high school sport in most school systems, and leads to stolen private info, altered grades, and all of that other fun stuff.
I said "do it in the computer lab" because that's where there are machines, instructors, and supposedly a nice little walled-off network just for screwing around with. Any instructor worth his salt is going to be happy to hear what the kids want to try. Of course, if their purpose is to do something they don't want the school or instructor to know about, well, that already sets the tone for what will happen when they get caught.
In the car analogy, I'm talking about the car that school is handing you to drive around the school parking lot for the next 30 minutes while you're in driver's ed class. And if, while sitting there using school equipment, you decide to use the car in a way that it can be technically used, but which by any common-sense take on things would be completely ass-holish, or just obviously going to have to make the people responsible for the car have to take time away from their day so that can guess at all of the things you may or may not have (what, poured in the tank?) - that's a better analogy to the school-issued computer situation, and is what I meant. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
since when was the internet invented by Kurtztown Area High School?
Read man, read! I'm referring to his comment that we need to "keep this up" so that the "American Empire" can go the way of Rome, blah blah. Talk about your shite!
But to imply that something easily gotten around (or through) like a window, an open door, or a known password somehow causes people to do something they know they shouldn't do - that's the part I'm responding to. They know they shouldn't install software or hack around on school PCs, and they know they shouldn't break the windows.
Except that the people who were paid to maintain those systems put the admin password on a piece of tape attached to those laptops. What responsibility do they bear?
The same responsibility as the person who doesn't lock the teacher's lounge, only to see that some student has (just to "test boundaries," mind you) deployed the science lab's entire cage full of mice into the room. Or the same responsibility you bear when you have your phone number and address listed in the phone book, and the neighbor kid uses it to get something illicit shipped to your house. The same responsibility that the chemistry teacher bears when flasks of acid, or bunsen burners with spark igniters are set up in a chemistry classroom. The same responsibility that the woodshop instructor has for having big power tools available. Deliberate bad acts by people using school tools, hardware, etc., are not always the fault of the people who don't make the school an impenetrable maze of padlocks and tied-down-everything. What about the 99% of the decent kids in the school who don't operate in a constant state of malice, who may not know the why of every school rule, but actually get that maybe the rules exist for a reason. Personally, I blame the parents of the kids involved, at least for laying the foundation for these kids - a foundation of not thinking past some immediate little twitch of Pwnership Urges and thinking about the consequences. These parents obviously have never demonstrated to their kids that "because I say so" sometimes has a more complex basis than the kids can immediately see, and that it's not because everyone who works in the school system signs up expressly to make 1% of the school's students miserable by not letting those kids dick around with school-issued computer systems.
I don't hold the school's custodial crew responsible for continuing to replace broken windows with more fragile glass (what could they be thinking? don't the know they're causing students to just break it again?), and while leaving passwords in plain site doesn't help matters, it sure as hell doesn't cause students to install their own chat sofware on school-issue hardware. If kids get out of high school thinking that not preventing people from doing all bad things is the same as causing all bad things to happen, then what's left of reason in our culture is completely doomed.
Look, chemistry instructors that position bunsen burners and spark igniters out on a high school lab bench are not and should not get "credit where credit is due" when a student "naturally explores boundaries" by seeing what happens when they torch various things around the classroom, or rig up a leak so that the next person who does sit down to use the lab gets to experience an explosion. The fact that some jerky kids will do this (because their "natural" need to explore doesn't include any of the "natural" common sense that would help them see when they're about to do something they already know they shouldn't, or their natural disposition is to prefer to see chaos or damage happen to other people) means that the people whose jobs are on the line have to set down rules that say You Can't Screw Around With This Equipment - Only Use It In The Way We're Describing.
What, you'd have every possible apparatus, tool, supply, or pointy object in a school setting come with a laundry list of every single thing that you shouldn't do with it? How about giving the average kid enough credit to know that intentionally doing something they've been asked not to do is bad news, period. And that actions deliberately taken to cause harm (like, shoving a pair of school scissors into the radiator fins of a school air conditioner unit) still aren't OK even though the students weren't issued any paperwork or lectures on that specific bad act.
For as many times as students have acted to do felony-worthy things like vandalize networks or corrupt things like academic records or obtain payroll data on teachers, etc, it's certainly reasonable to have a single rule that says "only use this equipment in the way we've described, and that includes not installing stuff that's not already there."
Just because the staff lounge isn't locked doesn't mean that it's reasonable for a student to wander in an hose the place up or look for private papers in someone's briefcase, or find a phone with which to make long distance calls to Peru.
No, HELL NO, they must redirect it to the little guys
No, the "little guys" are the people who are using the school's equipment in the way they've been asked to, and who may or may not be hacking their way to glory on their own home equipment on their own time, with someone else dealing with any support fallout. The people who decide that the school's equipment needs some new communication software installed on it, despite being told not to do that - they are not "the little guys," they're the guys that presume the rules set up to avoid all sorts of potential legal problems, sensitive data loss, expensive equipemnt maintenance, and classroom disruption don't apply to "explorers" such as themselves.
I'm all for exploring. Do it in the computer lab, and show the instructor the cool thing you want to try. Or do it on the free one-generation-old PC that is sitting out on the curb of every suburban neighborhood in the country. Don't raise my property taxes so that the school can afford to pay the new IT guy they just had to hire because there are no consequences for deliberately Pnwing school hardware and systems.
authoritarian society continually harasses people and pushes them around
Um, so, issuing a kid free computer hardware as part of their education, telling them not to screw it up (and not to risk infecting the network that that their fellow students and staff rely upon), and then, when the kids explicitly do exactly the thing they know they're not supposed to, getting them in trouble for that... that's "pushing them around?"
How is that different than the kid taking high school driver's ed deciding he's going to take the Toyota Corolla for which he's just been handed the keys, and deciding to "explore" the soccer field with it? He knows he's not supposed to, and he knows that if he's that interested in screwing around with cars he can get a job or ask his parents to buy him his own "exploration" platform to which he can do whatever he wants.
will be detained, beaten, fined, and thrown in jail.
Really. So, you hate the boss's rules about not, what - wasting printer paper? - and if you somehow rebel, you get beaten and thrown in jail? I see. Now, we get non-stop, round-the-clock cable news coverage and lawsuits when someone gets roughed up by a security guard at Best Buy, but no non-crazy-blog coverage of this sort of thing? Any chance that perhaps your personality or judgement has had a grating way of pissing off a lot of the people with which you've interacted? It sounds like you consider your "microscopic sphere of influence" to be the "most important thing in the universe." Any chance that's part of the friction? Even a part of it?
I say "Keep it up!" The American Empire is going the way of the Roman Empire.
Because, what, the institutions and operations that make things like the internet you're using right this minute even possible will somehow work better for you when there's no expectation of consequences for people's attempts to damage it?
Why should the moving violation be any more severe if you were stoned/drunk/high at the time?
Because that implies that not only were you speeding (or whatever - running over a pedestrian), but that before you did it, you deliberately also acted to make yourself even less capable of safely operating the vehicle, and then got behind the wheel knowing that you had. That suggests a special sort of recklessness that goes beyond simply speeding - and it's completely the choice of the driver to handle things that way, so there's not a lot of room to argue. There isn't a single driver's license holder out there that doesn't know the consequences.
The real problem here is that there isn't even a victim.
Sure there is: the taxpayers. When a system that's supposed to be stable, predictable, not varying with newly installed user widgets, and thus administered within something like a known budget (the ONLY way that school systems can reasonably afford to work) is changed in a way that is outside the established bounds, you've just screwed the people that have to maintain it. And that means they've got to lay hands (and time) on the system in a way that they otherwise wouldn't have to, and that takes them away from doing what they just spent the previous year budgeting to do, with everyone's tax dollars.
It's like when a school budgets for a certain amount of painting for a year, and then they have 11 kids decide that vandalizing a wall (strictly for educational, personally expressive purposes, of course) sounds like fun. The manhours, materials, and disruption to clean it up are not free. Taxpayers are the victims. And when it comes to installing software you're not supposed to install, tolerating it in a networked environment where a larger infection or other disruption could disrupt an entire school's reliance on a new tool... that's BS, and whether or not the kids have the intellect to actually understand all of the possible consequences of doing something they've been explicitly told not to do doesn't mean that they're off the hook for doing it. In terms of real responsibility, though, other than probably just shipping those kids to a school where they use plain old books, it's their parents who should probably really have to face the music.
All this inflation of an existing crime (copyright infringement, fraud, cheating, spying) just because it happens on a computer makes me sick.
It's not inflated. Fraud is fraud, cheating is cheating, infringement is infringement. The difference is that when a kid decides to try something a thousand times (because now that he's on a computer on a huge network, he thinks it's cool that he can), he's doing the same crime a thousand times. Trying to defraud one person the old fashioned way, as opposed to launching a phishing site and spam campaign aimed a million people - those are different things. Rather than complain that there appear to be different prosecutions "just because" computers happen to be involved, why not recognize that the scale of the damage is vastly different when the criminal decides to stretch his wings and use a mechanism that has vastly more reach? If prosecuters were after a more "analog" thief or scam artist who happened to be prolific enough to reach out to as many people as the guy who does it with his network-connected computer, he'd get the same treatment as the malicious phishing script kiddie - because he's attempting the same scale of activity. It's just that most crooks are lazy, so the ones looking to crack into the accounts of thousands of people are going to reach for the most convenient tool. Likewise with people too lazy/cheap to pay an artists a buck for their song. Sure, bumming a cassette tape from a friend was infringement, but on a spectacularly small scale. Cranking out 1000 cassettes for sale at a buck or two on the street wasn't, and people got busted big time for that. Well, putting that same material up to "share" with a thousand unknown "friends" who happen to
Having attended and later worked in an American high school where the mentality was...
Any chance that your high school's mascot wore a spectacular tinfoil hat? Come on. It takes a really bent imagination to picture a bunch of underpaid, overworked public school employees sitting around dreaming up IT entrapment schemes so they can lock up students (what, to reduce class sizes?).
That being said, we've got high schools in my county that are so overrun by gangs like MS13 that the other students and staff literally have to worry about getting their throats cut. So, like all tinfoil-based perspectives, there usually is a grain of truth to it.
A man was recently killed in Enumclaw (though he was actually from Seattle) by having sex with a horse. His colon ruptured.
Well, now, see, if you'd asked me to guess the signifigance of "Enumclaw" as a word (which I had not yet associated with an actual place), I'd have guessed that it was either an MMORPG server name, or perhaps some new open source *nix-oriented text editor. The whole horse-does-man-to-death thing would have been pretty low on my speculation-o-meter. Thanks (well, not really) for bringing me up to date! Slashdot: cool stuff for your brain that will displace things you do need to know, like your wife's birthday and what time that meeting with your boss is. But now I know something about Enumclaw that I'll have to work extra hard to un-cache. Must... surf... to... Drudge Report.
Since your nick is ScentCone, I'll trust that you know what you're talking about...
I know you won't believe this, but I wasn't even thinking about that when I chose farty horses.
A scent cone, in bird-hunting vernacular, is that shifting puddle of scent that fans out from, say, a pheasant that's camped out in a bush or other cover. The farther away you are from the bird, the wider the pattern. This is what a bird dog encounters in the field, and usually follows the "cone" in towards the more dense source of the scent. In a slashdot sense, it's like noticing a cluster of comments and drilling down to the one they're all responding to.
Flickering see-through projections and little puffs of smelly air trying to convince you that you're experiencing a real horse simply can't compete with standing next to an actual, farty horse.
I mean, if we can create an organism, why couldn't some higher being?
Well, because we have hands and whatnot, as opposed to imaginary magical, worshipper-fueled, fantasy Santa-Clause-like mythological constructions that are easier to dream up than complex biology is for a lot of people to understand. Pretty much that's why. I think it's a lot like wondering why the breakfast you're eating, as just made by your mom, isn't an indication (or proof, even) that the Easter Bunny could also have made breakfast. Someone who is comforted by the image of the Easter Bunny making them breakfast is always goint to be able to say that maybe, just maybe Mom was sidelined while the rabbit scrambled the eggs. Never mind that Mom can stand right there and show breakfast being made, and even point out how that goes a long way to explaining how lunch will be made later in the day... there's no point explaining any of that to the True Believers.
That assumes that the people he sold the names to (and whoever else might have received them downstream) only used them once. I'm going to bet that's not the case. Some hunk of that last has probably made rounds to multiple mail whores for a little merge/purge processing against their other lists. That's not nearly enough time - he should get out when people holding those addresses haven't seen any spam for at least 6 months.
"musicians, animators, directors, and writers": disposables according to their parent publishing houses, given a nearly insignificant minimum of the pie (sometimes just SALARY) and then blamed and even charged for any failure of the product.
"Disposables according to their parent publishing houses"? First, it would be interesting to actually see a quote that even begins to reflect that sentiment. But if what you really mean is "business partners which may not have their contracts renewed if it doesn't seem to be working out," then that's a two-way street. A talented artist has their pick of representation, just like a talented athlete does. A musician that has invested her own cash in the making of an inspiring demo (the perfect use for those basement studios) has the ammo to let the many more than "five" labels compete to handle her business matters. Most would-be artists don't have what it takes to support a large audience, so it's not only normal for those speculative contracts to expire in most cases, but for those artists to seek out and work with a more niche label that's better connected to an audience that's a better fit. This isn't a bit different than the fact that most small businesses (IIRC, it's something like 9 out of 10) fail after the first year or two, and those that have invested time and effort into them - no matter how high their original hopes for the talent involved - lose their investments and walk away. People who agree to put up their money and other resources to back a musician take chances, and usually lose. Just like most musicians who quit their "day jobs" to do it all on their own also fail.
given a small font mention in the credits, salary for work done, and not much else
Well, sure. Not every technician is a rock star, or the head cinematographer on a project large enough to risk flat pay in exchange for the more risky proposition of a share of the investment return. Of course, working on more "indy" projects can change that recipe, but the odds of success are that much smaller.
the last group mentioned need not be there at all! the market has changed and *gasp* they are not necessary.
Not necessary? Productions that require lots of time, people, and equipment pretty much demand the backing of people with deep enough pockets to make it through the project. In the case of more successful artists, each project funds the bigger investment in the last. The natural progression for those that really have the discipline and audience is to self-label (and start sponsoring other artists, in time). But the layer is necessary unless you never want to hear anything beyond garage-grade productions or see "The Blair Witch Project" instead of, say, "The Lord Of The Rings."
if a major label has an ad contract with a tv station..then that TV station will also be able to sell ad space to an indie label without threats from RIAA members of pulling out?
If the indie label wants to compete with those ad dollars, they're welcome to. Why, they might even want to get together and pool some resources. Collective bargaining is powerful, and it exactly how other trade associations work. But more to the point, there are hundreds of radio stations, and as so many people here fall all over themselves to point out, there are live performances at which to earn the reputation that leads to other sales.
Lawyer infested eh? Maybe you too should be championing copyright reform
Obviously I'm referring to the larger burden of our litigious society on all forms of human interaction. When you run a small business (say, a record store), you can be ruined by one person who slips on the sidewalk outside your store and sues you out of existence. Despite your tone, you aren't going to find anywhere that I've advocated frivalous lawsuits against people who don't dance around artists' copyrights. A suit that targets the wrong person should be thrown out, and an automatic countersuit should a
Oh for crying out loud, give it a rest. You'd probably be a lot happier with Kerry in office just so you'd really have something to complain about. I've definitely got bones to pick with Bush, mostly related to his beholdeness to the religious right, but finding him to be a better C-in-C than the alternative doesn't exactly make me a cult member. My principles don't allow me to vote for a guy I like even less (or note vote at all) just because the guy that at least echos some of what I like isn't my entire philosophical clone.
Why are you so hung up on smoking? It's not the only way. One can eat it, and (I did not know this) someone else mentioned you can vaporize it.
I'm not hung up on smoking, just sticking with the same topic for clarity. The real issue is people with a separate agenda pretending to argue the minute details of red herring-ish side issues.
No, from musicians, animators, writers, directors, photographers, videographers, producers, label owners, and others that do business pretty much however they see fit - with, or without involvement with larger companies or industry associations.
They control the marketing
No, they control their own marketing. How am I prevented from running a Google ad, putting up fliers, shipping samples in conjunction with other businesses, using online distribution in ways I choose to create exposure, etc? How does a record label prevent me from doing that? I notice that you conveniently ignored, for example, the long list of independent labels I pointed you to. I know they sort of complicate your argument and might damage your rebel street cred, but you might want to look it over anyway. "They" don't control the marketing, they pay a lot for their own marketing. On the other hand, I've been turned onto all sorts of music I'd never have otherwise heard by subscribing to services like RadioIO. The artists that are showcased there have their CDs advertised, are paid for their airplay, and all based on the staff's appreciation of the quality of the music. Most of what they decide is worthy is vetted from recordings provided by the artists themselves. This is exactly contrary to your tinfoil-lined corporate conspiracy picture of the world. Buy a beer or two less this month, and try them out - you'll find that you're way, way wrong about many of your presumptions.
if one records off the radio, it has the same economic effect as downloading an mp3
No, because the musicians (if they want to be) are paid when the radio station uses their work as part of their day's business operations.
As far as human interaction is concerned you're damned right it's not
I'm thinking you have a typo, there. But would you consider talking to your mom on the phone not "real"? I'm not interacting with you face-to-face right now, any more than you are when you talk to family on the phone. What's your standard, lack of face time? What about when I'm talking to my wife in the next room, where I can't see her, but can hear her? In order to bolster your sense that the things you do online aren't "real," you're applying standards that show your own confusion about reality. Citing MMORPGs is ridiculous. That's not a bit different than people doing old fashioned play-by-mail, or four people sitting around a table playing paper-and-dice D&D. You're confusing communication mechanisms with anonymity, and assuming that anonymity washes away all requirements for respecting an artist's wishes.
You know about the costs of the OLD way of being a musician.
None of what I mentioned has ceased to be true. That you have a friend who put together a cheap studio doesn't change the laws of physics or change what it costs to make environments that have no EM hum, perfect acoustics, and clean power. Shopped for high-end condenser mics that will do justice to oversampled digital recordings of instruments with a huge dynamic range? You don't string up an entire percussion rig with Neumanns or studio-grade AKGs for a few hundred dollars. The pro-grade A-to-D converters that make the quality of recordings of which you're so interested in maintaining your fair use don't just cost a few hundred dollars. I have friends that have a copy of 3D Studio Max and various sorts of desktop renderers. All on hardware they built. They can even laboriously produce some pretty good looking output. But I also have a family member that works for Pixar, where they have to use thousands of machines to render the sort of output we all love to look at (and hear) in feature-length packages. Thousands of machines, managed by huge teams
Ah, Ted. My favorite of his many works: "Whack 'Em, Stack 'Em, and Pack 'Em"
He's a little over the top sometimes, but I completely understand why. He makes lots of good points, and gets lots of kids tuned into the natural world, the food chain, and wildlife conservation/management. Gotta love ol' Ted. He's actually a hoot in most radio interviews because the typical politically correct city slicker doesn't just disagree with him... they don't even know how to talk to him! It's like he's an alien or something, because he'll actually admit to liking huning and enjoying eating Bambi. I never liked "Cat Scratch Fever" but I always get a kick out of Ted, and like how he can muster corporate and other resources to sponsor really great activities and educational programs. He's a good shot, too! And despite the rock-and-roll good-old-boy atmosphere, he's virtually encyclopedic about regulations, legislation, civil suits, game management, and a passle of other issues central to his area of activism. Now, catching him posting on Slashdot - that would be something new for Ted!
They are the product of natural interactions between natural creatures. Breeding us not an unnatural process. We're not talking cat-dogs.
But breeding under circumstances that would not naturally occur, and selectively breeding for traits that would, absent continual human intervention, completely doom the new breeds - that's not natural at all. Most modern livestock would never have come to exist, and would never survive, in a "natural" setting.
Mind you, I'm not saying this is bad (I also like a good, simple beef burger - too often, alas), I'm just saying that people are wrong if they think that tissue-growing machines in labs are the first time they're hearing about meat that didn't occur "naturally." Hell, some of the best beef cattle in the world are artifically inseminated specifically to keep them that way!
Well, seeing as the cow and chicken are products of nature, they are by definition natural.
Neither the "cow" nor the "chicken" (in the sense of the domesticated animals that you're thinking about, and crops of which we eat by the millions) are at all natural. And I'm not just talking about the chemicals we use to improve their growth rates or reduce infections. I'm saying they would not exist without our having created them. Neither would Labrador Retrievers. These animals were artificially bred, over the course of many generations of farmers (and chefs!) to be the meat providing crops that they are. Natural? Try whitetail deer, grouse, or maybe some trout. Or a nice tasty cottontail rabbit.
On a more serious note - what if the meat cells came from an animal killed by natural causes - say, a cow killed by wolves? Or a deer killed by a bumper?
Believe it or not, there are PETA/vegan types that will tell you it's "un-natural" for a deer to be killed by a car, even though the predators that normally would have kept their numbers vastly lower than they are now are absent. In other words, we have a hugely unnatural deer population, and they cross highways looking for territory into which they can balance the population pressure. Human hunters help some, taking the role of mountain lion and wolf, but suburban restrictions against even bow hunters have left the deer population exploding right where the least can be done about it.
Of course, I'm discounting the PETA-ish view that we should be running around with dart guns full of birth control medication, tagging most of the does so that they won't bear as many fawns. Great idea! There are only a few million of them, so doing that every year should be a piece of cake. Or... howzabout putting the surplus meat in the freezer, and require less agro-industry farmland use for raising wildly inferior beef?
Your point is a good one, though. The vegans that have so anthropomorphised the rest of the mammal stock always seem to stop right at the point where large animals with pointy teeth rip the throat out of Bambi. I guarantee that when I shoot a deer through the heart, it's a better way to go. Likewise, that quail that I kill with a shotgun (yum! Quail stew!) isn't really going to have too many preferences between that and having its back broken by a hawk, and then being eaten alive by Mrs. Hawk's kids back at the nest. Ah, nature! What a warm, fuzzy place!
Thank goodness the Whole Foods crowd is so politically correct that they'd never pick up a gun or a bow and go hunting for game. There's nothing better than venison, or leaner than upland game bird meat. Since getting it yourself requires real work, an understanding of true wildlife conservation, and a willingness to actually connect your own actions to the death of the animal you're going to eat... there will always be fewer yuppies and more good old boys out procuring the very best meat there is.
Of course, there are exceptions - somebody has to pay for those $20,000 designer quail shotguns and book rooms at those $1000/night lodges. But those are the upper-class people who actually get it, so they're welcome aboard.
Slashdot Mirror
They explored their computer
No, they installed chat software on their machines. Installing your own stuff on the machines was a complete no-no, since that sort of activity is exactly how stuff gets corrupted, infected, etc. Even if it's hard to get your Mac infected, you can still just plain install malware. It's a lot easier for IT in a public school setting to be able to rule out, for ALL support scenarios, the presence of unexpected software. More to the point, though, these kids are using the machines on the school network. They don't want packet sniffers, or other magic h@xxor tools running around - since that's like a high school sport in most school systems, and leads to stolen private info, altered grades, and all of that other fun stuff.
I said "do it in the computer lab" because that's where there are machines, instructors, and supposedly a nice little walled-off network just for screwing around with. Any instructor worth his salt is going to be happy to hear what the kids want to try. Of course, if their purpose is to do something they don't want the school or instructor to know about, well, that already sets the tone for what will happen when they get caught.
Come on now, read in context.
In the car analogy, I'm talking about the car that school is handing you to drive around the school parking lot for the next 30 minutes while you're in driver's ed class. And if, while sitting there using school equipment, you decide to use the car in a way that it can be technically used, but which by any common-sense take on things would be completely ass-holish, or just obviously going to have to make the people responsible for the car have to take time away from their day so that can guess at all of the things you may or may not have (what, poured in the tank?) - that's a better analogy to the school-issued computer situation, and is what I meant. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
since when was the internet invented by Kurtztown Area High School?
Read man, read! I'm referring to his comment that we need to "keep this up" so that the "American Empire" can go the way of Rome, blah blah. Talk about your shite!
But to imply that something easily gotten around (or through) like a window, an open door, or a known password somehow causes people to do something they know they shouldn't do - that's the part I'm responding to. They know they shouldn't install software or hack around on school PCs, and they know they shouldn't break the windows.
Except that the people who were paid to maintain those systems put the admin password on a piece of tape attached to those laptops. What responsibility do they bear?
The same responsibility as the person who doesn't lock the teacher's lounge, only to see that some student has (just to "test boundaries," mind you) deployed the science lab's entire cage full of mice into the room. Or the same responsibility you bear when you have your phone number and address listed in the phone book, and the neighbor kid uses it to get something illicit shipped to your house. The same responsibility that the chemistry teacher bears when flasks of acid, or bunsen burners with spark igniters are set up in a chemistry classroom. The same responsibility that the woodshop instructor has for having big power tools available. Deliberate bad acts by people using school tools, hardware, etc., are not always the fault of the people who don't make the school an impenetrable maze of padlocks and tied-down-everything. What about the 99% of the decent kids in the school who don't operate in a constant state of malice, who may not know the why of every school rule, but actually get that maybe the rules exist for a reason. Personally, I blame the parents of the kids involved, at least for laying the foundation for these kids - a foundation of not thinking past some immediate little twitch of Pwnership Urges and thinking about the consequences. These parents obviously have never demonstrated to their kids that "because I say so" sometimes has a more complex basis than the kids can immediately see, and that it's not because everyone who works in the school system signs up expressly to make 1% of the school's students miserable by not letting those kids dick around with school-issued computer systems.
I don't hold the school's custodial crew responsible for continuing to replace broken windows with more fragile glass (what could they be thinking? don't the know they're causing students to just break it again?), and while leaving passwords in plain site doesn't help matters, it sure as hell doesn't cause students to install their own chat sofware on school-issue hardware. If kids get out of high school thinking that not preventing people from doing all bad things is the same as causing all bad things to happen, then what's left of reason in our culture is completely doomed.
Look, chemistry instructors that position bunsen burners and spark igniters out on a high school lab bench are not and should not get "credit where credit is due" when a student "naturally explores boundaries" by seeing what happens when they torch various things around the classroom, or rig up a leak so that the next person who does sit down to use the lab gets to experience an explosion. The fact that some jerky kids will do this (because their "natural" need to explore doesn't include any of the "natural" common sense that would help them see when they're about to do something they already know they shouldn't, or their natural disposition is to prefer to see chaos or damage happen to other people) means that the people whose jobs are on the line have to set down rules that say You Can't Screw Around With This Equipment - Only Use It In The Way We're Describing.
What, you'd have every possible apparatus, tool, supply, or pointy object in a school setting come with a laundry list of every single thing that you shouldn't do with it? How about giving the average kid enough credit to know that intentionally doing something they've been asked not to do is bad news, period. And that actions deliberately taken to cause harm (like, shoving a pair of school scissors into the radiator fins of a school air conditioner unit) still aren't OK even though the students weren't issued any paperwork or lectures on that specific bad act.
For as many times as students have acted to do felony-worthy things like vandalize networks or corrupt things like academic records or obtain payroll data on teachers, etc, it's certainly reasonable to have a single rule that says "only use this equipment in the way we've described, and that includes not installing stuff that's not already there."
Just because the staff lounge isn't locked doesn't mean that it's reasonable for a student to wander in an hose the place up or look for private papers in someone's briefcase, or find a phone with which to make long distance calls to Peru.
No, HELL NO, they must redirect it to the little guys
No, the "little guys" are the people who are using the school's equipment in the way they've been asked to, and who may or may not be hacking their way to glory on their own home equipment on their own time, with someone else dealing with any support fallout. The people who decide that the school's equipment needs some new communication software installed on it, despite being told not to do that - they are not "the little guys," they're the guys that presume the rules set up to avoid all sorts of potential legal problems, sensitive data loss, expensive equipemnt maintenance, and classroom disruption don't apply to "explorers" such as themselves.
I'm all for exploring. Do it in the computer lab, and show the instructor the cool thing you want to try. Or do it on the free one-generation-old PC that is sitting out on the curb of every suburban neighborhood in the country. Don't raise my property taxes so that the school can afford to pay the new IT guy they just had to hire because there are no consequences for deliberately Pnwing school hardware and systems.
authoritarian society continually harasses people and pushes them around
Um, so, issuing a kid free computer hardware as part of their education, telling them not to screw it up (and not to risk infecting the network that that their fellow students and staff rely upon), and then, when the kids explicitly do exactly the thing they know they're not supposed to, getting them in trouble for that... that's "pushing them around?"
How is that different than the kid taking high school driver's ed deciding he's going to take the Toyota Corolla for which he's just been handed the keys, and deciding to "explore" the soccer field with it? He knows he's not supposed to, and he knows that if he's that interested in screwing around with cars he can get a job or ask his parents to buy him his own "exploration" platform to which he can do whatever he wants.
will be detained, beaten, fined, and thrown in jail.
Really. So, you hate the boss's rules about not, what - wasting printer paper? - and if you somehow rebel, you get beaten and thrown in jail? I see. Now, we get non-stop, round-the-clock cable news coverage and lawsuits when someone gets roughed up by a security guard at Best Buy, but no non-crazy-blog coverage of this sort of thing? Any chance that perhaps your personality or judgement has had a grating way of pissing off a lot of the people with which you've interacted? It sounds like you consider your "microscopic sphere of influence" to be the "most important thing in the universe." Any chance that's part of the friction? Even a part of it?
I say "Keep it up!" The American Empire is going the way of the Roman Empire.
Because, what, the institutions and operations that make things like the internet you're using right this minute even possible will somehow work better for you when there's no expectation of consequences for people's attempts to damage it?
Why should the moving violation be any more severe if you were stoned/drunk/high at the time?
Because that implies that not only were you speeding (or whatever - running over a pedestrian), but that before you did it, you deliberately also acted to make yourself even less capable of safely operating the vehicle, and then got behind the wheel knowing that you had. That suggests a special sort of recklessness that goes beyond simply speeding - and it's completely the choice of the driver to handle things that way, so there's not a lot of room to argue. There isn't a single driver's license holder out there that doesn't know the consequences.
The real problem here is that there isn't even a victim.
Sure there is: the taxpayers. When a system that's supposed to be stable, predictable, not varying with newly installed user widgets, and thus administered within something like a known budget (the ONLY way that school systems can reasonably afford to work) is changed in a way that is outside the established bounds, you've just screwed the people that have to maintain it. And that means they've got to lay hands (and time) on the system in a way that they otherwise wouldn't have to, and that takes them away from doing what they just spent the previous year budgeting to do, with everyone's tax dollars.
It's like when a school budgets for a certain amount of painting for a year, and then they have 11 kids decide that vandalizing a wall (strictly for educational, personally expressive purposes, of course) sounds like fun. The manhours, materials, and disruption to clean it up are not free. Taxpayers are the victims. And when it comes to installing software you're not supposed to install, tolerating it in a networked environment where a larger infection or other disruption could disrupt an entire school's reliance on a new tool... that's BS, and whether or not the kids have the intellect to actually understand all of the possible consequences of doing something they've been explicitly told not to do doesn't mean that they're off the hook for doing it. In terms of real responsibility, though, other than probably just shipping those kids to a school where they use plain old books, it's their parents who should probably really have to face the music.
All this inflation of an existing crime (copyright infringement, fraud, cheating, spying) just because it happens on a computer makes me sick.
It's not inflated. Fraud is fraud, cheating is cheating, infringement is infringement. The difference is that when a kid decides to try something a thousand times (because now that he's on a computer on a huge network, he thinks it's cool that he can), he's doing the same crime a thousand times. Trying to defraud one person the old fashioned way, as opposed to launching a phishing site and spam campaign aimed a million people - those are different things. Rather than complain that there appear to be different prosecutions "just because" computers happen to be involved, why not recognize that the scale of the damage is vastly different when the criminal decides to stretch his wings and use a mechanism that has vastly more reach? If prosecuters were after a more "analog" thief or scam artist who happened to be prolific enough to reach out to as many people as the guy who does it with his network-connected computer, he'd get the same treatment as the malicious phishing script kiddie - because he's attempting the same scale of activity. It's just that most crooks are lazy, so the ones looking to crack into the accounts of thousands of people are going to reach for the most convenient tool. Likewise with people too lazy/cheap to pay an artists a buck for their song. Sure, bumming a cassette tape from a friend was infringement, but on a spectacularly small scale. Cranking out 1000 cassettes for sale at a buck or two on the street wasn't, and people got busted big time for that. Well, putting that same material up to "share" with a thousand unknown "friends" who happen to
Having attended and later worked in an American high school where the mentality was...
Any chance that your high school's mascot wore a spectacular tinfoil hat? Come on. It takes a really bent imagination to picture a bunch of underpaid, overworked public school employees sitting around dreaming up IT entrapment schemes so they can lock up students (what, to reduce class sizes?).
That being said, we've got high schools in my county that are so overrun by gangs like MS13 that the other students and staff literally have to worry about getting their throats cut. So, like all tinfoil-based perspectives, there usually is a grain of truth to it.
A man was recently killed in Enumclaw (though he was actually from Seattle) by having sex with a horse. His colon ruptured.
Well, now, see, if you'd asked me to guess the signifigance of "Enumclaw" as a word (which I had not yet associated with an actual place), I'd have guessed that it was either an MMORPG server name, or perhaps some new open source *nix-oriented text editor. The whole horse-does-man-to-death thing would have been pretty low on my speculation-o-meter. Thanks (well, not really) for bringing me up to date! Slashdot: cool stuff for your brain that will displace things you do need to know, like your wife's birthday and what time that meeting with your boss is. But now I know something about Enumclaw that I'll have to work extra hard to un-cache. Must... surf... to... Drudge Report.
Since your nick is ScentCone, I'll trust that you know what you're talking about...
I know you won't believe this, but I wasn't even thinking about that when I chose farty horses.
A scent cone, in bird-hunting vernacular, is that shifting puddle of scent that fans out from, say, a pheasant that's camped out in a bush or other cover. The farther away you are from the bird, the wider the pattern. This is what a bird dog encounters in the field, and usually follows the "cone" in towards the more dense source of the scent. In a slashdot sense, it's like noticing a cluster of comments and drilling down to the one they're all responding to.
Are you, by any chance, from Enumclaw?
Not having ANY idea what you're talking about, I'm going to have to say no.
This is not the holodeck.
Flickering see-through projections and little puffs of smelly air trying to convince you that you're experiencing a real horse simply can't compete with standing next to an actual, farty horse.
I mean, if we can create an organism, why couldn't some higher being?
Well, because we have hands and whatnot, as opposed to imaginary magical, worshipper-fueled, fantasy Santa-Clause-like mythological constructions that are easier to dream up than complex biology is for a lot of people to understand. Pretty much that's why. I think it's a lot like wondering why the breakfast you're eating, as just made by your mom, isn't an indication (or proof, even) that the Easter Bunny could also have made breakfast. Someone who is comforted by the image of the Easter Bunny making them breakfast is always goint to be able to say that maybe, just maybe Mom was sidelined while the rabbit scrambled the eggs. Never mind that Mom can stand right there and show breakfast being made, and even point out how that goes a long way to explaining how lunch will be made later in the day... there's no point explaining any of that to the True Believers.
He has got just 1 second of jail per 175 emails
That assumes that the people he sold the names to (and whoever else might have received them downstream) only used them once. I'm going to bet that's not the case. Some hunk of that last has probably made rounds to multiple mail whores for a little merge/purge processing against their other lists. That's not nearly enough time - he should get out when people holding those addresses haven't seen any spam for at least 6 months.
"musicians, animators, directors, and writers": disposables according to their parent publishing houses, given a nearly insignificant minimum of the pie (sometimes just SALARY) and then blamed and even charged for any failure of the product.
"Disposables according to their parent publishing houses"? First, it would be interesting to actually see a quote that even begins to reflect that sentiment. But if what you really mean is "business partners which may not have their contracts renewed if it doesn't seem to be working out," then that's a two-way street. A talented artist has their pick of representation, just like a talented athlete does. A musician that has invested her own cash in the making of an inspiring demo (the perfect use for those basement studios) has the ammo to let the many more than "five" labels compete to handle her business matters. Most would-be artists don't have what it takes to support a large audience, so it's not only normal for those speculative contracts to expire in most cases, but for those artists to seek out and work with a more niche label that's better connected to an audience that's a better fit. This isn't a bit different than the fact that most small businesses (IIRC, it's something like 9 out of 10) fail after the first year or two, and those that have invested time and effort into them - no matter how high their original hopes for the talent involved - lose their investments and walk away. People who agree to put up their money and other resources to back a musician take chances, and usually lose. Just like most musicians who quit their "day jobs" to do it all on their own also fail.
given a small font mention in the credits, salary for work done, and not much else
Well, sure. Not every technician is a rock star, or the head cinematographer on a project large enough to risk flat pay in exchange for the more risky proposition of a share of the investment return. Of course, working on more "indy" projects can change that recipe, but the odds of success are that much smaller.
the last group mentioned need not be there at all! the market has changed and *gasp* they are not necessary.
Not necessary? Productions that require lots of time, people, and equipment pretty much demand the backing of people with deep enough pockets to make it through the project. In the case of more successful artists, each project funds the bigger investment in the last. The natural progression for those that really have the discipline and audience is to self-label (and start sponsoring other artists, in time). But the layer is necessary unless you never want to hear anything beyond garage-grade productions or see "The Blair Witch Project" instead of, say, "The Lord Of The Rings."
if a major label has an ad contract with a tv station..then that TV station will also be able to sell ad space to an indie label without threats from RIAA members of pulling out?
If the indie label wants to compete with those ad dollars, they're welcome to. Why, they might even want to get together and pool some resources. Collective bargaining is powerful, and it exactly how other trade associations work. But more to the point, there are hundreds of radio stations, and as so many people here fall all over themselves to point out, there are live performances at which to earn the reputation that leads to other sales.
Lawyer infested eh? Maybe you too should be championing copyright reform
Obviously I'm referring to the larger burden of our litigious society on all forms of human interaction. When you run a small business (say, a record store), you can be ruined by one person who slips on the sidewalk outside your store and sues you out of existence. Despite your tone, you aren't going to find anywhere that I've advocated frivalous lawsuits against people who don't dance around artists' copyrights. A suit that targets the wrong person should be thrown out, and an automatic countersuit should a
Oh for crying out loud, give it a rest. You'd probably be a lot happier with Kerry in office just so you'd really have something to complain about. I've definitely got bones to pick with Bush, mostly related to his beholdeness to the religious right, but finding him to be a better C-in-C than the alternative doesn't exactly make me a cult member. My principles don't allow me to vote for a guy I like even less (or note vote at all) just because the guy that at least echos some of what I like isn't my entire philosophical clone.
temporary blindness after an intense and violent slashdotting.
Why are you so hung up on smoking? It's not the only way. One can eat it, and (I did not know this) someone else mentioned you can vaporize it.
I'm not hung up on smoking, just sticking with the same topic for clarity. The real issue is people with a separate agenda pretending to argue the minute details of red herring-ish side issues.
where do you get this crap.. the riaa website?
No, from musicians, animators, writers, directors, photographers, videographers, producers, label owners, and others that do business pretty much however they see fit - with, or without involvement with larger companies or industry associations.
They control the marketing
No, they control their own marketing. How am I prevented from running a Google ad, putting up fliers, shipping samples in conjunction with other businesses, using online distribution in ways I choose to create exposure, etc? How does a record label prevent me from doing that? I notice that you conveniently ignored, for example, the long list of independent labels I pointed you to. I know they sort of complicate your argument and might damage your rebel street cred, but you might want to look it over anyway. "They" don't control the marketing, they pay a lot for their own marketing. On the other hand, I've been turned onto all sorts of music I'd never have otherwise heard by subscribing to services like RadioIO. The artists that are showcased there have their CDs advertised, are paid for their airplay, and all based on the staff's appreciation of the quality of the music. Most of what they decide is worthy is vetted from recordings provided by the artists themselves. This is exactly contrary to your tinfoil-lined corporate conspiracy picture of the world. Buy a beer or two less this month, and try them out - you'll find that you're way, way wrong about many of your presumptions.
if one records off the radio, it has the same economic effect as downloading an mp3
No, because the musicians (if they want to be) are paid when the radio station uses their work as part of their day's business operations.
As far as human interaction is concerned you're damned right it's not
I'm thinking you have a typo, there. But would you consider talking to your mom on the phone not "real"? I'm not interacting with you face-to-face right now, any more than you are when you talk to family on the phone. What's your standard, lack of face time? What about when I'm talking to my wife in the next room, where I can't see her, but can hear her? In order to bolster your sense that the things you do online aren't "real," you're applying standards that show your own confusion about reality. Citing MMORPGs is ridiculous. That's not a bit different than people doing old fashioned play-by-mail, or four people sitting around a table playing paper-and-dice D&D. You're confusing communication mechanisms with anonymity, and assuming that anonymity washes away all requirements for respecting an artist's wishes.
You know about the costs of the OLD way of being a musician.
None of what I mentioned has ceased to be true. That you have a friend who put together a cheap studio doesn't change the laws of physics or change what it costs to make environments that have no EM hum, perfect acoustics, and clean power. Shopped for high-end condenser mics that will do justice to oversampled digital recordings of instruments with a huge dynamic range? You don't string up an entire percussion rig with Neumanns or studio-grade AKGs for a few hundred dollars. The pro-grade A-to-D converters that make the quality of recordings of which you're so interested in maintaining your fair use don't just cost a few hundred dollars. I have friends that have a copy of 3D Studio Max and various sorts of desktop renderers. All on hardware they built. They can even laboriously produce some pretty good looking output. But I also have a family member that works for Pixar, where they have to use thousands of machines to render the sort of output we all love to look at (and hear) in feature-length packages. Thousands of machines, managed by huge teams
Ted Nugent, is that you?
Ah, Ted. My favorite of his many works: "Whack 'Em, Stack 'Em, and Pack 'Em"
He's a little over the top sometimes, but I completely understand why. He makes lots of good points, and gets lots of kids tuned into the natural world, the food chain, and wildlife conservation/management. Gotta love ol' Ted. He's actually a hoot in most radio interviews because the typical politically correct city slicker doesn't just disagree with him... they don't even know how to talk to him! It's like he's an alien or something, because he'll actually admit to liking huning and enjoying eating Bambi. I never liked "Cat Scratch Fever" but I always get a kick out of Ted, and like how he can muster corporate and other resources to sponsor really great activities and educational programs. He's a good shot, too! And despite the rock-and-roll good-old-boy atmosphere, he's virtually encyclopedic about regulations, legislation, civil suits, game management, and a passle of other issues central to his area of activism. Now, catching him posting on Slashdot - that would be something new for Ted!
They are the product of natural interactions between natural creatures. Breeding us not an unnatural process. We're not talking cat-dogs.
But breeding under circumstances that would not naturally occur, and selectively breeding for traits that would, absent continual human intervention, completely doom the new breeds - that's not natural at all. Most modern livestock would never have come to exist, and would never survive, in a "natural" setting.
Mind you, I'm not saying this is bad (I also like a good, simple beef burger - too often, alas), I'm just saying that people are wrong if they think that tissue-growing machines in labs are the first time they're hearing about meat that didn't occur "naturally." Hell, some of the best beef cattle in the world are artifically inseminated specifically to keep them that way!
Sure, but synthetic meat in a spandex jumpsuit... think Pamela Anderson!
Well, seeing as the cow and chicken are products of nature, they are by definition natural.
Neither the "cow" nor the "chicken" (in the sense of the domesticated animals that you're thinking about, and crops of which we eat by the millions) are at all natural. And I'm not just talking about the chemicals we use to improve their growth rates or reduce infections. I'm saying they would not exist without our having created them. Neither would Labrador Retrievers. These animals were artificially bred, over the course of many generations of farmers (and chefs!) to be the meat providing crops that they are. Natural? Try whitetail deer, grouse, or maybe some trout. Or a nice tasty cottontail rabbit.
On a more serious note - what if the meat cells came from an animal killed by natural causes - say, a cow killed by wolves? Or a deer killed by a bumper?
Believe it or not, there are PETA/vegan types that will tell you it's "un-natural" for a deer to be killed by a car, even though the predators that normally would have kept their numbers vastly lower than they are now are absent. In other words, we have a hugely unnatural deer population, and they cross highways looking for territory into which they can balance the population pressure. Human hunters help some, taking the role of mountain lion and wolf, but suburban restrictions against even bow hunters have left the deer population exploding right where the least can be done about it.
Of course, I'm discounting the PETA-ish view that we should be running around with dart guns full of birth control medication, tagging most of the does so that they won't bear as many fawns. Great idea! There are only a few million of them, so doing that every year should be a piece of cake. Or... howzabout putting the surplus meat in the freezer, and require less agro-industry farmland use for raising wildly inferior beef?
Your point is a good one, though. The vegans that have so anthropomorphised the rest of the mammal stock always seem to stop right at the point where large animals with pointy teeth rip the throat out of Bambi. I guarantee that when I shoot a deer through the heart, it's a better way to go. Likewise, that quail that I kill with a shotgun (yum! Quail stew!) isn't really going to have too many preferences between that and having its back broken by a hawk, and then being eaten alive by Mrs. Hawk's kids back at the nest. Ah, nature! What a warm, fuzzy place!
Thank goodness the Whole Foods crowd is so politically correct that they'd never pick up a gun or a bow and go hunting for game. There's nothing better than venison, or leaner than upland game bird meat. Since getting it yourself requires real work, an understanding of true wildlife conservation, and a willingness to actually connect your own actions to the death of the animal you're going to eat... there will always be fewer yuppies and more good old boys out procuring the very best meat there is.
Of course, there are exceptions - somebody has to pay for those $20,000 designer quail shotguns and book rooms at those $1000/night lodges. But those are the upper-class people who actually get it, so they're welcome aboard.