That's the one really important thing that you've got, that most others don't—a ham radio. That would be worth its weight in gold in any isolating disaster that lasted more than a couple of weeks.
Well, flood and forest fire, yes. My home has a galvanized aluminum roof and is clad in cement fiberboard, so forest fires aren't liable to affect me. And my home is cited on the slope of a mountain perched between a pair of ravines (not that severe, but you get the idea) down which water drains, so flooding would require that the sea level rise a thousand feet.:) Both of these are steps that anybody can and should take when siting a home. The mountain range I'm in hasn't been seismically active for millions of years, so earthquakes aren't a concern.
But we didn't spring for the astroid or volcano-proofing.:)
How many ducks and deer do you think there *are*? If there was an actual disaster, the deer, duck, quail, and lizard populations would plummet as a teaming horde of well-armed people suddenly ravage the landscape.
Cornell University Cooperative Extension: "Today there are over 20 million deer in the United States and numbers are rising. [...] Densitites may exceed 40 deer per square mile in some rural areas, and over 100 deer/square mile have been documented near many eastern metropolitan areas. [...] As long as adequate food resources are available, deer populations can double in size every 2-3 years. Eventually some form of population management is needed to control herd growth and maintain deer numbers within the social carrying capacity."
I almost forgot: firearms. We've got a 12-gage shotgun, a.22, and a 7.92mm 1948 Turkish Mauser. I've only got a couple of boxes of shells, and maybe three dozen rounds for the Mauser (they're expensive) but I have a few hundred rounds for the.22. We can hunt enough turkey, deer, and squirrel to keep us in protein year-round. Right now I hunt rarely, and when I do it's strictly for food (not trophies), but I'm certainly prepared to do so regularly if it were necessary.
If you have never hunted, note that there is nothing about owning a gun that prepares you to do so. If you're thinking "hey, I see deer around—I could eat those," then you are wrong. Learn to hunt now. Get a license. Find somebody to teach you how to gut and butcher a deer. Otherwise, if you do wind up in a bad situation, you might get lucky enough to actually shoot a deer, only to find that you have no idea of what to do with it. Worse still, it'll be gut-shot, and you'll wind up getting some horrible disease from eating venison streaked with deer shit.
First, our home. We live in a very rural area, on the side of a treed mountain. We built our home last year, and it's passive solar, sited to take maximum advantage of the sun, built very tightly (LEED gold-ish, but we didn't bother to get certified). We maintain the forest, have large piles of wood in rotation being seasoned, and keep a large stockpile of planked wood on hand (milled from the trees on our land). Our neighbors have cows, goats, and sheep, from which they produce milk and meat—handy to have When The Shit Comes Down®. (I use that phrase facetiously—it's a generic term that my wife and I use to refer to anything that may or may not happen in our lifetimes that would disrupt supply chains, limit movement, or otherwise require short or long-term independence.) We paid a few thousand bucks to have an enormous propane tank buried next to our house, in which we maintain a two-year supply of propane. Soon enough we'll have a propane generator, a few solar panels, and a small windmill, which should allow us to maintain ~1.5 kWh of power during about half of the day, but make it possible to peak to 5 kWh when demand requires (until the propane runs out, and then we top out at 1.5 kWh).
Second, food and water. We always keep about ten pounds of oats, twenty pounds of flour, ten pounds of sugar, ten pounds of rice, and ten pounds of dried beans on hand. We always have 20 gallons of fresh drinking water stored, 55 gallons of rainwater, and we maintain a spring. Also, we have a stream. We have a small flock of chickens, a horse, and we're about to get ducks. Six months out of the year we have what's either a large garden or a small farm, and we put up a lot of food in the fall. Not enough to get us through a winter, but we do alright, and feel confident that we could ramp up production significantly, if need be. We save our seed, so the notion of increasing the size of our garden by tenfold with four months of lead time (seasonally depending, of course) isn't totally unreasonable.
Third, medical. We've got potassium iodide on hand (there's a nuclear power plant ~35 miles from us), a dose of Tamiflu for each of us, two very complete medical kits, moderate training in first aid (with more coming soon—see below), and we generally maintain a three-month supply of our medications.
Fourth, general supplies. We have an oil lamp (and, of course, lamp oil), a bunch of candles, several fire extinguishers, a NOAA radio, a hand-cranked AM/FM/shortwave radio, matches, lighters, a flotilla of batteries of all sorts, headlamps, and flashlights. We keep a couple of canisters of propane on hand (rotated through annually, thanks to grilling season) and have a propane heater that can heat our entire house for a couple of days with one of those plugged in.
Fifth, evacuation preparedness. We keep a 72-hour pack by the front door, ready to go, with a couple of hundred bucks in cash, a few days food, tinned water, flashlights, blankets, tarps, matches, fire starters, and so on. We've got sleeping bags and internal frame packs on hand for each of us. The idea is to make sure that if sheltering in place isn't safe, that we can leave without delay.
Finally, a flotilla of books (not all of which we've read, I admit) on wilderness medicine. This Tuesday we're starting an eight-week Community Emergency Response Team training course (held just once a week). This is available in most areas—google around to see if you can take it in your area. That's where you can learn to be helpful in an emergency, rather than somebody who needs help—learn to use a chainsaw, direct traffic, suture a wound, lead a panicked group of people to safety, etc. Recommended highly.
I've come to relish when we lose power in good weather. It's a chance to test out our plans. There are a lot of basic aspects to preparedness that would just never cross your mind until you actually need to carry out that plan. You know how, without power, you keep flipping light switches every time you walk into a room, or thinking "well, I'll just google that...*DOH*"? The same applies to all kinds of things, like having candles...but no matches.:)
Both sides of my family are from Vermont—Rutland, on one side, and the White River Junction area, on the other. I've spent a lot of time there, and I think I'm about as familiar as somebody who doesn't live there could reasonably be. And I can say that with fair confidence that Vermont's rural areas are no more rural or isolated than the rural areas of Virginia, where I live. (Compare Vermont's population density and Virginia's population density. While you're at it, compare the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Green Mountains. If you were blindfolded and kidnapped, when the blindfold was taken off, you'd be hard pressed to know if you were in Vermont or Virginia.) Good luck finding any USPS address that has no other USPS address within five miles.
And I'm not at all frustrated about the lack of universal postal service—it's no problem for me at all, having been the case for me for much of my life.
Congratulations, you've just described exactly how the USPS works.
Bajillions of people who live in rural areas (like me) pick up their mail at the post office, because the cost of delivery to their homes is prohibitive. Universal service is not, in fact, universal, and never has been. Even UPS won't deliver to my house—I've got to pick up their packages at the post office (!), too.
Also, your example is ludicrous. Have you ever heard of a house so isolated that it's in a "neighborhood" (?) five miles away and yet, mysteriously, this five-mile-long stretch of road, devoid of any homes or businesses, has a 20 MPH speed limit on its road? Because I can't summon any scenario in which that would be the case.
I've put a bunch of time into this for a project of my own. The short answer is, no, I have found no such program. I've experimented with a few older programs, but they're useless.
Sorry.
I considered putting this very system into place on a site of mine a half-decade ago, until I realized that I would just be informing attackers which passwords are in use.
Actually, Cuccinelli wasn't "appointed" as attorney general—he was elected. He defeated Democrat Steve Shannon by a huge margin. We chose to have this guy as AG, and it wasn't even close. Any informed voter should have known what they were getting into with Cuccinelli. He's really, really far right, and he's never hid it. It doesn't speak well of Virginia.
Face it, a gun is purely designed to maim or kill. It is not a tool and is not designed for any other purpose.
Wrong. A gun is a thing that's designed to a put a hole in that thing over there. Just last week I was using my Mossberg to put holes in targets and, to spectacular effect, a full can of shaving cream. In a decade of ownership, I've never once used that particular gun to maim or kill.
She's not acting in the manner of a journalist, by which I mean that there is no goal to her coverage, no public interest being served, no story being pieced together. She's simply taking private information about private individuals who happen to work for the local government (albeit in a very private capacity) and making it public.
First, I don't think you're in any position to judge whether or not she's acting in the capacity of journalist or if the free speech she is exercising is worthwhile.
If none of us are in the position to judge anything, then I think we can safely shut down the/. commenting system, can't we?
The whole point of free speech is that no one gets to judge what is and is not worthwhile.
Yes, that's the point, but that's not really how it works out. Here in Virginia, for instance, we have a shield law that's been established by the judiciary. If a reporter follows around police officers for the purpose of writing a story in the public interest, that's not stalking, that's journalism. But if an individual does it in order to...well, in order to just harass them, that's illegal.
The only criteria is if the speech is infringing upon someone else's human rights as protected under the law.
"Human rights"? Um. No.
Second, isn't all the information she gathered public information. She just followed people around in public and gathered together public records that a lot of people don't know are public.
You haven't been reading Slashdot very long if you think that the gathering of lots of ostensibly public information about an individual and making it public isn't an abuse of privacy. A listing of all of the websites that you visit is public information, in the sense that it's probably possible for me to track it down, with a little sleuthing and calling in a few favors from friends at DoubleClick and Google. (I'm talking in the abstract here, obviously.) You don't post under your real name here, but I'll bet I could find it out. That's public. Hell, given that, I bet I could figure out and post your address, phone number, e-mail address, social security number, criminal history, home value, workplace, career history, educational background, etc., with some spare time and a big of legwork. But you probably wouldn't want me to make all of that public, because it would totally freak you out and definitely be a violation of your privacy...despite it being public information. One might even call it "stalking."
But then, equating a secretary at a courthouse and police officer in this instance is slightly disingenuous as they have different levels of authority and pose different levels of risk to the people from abuse of that authority.
It's not disingenuous, it's making the point that the notion that a "public employee" vs. a "private employee" is a false dichotomy. The fact that somebody works for the government (as do I, in a roundabout away) does not suddenly make their private life an open book. What a police officer does on his own time, provided it's not illegal, should as private of a matter as what a secretary does, or what anybody else does.
Further your selection of a position of secretary and pronouns indicating it is a woman while the stalker is a man seems like something of an emotional, fear based appeal.
That's right. The point being that we can't have laws that are different for different sexes. Is it OK for a woman to follow a man, but not a man to follow a woman? Of course not. You're paying attention -- that's good.:)
I've been following this story for a few years, or rather following it as it developed.
Her ex-husband is Kevin Strom, a prominent white nationalist and white supremacist* who was arrested for possession of child pornography and beating his wife (while threatening worse if she testified against him) a couple of years ago. He'd been stalking a ten-year-old girl, regularly cruising by her house, giving her gifts, sending her love letters, and proposing to her. (The kid's parents were none too thrilled.) It turned out, bizarrely, that none of that is illegal -- but possession of child pornography landed him in prison for a couple of years. He was released earlier this year. He was also, incidentally, an inveterate troll of one of my blogs, so I've got a special dislike for the guy.
Anyhow, Elisha is every bit as much of a racist as Strom, only she's also a feminist, which means that racists think she's scum, meaning that basically everybody hates her. Based on her blog entries, commenters on my blog have come to the conclusion that she was having an affair with one or more of these police officers. To my knowledge, she's never had any interaction with JADEâ"that is, neither she nor her husband have been busted for drug possession by them. So her interest in them appears to be romantic. Spurned, she's started stalking them, and expanded her interest to include all members of JADE.
What I can't shed any light on is whether or not this arrest is appropriate. I've been involved in a couple of high-profile bloggers' free expression cases (as a defendant in both cases), and though you'd think I'd rush to defend somebody in her positionâ"cretin though she may beâ"I just don't think it's cut-and-dry enough. The fact that she's putting this stuff on a blog seems to be irrelevant, by which I mean it's not a special form of expression here. She's not acting in the manner of a journalist, by which I mean that there is no goal to her coverage, no public interest being served, no story being pieced together. She's simply taking private information about private individuals who happen to work for the local government (albeit in a very private capacity) and making it public.
The question here is simply, I think, whether stalking laws are meant to cover people who are public employees. If a racist who advocates violent rebellion against black Americans starts following the a black secretary who works in the county office building, documenting her every move publicly, can the police intervene? Or is that his right, because she's opted out of a right to privacy by working for a government agency? There is a legitimate argument to be made that it is his right, in order to be consistent with what is to be expected for more prominent public employees. But a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, after all, so maybe we should put less thought into being consistent and more into protecting our citizens. I'm not being vague to be cute -- I really don't know what's right here.
* I regret that covering these nutcases involves learning things like that there's a difference between being a white nationalist and a white supremacist.
Those of us who are website developers will recognize the misuse of "design" committed by ABC News here. To a layperson, "design" means "make" when it comes to websites. They're not spending $18M to redesign the website (presumably), but presumably on a total overhaul of the thing.
I worked with Aneesh earlier this year on an open government project here in Virginia. He asked me to function in a very small role in developing stimulus.virginia.gov, basically to serve as a programmer/open government guy to advocate from the inside for increased openness and strong adherence to public, open data exchange standards on the website and its API. Aneesh isn't a geek, but he "gets it," if I may return to that old chestnut that we all employed round about 2000. He might not know Unicode from Latin 1, but he surrounds himself with people who do know the difference, he gets the gist of it from them, and chooses the path that provides the most accessibility for the most data to the most people.
The guy is, incidentally, utterly exhausting to try to keep up with. I'm somebody to whom people say constantly "when do you sleep?", and even I find Aneesh an absolutely whirlwind of activity.
The only downside for me here is that Aneesh had expressed interested in me joining Governor Kaine's cabinet as "Senior Advisor for Open Government" (or something like that). I'd been in talks with my employer about taking a leave of absence. Now, of course, that won't happen. But since the (apparent) tradeoff is having Aneesh as the nation's CTO, that's A-OK by me.
There's so much about what you wrote that is simply wrong. Let's run down the list.
1. Rick Boucher isn't a member of the Virginia General Assembly, he's a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
2. There was never a heyday of Virginia politicians who spearheaded smart internet laws. You can tell because, if there had been, then we'd have smart internet laws. The closest that we ever got was Gov. Jim Gilmore, who created the Secretary of Technology cabinet position and created those asinine "@" internet license plates. Oh, and he required censorware on all school computers. That was the high point for Virginia.
3. You speak of the legislature as a single unit, wondering why "they" did something or "they" didn't do something. It's made up of 140 members, each of whom is free to introduce legislation on a given topic. Do you live in Virginia? Did you ask your legislator to introduce such a bill? Nothing is "on tap for next year," because it's not possible. It's not possible to prefile a bill until summer, some months after the veto session. If you have an idea for a better UCE ban, I wish you'd write up a proposal to share with the legislature.
There are lots of good reasons to do such filtering. Note the joking comment about 4chan elsewhere in the discussion. Managing an online community is a lot of work, but it's a great deal easier when its participants are a member of the same physical community. Those face-to-face encounters do a lot to defuse online anger.
He's not worrying about "what is of use to other people," he's worrying about what is of use to him. That's not self-centered, that's just smart product development.
They'll have no trouble with it at all. I'm yet to encounter a screen reader that reads the name element of an input field. Perhaps it would if the field was otherwise devoid of any descriptive text, but you'd have to be a real jackass to provide an unlabeled input field and expect anybody to know what to do with it.:)
Im afraid you misunderstand me. Again, only the field name is affected, not the label for the field. I've used text-only browsers regularly since 1994 (Mosaic over a 14.4k modem, Lynx, and now Links), and I'm yet to encounter one that displays the name element of an input field to the user.
Third, do they fill out a hidden inputbox? This is sort of the reverse captcha.
This is really a very good test. As others have mentioned in this thread, it's the sort of thing that spammers will circumvent if it becomes widespread, but for now it's great.
There's something else I've found to be really quite effective: deliberately misnaming my form fields. For instance, give the input field that's labelled "First Name" an input name of "phone number." Humans don't use input names to determine what text to enter, but spambots do. Then check that inputâ"if the first name field contains a phone number, you know you've got yourself spammer.
I've used solely the combination of these two things to run one of my websites for two years now, and I get a vanishingly small amount of spam.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't logged in, but that was my post.
What kind of weird-ass chickens do you have? This time of year, it's too hot to be feeding them at 4pm. They eat in the morning and again around 7pm.
That's the one really important thing that you've got, that most others don't—a ham radio. That would be worth its weight in gold in any isolating disaster that lasted more than a couple of weeks.
Well, flood and forest fire, yes. My home has a galvanized aluminum roof and is clad in cement fiberboard, so forest fires aren't liable to affect me. And my home is cited on the slope of a mountain perched between a pair of ravines (not that severe, but you get the idea) down which water drains, so flooding would require that the sea level rise a thousand feet. :) Both of these are steps that anybody can and should take when siting a home. The mountain range I'm in hasn't been seismically active for millions of years, so earthquakes aren't a concern.
But we didn't spring for the astroid or volcano-proofing. :)
Congratulations, you found my home address in...er...1992. Now you just need to create a time machine!
How many ducks and deer do you think there *are*? If there was an actual disaster, the deer, duck, quail, and lizard populations would plummet as a teaming horde of well-armed people suddenly ravage the landscape.
Cornell University Cooperative Extension: "Today there are over 20 million deer in the United States and numbers are rising. [...] Densitites may exceed 40 deer per square mile in some rural areas, and over 100 deer/square mile have been documented near many eastern metropolitan areas. [...] As long as adequate food resources are available, deer populations can double in size every 2-3 years. Eventually some form of population management is needed to control herd growth and maintain deer numbers within the social carrying capacity."
There are plenty of deer.
I almost forgot: firearms. We've got a 12-gage shotgun, a .22, and a 7.92mm 1948 Turkish Mauser. I've only got a couple of boxes of shells, and maybe three dozen rounds for the Mauser (they're expensive) but I have a few hundred rounds for the .22. We can hunt enough turkey, deer, and squirrel to keep us in protein year-round. Right now I hunt rarely, and when I do it's strictly for food (not trophies), but I'm certainly prepared to do so regularly if it were necessary.
If you have never hunted, note that there is nothing about owning a gun that prepares you to do so. If you're thinking "hey, I see deer around—I could eat those," then you are wrong. Learn to hunt now. Get a license. Find somebody to teach you how to gut and butcher a deer. Otherwise, if you do wind up in a bad situation, you might get lucky enough to actually shoot a deer, only to find that you have no idea of what to do with it. Worse still, it'll be gut-shot, and you'll wind up getting some horrible disease from eating venison streaked with deer shit.
My wife and I like to stay fairly well prepared.
First, our home. We live in a very rural area, on the side of a treed mountain. We built our home last year, and it's passive solar, sited to take maximum advantage of the sun, built very tightly (LEED gold-ish, but we didn't bother to get certified). We maintain the forest, have large piles of wood in rotation being seasoned, and keep a large stockpile of planked wood on hand (milled from the trees on our land). Our neighbors have cows, goats, and sheep, from which they produce milk and meat—handy to have When The Shit Comes Down®. (I use that phrase facetiously—it's a generic term that my wife and I use to refer to anything that may or may not happen in our lifetimes that would disrupt supply chains, limit movement, or otherwise require short or long-term independence.) We paid a few thousand bucks to have an enormous propane tank buried next to our house, in which we maintain a two-year supply of propane. Soon enough we'll have a propane generator, a few solar panels, and a small windmill, which should allow us to maintain ~1.5 kWh of power during about half of the day, but make it possible to peak to 5 kWh when demand requires (until the propane runs out, and then we top out at 1.5 kWh).
Second, food and water. We always keep about ten pounds of oats, twenty pounds of flour, ten pounds of sugar, ten pounds of rice, and ten pounds of dried beans on hand. We always have 20 gallons of fresh drinking water stored, 55 gallons of rainwater, and we maintain a spring. Also, we have a stream. We have a small flock of chickens, a horse, and we're about to get ducks. Six months out of the year we have what's either a large garden or a small farm, and we put up a lot of food in the fall. Not enough to get us through a winter, but we do alright, and feel confident that we could ramp up production significantly, if need be. We save our seed, so the notion of increasing the size of our garden by tenfold with four months of lead time (seasonally depending, of course) isn't totally unreasonable.
Third, medical. We've got potassium iodide on hand (there's a nuclear power plant ~35 miles from us), a dose of Tamiflu for each of us, two very complete medical kits, moderate training in first aid (with more coming soon—see below), and we generally maintain a three-month supply of our medications.
Fourth, general supplies. We have an oil lamp (and, of course, lamp oil), a bunch of candles, several fire extinguishers, a NOAA radio, a hand-cranked AM/FM/shortwave radio, matches, lighters, a flotilla of batteries of all sorts, headlamps, and flashlights. We keep a couple of canisters of propane on hand (rotated through annually, thanks to grilling season) and have a propane heater that can heat our entire house for a couple of days with one of those plugged in.
Fifth, evacuation preparedness. We keep a 72-hour pack by the front door, ready to go, with a couple of hundred bucks in cash, a few days food, tinned water, flashlights, blankets, tarps, matches, fire starters, and so on. We've got sleeping bags and internal frame packs on hand for each of us. The idea is to make sure that if sheltering in place isn't safe, that we can leave without delay.
Finally, a flotilla of books (not all of which we've read, I admit) on wilderness medicine. This Tuesday we're starting an eight-week Community Emergency Response Team training course (held just once a week). This is available in most areas—google around to see if you can take it in your area. That's where you can learn to be helpful in an emergency, rather than somebody who needs help—learn to use a chainsaw, direct traffic, suture a wound, lead a panicked group of people to safety, etc. Recommended highly.
I've come to relish when we lose power in good weather. It's a chance to test out our plans. There are a lot of basic aspects to preparedness that would just never cross your mind until you actually need to carry out that plan. You know how, without power, you keep flipping light switches every time you walk into a room, or thinking "well, I'll just google that...*DOH*"? The same applies to all kinds of things, like having candles...but no matches. :)
Both sides of my family are from Vermont—Rutland, on one side, and the White River Junction area, on the other. I've spent a lot of time there, and I think I'm about as familiar as somebody who doesn't live there could reasonably be. And I can say that with fair confidence that Vermont's rural areas are no more rural or isolated than the rural areas of Virginia, where I live. (Compare Vermont's population density and Virginia's population density. While you're at it, compare the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Green Mountains. If you were blindfolded and kidnapped, when the blindfold was taken off, you'd be hard pressed to know if you were in Vermont or Virginia.) Good luck finding any USPS address that has no other USPS address within five miles.
And I'm not at all frustrated about the lack of universal postal service—it's no problem for me at all, having been the case for me for much of my life.
Congratulations, you've just described exactly how the USPS works.
Bajillions of people who live in rural areas (like me) pick up their mail at the post office, because the cost of delivery to their homes is prohibitive. Universal service is not, in fact, universal, and never has been. Even UPS won't deliver to my house—I've got to pick up their packages at the post office (!), too.
Also, your example is ludicrous. Have you ever heard of a house so isolated that it's in a "neighborhood" (?) five miles away and yet, mysteriously, this five-mile-long stretch of road, devoid of any homes or businesses, has a 20 MPH speed limit on its road? Because I can't summon any scenario in which that would be the case.
I've put a bunch of time into this for a project of my own. The short answer is, no, I have found no such program. I've experimented with a few older programs, but they're useless. Sorry.
THIS
I considered putting this very system into place on a site of mine a half-decade ago, until I realized that I would just be informing attackers which passwords are in use.
Actually, Cuccinelli wasn't "appointed" as attorney general—he was elected. He defeated Democrat Steve Shannon by a huge margin. We chose to have this guy as AG, and it wasn't even close. Any informed voter should have known what they were getting into with Cuccinelli. He's really, really far right, and he's never hid it. It doesn't speak well of Virginia.
Wrong. A gun is a thing that's designed to a put a hole in that thing over there. Just last week I was using my Mossberg to put holes in targets and, to spectacular effect, a full can of shaving cream. In a decade of ownership, I've never once used that particular gun to maim or kill.
If none of us are in the position to judge anything, then I think we can safely shut down the /. commenting system, can't we?
Yes, that's the point, but that's not really how it works out. Here in Virginia, for instance, we have a shield law that's been established by the judiciary. If a reporter follows around police officers for the purpose of writing a story in the public interest, that's not stalking, that's journalism. But if an individual does it in order to...well, in order to just harass them, that's illegal.
"Human rights"? Um. No.
You haven't been reading Slashdot very long if you think that the gathering of lots of ostensibly public information about an individual and making it public isn't an abuse of privacy. A listing of all of the websites that you visit is public information, in the sense that it's probably possible for me to track it down, with a little sleuthing and calling in a few favors from friends at DoubleClick and Google. (I'm talking in the abstract here, obviously.) You don't post under your real name here, but I'll bet I could find it out. That's public. Hell, given that, I bet I could figure out and post your address, phone number, e-mail address, social security number, criminal history, home value, workplace, career history, educational background, etc., with some spare time and a big of legwork. But you probably wouldn't want me to make all of that public, because it would totally freak you out and definitely be a violation of your privacy...despite it being public information. One might even call it "stalking."
It's not disingenuous, it's making the point that the notion that a "public employee" vs. a "private employee" is a false dichotomy. The fact that somebody works for the government (as do I, in a roundabout away) does not suddenly make their private life an open book. What a police officer does on his own time, provided it's not illegal, should as private of a matter as what a secretary does, or what anybody else does.
That's right. The point being that we can't have laws that are different for different sexes. Is it OK for a woman to follow a man, but not a man to follow a woman? Of course not. You're paying attention -- that's good. :)
I've been following this story for a few years, or rather following it as it developed.
Her ex-husband is Kevin Strom, a prominent white nationalist and white supremacist* who was arrested for possession of child pornography and beating his wife (while threatening worse if she testified against him) a couple of years ago. He'd been stalking a ten-year-old girl, regularly cruising by her house, giving her gifts, sending her love letters, and proposing to her. (The kid's parents were none too thrilled.) It turned out, bizarrely, that none of that is illegal -- but possession of child pornography landed him in prison for a couple of years. He was released earlier this year. He was also, incidentally, an inveterate troll of one of my blogs, so I've got a special dislike for the guy.
Anyhow, Elisha is every bit as much of a racist as Strom, only she's also a feminist, which means that racists think she's scum, meaning that basically everybody hates her. Based on her blog entries, commenters on my blog have come to the conclusion that she was having an affair with one or more of these police officers. To my knowledge, she's never had any interaction with JADEâ"that is, neither she nor her husband have been busted for drug possession by them. So her interest in them appears to be romantic. Spurned, she's started stalking them, and expanded her interest to include all members of JADE.
What I can't shed any light on is whether or not this arrest is appropriate. I've been involved in a couple of high-profile bloggers' free expression cases (as a defendant in both cases), and though you'd think I'd rush to defend somebody in her positionâ"cretin though she may beâ"I just don't think it's cut-and-dry enough. The fact that she's putting this stuff on a blog seems to be irrelevant, by which I mean it's not a special form of expression here. She's not acting in the manner of a journalist, by which I mean that there is no goal to her coverage, no public interest being served, no story being pieced together. She's simply taking private information about private individuals who happen to work for the local government (albeit in a very private capacity) and making it public.
The question here is simply, I think, whether stalking laws are meant to cover people who are public employees. If a racist who advocates violent rebellion against black Americans starts following the a black secretary who works in the county office building, documenting her every move publicly, can the police intervene? Or is that his right, because she's opted out of a right to privacy by working for a government agency? There is a legitimate argument to be made that it is his right, in order to be consistent with what is to be expected for more prominent public employees. But a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, after all, so maybe we should put less thought into being consistent and more into protecting our citizens. I'm not being vague to be cute -- I really don't know what's right here.
* I regret that covering these nutcases involves learning things like that there's a difference between being a white nationalist and a white supremacist.
Those of us who are website developers will recognize the misuse of "design" committed by ABC News here. To a layperson, "design" means "make" when it comes to websites. They're not spending $18M to redesign the website (presumably), but presumably on a total overhaul of the thing.
We all discussed Aneesh Chopra on /. a month ago, folks. No less than Tim O'Reilly has vouched for him as a technological bad-ass. Read that. Read the comments. Then return here and carry on. There's no need for us to have to re-learn who this guy is every time he's written about here.
A guy can dream. :)
I worked with Aneesh earlier this year on an open government project here in Virginia. He asked me to function in a very small role in developing stimulus.virginia.gov, basically to serve as a programmer/open government guy to advocate from the inside for increased openness and strong adherence to public, open data exchange standards on the website and its API. Aneesh isn't a geek, but he "gets it," if I may return to that old chestnut that we all employed round about 2000. He might not know Unicode from Latin 1, but he surrounds himself with people who do know the difference, he gets the gist of it from them, and chooses the path that provides the most accessibility for the most data to the most people.
The guy is, incidentally, utterly exhausting to try to keep up with. I'm somebody to whom people say constantly "when do you sleep?", and even I find Aneesh an absolutely whirlwind of activity.
The only downside for me here is that Aneesh had expressed interested in me joining Governor Kaine's cabinet as "Senior Advisor for Open Government" (or something like that). I'd been in talks with my employer about taking a leave of absence. Now, of course, that won't happen. But since the (apparent) tradeoff is having Aneesh as the nation's CTO, that's A-OK by me.
There's so much about what you wrote that is simply wrong. Let's run down the list.
1. Rick Boucher isn't a member of the Virginia General Assembly, he's a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
2. There was never a heyday of Virginia politicians who spearheaded smart internet laws. You can tell because, if there had been, then we'd have smart internet laws. The closest that we ever got was Gov. Jim Gilmore, who created the Secretary of Technology cabinet position and created those asinine "@" internet license plates. Oh, and he required censorware on all school computers. That was the high point for Virginia.
3. You speak of the legislature as a single unit, wondering why "they" did something or "they" didn't do something. It's made up of 140 members, each of whom is free to introduce legislation on a given topic. Do you live in Virginia? Did you ask your legislator to introduce such a bill? Nothing is "on tap for next year," because it's not possible. It's not possible to prefile a bill until summer, some months after the veto session. If you have an idea for a better UCE ban, I wish you'd write up a proposal to share with the legislature.
4. In fact, two bills were introduced into the Virginia General Assembly to deal with UCE, both by Del. Manoli Loupassi (R-Richmond). HB1796: Unsolicited bulk electronic mail; penalty and Unsolicited bulk electronic mail (spam); penalty. (HB1797). The former was killed in a Senate Committee for Courts of Justice subcommittee, the latter was killed in a House Courts of Justice subcommittee.
There are lots of good reasons to do such filtering. Note the joking comment about 4chan elsewhere in the discussion. Managing an online community is a lot of work, but it's a great deal easier when its participants are a member of the same physical community. Those face-to-face encounters do a lot to defuse online anger.
He's not worrying about "what is of use to other people," he's worrying about what is of use to him. That's not self-centered, that's just smart product development.
They'll have no trouble with it at all. I'm yet to encounter a screen reader that reads the name element of an input field. Perhaps it would if the field was otherwise devoid of any descriptive text, but you'd have to be a real jackass to provide an unlabeled input field and expect anybody to know what to do with it. :)
Im afraid you misunderstand me. Again, only the field name is affected, not the label for the field. I've used text-only browsers regularly since 1994 (Mosaic over a 14.4k modem, Lynx, and now Links), and I'm yet to encounter one that displays the name element of an input field to the user.
This is really a very good test. As others have mentioned in this thread, it's the sort of thing that spammers will circumvent if it becomes widespread, but for now it's great.
There's something else I've found to be really quite effective: deliberately misnaming my form fields. For instance, give the input field that's labelled "First Name" an input name of "phone number." Humans don't use input names to determine what text to enter, but spambots do. Then check that inputâ"if the first name field contains a phone number, you know you've got yourself spammer.
I've used solely the combination of these two things to run one of my websites for two years now, and I get a vanishingly small amount of spam.