I think it depends how you use it. I have a friend who uses it via IMAP, and he does nothing but complain about it. I use POP3 over the Web interface, and I've had maybe 3 incidents over 4 years or so.
If you don't care about IMAP, I think it works okay. If you do, then (in my experience), it's a little dicier.
Sorry. I thought I replied to this already. I guess not.
Juvenile detention is more like a boarding school than prison. The main idea of it is to get the child back on the right track, so to speak (operating under the assumption that the child isn't already a lost cause).
I mean, a heads-up display telling you what your BAC is would be nice and all, but I think we should be using biological interfaces with machines to fix systems that are actually broken first.
I sympathize with your predicament, and I want to see a lot more resources going into neurological interfacing and repair.
I also very much appreciate my own largely-intact nervous system, and my more-or-less-correctable-to-"normal" vision. However, I think a visual system that's only correctable to 20/20 or so, only resolves three widely-overlapping color bands (and can't focus one of them worth squat), needs 15-30 minutes for full dark adaptation, is subject to irreversible damage from common light sources, reliably loses focal accommodation between age 40 and 50, and is repairable (for a very few failure modes) only at great risk and expense, IS "broken".
And don't even get me started on the lack of thermal IR, or a 360-degree FOV, or recordability, or image intensification, or...
Okay, granted. The human visual system could use some improvement.:) I think of "broken" as being "not on par with manufacturer's specs", though. Humans have had the same vision since they've been homo sapien sapiens (at least), so I think they can wait a little longer for x-ray vision.:)
Is it blasphemy to admit that I liked the movie version of The Andromeda Strain but never bothered with the book?
That depends on which movie you're talking about. If you're talking about the 1971 movie, I think you're on fairly safe ground. The miniseries, on the other hand, had little, if any, redeeming value.
Okay...no redeeming value.
Crichton's mixture of science and fantasy does get to be a bit much, at times. Timeline damn near drove me over the edge and put me off Crichton for good. Blech!
On the other hand, I'm enjoying Next, but it's a little slow-going.
It has one only in effect, at the nuts and bolts level evolution is down to *random* genetic mutations, some of which turn out to be more advantageous than others.
The genetic mutations are only "random" in the sense that we can't see what's happening and predict the mutations. If we understood better what specific processes caused the mutations, they would no longer appear random.
I agree with that, although, I'd certainly want it to be elective surgery. I don't think there's any sense in replacing someone's eyes unless you have to. No surgery, no matter how routine, is without risk. You're taking a chance (albeit a small one) every time you go under anaesthesia. There are several organs (tonsils, appendix, etc.) that people don't necessarily need (or where keeping them leads to more harm than good), but that doesn't mean doctors pre-emptively yank them out.
As far as the contact lens, idea, I forsee one hurdle, not mentioned in the piece: Information overload. A heads-up display of your medical information is fine, but is it possible to turn the thing off without removing the lens? I don't wear them, but it's my understanding that most people wear contact lenses all day, so there should probably be a way to turn this "second sight" off, so that the user can se au naturel without having to worry about safely storing the lenses.
I've got spina bifida, so personally, I'm hoping that someone develops artificial spines (or at least nerves) in my lifetime. I've seen some promising work done w/ attaching electrodes to people's brains to let them control computers, but that needs to be diverted into actually controling your own muscles from the inside.
I mean, a heads-up display telling you what your BAC is would be nice and all, but I think we should be using biological interfaces with machines to fix systems that are actually broken first.
I would think they would supplant goals. Seems to be the easiest way. Otherwise you end up with...
"We're sorry, but we can't let you do that, Dave..."
That's what I think, too. But if you need to supplant goals, then that means you have to:
a) communicate with the bots
b) have some way of making sure that your goal overrides theirs
The communication part is easy. But the supplanting part (I would think) would still involve rules rather than goals. You'd need something that says "Stop what you're doing, and follow this goal instead."
I'm not a "gray goo" expert, but I think the hypothesis rests, in part, on the idea that the replication of the "goo" will happen so fast that there won't be time for the kind of genetic diversification you'd need to avoid the gray goo scenario. And that's if the gray goo had the ability to diversify at all.
Think of the gray goo in terms of super-adaptable humans. If humans all of a sudden started multiplying like bacteria (or even close to that pace), you'd get a lot of biodiversity, but you might not get enough diversity to get speciation before Something Really Bad (starvation, pestilence, etc.) happened.
It's the same with the gray goo. The explosion happens so rapidly (in this hypothetical scenario) that the environment and the species are both overwhelmed. It's not such a hard thing to imagine, if you picture it on a smaller scale (e.g., an island).
I don't know that the gray goo scenario means the Earth is literally suffocated by gray goo, either. I think it just means that the gray goo crowds out all other life until there's no life left but goo. But then the goo, in this scenario, would only die if their source of sustenance died. And that's not a given. If you had solar-powered goo, it could go on reproducing until the sun burnt out or went supernova. (I don't particularly recall how scientists now think it's going to die.)
Wouldn't you need to override whatever the initial goal was? If you have no instructions, but only goals, you need to have some way to supplant one for the other, don't you? Otherwise, you'd need a way to prioritize them, which, I would think, would involve instructions...
Like all his books, interesting but not necessarily plausible.
I think his best was The Andromeda Strain, by far. I remember my first time reading it (I was probably around 10 or 11 at the time) wondering whether there was some factual basis for it. It was written in such a documentary way that at times it was hard to tell if it was one of those "based on a true story" kinds of things (at least, when I was that age it was).
I wanted to like Prey the same way, and for a part of the book, I did, but it just became less and less plausible as it went along. I was really left with the sense, at times, that the science got away from him, and he was too interested in writing something people might find exciting. As much as I liked some of his work, sometimes he forgot that for some of us, the science was the exciting part. I'll certainly miss his contribution to the genre, though.
Anyone interested in him, I would probably also recommend The Terminal Man.
They're already programmed at a particularly high level: they're swarm robots. Yout don;t give them instructions, you give them goals. Why would you want memory on board anyway when you can just broadcast it back to a central storage device?
I would think it would be fairly important to be able to give them instructions, in case you need to, say, over-ride their goals on an impromptu basis.
That is, unless you want uncontrollable, self-motivated bots flying around.
And to address the self-replication idea: I'd rather not be up to my neck in gray goo, but thanks anyway.:)
No matter what anyone says to you, if you decide to commit suicide it's your fault.
You are the owner of your emotions, not anyone else. Nobody but you is responsible for how you feel, and if you don't like how someone is making you feel you can stop talking to them.
If you talk to someone and call them a douch bag and they go and commit suicide you are not responsible for their suicide, they are.
The only emotions you are responsible for is your own.
In a literal sense, you're correct, and if we were talking about an apparently emotionally stable adult having committed suicide, it would be a different situation. In this case, however, we're talking about a psychologically unstable teenager (more psychologically unstable than most), being specifically set up by one adult (at least) and a cohort of accomplices, who tailored their attack to do the most harm possible. That's a lot to expect a 13-year old to stand up to -- even if they weren't suffering from clinical depression.
In short, you're expecting too much in this case. It's almost akin to expecting a blind person to accept responsibility if someone gave them incorrect change in bills.
Whether her parents should have anticipated such a situation is a different question. I can see the argument to be made that she shouldn't have been able to access the computer without her parents being there (e.g., with a password only they knew), but a) this would be a hard situation to anticipate, and b) my understanding from what I've read is that she did need her parents to log on to the site. The problem was that they allowed her to stay on after they left.
The other difference is this: The parents are being punished every day for their error in judgment, with no possibility of reprieve. Drew, on the other hand, apparently isn't burdened with a conscience that can bother her, which is why, IMO, another punishment should have been meted out. In retrospect, if they didn't know beforehand (which apparently the prosecutor didn't) who made the "the world would be better off without you" comment, they simply should have made it a conspiracy charge, so that as long as they had the players, it wouldn't matter who said which thing.
I've read the background. It literally shows that they would get into fights, with their 12 year old daughter, because she'd go on the computer after being told she couldn't...time after time after time. They REFUSED to be parents and simply stood back as she did whatever the fuck she wanted.
Can you show where you found that information? That's not what I've read concerning it. What I've read is, she was supervised online, except for the day the messages started coming, and that in fact, the parents had been monitoring her use (even reading the "boy's" profile and messages) up to that point.
Children getting molested by predators, internet or not? Yes, the parents are responsible.
Could you explain your rationale for that? There are plenty of situations (online or off) where parents couldn't possibly have control over what happened to their children. As a parent, you'd like to protect your child 24/7, but it's not a practical goal. Put bluntly, shit happens, and if someone molests a child, it's the child molestor's fault, not the parents (unless they had knowledge of it, or they happened to be the molestors).
Women being raped? No, because women are adults and therefore not under the guardianship of their parents.
That wasn't actually my question. I'll rephrase:
Are the women who get raped responsible for getting raped? That's what I was asking.
People living in high crime neighborhoods being mugged? No, because they choose to live in those places and are presumably adults so they are not under the care of their parents.
Again, it's not a question of parental care in this case. Are the people who choose to live in that area (either because of financial reasons or because it's their chosen neighborhood) responsible for getting mugged?
The point I'm trying to get across is this: It's the people who commit the crime who are guilty. The victims, or the victim's families, may make themselves more or less vulnerable by their actions, but the ultimate responsibility for evil acts rests with the person who commits the acts. "But they made it so easy..." isn't a defense.
We aren't defending the right to be an asshole online. We are defending the right to not be sued or imprisoned any time someone gets their feelings hurt or tries to pin the blame for their actions on the words of another.
This case isn't merely a matter of someone getting their feelings hurt. There are lots of ways and reasons a person can get their feelings hurt online, as I'm sure all of us know. This case involves someone maliciously picking on someone they knew was vulnerable and weaker than them, and intending to cause them harm (although not necessarily the harm that actually resulted, admittedly). Calling some random person you "see" on a forum an asshole is a completely different matter, because you don't know anything about them and can assume they can handle the assault. This was a very different situation. I think if the person doing the harassment (who innitiated it, I mean) had been under 18 and/or hadn't known Meier personally, this would've been written off as a tragic Internet coincidence. As it is, this is more akin to the asshats who watched someone commit suicide online and egged him on during the process.
We are defending our right to free speech. We are defending our rights to not live in a police state. We are defending our rights to live without thought control.
Free speech doesn't mean the right to say anything you please without consequences. Like every other constitutional right, there are reasonable limits on free speech.
The scope and severity of the issues that would follow a sentence for Lori Drew are obviously far beyond your comprehension. Think precedent. If they give Lori Drew a prison sentence for merely writing some words, then what comes next? Someone gets their feelings hurt or someone states an unpopular opinion and that person gets thrown in the slammer too?
The prison sentence wouldn't be for "merely writing some words". What you're missing is that there was a great deal more intent and knowledge involved here than that. It wasn't some drive-by flame war. It was very deliberate. The closest analogy I can think of would be something like PrankNet, but even there, the targets are not personally known to the "pranksters". The situation with Meier is more akin to s
I'm sort of surprised that such a thing came out of the mouth of the prosecutor's witness. I always thought the first rule of putting a witness on the stand was to know what the witness was going to say.
At any rate, if that's what the testimony was, I'm not surprised by the verdict.
a) The girl was Clinically Depressed
b) Her PARENTS should have been observing what she was doing a bit more closely.
Every indication we have at this point is that the parents were observing what Meier was doing closely, other than the day that she died, when she stayed on the computer when her parents told her to get off (because they couldn't be there, apparently).
Would I nominate them for Parents of the Year? Probably not. They could've been more understanding to what she was going through at the time, or taken it more seriously. But at the same time, these don't appear to be parents who simply let the computer babysit their child.
I certainly feel your pain. I've met quite a few librarians who were stuck in the old technology. Thankfully, I think you'll start to see that die out, though.
Modern library programs (at least, at the graduate level) are mostly about computers and indexing (although they still refer to it as "cataloging", in a lot of places). The more professional systems (e.g., Dialog) aren't as simple to search as Google or any other Web search engine, but they're much more powerful and precise, and they can give you access to information you can't get for free.
And that's the other point people need to remember: When you go to a library (or access it online), one of the things you're getting is access to premium resources. These are things you could get access to yourself, but they'd generally be cost-prohibitive.
The cost to you, of course, is your tax money, plus a measure of your privacy (in most cases). For most people, I think it's a fair trade. I wouldn't want to conduct any business at a public library on one of the premium databases, but presumably if you're using it for business, you've got an account through your company or have budgeted enough to get an account yourself.
But the jury acquitted Drew of the three felony charges (and 2 more conspiracy charges) involving unauthorized access to a computer in furtherance of intentional inflection of emotional distress.
I can't say why the jury reached that decision, but I can take a stab at it: She didn't have unauthorized access to the computer in question. "Unauthorized access" can be taken to mean more than violating the terms of service. In order to gain "unauthorized" access, someone would have to break in to a system, or use someone else's credentials (i.e., not be the one actually authorized to use the system), wouldn't they?
I'm not at all certain that it was the "intentional infliction of emotional distress" part that the jury had the problem with.
Of course they do. They desperately try to find a reason why libraries should continue to exist.
I'll tell you why libraries should continue to exist: librarians.
Too many people think "Google it" is the answer to everything, but for serious research (i.e., anything where reliability is important) it's not always that simple. It cannot be overemphasized that the Internet is the equivalent of a massive shoebox full of information. There's no real indexing or quality control. Sites like Google and (God help us all...) Bing are doing a better job at the indexing, but just about any yahoo that can use an HTML editor (which means, just about any yahoo) can put up a web page about any topic they like, and become an "expert" if they can manage to get the page hits/links to back it up.
Librarians are the people who fill the gap, explaining to people how to evaluate and cull through the information they get online. (Of course, this is the ideal. I acknowledge that there are librarians who don't have this skill when it comes to online resources, and I don't have any sympathy for them, frankly.)
As background, I'm not a librarian, but I do have a Masters in library science, and I have done professional searching for ~ 13 years.
The time for kicking Drew's ass was before the child killed herself.
Frankly, that would be less just, not more just. It's the consequences of her action that justify the response. If she had done the same thing, and the child hadn't killed herself, I don't think you'd see the same reaction from most people. She'd simply be another immature middle-aged woman who needed to get a life. The fact that a death resulted is what makes it worth punishing her severely. (Just as a drunk driver is punished more severely when their actions result in death.)
In retrospect, though, I'll say this much: I should've specified that the communal stoning I mentioned was not meant to be in reaction to an "innocent" verdict by the court. In a just universe, the community itself would decide her guilt or innocence, and affix the punishment. In this case, the judge tossed the verdict of the jury (which, incidentally, is exactly the kind of thing that leads to vigilantism). We've got the jury system for a reason. Judges should respect it. It's bad enough that we insist that our juries be ignorant of most of the pertinent facts in a case in the first place (because such facts may be "prejudicial"). When they actually do come up with a just verdict, a judge shouldn't be able to just flush it.
The reason I specified stoning is because it's the most direct expression of a community's condemnation of a person
Wrong. It's because you think it makes you sound like some uber-tough vigilante.
Glad to hear those mind-reading lessons are giving you more confidence. Keep a it. It might work someday.
An "uber-tough vigilante" would probably express a desire to do such a thing themselves. And public stoning isn't vigilantism. In societies that practiced public stoning, the stoning is part of the justice system, whereas vigilantism is a reaction to an inadequate justice system. IOW, if there's a trial and you don't get the result you want, and then you stone the person, that's vigilantism. If the community decides the person is guilty and fixes the punishment at stoning, that's not vigilantism.
It kind of helps to define your terms before you assume to know people's motives.
You would be just as responsible as the shooter, because if you had raised your child properly then they would have listened to you and would have the sense to not go to places like that.
Great. So by that logic, parents are responsible for their children getting molested by Internet predators, women are responsible for getting themselves raped, and people who live in high crime neighborhoods are responsible for getting mugged.
Thanks. Good to know...
Now, back here in the real world, we actually hold the perpetrators of such actions entirely responsible for their crimes. "Well, if they hadn't have been there, I would've never been able to do it" isn't a defense.
My question is, why do people want to take the responsibility away from the people who do the evil acts, and on to the people who are the victims of the acts? Is it really so important to defend one's right to be an a**hole online? Because that's the only advantage I can see to defending scum like Drew.
First, the mythical message where she told her to kill herself or that "the world would be a better place without her" has never been found (even if it was found that she said the world would be a better place without her, how the hell can you call stating an opinion a crime? Good god, I'm terrified of the kind of politicians you vote for with views like that...) - on anyone's myspace account or server. Secondly, the girl killed herself after having an argument with her mother about her spending too much time online and her swearing.
Lori Drew being mean to the girl had nothing to do with her committing suicide. It was her crappy relationship with her parents that resulted in her suicide and her parents, like most Americans these days, wanted a scapegoat to avoid taking the blame for being crappy parents.
Since you've read up on the case, could you point to anything that indicates a poor relationship with her parents? I haven't been able to find anything that indicates anything other than a fairly typical teenage dynamic with the parents. In fact, most of what I've read has given me the impression that her parents did monitor her Internet use, and even exerted some control over her MySpace account.
Slashdot Mirror
That's good to know. Maybe he's just trying to do something funky with it, then...
I think it depends how you use it. I have a friend who uses it via IMAP, and he does nothing but complain about it. I use POP3 over the Web interface, and I've had maybe 3 incidents over 4 years or so.
If you don't care about IMAP, I think it works okay. If you do, then (in my experience), it's a little dicier.
Sorry. I thought I replied to this already. I guess not.
Juvenile detention is more like a boarding school than prison. The main idea of it is to get the child back on the right track, so to speak (operating under the assumption that the child isn't already a lost cause).
I mean, a heads-up display telling you what your BAC is would be nice and all, but I think we should be using biological interfaces with machines to fix systems that are actually broken first.
I sympathize with your predicament, and I want to see a lot more resources going into neurological interfacing and repair.
I also very much appreciate my own largely-intact nervous system, and my more-or-less-correctable-to-"normal" vision. However, I think a visual system that's only correctable to 20/20 or so, only resolves three widely-overlapping color bands (and can't focus one of them worth squat), needs 15-30 minutes for full dark adaptation, is subject to irreversible damage from common light sources, reliably loses focal accommodation between age 40 and 50, and is repairable (for a very few failure modes) only at great risk and expense, IS "broken".
And don't even get me started on the lack of thermal IR, or a 360-degree FOV, or recordability, or image intensification, or...
Okay, granted. The human visual system could use some improvement. :) I think of "broken" as being "not on par with manufacturer's specs", though. Humans have had the same vision since they've been homo sapien sapiens (at least), so I think they can wait a little longer for x-ray vision. :)
Is it blasphemy to admit that I liked the movie version of The Andromeda Strain but never bothered with the book?
That depends on which movie you're talking about. If you're talking about the 1971 movie, I think you're on fairly safe ground. The miniseries, on the other hand, had little, if any, redeeming value.
Okay...no redeeming value.
Crichton's mixture of science and fantasy does get to be a bit much, at times. Timeline damn near drove me over the edge and put me off Crichton for good. Blech!
On the other hand, I'm enjoying Next, but it's a little slow-going.
It has one only in effect, at the nuts and bolts level evolution is down to *random* genetic mutations, some of which turn out to be more advantageous than others.
The genetic mutations are only "random" in the sense that we can't see what's happening and predict the mutations. If we understood better what specific processes caused the mutations, they would no longer appear random.
I think this must be the kind of thing they're contemplating.
I agree with that, although, I'd certainly want it to be elective surgery. I don't think there's any sense in replacing someone's eyes unless you have to. No surgery, no matter how routine, is without risk. You're taking a chance (albeit a small one) every time you go under anaesthesia. There are several organs (tonsils, appendix, etc.) that people don't necessarily need (or where keeping them leads to more harm than good), but that doesn't mean doctors pre-emptively yank them out.
As far as the contact lens, idea, I forsee one hurdle, not mentioned in the piece: Information overload. A heads-up display of your medical information is fine, but is it possible to turn the thing off without removing the lens? I don't wear them, but it's my understanding that most people wear contact lenses all day, so there should probably be a way to turn this "second sight" off, so that the user can se au naturel without having to worry about safely storing the lenses. I've got spina bifida, so personally, I'm hoping that someone develops artificial spines (or at least nerves) in my lifetime. I've seen some promising work done w/ attaching electrodes to people's brains to let them control computers, but that needs to be diverted into actually controling your own muscles from the inside.
I mean, a heads-up display telling you what your BAC is would be nice and all, but I think we should be using biological interfaces with machines to fix systems that are actually broken first.
I would think they would supplant goals. Seems to be the easiest way. Otherwise you end up with...
"We're sorry, but we can't let you do that, Dave..."
That's what I think, too. But if you need to supplant goals, then that means you have to:
a) communicate with the bots b) have some way of making sure that your goal overrides theirs
The communication part is easy. But the supplanting part (I would think) would still involve rules rather than goals. You'd need something that says "Stop what you're doing, and follow this goal instead."
I'm not a "gray goo" expert, but I think the hypothesis rests, in part, on the idea that the replication of the "goo" will happen so fast that there won't be time for the kind of genetic diversification you'd need to avoid the gray goo scenario. And that's if the gray goo had the ability to diversify at all.
Think of the gray goo in terms of super-adaptable humans. If humans all of a sudden started multiplying like bacteria (or even close to that pace), you'd get a lot of biodiversity, but you might not get enough diversity to get speciation before Something Really Bad (starvation, pestilence, etc.) happened.
It's the same with the gray goo. The explosion happens so rapidly (in this hypothetical scenario) that the environment and the species are both overwhelmed. It's not such a hard thing to imagine, if you picture it on a smaller scale (e.g., an island).
I don't know that the gray goo scenario means the Earth is literally suffocated by gray goo, either. I think it just means that the gray goo crowds out all other life until there's no life left but goo. But then the goo, in this scenario, would only die if their source of sustenance died. And that's not a given. If you had solar-powered goo, it could go on reproducing until the sun burnt out or went supernova. (I don't particularly recall how scientists now think it's going to die.)
Wouldn't you need to override whatever the initial goal was? If you have no instructions, but only goals, you need to have some way to supplant one for the other, don't you? Otherwise, you'd need a way to prioritize them, which, I would think, would involve instructions...
Crichton had a novel about this back in '02. Prey
Like all his books, interesting but not necessarily plausible.
I think his best was The Andromeda Strain, by far. I remember my first time reading it (I was probably around 10 or 11 at the time) wondering whether there was some factual basis for it. It was written in such a documentary way that at times it was hard to tell if it was one of those "based on a true story" kinds of things (at least, when I was that age it was).
I wanted to like Prey the same way, and for a part of the book, I did, but it just became less and less plausible as it went along. I was really left with the sense, at times, that the science got away from him, and he was too interested in writing something people might find exciting. As much as I liked some of his work, sometimes he forgot that for some of us, the science was the exciting part. I'll certainly miss his contribution to the genre, though.
Anyone interested in him, I would probably also recommend The Terminal Man.
They're already programmed at a particularly high level: they're swarm robots. Yout don;t give them instructions, you give them goals. Why would you want memory on board anyway when you can just broadcast it back to a central storage device?
I would think it would be fairly important to be able to give them instructions, in case you need to, say, over-ride their goals on an impromptu basis.
:)
That is, unless you want uncontrollable, self-motivated bots flying around.
And to address the self-replication idea: I'd rather not be up to my neck in gray goo, but thanks anyway.
No matter what anyone says to you, if you decide to commit suicide it's your fault. You are the owner of your emotions, not anyone else. Nobody but you is responsible for how you feel, and if you don't like how someone is making you feel you can stop talking to them.
If you talk to someone and call them a douch bag and they go and commit suicide you are not responsible for their suicide, they are.
The only emotions you are responsible for is your own.
In a literal sense, you're correct, and if we were talking about an apparently emotionally stable adult having committed suicide, it would be a different situation. In this case, however, we're talking about a psychologically unstable teenager (more psychologically unstable than most), being specifically set up by one adult (at least) and a cohort of accomplices, who tailored their attack to do the most harm possible. That's a lot to expect a 13-year old to stand up to -- even if they weren't suffering from clinical depression.
In short, you're expecting too much in this case. It's almost akin to expecting a blind person to accept responsibility if someone gave them incorrect change in bills.
Whether her parents should have anticipated such a situation is a different question. I can see the argument to be made that she shouldn't have been able to access the computer without her parents being there (e.g., with a password only they knew), but a) this would be a hard situation to anticipate, and b) my understanding from what I've read is that she did need her parents to log on to the site. The problem was that they allowed her to stay on after they left.
The other difference is this: The parents are being punished every day for their error in judgment, with no possibility of reprieve. Drew, on the other hand, apparently isn't burdened with a conscience that can bother her, which is why, IMO, another punishment should have been meted out. In retrospect, if they didn't know beforehand (which apparently the prosecutor didn't) who made the "the world would be better off without you" comment, they simply should have made it a conspiracy charge, so that as long as they had the players, it wouldn't matter who said which thing.
I've read the background. It literally shows that they would get into fights, with their 12 year old daughter, because she'd go on the computer after being told she couldn't...time after time after time. They REFUSED to be parents and simply stood back as she did whatever the fuck she wanted.
Can you show where you found that information? That's not what I've read concerning it. What I've read is, she was supervised online, except for the day the messages started coming, and that in fact, the parents had been monitoring her use (even reading the "boy's" profile and messages) up to that point.
Reference Article
I've read lots of blog comments claiming she was unsupervised/running wild, etc., but I haven't read anything from a reputable source to that affect.
Children getting molested by predators, internet or not? Yes, the parents are responsible.
Could you explain your rationale for that? There are plenty of situations (online or off) where parents couldn't possibly have control over what happened to their children. As a parent, you'd like to protect your child 24/7, but it's not a practical goal. Put bluntly, shit happens, and if someone molests a child, it's the child molestor's fault, not the parents (unless they had knowledge of it, or they happened to be the molestors).
Women being raped? No, because women are adults and therefore not under the guardianship of their parents.
That wasn't actually my question. I'll rephrase:
Are the women who get raped responsible for getting raped? That's what I was asking.
People living in high crime neighborhoods being mugged? No, because they choose to live in those places and are presumably adults so they are not under the care of their parents.
Again, it's not a question of parental care in this case. Are the people who choose to live in that area (either because of financial reasons or because it's their chosen neighborhood) responsible for getting mugged?
The point I'm trying to get across is this: It's the people who commit the crime who are guilty. The victims, or the victim's families, may make themselves more or less vulnerable by their actions, but the ultimate responsibility for evil acts rests with the person who commits the acts. "But they made it so easy..." isn't a defense.
We aren't defending the right to be an asshole online. We are defending the right to not be sued or imprisoned any time someone gets their feelings hurt or tries to pin the blame for their actions on the words of another.
This case isn't merely a matter of someone getting their feelings hurt. There are lots of ways and reasons a person can get their feelings hurt online, as I'm sure all of us know. This case involves someone maliciously picking on someone they knew was vulnerable and weaker than them, and intending to cause them harm (although not necessarily the harm that actually resulted, admittedly). Calling some random person you "see" on a forum an asshole is a completely different matter, because you don't know anything about them and can assume they can handle the assault. This was a very different situation. I think if the person doing the harassment (who innitiated it, I mean) had been under 18 and/or hadn't known Meier personally, this would've been written off as a tragic Internet coincidence. As it is, this is more akin to the asshats who watched someone commit suicide online and egged him on during the process.
We are defending our right to free speech. We are defending our rights to not live in a police state. We are defending our rights to live without thought control.
Free speech doesn't mean the right to say anything you please without consequences. Like every other constitutional right, there are reasonable limits on free speech.
The scope and severity of the issues that would follow a sentence for Lori Drew are obviously far beyond your comprehension. Think precedent. If they give Lori Drew a prison sentence for merely writing some words, then what comes next? Someone gets their feelings hurt or someone states an unpopular opinion and that person gets thrown in the slammer too?
The prison sentence wouldn't be for "merely writing some words". What you're missing is that there was a great deal more intent and knowledge involved here than that. It wasn't some drive-by flame war. It was very deliberate. The closest analogy I can think of would be something like PrankNet, but even there, the targets are not personally known to the "pranksters". The situation with Meier is more akin to s
Okay, thanks for that information.
I'm sort of surprised that such a thing came out of the mouth of the prosecutor's witness. I always thought the first rule of putting a witness on the stand was to know what the witness was going to say.
At any rate, if that's what the testimony was, I'm not surprised by the verdict.
Here's a hint:
a) The girl was Clinically Depressed b) Her PARENTS should have been observing what she was doing a bit more closely.
Every indication we have at this point is that the parents were observing what Meier was doing closely, other than the day that she died, when she stayed on the computer when her parents told her to get off (because they couldn't be there, apparently).
"Friend Game" -- 1/21/2008
Would I nominate them for Parents of the Year? Probably not. They could've been more understanding to what she was going through at the time, or taken it more seriously. But at the same time, these don't appear to be parents who simply let the computer babysit their child.
I certainly feel your pain. I've met quite a few librarians who were stuck in the old technology. Thankfully, I think you'll start to see that die out, though.
Modern library programs (at least, at the graduate level) are mostly about computers and indexing (although they still refer to it as "cataloging", in a lot of places). The more professional systems (e.g., Dialog) aren't as simple to search as Google or any other Web search engine, but they're much more powerful and precise, and they can give you access to information you can't get for free.
And that's the other point people need to remember: When you go to a library (or access it online), one of the things you're getting is access to premium resources. These are things you could get access to yourself, but they'd generally be cost-prohibitive.
The cost to you, of course, is your tax money, plus a measure of your privacy (in most cases). For most people, I think it's a fair trade. I wouldn't want to conduct any business at a public library on one of the premium databases, but presumably if you're using it for business, you've got an account through your company or have budgeted enough to get an account yourself.
But the jury acquitted Drew of the three felony charges (and 2 more conspiracy charges) involving unauthorized access to a computer in furtherance of intentional inflection of emotional distress.
I can't say why the jury reached that decision, but I can take a stab at it: She didn't have unauthorized access to the computer in question. "Unauthorized access" can be taken to mean more than violating the terms of service. In order to gain "unauthorized" access, someone would have to break in to a system, or use someone else's credentials (i.e., not be the one actually authorized to use the system), wouldn't they?
I'm not at all certain that it was the "intentional infliction of emotional distress" part that the jury had the problem with.
Of course they do. They desperately try to find a reason why libraries should continue to exist.
I'll tell you why libraries should continue to exist: librarians.
Too many people think "Google it" is the answer to everything, but for serious research (i.e., anything where reliability is important) it's not always that simple. It cannot be overemphasized that the Internet is the equivalent of a massive shoebox full of information. There's no real indexing or quality control. Sites like Google and (God help us all...) Bing are doing a better job at the indexing, but just about any yahoo that can use an HTML editor (which means, just about any yahoo) can put up a web page about any topic they like, and become an "expert" if they can manage to get the page hits/links to back it up.
Librarians are the people who fill the gap, explaining to people how to evaluate and cull through the information they get online. (Of course, this is the ideal. I acknowledge that there are librarians who don't have this skill when it comes to online resources, and I don't have any sympathy for them, frankly.)
As background, I'm not a librarian, but I do have a Masters in library science, and I have done professional searching for ~ 13 years.
The time for kicking Drew's ass was before the child killed herself.
Frankly, that would be less just, not more just. It's the consequences of her action that justify the response. If she had done the same thing, and the child hadn't killed herself, I don't think you'd see the same reaction from most people. She'd simply be another immature middle-aged woman who needed to get a life. The fact that a death resulted is what makes it worth punishing her severely. (Just as a drunk driver is punished more severely when their actions result in death.)
In retrospect, though, I'll say this much: I should've specified that the communal stoning I mentioned was not meant to be in reaction to an "innocent" verdict by the court. In a just universe, the community itself would decide her guilt or innocence, and affix the punishment. In this case, the judge tossed the verdict of the jury (which, incidentally, is exactly the kind of thing that leads to vigilantism). We've got the jury system for a reason. Judges should respect it. It's bad enough that we insist that our juries be ignorant of most of the pertinent facts in a case in the first place (because such facts may be "prejudicial"). When they actually do come up with a just verdict, a judge shouldn't be able to just flush it.
Wrong. It's because you think it makes you sound like some uber-tough vigilante.
Glad to hear those mind-reading lessons are giving you more confidence. Keep a it. It might work someday.
An "uber-tough vigilante" would probably express a desire to do such a thing themselves. And public stoning isn't vigilantism. In societies that practiced public stoning, the stoning is part of the justice system, whereas vigilantism is a reaction to an inadequate justice system. IOW, if there's a trial and you don't get the result you want, and then you stone the person, that's vigilantism. If the community decides the person is guilty and fixes the punishment at stoning, that's not vigilantism.
It kind of helps to define your terms before you assume to know people's motives.
You would be just as responsible as the shooter, because if you had raised your child properly then they would have listened to you and would have the sense to not go to places like that.
Great. So by that logic, parents are responsible for their children getting molested by Internet predators, women are responsible for getting themselves raped, and people who live in high crime neighborhoods are responsible for getting mugged.
Thanks. Good to know...
Now, back here in the real world, we actually hold the perpetrators of such actions entirely responsible for their crimes. "Well, if they hadn't have been there, I would've never been able to do it" isn't a defense.
My question is, why do people want to take the responsibility away from the people who do the evil acts, and on to the people who are the victims of the acts? Is it really so important to defend one's right to be an a**hole online? Because that's the only advantage I can see to defending scum like Drew.
but I've actually read up on this case.
First, the mythical message where she told her to kill herself or that "the world would be a better place without her" has never been found (even if it was found that she said the world would be a better place without her, how the hell can you call stating an opinion a crime? Good god, I'm terrified of the kind of politicians you vote for with views like that...) - on anyone's myspace account or server. Secondly, the girl killed herself after having an argument with her mother about her spending too much time online and her swearing .
Lori Drew being mean to the girl had nothing to do with her committing suicide. It was her crappy relationship with her parents that resulted in her suicide and her parents, like most Americans these days, wanted a scapegoat to avoid taking the blame for being crappy parents.
Since you've read up on the case, could you point to anything that indicates a poor relationship with her parents? I haven't been able to find anything that indicates anything other than a fairly typical teenage dynamic with the parents. In fact, most of what I've read has given me the impression that her parents did monitor her Internet use, and even exerted some control over her MySpace account.
New Yorker article