But how is religion offensive in any way shape or form? I don't see how you could/would censor religion and why? I mean, I see the censorship of media stupid too, but I don't see why we should censor religion in the same way we do other things.
Orthodox Judaism has a rather harsh take on homosexuality - as well as women's rights.
Fundamentalist Christianity requires proselytizing - it likes the part about threatening people with the torments of hell if they don't convert - oh and they adopted that whole homosexuality & women's rights are bad thing.
Fundamentalist Islam requires conversion - by the sword if necessary.
Serious Judaio-Christian-Islam religion isn't light & fluffy. It's about dictating the lives of it's believers so that they fall into the narrow scope of what their interpretation of the divine's definition of 'good' is. And that block covers over half of the people in the world & well over 80% in the US.
I don't see what you are getting at. It is in just about everyone's best interest whether the believe it or not, to give children morals from religion. Put it this way, if you were the owner of a store, would you rather have people teaching "Stealing is wrong" or "When you die you're dead so take whatever because you could die tomorrow".
How about "Stealing is is wrong because they worked to get that, and if you take it, then they won't have it anymore. Think about how you would feel if it was yours and someone took it away from you and wouldn't give it back." See, stealing is still wrong - just no religion involved. You paint a false dichotomy and point to it as part of the foundation of your argument. The humanistic approach works just as well.
It would be nice if voters elected politicians based on their scientific views rather than the politician's religious beliefs.
My favorite(?) was listening to a woman complain that she hated everything about one candidate but loved the other ones opinions about everything but abortion, and she had to vote for the one she hated because he was 'Pro-life'.
while (conscious){
head->desk();
}
What happens when little girls and boys look at porn is that they form unrealistic expectations of sex:
Which is exactly the same expectation they get from the news, advertising, television, music videos, books, and movies. One more source isn't going to kill them. In fact since porn is so blatant & contrived, children might actually get the idea that it's not really like that at all. Movies where casual sex leads to a Cinderella ending in a setting that requires that you suspend disbelief - rather than Porn's shove it into a safe to only be let out after the movie - are probably more damaging to a kids concept of real sex.
This law isn't about denying porn to those who will make an effort to get it, but rather, about protecting children from inadvertently stumbling upon it
Bullshit. This law was about pandering to the 'do something now' PACs. It was so poorly writen it would have required age verification for CNN's special reports on Iraq & gang violence. Subjects like the consequences of a poorly done nipple or genital piercing would be locked away from some of the people who need them most. This was blatantly unconstitutional from the get go because it was excessively broad and restrictive.
As a parent, I don't want my child's Google search for "hot fire truck" to serve up porn.
So use the filter Google put there for that purpose.
Until I'm convinced that an innocent phrase won't turn up porn, my kid isn't going to use the internet.
Hmm - get & install some filter software, better yet surf with them - cause some porn is always going to get through. I purged 50-60 messages off of a forum yesterday that were spam for redirects buried in Google & Yahoo groups - travel, finance, game, and movie groups, not adult groups. I also found one for porn spam in a sourceforge forum.
So what a law like this really does is allow children to be exposed to the internet, because without such controls, parents such as myself just won't let our children use the internet.
That's just a laughable opinion. First off, most porn sites are outside the US - because they don't have to worry about US obscenity laws. This law is just another one to laugh at. Even if there was 100% compliance in the US, you would still have more porn available than you could possibly look at.
Get a filter, then you can control what is available to your kids. Trying to mandate age verification is pointless, restrictive, and reactionary. Try doing something right rather than easy. It takes more effort, but the results are usually better.
For example, the Patriot Act one could say violated the constitution, but in the few months after 9/11 it might have been needed (now, if it needed renewing is up for debate...)
Hmm, don't think so. Everything the Patriot act defines as illegal was already illegal - except those things about Fourth & Fifth amendment rights not really applying if the government uses the word 'terror' within 5 feet of the case file.
Is the policy of the law stupid? Yes. Credit card to check for age? Idiotic. Is it a constitutional violation? No. A thousand times no. It falls under the very purpose of the constitution.
I refer you to the text of the first ammendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Now if I pass a law that requires you to only speak about testicular cancer to adults - and threaten you with 5 years in jail if a minor hears you - how exactly is that not 'abridging the freedom of speech'. Make no mistake about it, that is exactly what this law would have done.
This law didn't state pornography, it stated material not suitable for minors - with no clarification on what that meant. That means any discussion of genital cancer which might show a picture as an example would have to be restricted. As would a website showing the dangers of improperly done genital or nipple piercing. My favorite is that CNN would have to seal off parts of it's website due to the graphic nature of some of the investigative reports into the war & gangland violence.
That's why this law was unconstitutional - not because it prohibited people from posting porn, but because it prohibited people from openly discussing anything above a PG rating without violating the rights of the people to listen to the discussion anonymously.
As for "referring to your line "violation of the constitution" that chumps like you bark out whenever any law is enacted, ever." In the last 20 years congress has passed more laws that violated the constitution than in the previous 200. There have been discussions on the floor that they KNEW that the law wouldn't pass muster but they passed it anyway - so they could be seen 'doing something'. Calling a spade a spade doesn't make someone a chump. Calmly accepting whatever pablum your government spoon feeds you as the truth does.
The analogy here would be you fire someone who has a set of keys to your shed, and then say, "By the way, I need you to return those keys to the shed." And they don't.
No, because keys are physical property which belong to you, your employee only keeps them under the condition of employment. Passwords are information. I know there are a whole lot of problems recently understanding that Intellectual Property isn't treatable like Physical Property but there is a difference.
If Childs set up the system in accordance to an approved policy & maintained the system according to an approved policy - which according to some reports he did - then when they fired him, he can walk out the door & never talk to them again. Now, if he sealed off the network when he thought he was going to get fired, then it's different, but according to the reports from the IT people around, he built it by himself, maintained it by himself, and nobody else has ever had access.
I've had companies I worked for call me up after I left & ask questions, if I left on good terms I tell them what I know. If I feel they screwed me, I politely tell them I no longer work for them, but if they would like to hire me as a consultant for $grossOverCharge I would be happy to tell them what I know. The point is, once I'm not with the company, what's in my head is mine - they can't demand it back or even demand I share it with them.
The problem with hemp is the fact that it is called hemp and this word is synonymous with marijuana so in the eyes of the public it is bad and for some competing business this is a good thing to foster.
When I was doing my BS in Bio, one of the profs had a contract to do research for SE Asia - where they do grow hemp for textiles & rope. There were at least 4 Bankers Boxes of paperwork for this project - along with a security greenhouse.
Radioactive materials could be had from the Physics supply closet by asking the work study kid at the window.
If the people he refused to cooperate with were the police, then it is criminal. Not that we really know the details, but if it's true that they brought the cops in and he still wouldn't budge, then that's something they can legitimately charge him with.
Um, no.
Once the city fired him, he has no duty to provide any information regarding his work to the city. They want the passwords - too bad, he doesn't work for them anymore. Any information in your head is yours when you walk out the door - most of it you can't divulge under non-disclosure agreements, but no former employer can make you come back & spit out information they don't have a record of. You may, of course, do so voluntarily, but they can't force you to.
From the article, it sounds like the network was built from the ground up with only 1 administrative account. If that's the case, then he didn't sabotage the network, it was designed & built that way and the city is SOL.
If the cops ask him questions about his job as the network admin & he refuses to cooperate, then the police might have an 'obstruction of justice' case. If they ask him for the administrative password, he's probably within his rights to deny them the information they want.
I mean, I see PLENTY of "regular" or even crazy-weird porn online all the time, but I've NEVER accidentally or intentionally come across child porn. Are the distributors sophisticated enough to use private/encrypted systems, or do I just not crawl usenet enough? Seems like a fictional problem that sounds REALLY good to elected officials and families ("Yes, let's change to that ISP who blocks child porn, that will solve all of our problems, honey!")
Yes, it's principly a fictional problem that 'doing something' about is much more high profile & cheaper than actually working to solve problems. This particular tack will save 0 children from abuse. When they were talking about mandating every ISP save all of the headers, the FBI estimated they may get an extra 1000 convictions for child abuse per year - at a cost of over $400M/year to the ISP industry.
Actually solving the problems of child abuse etc take actual, low profile, boring gruntwork and time - waving big flags saying 'think of the children' doesn't solve the problem, but it does get you re-elected cheaply.
Many actually have a dual age of consent - there is a higher age for a sexual relationship involving people who have an authoritarian relationship with the younger person - teachers, clergy, doctors, cops, etc.
Seriously. Young girls - by my definition, anything under 16 - do not have tits, do not have curves,...
Wow, um... no,... um... wow.
From a biology standpoint, most female humans have partially developed secondary sexual characteristics by the age of 13 - full development usually stops around 19-22. Given the increasing levels of mammalian growth & sexual hormones in our water & food supplies, that age is dropping with a not-insignificant portion having achieved menstruation by the age of 9.
To you that means that 'Young girls' most certainly do have tits & do have curves.
Because if I ever have a girl and I smell someone like you around her, I will beat the crap out of him.
I certainly hope that you lock her up in her room with sweatpants & bulky sweatshirts, because there is an age between about 13 & 20 where girls are trying to get male attention - and advertising & entertainment all tell them that being sexy is how to get it. Some days I see more skin in the 20 minutes after schools let out than I do in a day at in a college. Sometimes I appreciate & move on, sometimes I want to slap them & say 'what were you thinking & does your mother know what you're wearing?'. Not once have I checked ID before noticing a curvy ass in tight jeans.
most importantly, can't deal with a proper relationship yet.
Bingo, one thing you have an understanding of, and the reason 95% of the people who look would never touch. The other 5% are either wackjobs or suffer from the same problem despite their age.
Pedophilia laws are usually presented to legislatures as protecting pre-pubescent children - yet the majority of incidences involve mid or post pubescent ones. Thus you have 'save the children' with images of toddlers & 6 year olds, against the reality of charging 16 year old girls with creating child porn for sending their boyfriend cellphone photos of themselves and sexual assault charges in cases where an ongoing relationship has one child turning 17 before the other.
Now, if you have an honest to goodness guy with a fetish for prepubescent children, by all means keep him away from them - and give him a well deserved beatdown if he hurts one. But don't class him the same as people who don't check the calendar & ID before admiring what's walking around in public.
Yet you find it quite acceptable to force your ideals on them...
I don't see anywhere where he said anything about forcing his ideals on them. In fact he said that they were quite welcome to try and change his opinions. Telling people to get the fuck out of your life is very different than trying to force your ideals on them.
If you don't like something, that's fine - don't do it. You can even try to get people to change. But history shows that attempts at legislating morality always fail in the end - usually with disastrous consequences. I direct your attention to Prohibition as the US's finest example of failed morality legislation. Not only did it fail to curb alcohol consumption, it converted a few isolated criminal gangs into massive organized crime enterprises. Yeah for legislated morality.
Obscenity trials, Alabama's Dildo Law, countless underhanded - if not illegal - zoning board rulings all show exactly how dichotomous our public & private lives are. In private, we as a population consume mass quantities of porn and bloodsports. In public, we as a culture, try to appear to disdain it.
Check the US, some states drop as low as 14 for age of consent. I believe Spain's AoC is 13. However, per US law, a minor, under 18 & not emancipated, cannot enter into the model contract to do a legal photo shoot. That leaves a whole lot of very strange potential situations - In a few cases people have been arrested for private boudoir photo's of their wives.
Why is this modded Funny? In this case it's a perfectly reasonable justice system. He's already been fined NZ$15,000 (~US$11,000) which would likely be a lot for him.
It's not reasonable because he created ~ US$20M in damages/lost work, collected ~US$40K in payments, and gets to keep his cash with no criminal record. That doesn't exactly sound like a reasonable justice system to me. Baseline he should have had to fork over all property obtained via the CC fraud & all monies received related to the botnet. Then posting a fine against him would be reasonable - as long as people are allowed to individually sue him to recover damages.
Yeah, because criminals are evil people who need to be locked up! Not fellow humans with issues. I'm not saying compassion absolves a person of their responsibility, it doesn't, but too many people seem to have this black and white view on justice, crime, and human nature.
Um, the judge refused to put a conviction on his record because it might 'hurt his future prospects'. Hmm, he created & ran a botnet that engaged in CC fraud, he admits he pocketed over 40K in just a few months. Call me crazy, but I think that perhaps some official notice that he's a sociopath with no compunction against ruining other peoples live to steal from them might just be warranted.
As it is, his punishment amounts to 4K in fines & 9K in restitution to one company - no restitution to the thousands of people who's credit cards he abused. So his 'punishment' is to pocket about 27K garnered from credit card fraud & abusing other people's computers. Yep, sign me up... I could stand to be punished like that every quarter. Tell you what, make it every month & I'll cut out the whole spambotting & credit card fraud thing to save everyone time & money.
Wrong. The right to copy something I make is one of the rights I control exclusively.
Based on what? You are aware that if you make a speech in public & someone writes down your words, they - not you - own the copyright on your speech?
The statute of St Anne is the first time and place in the world that the concept of owning the expression of an idea was conceived of. Ideas are not the same as physical property, they belong to the entirety of society - both patent law & copyright law express this concept.
The conceptual difference is that physical property is economically scarce, ideas are not. Once created, an idea can propagate throughout society with from one member to another without any members being deprived of it as a consequence. If that's a fundamental difference you don't understand, bluntly your too stupid to be able to type the arguments you have already made - thus you do understand it.
Society by it's very nature is a collective of shared ideas, restriction of those ideas harms society. That is a very basic concept that is an integral part of sociology & was well understood back as far as the 17th century when copyrights came into existence. You should also check into the purpose of the Statute of St Anne, it was to protect the publishing houses from poaching not to enrich the authors.
If your right to control the concepts you put down on paper is such a natural right, why then doesn't it extend into inventions & basic science? Do you honestly believe that that the value of your work is such that 'Baby Hit Me one More Time' deserves more protection and encouragement than the heart-lung machine? Surely a medical device that has saved thousands of lives should be encouraged more than a work who's only action is to make the listener's ears bleed. Isn't the basic understanding of the nature of the 11 year solar cycle & how it effects telecommunications & weather more important than pop music?
Pop music is granted life+ protection for the artist or 120 Years if a company owns the copyright - the most you can get out of a patent is 20 years - and then only if you invest 20+K to maintain your patent - oh, and it has to be patented in each country because it's not automagically valid everywhere for free. Basic science is totally unprotected - you cannot patent it & you cannot prevent derivative works from being created from the base ideas conceived in it's discovery.
In short, everyone in every industry except publishing recognizes that ideas belong to society once disclosed. The only thing that ever comes to mind when I hear people screaming about copyrights being some absolute right or how they need to extend to ridiculous terms in order to promote creativity, is a thumb sized Daffy Duck wrapped around a pearl screaming "It's mine, mine, mine!".*
* That image in your head belongs to Warner Brothers & they would like their royalty payments - check or cash is fine.
I make a living from copyright as a writer, and a 95 year term seems ludicrous to me.
Since you make a living as a writer & presumably know others who do, can you verify the information I have from friends in the publishing & selling industries? Per my information - most book sales have dropped to ~5% of their peak sales rate after about 6 months from the last printing release, with volume dropping to the low hundreds per year after the first 2 years.
Loosening them up will make people stop producing IP and work on something which makes some money, because without IP laws producing IP is not a rational way to spend your time.
Hmm, it's just awe inspiring to me how inane some comments are. Do you honestly thing that artists would suddenly stop creating works if we suddenly went back to 14 years w/ a 14 year extension? I'll give you a place to look for a clue - an antique bookstore.
Look at the reality of it, 95% of artists receive little to no royalties after the first year of a release. In the book world, the normal pattern shows that 6 months after the peak, sales have dropped to less than 5% volume. 2 years out, the volumes are even worse - dropping as low as 2-3 books per month - with most of the consignment books having been returned or destroyed by then.
I have friends in the book business so that's where I'm concentrating rather than the music industry. That being said, all of the data I've seen regarding sales numbers shows that there is a very similar crash in the music industry. Face it, how many times a year do you hear a Billie Holiday song - the only one's I've seen in a store recently have been in compilations or on DVD biopics. According the the FYE website, I can get a copy of most of her albums though them, but last time I looked, the stores around here don't stock them.
Let's be generous and say that her estate gets 4cents per album & 10K albums sell annually. That runs to $100 a quarter. The reality is probably closer to being that most quarters the royalty checks are worth less than the stamp to mail them out. All of that presupposes that her estate gets any royalties at all, most artists of her era don't.
If you think that artists won't produce if we don't guarantee them the kind of copyright terms they enjoy now, I suggest you look at the Beatles and the entire British invasion, their works were quite happily produced under about half of the current length of copyright. To say that returning to that length or shorter would stunt the industry just shows an ignorance of both economics & the artistic mentality.
SCO has to restate earnings for the Quarter they claimed the SUN contract.
Executives have to give back bonuses adjusted for the restated earnings.
SCO has to fork over the 2.5M + Interest from it's reserves - outside the protection of the bankruptcy court.
If Novell wins 'Legal Fees', then Novell petitions the court to add themselves as a creditor for that amount - estimates have ranged in the 20M+ range for the cost of this litigation.
This is independent of any legal action that the SEC or the local AG may decide to take.
Now some small fry entrepreneur is willing to take the risk of tapping into the rest of the 99.9% of the OS X market by selling PCs with OS X loaded on them. Despite the overwhelming legal precedent against them (I don't know of any official retailer that has gotten away with installing pirated versions of Windows on commodity PCs), they figure it's worth the risk. If they argue that they paid for every shrink-wrapped copy of OS X, then they stand a moderately better chance of succeeding.
They not only argue it, they explicitly advertise that the system is sold as OS X ready out of the box & if you choose to buy the OS, they will pre-load it. So, they are selling hardware w/ a EFI preloader & installing OS X if you buy it through them.
This isn't about unlicensed copying or about distribution. The copies are mfg by Apple & sold through a distributor to Pystar. Apple is claiming that the EULA prohibits installing the software on non MAC hardware & therefore negates the licenses. So, does a legal copy make a legal software install? Guess we'll find out if EULAs are actually licenses or if they're contracts.
Yesterday Slashdot had a story about how it was judged that loading software in RAM is equivalent to distributing software. Psystar is loading it onto the HDD, so this ruling might be different.
Loading software into RAM has always been acknowledged as making a copy. However, the right to make that copy from a licensed product has been written into the copyright code. This judge said that violating the EULA means you don't have a licensed product & therefore the RAM copy isn't covered under the exemption clause.
Basically, they pushed an argument through under an arcane interpretation of copyright law, what should have needed to be done under contract law. From what I read, this appears to be the only way they could go after the makers of Glider instead of individually after each player.
The side effect of this is that VMWare etc could be held to the same standard if you loaded an OS into a VM when the OS's EULA said it was prohibited.
Without the clause in the EULA that you will only run the OS on a genuine MAC, there is nothing here. So I guess we get to see just how far a shrink wrap EULA will go in the court. I'm not entirely certain that this is a good case for it, but it's not one of the worst.
Unfortunately, the 9th Circuit just ruled for Blizzard in their interpretation of a EULA violation negating the validity of license of legally purchased software & CA is in the 9th Circuit.
Have you forgotten live CD do have access to the hard disks?
Usually not. Most of the Live CDs don't mount the HDDs by default - and design. Unless your infection is going to mount the HDDs automagically or do block level work through/dev, most uses of a Live CD won't have access to a HDD.
If you're technically savvy enough to be working your way through a recovery using a live CD, you are also, almost certainly, savvy enough to be hiding behind an external firewall or without a network.
Is it potentially a real world problem - sure, but I'm not going to rebuild my utility CD's every time theres a new vulnerability patch. At work,I've got border virus scanning and border security, I've got AV & system monitor software, & I've got network traffic monitors. If somethings running around in my network & I don't know about it yet, an up to date Live CD isn't going to help me. At home, I've got a much more basic system w/ a router & AV software on everything & just some basic net traffic software.
I know I'm not an edge case in either place. From logs, I would say that a basic router catches & drops 95+% of the shit that would hit an unprotected system - and a good percentage of the remaining 5% is crap targeted at owning the router itself. So as long as you're behind an external firewall - almost everyone on broadband now days - you're probably just about as safe with an older live CD as you are with a new one.
In the event of not having an external firewall, well, for the most part, you're still more secure with an old Linux Live CD than you are with a current copy of Windows - simply from a volume of attack perspective.
In short, I'm not an idiot, I am a realist looking at the fact that most viri are built to attack the mounted filesystem - not go after block level edits of a random drive. Since any successful attempt at altering the mounted system will be reset after a reboot, the potential for long term damage is minimized. If you want to chase edge case infection scenarios go right ahead - but if you're planning for them, you're also not going to use a live CD.
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Orthodox Judaism has a rather harsh take on homosexuality - as well as women's rights.
Fundamentalist Christianity requires proselytizing - it likes the part about threatening people with the torments of hell if they don't convert - oh and they adopted that whole homosexuality & women's rights are bad thing.
Fundamentalist Islam requires conversion - by the sword if necessary.
Serious Judaio-Christian-Islam religion isn't light & fluffy. It's about dictating the lives of it's believers so that they fall into the narrow scope of what their interpretation of the divine's definition of 'good' is. And that block covers over half of the people in the world & well over 80% in the US.
How about "Stealing is is wrong because they worked to get that, and if you take it, then they won't have it anymore. Think about how you would feel if it was yours and someone took it away from you and wouldn't give it back." See, stealing is still wrong - just no religion involved. You paint a false dichotomy and point to it as part of the foundation of your argument. The humanistic approach works just as well.
My favorite(?) was listening to a woman complain that she hated everything about one candidate but loved the other ones opinions about everything but abortion, and she had to vote for the one she hated because he was 'Pro-life'. while (conscious){ head->desk(); }
Which is exactly the same expectation they get from the news, advertising, television, music videos, books, and movies. One more source isn't going to kill them. In fact since porn is so blatant & contrived, children might actually get the idea that it's not really like that at all. Movies where casual sex leads to a Cinderella ending in a setting that requires that you suspend disbelief - rather than Porn's shove it into a safe to only be let out after the movie - are probably more damaging to a kids concept of real sex.
Bullshit. This law was about pandering to the 'do something now' PACs. It was so poorly writen it would have required age verification for CNN's special reports on Iraq & gang violence. Subjects like the consequences of a poorly done nipple or genital piercing would be locked away from some of the people who need them most. This was blatantly unconstitutional from the get go because it was excessively broad and restrictive.
So use the filter Google put there for that purpose.
Hmm - get & install some filter software, better yet surf with them - cause some porn is always going to get through. I purged 50-60 messages off of a forum yesterday that were spam for redirects buried in Google & Yahoo groups - travel, finance, game, and movie groups, not adult groups. I also found one for porn spam in a sourceforge forum.
That's just a laughable opinion. First off, most porn sites are outside the US - because they don't have to worry about US obscenity laws. This law is just another one to laugh at. Even if there was 100% compliance in the US, you would still have more porn available than you could possibly look at.
Get a filter, then you can control what is available to your kids. Trying to mandate age verification is pointless, restrictive, and reactionary. Try doing something right rather than easy. It takes more effort, but the results are usually better.
Hmm, don't think so. Everything the Patriot act defines as illegal was already illegal - except those things about Fourth & Fifth amendment rights not really applying if the government uses the word 'terror' within 5 feet of the case file.
I refer you to the text of the first ammendment:
Now if I pass a law that requires you to only speak about testicular cancer to adults - and threaten you with 5 years in jail if a minor hears you - how exactly is that not 'abridging the freedom of speech'. Make no mistake about it, that is exactly what this law would have done.
This law didn't state pornography, it stated material not suitable for minors - with no clarification on what that meant. That means any discussion of genital cancer which might show a picture as an example would have to be restricted. As would a website showing the dangers of improperly done genital or nipple piercing. My favorite is that CNN would have to seal off parts of it's website due to the graphic nature of some of the investigative reports into the war & gangland violence.
That's why this law was unconstitutional - not because it prohibited people from posting porn, but because it prohibited people from openly discussing anything above a PG rating without violating the rights of the people to listen to the discussion anonymously.
As for "referring to your line "violation of the constitution" that chumps like you bark out whenever any law is enacted, ever." In the last 20 years congress has passed more laws that violated the constitution than in the previous 200. There have been discussions on the floor that they KNEW that the law wouldn't pass muster but they passed it anyway - so they could be seen 'doing something'. Calling a spade a spade doesn't make someone a chump. Calmly accepting whatever pablum your government spoon feeds you as the truth does.
He says about the man who had several mistresses & was a noted ladies man while in Paris drumming up support for the Revolution.
No, because keys are physical property which belong to you, your employee only keeps them under the condition of employment. Passwords are information. I know there are a whole lot of problems recently understanding that Intellectual Property isn't treatable like Physical Property but there is a difference.
If Childs set up the system in accordance to an approved policy & maintained the system according to an approved policy - which according to some reports he did - then when they fired him, he can walk out the door & never talk to them again. Now, if he sealed off the network when he thought he was going to get fired, then it's different, but according to the reports from the IT people around, he built it by himself, maintained it by himself, and nobody else has ever had access.
I've had companies I worked for call me up after I left & ask questions, if I left on good terms I tell them what I know. If I feel they screwed me, I politely tell them I no longer work for them, but if they would like to hire me as a consultant for $grossOverCharge I would be happy to tell them what I know. The point is, once I'm not with the company, what's in my head is mine - they can't demand it back or even demand I share it with them.
When I was doing my BS in Bio, one of the profs had a contract to do research for SE Asia - where they do grow hemp for textiles & rope. There were at least 4 Bankers Boxes of paperwork for this project - along with a security greenhouse.
Radioactive materials could be had from the Physics supply closet by asking the work study kid at the window.
Um, no.
Once the city fired him, he has no duty to provide any information regarding his work to the city. They want the passwords - too bad, he doesn't work for them anymore. Any information in your head is yours when you walk out the door - most of it you can't divulge under non-disclosure agreements, but no former employer can make you come back & spit out information they don't have a record of. You may, of course, do so voluntarily, but they can't force you to.
From the article, it sounds like the network was built from the ground up with only 1 administrative account. If that's the case, then he didn't sabotage the network, it was designed & built that way and the city is SOL.
If the cops ask him questions about his job as the network admin & he refuses to cooperate, then the police might have an 'obstruction of justice' case. If they ask him for the administrative password, he's probably within his rights to deny them the information they want.
Yes, it's principly a fictional problem that 'doing something' about is much more high profile & cheaper than actually working to solve problems. This particular tack will save 0 children from abuse. When they were talking about mandating every ISP save all of the headers, the FBI estimated they may get an extra 1000 convictions for child abuse per year - at a cost of over $400M/year to the ISP industry.
Actually solving the problems of child abuse etc take actual, low profile, boring gruntwork and time - waving big flags saying 'think of the children' doesn't solve the problem, but it does get you re-elected cheaply.
Many actually have a dual age of consent - there is a higher age for a sexual relationship involving people who have an authoritarian relationship with the younger person - teachers, clergy, doctors, cops, etc.
Wow, um... no,... um ... wow.
From a biology standpoint, most female humans have partially developed secondary sexual characteristics by the age of 13 - full development usually stops around 19-22. Given the increasing levels of mammalian growth & sexual hormones in our water & food supplies, that age is dropping with a not-insignificant portion having achieved menstruation by the age of 9.
To you that means that 'Young girls' most certainly do have tits & do have curves.
I certainly hope that you lock her up in her room with sweatpants & bulky sweatshirts, because there is an age between about 13 & 20 where girls are trying to get male attention - and advertising & entertainment all tell them that being sexy is how to get it. Some days I see more skin in the 20 minutes after schools let out than I do in a day at in a college. Sometimes I appreciate & move on, sometimes I want to slap them & say 'what were you thinking & does your mother know what you're wearing?'. Not once have I checked ID before noticing a curvy ass in tight jeans.
Bingo, one thing you have an understanding of, and the reason 95% of the people who look would never touch. The other 5% are either wackjobs or suffer from the same problem despite their age.
Pedophilia laws are usually presented to legislatures as protecting pre-pubescent children - yet the majority of incidences involve mid or post pubescent ones. Thus you have 'save the children' with images of toddlers & 6 year olds, against the reality of charging 16 year old girls with creating child porn for sending their boyfriend cellphone photos of themselves and sexual assault charges in cases where an ongoing relationship has one child turning 17 before the other.
Now, if you have an honest to goodness guy with a fetish for prepubescent children, by all means keep him away from them - and give him a well deserved beatdown if he hurts one. But don't class him the same as people who don't check the calendar & ID before admiring what's walking around in public.
I don't see anywhere where he said anything about forcing his ideals on them. In fact he said that they were quite welcome to try and change his opinions. Telling people to get the fuck out of your life is very different than trying to force your ideals on them.
If you don't like something, that's fine - don't do it. You can even try to get people to change. But history shows that attempts at legislating morality always fail in the end - usually with disastrous consequences. I direct your attention to Prohibition as the US's finest example of failed morality legislation. Not only did it fail to curb alcohol consumption, it converted a few isolated criminal gangs into massive organized crime enterprises. Yeah for legislated morality.
Obscenity trials, Alabama's Dildo Law, countless underhanded - if not illegal - zoning board rulings all show exactly how dichotomous our public & private lives are. In private, we as a population consume mass quantities of porn and bloodsports. In public, we as a culture, try to appear to disdain it.
Check the US, some states drop as low as 14 for age of consent. I believe Spain's AoC is 13. However, per US law, a minor, under 18 & not emancipated, cannot enter into the model contract to do a legal photo shoot. That leaves a whole lot of very strange potential situations - In a few cases people have been arrested for private boudoir photo's of their wives.
It's not reasonable because he created ~ US$20M in damages/lost work, collected ~US$40K in payments, and gets to keep his cash with no criminal record. That doesn't exactly sound like a reasonable justice system to me. Baseline he should have had to fork over all property obtained via the CC fraud & all monies received related to the botnet. Then posting a fine against him would be reasonable - as long as people are allowed to individually sue him to recover damages.
Um, the judge refused to put a conviction on his record because it might 'hurt his future prospects'. Hmm, he created & ran a botnet that engaged in CC fraud, he admits he pocketed over 40K in just a few months. Call me crazy, but I think that perhaps some official notice that he's a sociopath with no compunction against ruining other peoples live to steal from them might just be warranted.
As it is, his punishment amounts to 4K in fines & 9K in restitution to one company - no restitution to the thousands of people who's credit cards he abused. So his 'punishment' is to pocket about 27K garnered from credit card fraud & abusing other people's computers. Yep, sign me up ... I could stand to be punished like that every quarter. Tell you what, make it every month & I'll cut out the whole spambotting & credit card fraud thing to save everyone time & money.
Based on what? You are aware that if you make a speech in public & someone writes down your words, they - not you - own the copyright on your speech?
The statute of St Anne is the first time and place in the world that the concept of owning the expression of an idea was conceived of. Ideas are not the same as physical property, they belong to the entirety of society - both patent law & copyright law express this concept.
The conceptual difference is that physical property is economically scarce, ideas are not. Once created, an idea can propagate throughout society with from one member to another without any members being deprived of it as a consequence. If that's a fundamental difference you don't understand, bluntly your too stupid to be able to type the arguments you have already made - thus you do understand it.
Society by it's very nature is a collective of shared ideas, restriction of those ideas harms society. That is a very basic concept that is an integral part of sociology & was well understood back as far as the 17th century when copyrights came into existence. You should also check into the purpose of the Statute of St Anne, it was to protect the publishing houses from poaching not to enrich the authors.
If your right to control the concepts you put down on paper is such a natural right, why then doesn't it extend into inventions & basic science? Do you honestly believe that that the value of your work is such that 'Baby Hit Me one More Time' deserves more protection and encouragement than the heart-lung machine? Surely a medical device that has saved thousands of lives should be encouraged more than a work who's only action is to make the listener's ears bleed. Isn't the basic understanding of the nature of the 11 year solar cycle & how it effects telecommunications & weather more important than pop music?
Pop music is granted life+ protection for the artist or 120 Years if a company owns the copyright - the most you can get out of a patent is 20 years - and then only if you invest 20+K to maintain your patent - oh, and it has to be patented in each country because it's not automagically valid everywhere for free. Basic science is totally unprotected - you cannot patent it & you cannot prevent derivative works from being created from the base ideas conceived in it's discovery.
In short, everyone in every industry except publishing recognizes that ideas belong to society once disclosed. The only thing that ever comes to mind when I hear people screaming about copyrights being some absolute right or how they need to extend to ridiculous terms in order to promote creativity, is a thumb sized Daffy Duck wrapped around a pearl screaming "It's mine, mine, mine!".*
* That image in your head belongs to Warner Brothers & they would like their royalty payments - check or cash is fine.
Since you make a living as a writer & presumably know others who do, can you verify the information I have from friends in the publishing & selling industries? Per my information - most book sales have dropped to ~5% of their peak sales rate after about 6 months from the last printing release, with volume dropping to the low hundreds per year after the first 2 years.
Hmm, it's just awe inspiring to me how inane some comments are. Do you honestly thing that artists would suddenly stop creating works if we suddenly went back to 14 years w/ a 14 year extension? I'll give you a place to look for a clue - an antique bookstore.
Look at the reality of it, 95% of artists receive little to no royalties after the first year of a release. In the book world, the normal pattern shows that 6 months after the peak, sales have dropped to less than 5% volume. 2 years out, the volumes are even worse - dropping as low as 2-3 books per month - with most of the consignment books having been returned or destroyed by then.
I have friends in the book business so that's where I'm concentrating rather than the music industry. That being said, all of the data I've seen regarding sales numbers shows that there is a very similar crash in the music industry. Face it, how many times a year do you hear a Billie Holiday song - the only one's I've seen in a store recently have been in compilations or on DVD biopics. According the the FYE website, I can get a copy of most of her albums though them, but last time I looked, the stores around here don't stock them.
Let's be generous and say that her estate gets 4cents per album & 10K albums sell annually. That runs to $100 a quarter. The reality is probably closer to being that most quarters the royalty checks are worth less than the stamp to mail them out. All of that presupposes that her estate gets any royalties at all, most artists of her era don't.
If you think that artists won't produce if we don't guarantee them the kind of copyright terms they enjoy now, I suggest you look at the Beatles and the entire British invasion, their works were quite happily produced under about half of the current length of copyright. To say that returning to that length or shorter would stunt the industry just shows an ignorance of both economics & the artistic mentality.
This is independent of any legal action that the SEC or the local AG may decide to take.
They not only argue it, they explicitly advertise that the system is sold as OS X ready out of the box & if you choose to buy the OS, they will pre-load it. So, they are selling hardware w/ a EFI preloader & installing OS X if you buy it through them.
This isn't about unlicensed copying or about distribution. The copies are mfg by Apple & sold through a distributor to Pystar. Apple is claiming that the EULA prohibits installing the software on non MAC hardware & therefore negates the licenses. So, does a legal copy make a legal software install? Guess we'll find out if EULAs are actually licenses or if they're contracts.
Without the clause in the EULA that you will only run the OS on a genuine MAC, there is nothing here. So I guess we get to see just how far a shrink wrap EULA will go in the court. I'm not entirely certain that this is a good case for it, but it's not one of the worst.
Unfortunately, the 9th Circuit just ruled for Blizzard in their interpretation of a EULA violation negating the validity of license of legally purchased software & CA is in the 9th Circuit.
Usually not. Most of the Live CDs don't mount the HDDs by default - and design. Unless your infection is going to mount the HDDs automagically or do block level work through /dev, most uses of a Live CD won't have access to a HDD.
If you're technically savvy enough to be working your way through a recovery using a live CD, you are also, almost certainly, savvy enough to be hiding behind an external firewall or without a network.
Is it potentially a real world problem - sure, but I'm not going to rebuild my utility CD's every time theres a new vulnerability patch. At work,I've got border virus scanning and border security, I've got AV & system monitor software, & I've got network traffic monitors. If somethings running around in my network & I don't know about it yet, an up to date Live CD isn't going to help me. At home, I've got a much more basic system w/ a router & AV software on everything & just some basic net traffic software.
I know I'm not an edge case in either place. From logs, I would say that a basic router catches & drops 95+% of the shit that would hit an unprotected system - and a good percentage of the remaining 5% is crap targeted at owning the router itself. So as long as you're behind an external firewall - almost everyone on broadband now days - you're probably just about as safe with an older live CD as you are with a new one.
In the event of not having an external firewall, well, for the most part, you're still more secure with an old Linux Live CD than you are with a current copy of Windows - simply from a volume of attack perspective.
In short, I'm not an idiot, I am a realist looking at the fact that most viri are built to attack the mounted filesystem - not go after block level edits of a random drive. Since any successful attempt at altering the mounted system will be reset after a reboot, the potential for long term damage is minimized. If you want to chase edge case infection scenarios go right ahead - but if you're planning for them, you're also not going to use a live CD.