There is a big difference between what they did and what he did. What they did is, generally, a huge breech of trust but.... that doesn't mean it is or even should be illegal. When it comes to personal relationships, sometimes the state really should say "My name is paul, this shit is between you all".
In the end, whether a particular upload would be an infringement or not would depend on context. I know women who have posted nude pictures of themselves or let others post pictures of them online. So you can't really just blanket assume its a violation.
How about situations where a man posts pictures online of his wife claiming they are swingers looking for more partners. We can't assume its with or without her knowledge out of hand, it could be either. she could easily turn around in a divorce and claim to have not known.
This isn't even academic, I KNOW people who have had problems like this where a divorce got messy and one side tried to use events out of context. Seriously I had a friend tell me his wife was really kinky and wanted him to have her sign a "slave contract" (not unusual in certain circles)....then a year later is telling me how she gave the contract to her lawyer to use as proof that he was really controlling.
If that was the worst of the things I have seen people in fights with their ex do, that would be one thing. One friend of mine had to go through all sorts of hell fighting his ex over custody; even having to deal with her making false abuse claims with DSS. (we are still waiting to see the hammer drop on her for that since DSS has closed the case saying there was no merit to the claims)
Relationships are messy business. Right or wrong, its usually best to stay out of them whenever possible. Unless there is "welfare of a child" involved (which admittedly can be the messiest) its best to just stay out and tell people do deal.
Yet it does seem like there should be some recourse here, maybe a civil offence for people to use after other means of dealing with it break down? I dunno, but it should be somewhat targeted to prevent abuse of the statute.
Think we finally found something we agree on. There must be some conflict we can find um.... best weapon was clearly the rocket launcher because....gibs thats why.
You are correct, but there are still broad classes of people who are unable to own firearms. Anybody with a felony record, for example, is generally unable to own a firearm. Additionally, illegal aliens and green card holders are generally (completely?) prohibited. We are adding whole classes of "mental illnesses" to prohibited categories. As 3D printing becomes more commonplace, these people will be able to obtain firearms for themselves.
I am personally not worried about it...
I am with you, and partially because couple of things:
1. In the US a "Felony record" is something that, for the past couple of generations, you could get for smoking pot. Well, not if you were a middle class white kid or could afford a lawyer other than a public defender. Color me unafraid.
2. Anyone with cash could get a gun already if they really wanted one
3. Guns are not hard to make, in places where they are harder to get, people have made them. A couple of guys in a german prison made their own shotgun (talk about ingenuity and determination!), recent reports from an african refugee camp found "home made rifles". See point 2....anyone who really wanted a gun can have one right now.
First someone printed one, then a second one..... OMG the number of 3d printed guns in the US has doubled in 1 day! Just think they went from those two to perhaps 10s of them within....weeks..... why if this growth rate continues, we will be walking to work waist deep on 3d printed guns within a decade!
> And entirely different in that the people on board the airplanes on 9/11 did what the government told > them to and just let the hijackers do what they wanted. Except for one airplane, who decided to say > "Fuck the government, we're not going to take this shit" and as a result that aircraft never hit a > building.
Absolutely correct except in the government part. I don't think anybody was asking "what would the government say to do", most people were not thinking about that. Much more likely they were thinking about past hijackings.
Up until 9/11, actual hijackings usually happened with the intention of making a statement or holding ransom. If you were in a seat on a plane on 9/11; you had every reason to expect that the plane was going to land, there was going to be a standoff where either the hijackers were killed, or you were released. Everyone fully expected to be walking off that plane alive within the next few days and that was perfectly reasonable for them to assume.
On 9/11, that changed; and as you rightly note; we saw the result before the day was out.
Not ignoring, just not willing to call them "many" when they are in fact, so few. If not a single one was arrested, the net difference would be noise. More people have died in car crashes, this year, more than 10 times over, than in the largest terrorist attack EVER on US soil.
Given that these attacks could generally be pulled off by anyone who wants to do it, the only real possible conclusion is that.... the number of people so inclined is so close to zero as to make no real odds, and the rest is just a bit of noise in an otherwise flat signal.
The very fact you have to go to documents that span a decade or more just to get their numbers up proves my point far more than I expect you will realize.
> The main reason I could come up with is explaining what cannot be explained and thus control > what cannot be controlled.
I doubt its that simple. A human mind is a very odd place to live, maybe you have noticed. All these sensors and interpretation of them, its messy business. We see faces even in places we know there is no reason to. Why would we ever see a face in a cloud, or even a picture on a page? Much of the visual information is wrong, the size, the distance, the color, the lack of depth.....but something in there says "face....right there". Shit, all it takes is a couple of circles and a line.
What percentage of the population hear voices? Most of us actually, the occasional auditory hallucination is pretty normal. However, we know this, we have science to explain it, we have studied the phenomena, we stand upon giants.
If we didn't; then how do you explain hearing a voice in the woods? How do you explain seeing a vision? Feelings like deja vu? If you have a mystical mindset, the world can be a very mystical place with a lot of room for interpretation....and for a person who has experienced such events....well... according to what he experienced and remembers, they actually happened. They ARE his experience.
I think these common events, ones which we have learned to ignore and dismiss as irrelevant abberations in our senses, that likely contributed to the rise of religions. I mean, in a world where you have no better explanation, maybe that voice in the woods was the elves, or the spirit of the woods?
> The only reason nobody's shooting random people or blowing stuff up all over the place is because > nobody wants it badly enough. If they did, well, look at what happened in Boston...
Exactly. Hell I was just hearing on NPR about a refugee camp where "home made rifles" were found. How hard is it to get a tank of propane or a sack of flour? How hard is it to get gasoline, sulfuric acid, or nitrate containing soil? Point is, if people want weapons they can and will make them, no matter what you try to do to stop them.
anybody who is in touch with the world enough to be able to read, do math, and generally solve problems and make plans can put together his own weapons of some sort, including bombs. There are plenty of examples of people who did it (many of whom were not even terrorists and didn't hurt anyone; if not most, since there are more teenagers living in the sticks with fuck all to do than there are terrorists)
So where does that leave us? If most teenagers who really set their mind to it could come up with a way to blow shit up, why is it shit isn't blowing up for the most part? Why do we not have bedlam?
Based on what I have seen of WoW players, it seems to be able to suck hours from them whether they find is satisfying or not, so it might actually both decrease satisfaction and increase retention; possibly sapping from them even the motivation to look for a new job.
While at the same time, making it impossible for them to complain because nobody will sympathise. I await them to start sueing the NSA for the metal stress of the situation leaving them incapable of doing anything but playing video games, could even be a disability.
While contemplating the Glory of God, it does make you wonder if any of anti-surveillance messages we sprinkle with little phrases, get their attention like ricin grains in letters to Obama?
Do these messages produce little red flags that make someone have to read them? Does the volume of hatred for their intrusion not blow up like semtex packages at the sears tower? Does it not infect them like a small pox release in the New York subway system?
Does it ever make them think? Why do I spy on grandma?
True, but you still have to download it and decrypt it. Do that on a machine that can't be trusted and you may be hosed. Hell, look at the capabilities of a system like foxacid, and the very request you make to download your key file could be the same one that infects the local machine.
At least a device like this is only as vulnerable as typing, and exposes only the one password being used at a time, the master password is always protected as its only entered on the device.
yes I know. Normally when you see quotes and qualifiers its a good indication someone is playing a bit fast and loose with a definition. If I wasn't aware of that I would have just called it a liquid metal and saved myself some characters.
The problem is the lack of contrast. Conventional contrast agents are based on iodine, which has a high electron density and so better absorbs x-rays than other atoms. But a better solution would be to use a higher density fluid, such as a liquid metal. The obvious fears associated with toxicity and so forth mean this has never been tried.
So my mother was an X-Ray technition for 25 years, and was trained in the 70s. In fact, metals, if not this kind of "liquid metal" have not only been tried, but used. In fact, when she was working back in the 90s, she used to say that soft tissue x-rays back in the 50s were much sharper because of the better contrast they had.
Better....because it contained thorium. While it made amazing x-rays, it turned out to not be so good for the patients. Turns out those "harmless" alpha decays are a lot less harmless when they happen inside your body.
I never really looked up the specific contrast before, apparently mom got her decades wrong, but it was history for her too so that isn't too surprizing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorotrast
I was thinking the problem is they have become victims of their own success. Since we have passed the point where just making incrementally better hardware improves the experience for users; and that good experience persists longer, means that people have little incentive to upgrade.
It takes me about 5 hours to drive drive to go see my cousin. If upgrading my vehicle in some weird fantasy world cuts that in half to 2.5 hours. Awesome, I will pay good money for that. If you then cut it from 2 to 1.75.... thats great. Cut it in half again, cool but, with each cut, there is less and less value in the increase...and its going to be harder and harder for me to justify an upgrade when I am getting so little out of it, compared to what I got last time.
Now maybe there is some population who benefits from the 10 minuite to 5 minute jump, enough to make it worth it (high frequency travellers?) but, with each chop, you are making it relevant to less and less people.
That hardly makes them skin flints, especially when the majority of software most people use, no matter how slow it runs, isn't even written to use multiple cores, so it only matters for parallelism between tasks, making the hardware even less valuable to upgrade.
No actually I didn't consider those; for a couple of reasons:
1. Smart, organized criminals are rather rare. Its much smarter to assume the general case until there is reason to suspect otherwise.
2. Smart organized criminals tend to know what they are stealing ahead of time
3. If I was going to consider this, I would also have to consider that they were smart enough to have colluded with the drivers to steal the truck, and any evidence of a beating may be a cover.
4. Mob style hitmen are a bad example too, See #1. Very rare. Even more rare than other kinds of smart organized criminals.
and 5: >> "Is it not worth trying to understand where the problem comes from?" > "And thus endeth all need for individual responsibility."
Right so not even worth considering. You get to personal responsibility and thats the full story, you are done. Good for you
Its like these damned doctors. They know about fever, they know how to treat it. Who the fuck needs to study the disease that causes the fever? Thus endeth all need for superficial treatments.
Its not necessarily about sympathy, just that, asking why they did one thing over another likely is missing this fact: They are dumb, they likely didn't even consider many options.
Its also a question of: Why are people so dumb and reckless? Are they not being produced somehow? Is reducing their numbers not, progress? Is it not worth trying to understand where the problem comes from?
In any case, nothing about it gives any indication that searching the inside of his car would likely turn up anything else. The search was still unjustified. So they were both wrong and the cop...was many many times more wrong.
Sheesh? All I was suggesting is that asking why they choose one method of theft over another is, well.... because they are likely dumb and it didn't even occur to them.
It might be worth considering that just because a person is wrong doesn't mean that is the end of the story. Criminals are generally a symptom of larger social issues. Morality is nice and all, but, just stopping at the morality of it and deciding they were wrong; is simultaneously correct and useless. You may as well be pointing out that water is wet.
> Sort of makes you wonder why they chose to beat the two guys instead of just force them at > gunpoint to be tied up. They must have had literally no other choice.
You are likely far smarter and more well educated than them. I have met a few people who were, at one point or another, in the general category of criminal who would commit this kind of crime. It is a somewhat diverse group but.... they tend to be kinda dumb, and often have all sorts of issues.
People don't just go through a normal well adjusted life and then one day be like "I am a criminal now" I mean... they do for some "crimes" like.... smoking pot; but not stuff like this.
Yup, and the favorite counter example of mine is lojack. Even a smalish increase in lojack use in an area (if I remember right, around 1%) was shown to correlate to a 20% drop in car thefts in that area.
Nobody wants to get punished, but many more people will take a small chance at a large punishment than will take a large chance at a small one. which makes sense. A small chance at a large punishment is a large chance at nothing but benefit.
I mean, if you erased the actual action and just look at the risk/reward as a bet, it makes a lot more sense. I mean, imagine a Keno game where prizes go up to 19 numbers, but if you guess a perfect 20, you get executed.
Is that a good bet? You know what.... if I was a gambler I would, its still a good bet: There is no documented case of a perfect keno round having ever happened. It is that unlikely. You could place and replace that bet every minute and still die of old age.
Actually I am quite familiar with this; but mostly through friends. One friend of mine was caught driving 70ish lbs of pot through Arizona. (yes that is a fuckton of pot, he must have been working for someone but, some details I prefer not to find out)
He could afford a lawyer so how much time did he do? None. Didn't even have to travel back to Az for trial, all done over the phone.... at great expense. It is so blatantly a money game (especially when its over something so harmless its hard to see how they even justify it aside from making jobs).
You know if he couldn't afford a lawyer and had a public defender or represented himself, he would have spent a couple of years locked up.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming its illegal.
There is a big difference between what they did and what he did. What they did is, generally, a huge breech of trust but.... that doesn't mean it is or even should be illegal. When it comes to personal relationships, sometimes the state really should say "My name is paul, this shit is between you all".
In the end, whether a particular upload would be an infringement or not would depend on context. I know women who have posted nude pictures of themselves or let others post pictures of them online. So you can't really just blanket assume its a violation.
How about situations where a man posts pictures online of his wife claiming they are swingers looking for more partners. We can't assume its with or without her knowledge out of hand, it could be either. she could easily turn around in a divorce and claim to have not known.
This isn't even academic, I KNOW people who have had problems like this where a divorce got messy and one side tried to use events out of context. Seriously I had a friend tell me his wife was really kinky and wanted him to have her sign a "slave contract" (not unusual in certain circles)....then a year later is telling me how she gave the contract to her lawyer to use as proof that he was really controlling.
If that was the worst of the things I have seen people in fights with their ex do, that would be one thing. One friend of mine had to go through all sorts of hell fighting his ex over custody; even having to deal with her making false abuse claims with DSS. (we are still waiting to see the hammer drop on her for that since DSS has closed the case saying there was no merit to the claims)
Relationships are messy business. Right or wrong, its usually best to stay out of them whenever possible. Unless there is "welfare of a child" involved (which admittedly can be the messiest) its best to just stay out and tell people do deal.
Yet it does seem like there should be some recourse here, maybe a civil offence for people to use after other means of dealing with it break down? I dunno, but it should be somewhat targeted to prevent abuse of the statute.
Think we finally found something we agree on. There must be some conflict we can find um.... best weapon was clearly the rocket launcher because....gibs thats why.
I am with you, and partially because couple of things:
1. In the US a "Felony record" is something that, for the past couple of generations, you could get for smoking pot. Well, not if you were a middle class white kid or could afford a lawyer other than a public defender. Color me unafraid.
2. Anyone with cash could get a gun already if they really wanted one
3. Guns are not hard to make, in places where they are harder to get, people have made them. A couple of guys in a german prison made their own shotgun (talk about ingenuity and determination!), recent reports from an african refugee camp found "home made rifles". See point 2....anyone who really wanted a gun can have one right now.
I love that term "growing prevalence".
First someone printed one, then a second one..... OMG the number of 3d printed guns in the US has doubled in 1 day! Just think they went from those two to perhaps 10s of them within....weeks..... why if this growth rate continues, we will be walking to work waist deep on 3d printed guns within a decade!
> And entirely different in that the people on board the airplanes on 9/11 did what the government told
> them to and just let the hijackers do what they wanted. Except for one airplane, who decided to say
> "Fuck the government, we're not going to take this shit" and as a result that aircraft never hit a
> building.
Absolutely correct except in the government part. I don't think anybody was asking "what would the government say to do", most people were not thinking about that. Much more likely they were thinking about past hijackings.
Up until 9/11, actual hijackings usually happened with the intention of making a statement or holding ransom. If you were in a seat on a plane on 9/11; you had every reason to expect that the plane was going to land, there was going to be a standoff where either the hijackers were killed, or you were released. Everyone fully expected to be walking off that plane alive within the next few days and that was perfectly reasonable for them to assume.
On 9/11, that changed; and as you rightly note; we saw the result before the day was out.
Not ignoring, just not willing to call them "many" when they are in fact, so few. If not a single one was arrested, the net difference would be noise. More people have died in car crashes, this year, more than 10 times over, than in the largest terrorist attack EVER on US soil.
Given that these attacks could generally be pulled off by anyone who wants to do it, the only real possible conclusion is that.... the number of people so inclined is so close to zero as to make no real odds, and the rest is just a bit of noise in an otherwise flat signal.
The very fact you have to go to documents that span a decade or more just to get their numbers up proves my point far more than I expect you will realize.
> The main reason I could come up with is explaining what cannot be explained and thus control
> what cannot be controlled.
I doubt its that simple. A human mind is a very odd place to live, maybe you have noticed. All these sensors and interpretation of them, its messy business. We see faces even in places we know there is no reason to. Why would we ever see a face in a cloud, or even a picture on a page? Much of the visual information is wrong, the size, the distance, the color, the lack of depth.....but something in there says "face....right there". Shit, all it takes is a couple of circles and a line.
What percentage of the population hear voices? Most of us actually, the occasional auditory hallucination is pretty normal. However, we know this, we have science to explain it, we have studied the phenomena, we stand upon giants.
If we didn't; then how do you explain hearing a voice in the woods? How do you explain seeing a vision? Feelings like deja vu? If you have a mystical mindset, the world can be a very mystical place with a lot of room for interpretation....and for a person who has experienced such events....well... according to what he experienced and remembers, they actually happened. They ARE his experience.
I think these common events, ones which we have learned to ignore and dismiss as irrelevant abberations in our senses, that likely contributed to the rise of religions. I mean, in a world where you have no better explanation, maybe that voice in the woods was the elves, or the spirit of the woods?
> The only reason nobody's shooting random people or blowing stuff up all over the place is because
> nobody wants it badly enough. If they did, well, look at what happened in Boston...
Exactly. Hell I was just hearing on NPR about a refugee camp where "home made rifles" were found. How hard is it to get a tank of propane or a sack of flour? How hard is it to get gasoline, sulfuric acid, or nitrate containing soil? Point is, if people want weapons they can and will make them, no matter what you try to do to stop them.
anybody who is in touch with the world enough to be able to read, do math, and generally solve problems and make plans can put together his own weapons of some sort, including bombs. There are plenty of examples of people who did it (many of whom were not even terrorists and didn't hurt anyone; if not most, since there are more teenagers living in the sticks with fuck all to do than there are terrorists)
So where does that leave us? If most teenagers who really set their mind to it could come up with a way to blow shit up, why is it shit isn't blowing up for the most part? Why do we not have bedlam?
There really is only that one answer.
Based on what I have seen of WoW players, it seems to be able to suck hours from them whether they find is satisfying or not, so it might actually both decrease satisfaction and increase retention; possibly sapping from them even the motivation to look for a new job.
While at the same time, making it impossible for them to complain because nobody will sympathise. I await them to start sueing the NSA for the metal stress of the situation leaving them incapable of doing anything but playing video games, could even be a disability.
While contemplating the Glory of God, it does make you wonder if any of anti-surveillance messages we sprinkle with little phrases, get their attention like ricin grains in letters to Obama?
Do these messages produce little red flags that make someone have to read them? Does the volume of hatred for their intrusion not blow up like semtex packages at the sears tower? Does it not infect them like a small pox release in the New York subway system?
Does it ever make them think? Why do I spy on grandma?
True, but you still have to download it and decrypt it. Do that on a machine that can't be trusted and you may be hosed. Hell, look at the capabilities of a system like foxacid, and the very request you make to download your key file could be the same one that infects the local machine.
At least a device like this is only as vulnerable as typing, and exposes only the one password being used at a time, the master password is always protected as its only entered on the device.
yes I know. Normally when you see quotes and qualifiers its a good indication someone is playing a bit fast and loose with a definition. If I wasn't aware of that I would have just called it a liquid metal and saved myself some characters.
It would seem fitting for it to decay into germanium
So my mother was an X-Ray technition for 25 years, and was trained in the 70s. In fact, metals, if not this kind of "liquid metal" have not only been tried, but used. In fact, when she was working back in the 90s, she used to say that soft tissue x-rays back in the 50s were much sharper because of the better contrast they had.
Better....because it contained thorium. While it made amazing x-rays, it turned out to not be so good for the patients. Turns out those "harmless" alpha decays are a lot less harmless when they happen inside your body.
I never really looked up the specific contrast before, apparently mom got her decades wrong, but it was history for her too so that isn't too surprizing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorotrast
Skin flint?
I was thinking the problem is they have become victims of their own success. Since we have passed the point where just making incrementally better hardware improves the experience for users; and that good experience persists longer, means that people have little incentive to upgrade.
It takes me about 5 hours to drive drive to go see my cousin. If upgrading my vehicle in some weird fantasy world cuts that in half to 2.5 hours. Awesome, I will pay good money for that. If you then cut it from 2 to 1.75.... thats great. Cut it in half again, cool but, with each cut, there is less and less value in the increase...and its going to be harder and harder for me to justify an upgrade when I am getting so little out of it, compared to what I got last time.
Now maybe there is some population who benefits from the 10 minuite to 5 minute jump, enough to make it worth it (high frequency travellers?) but, with each chop, you are making it relevant to less and less people.
That hardly makes them skin flints, especially when the majority of software most people use, no matter how slow it runs, isn't even written to use multiple cores, so it only matters for parallelism between tasks, making the hardware even less valuable to upgrade.
Yes and I am saying the law should be adjusted then.
So if its not rational, what is the harm in talking about the links?
Did I ONCE say excuse the behaviour? No, not once.
Did I ONCE say it was ok because they are victims? No, not once.
You just seem to leap to that as the only possible result of even wanting to sympathise with the situation that brought them there.
No actually I didn't consider those; for a couple of reasons:
1. Smart, organized criminals are rather rare. Its much smarter to assume the general case until there is reason to suspect otherwise.
2. Smart organized criminals tend to know what they are stealing ahead of time
3. If I was going to consider this, I would also have to consider that they were smart enough to have colluded with the drivers to steal the truck, and any evidence of a beating may be a cover.
4. Mob style hitmen are a bad example too, See #1. Very rare. Even more rare than other kinds of smart organized criminals.
and 5:
>> "Is it not worth trying to understand where the problem comes from?"
> "And thus endeth all need for individual responsibility."
Right so not even worth considering. You get to personal responsibility and thats the full story, you are done. Good for you
Its like these damned doctors. They know about fever, they know how to treat it. Who the fuck needs to study the disease that causes the fever? Thus endeth all need for superficial treatments.
Its not necessarily about sympathy, just that, asking why they did one thing over another likely is missing this fact: They are dumb, they likely didn't even consider many options.
Its also a question of: Why are people so dumb and reckless? Are they not being produced somehow? Is reducing their numbers not, progress? Is it not worth trying to understand where the problem comes from?
In any case, nothing about it gives any indication that searching the inside of his car would likely turn up anything else. The search was still unjustified. So they were both wrong and the cop...was many many times more wrong.
Sheesh? All I was suggesting is that asking why they choose one method of theft over another is, well.... because they are likely dumb and it didn't even occur to them.
It might be worth considering that just because a person is wrong doesn't mean that is the end of the story. Criminals are generally a symptom of larger social issues. Morality is nice and all, but, just stopping at the morality of it and deciding they were wrong; is simultaneously correct and useless. You may as well be pointing out that water is wet.
> Sort of makes you wonder why they chose to beat the two guys instead of just force them at
> gunpoint to be tied up. They must have had literally no other choice.
You are likely far smarter and more well educated than them. I have met a few people who were, at one point or another, in the general category of criminal who would commit this kind of crime. It is a somewhat diverse group but.... they tend to be kinda dumb, and often have all sorts of issues.
People don't just go through a normal well adjusted life and then one day be like "I am a criminal now" I mean... they do for some "crimes" like.... smoking pot; but not stuff like this.
Yup, and the favorite counter example of mine is lojack. Even a smalish increase in lojack use in an area (if I remember right, around 1%) was shown to correlate to a 20% drop in car thefts in that area.
Nobody wants to get punished, but many more people will take a small chance at a large punishment than will take a large chance at a small one. which makes sense. A small chance at a large punishment is a large chance at nothing but benefit.
I mean, if you erased the actual action and just look at the risk/reward as a bet, it makes a lot more sense. I mean, imagine a Keno game where prizes go up to 19 numbers, but if you guess a perfect 20, you get executed.
Is that a good bet? You know what.... if I was a gambler I would, its still a good bet: There is no documented case of a perfect keno round having ever happened. It is that unlikely. You could place and replace that bet every minute and still die of old age.
Actually I am quite familiar with this; but mostly through friends. One friend of mine was caught driving 70ish lbs of pot through Arizona. (yes that is a fuckton of pot, he must have been working for someone but, some details I prefer not to find out)
He could afford a lawyer so how much time did he do? None. Didn't even have to travel back to Az for trial, all done over the phone.... at great expense. It is so blatantly a money game (especially when its over something so harmless its hard to see how they even justify it aside from making jobs).
You know if he couldn't afford a lawyer and had a public defender or represented himself, he would have spent a couple of years locked up.