1) The courts don't make more money if there are more trials. They just schedule more trials and everyone going to trial has to wait longer. Courts are funded by your tax dollars.
2) Prosecutors don't make more money if there are more trials. They too are paid by your tax dollars. Having a new federal crime of "harmful to minors" material on the Internet, if it was ever enforced, would mean that prosecutors weren't prosecuting something else as fast. More time for bad guy child molesters to roam the streets?
3) OK, maybe the tiny percentage of lawyers who defend First Amendment cases make more money. But I PROMISE YOU, those were not the people advocating for this law. Those are the people giving $ to the ACLU and others to fight this law. They oppose it on principle.
The people who advocated for these laws were ONLY the "true believers" -- the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, etc.
It's true, the Christian Coalition and MoveOn are working together. Here's the list of coalition members supporting Internet neutrality legislation: http://www.savetheinternet.com/=coalition
Unfortunately, it isn't in alphabetical order. But it's entertaining reading.
AND they are joined by groups as diverse as Consumers Union, Gun Owners of America, Feminist Majority Foundation, the Christian Coalition, and MoveOn.org...
AND they're opposed by traditional telcos and cable companies...
Here's the thing about subpoenas, or don't blame Google for having this particular information.
Once someone, like DOJ, asks you for this kind of information as part of a legal proceeding, you have to retain or create it unless it's an undue burden on you/your business to do so, or you don't routinely create/retain that information.
You can still fight in court about whether or not you have to turn over the info, and whether or not the request is actually valid. But imagine how obnoxious it would be if at the end of the challenge to the subpoena, the losing party could say "oh, it turns out we don't even have that data any more. Neener-neener-boo-boo!"
Obviously, for a company like Google, it isn't that big of a burden to retain search queries over a specified period of time, even if normally they only keep them cached for 24 hours, or to aggregate the top 100 search terms per day, or whatever their regular business practice is.
And that's why Google has to fight this based on privacy protection, not based on "we don't have the info."
BTW, in my comment above, I made a mistake. It isn't all searches and search results over the two month period that DOJ requested. DOJ actually requested a random sample from that period.
I think Google was asked to fork over records for search queries from certain key words.
Actually, they were asked for all searches and search results over a two month period. IMO, the DOJ is trying to prove that lots of "innocent" searches generate porn results, therefore we need a law to protect children from seeing those "harmful to minors" search results.
I think we can all agree that the average/. reader has been familiar with spyware for a lot longer than the average person. Right? Right.
As someone who was in the room for most of the ASC's work, I can assure you, we weren't spending a lot of time thinking "What will/. readers think?" (Except for each other. I'd guess that most of the people who were in those rooms are/. readers. Hi gang!)
Instead, these documents were written to try to explain to your parents, your elected officials, and your local newspaper reporters what "spyware" means, and to what degree they should be concerned about it.
As an added bonus, they help members of the anti-spyware industry communicate more effectively with one another.
So to reassure the/. readership, not that you're likely to be reassured, these guidelines DON'T prevent an anti-spyware software company from listing or removing a spyware product that works in some new and yet unimagined way. They don't give any of the member companies a free pass to avoid detection by each other's products.
What the guidelines do is provide a common vocabulary so we can help ORDINARY PEOPLE understand what the heck we're talking about when we talk about spyware in the media, and so it's harder for spyware vendors to play anti-spyware companies off of one another by claiming that "Foo Co. says we aren't spyware, so you should de-list us too."
Coming to a general industry agreement on how to define spyware, and what the relative risk of various software "features" that may be part of privacy-compromising malicious code is a challenging task. Especially when you consider that nearly every member of the group wants to make sure that it's products aren't disadvantaged by the definitions.
Of course anyone -- especially any/. reader -- can take issue with some member or some specific point in one or more of these documents. But overall, I think the ASC has done some great work and that it will help improve the media's understanding of spyware, and help policy makers do a better job of trying to deal with the problem of spyware.
If other anti-spyware companies want to join the group, contact info is on the web site, and you should go to the Public Workshop in Washington DC on 2/9./. readers are also welcome to come to the workshop.
Oh yes, and even more than usual, these opinions are my own.
I would dearly love a citation for this: 5 years ago, nearly half of all homes had an internet filter of some sort installed - now, only a quarter do.
One key point that is missing here is the question of whose responsibility it is to determine what gets viewed in my home or your home.
I'll be giving birth to a little boy early next year, and I would strongly prefer that he not be exposed to violent porn or images of people and animals in sexual situations. In my dream world, that's *ever*, but since I live in reality, I'll settle for 'until he's old enough to understand why in our house, we think that's wrong.' I feel the same way about neo-nazi, racist, and homophobic material.
Of course, I don't know how old my son will be when he reaches that level of maturity. It probably won't be the exact same age as the boy next door.
And the same time, I'm acutely aware of the fact that plenty of people think the family I'm creating is 'inappropriate' for young children to know about or see, because my son will have two mommies. And I want him to know how diverse families are, and that he isn't alone in having two mommies.
As a professional with eight years of experience in parental controls and web filtering technology, I know this is a tall order! I really can't have the filter I want 'out of the box.'
And as a former practicing First Amendment lawyer (my one and only jury trial was defending a video the state argued was obscene), I really don't think the government has a useful role in forcing one type of technology or one set of values on this situation. I can't imagine a constitutionally defensible way to make it work, and the effort to do so seems futile and wasteful.
Instead, the effort should be spent on parenting, teaching our children our values, having rules about what is acceptable -- both in the Real World and when using the Internet, and for some families, using technology tools. All of these are necessary to "protect" children from what we view as bad influences.
The idea of having parents and kids work out the rules, and the consequences, together is a great one. It only works once the kids hit some basic threshold of responsibility -- which obviously varies from person to person and family to family.
But after that point, not only are the kids more invested in following the rules, its also a good educational opportunity for both parents and kids.
Parents learn what their kids do and want to do on the computer, and kids are clear on what their parents consider appropriate, acceptable, and/or unsafe behavior, and what happens if they push those boundaries. Hopefully it even includes a conversation about WHY on all those topics too.
Here's the thing about the "monitor in the living room" issue.
Kids and teens love to chat, they love to blog, and they innocently expose a ton of personal information about themselves in blogs and chatting.
You may have told them not to give out their full name or address, but predators can learn identities using lots of other information: school names, team names, friends names, names of parks and malls and other places they like to hang out. Just as social engineering is used by phishers to get password or cc info from adults, it gets used by sexual predators to manipulate kids and teens into trusting the predators.
And I think most of you probably remember feeling like you could handle a lot more than those stupid controling adults thought you could, back when you were in in high school.
That combination of factors is what has teenagers, especially girls, make a shocking number of bad decisions about meeting people IRL who they've only met online.
Having your computer in a central location in your house isn't a foolproof way to protect your kids; there is no such thing. But if the computer is in the living room, you can see if your kids' behavior changes, if they get suddenly secretive about what's on the monitor, for example.
And then you can have a conversation with them about it and figure out whether or not you should be worried.
Different parents will make different choices on that front -- maybe you aren't worried about your teen checking out some naughty pictures, but maybe you are worried about her looking at violent rape fantasy sites or about his unwillingness to tell you who new people on the buddy list are....
Maybe you have a relationship with your kids where the conversation and reviewing what's acceptable at your house is all that is needed. Or maybe you decide to restrict computer use, or install parental controls software, or monitor the history & temp internet files -- all those choices make sense for some families and wouldn't work in others.
But paying attention to what your kids are doing with their time and who their doing it with, that's critical for parenting, and harder to do for a kid with a laptop in their room than a kid using the computer in a public part of the house.
Don't JUST talk about yourself and your interests.
I'll assume for the sake of easy to read sentences that I'm talking to straight male nerds, but this advice applies to all genders and sexual orientations.
Ask her about herself, about her interests, about her life, about her friends.
LISTEN to what she says.
Think about what she said, and comment or ask more questions related to the topic. Go ahead and share relevent anecdotes from your own life.
I trust you can all see how interrogation -- which is NOT attractive -- is distinct from what I've just described.
Also, when you are talking about yourself, don't just talk about how great you are. Admitting nervousness or some aspect of vulnerability is very attractive, so long as it doesn't cross the line into abject insecurity or whining.
One way to open up that area of conversation is to talk about things that you hope to do, but haven't yet been able to try or complete. NOTE: If 'have sex' is on this list, don't include it in this conversation! I mean things like write a novel or travel to antarctica.
I couldn't disagree more with the idea that self love == vanity. Self-delusion maybe, but not love.
Think about it. When you love someone, you know what their faults are, and although they might get on your nerves sometimes, you know that they're just part of what makes that person who they are. You know when they're going to do that thing, and sometimes you think it's cute or funny.
If you can't figure out what I'm talking about, think about your Mom or Dad for a moment.
Self-love is accepting yourself for all your traits, geeky and otherwise. Yes, not everyone finds your encyclopedic knowledge of FORTRAN or ST:TNG or crypto or as interesting as you find it. But the self-loving geek knows that, and has a sense of humor about it -- its just a PART of who you are.
And, it lays the foundation for love for someone else.
Not lust, or obsession, but actual love, the kind that could turn into a serious, long-lasting relationship.
Because EVERYONE has something geeky and quirky about them that will eventually either drive you crazy, or you'll accept and love it as part of what makes your love the person they are.
My love, for example, is a huge worrier and a geek in the areas of music and shoes. Sometimes this drives me nuts, but mostly I find it endearing and cute. At the moment, closet space is a problem, so the shoes are seeming less cute than they used to seem. And we've been married for 2.5 years.
Disclaimer: I think government censorship is wrong, and it makes me sad that major search engines are complying with it. BUT they are businesses, not governments, and they aren't blocking access to the sites, just making them harder to find.
A determined neo-Nazi or researcher of neo-Nazis will no doubt be able to find sites like http://www.whitepridehosting.com/ and http://www.whiterevolution.com/topsites/in.php?id= 5 even without google.de
On to my real point:
If the content filtered out from the search results is really illegal, the authorities should go after those who put the contents online.
Therein lies the glory of the Internet.
Most likely, contemporary German neo-Nazis know that their content is illegal in Germany. It isn't as if these laws are only discussed in the context of the Internet. So they probably host their sites in places where the content is not illegal, like the US.
Raise your hand if you think a US neo-Nazi web hosting provider is going to take down a German-language neo-Nazi domain, not to mention all the other neo-Nazi domains they host, just because the German government asks.
The German gov't can't arrest the host provider if they aren't in Germany unless they can persuade the host country to extradite the person. And in the US, the First Amendment makes that pretty darn unlikely. (Now if the host provider can be considered a terrorist under the PATRIOT act, that's a whole other issue......)
You can buy a small one at Home Depot for under $3. They come in a huge range of colors, so pick one you like.
The KEY to cube-grown African Violets is the pot. A pair of nested "self watering" pots will give your African Violet the right amount of water all the time, while you just have to remember to check it ~once/week.
Again, Home Depot is your friend. They have a few pretty options in the under $10 range for smaller pots. Google also provides a lot of alternatives.
I grew 2 in my cube, and over the course of 2 years, they went from being 2-inch baby plants to thriving plants approximately 12 inches in diameter. And both bloomed almost-constantly.
OH, and African Violets have a reputation of being difficult to grow. So you'll be able to impress non/. readers with your green thumb.;-)
Unfortunately, mine still in VA while I'm down here in GA, so I can't link to any pictures.
Cellphone number portability, Do Not Call list, he's pushed hard to free up more spectrum for WiFi.
But he's republican so let's focus on the stuff we don't like.
The Do Not Call List was a creation of the Federal Trade Commission, or the FTC, not the FCC.
Personally, I was very surprised that Powell came down so hard on speech issues. Years ago, I heard him give a talk where he basically said that he didn't think speech regulation in broadcast media was justified any longer. I thought I would like him as a First Amendment friendly FCC Chair (although I expected to disagree on other matters). Surprise!
Liza
My employer does not know I'm writing this.
Re:In the beginning was the command line...
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
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· Score: 2, Informative
In the Beginning was the Command Line is now badly obsolete and probably needs a thorough revision. For the last couple of years I have been a Mac OS X user almost exclusively.
I think this is a great point about Stephenson's writing, but I have to make one observation.
your action scenes are far detailed...than are those of many authors, who gloss over the ways that...people interact at close range including...the awkwardness of in-car sex with Amy Shaftoe.
I can't remember reading any other author's descriptions of in-car sex with America Shaftoe.;-)
1) Tell the telco they want Caller ID blocking (disables telco caller ID info)
Newsflash!
This is not an option in many states.
When Caller ID was first offered, the telcos didn't want anyone to be able to get out of it. This tended to upset groups like undercover police officers and domestic violence shelters, not to mention people who paid the phone company not to list there phone numbers.
Lobbyists for the telcos had a lot more time to spend convincing state telco regulatory bodies (generally "public utility commission" but the name varies from state to state) that the service was worthless if everyone wasn't forced to participate than the domestic violence shelters had to convince the regulators that this was an invasion of privacy. So the telcos mostly won.
Most states offer a "per call blocking" option where you dial something into the phone and it disables Caller ID for that call, if they don't offer "per line blocking" as recommended by the poster above. For example, in Wisconsin, the code was either *67 or *69 (I can't remember which). But that doesn't work in Virginia.
Not all states offer any way to disable Caller ID.
The bit I think people get in trouble for is "knowingly recieves... any material that contains child pornography that has been mailed, or shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce by any means, including by computer."
"knowingly" doesn't always require actual knowledge. If you should have known, you can't generally defend yourself by claiming you didn't actually know.
You can't claim you didn't know a chair would shatter and maybe hurt someone when you threw it off the roof, or that you didn't know there was someone around that corner when you turned too fast and ran them over.
It isn't a huge stretch for a finder of fact to say, "the guy was looking at all this 'Lolita' and 'barely legal' porn -- he knew or should have known that some of it was illegal."
That's my view of it, anyway. And I agree with the parent's sig. If you think this is legal advice, I think you're an idiot.:)
I'm a lawyer, not a law student. (I'm not your lawyer. I don't practice in your jurisdiction. This isn't legal advice. And I've never been a prosecutor or a criminal defense attorney. But I have worked a lot on issues related to kids, sexual content, and the Internet.)
Any possession, whatsoever, of child porn is a federal felony offense. It doesn't matter how you got it, that you didn't want it, or that the computer made you do it.
Maybe you could challenge the statute, but good luck finding a lawyer who wants to argue that possession of actual child porn shouldn't be illegal because the statute didn't include an element of mens rea. The ACLU had a hard enough time challenging the law prohibiting images that just looked like child porn, but didn't involve actual children.
Back in 1998 or 1999, there was a senior exec at Infoseek who was arrested for travelling interstate to have sex with a minor -- who turned out to be an FBI agent, not a little girl. He was also charged with possession of child porn.
When the case finally went to trial, he brought out expert witnesses, who were able to convince the jury that plenty of people go online and pretend to be someone other than they are to have sex. He said that he never thought she was a real child; he thought she was a woman who liked to pretend she was a child having sex.
As I remember it, he agreed to a plea during the trial. I think the prosecutors must have found the expert persuasive. Ultimately, he pled guilty to possession of child porn, and agreed to some sort of community service helping the FBI improve its enforcement of child sexual exploitation laws.
In this case, here's what I think happened: This shmuck was deliberately looking at porn that was, at the very least, borderline. But he didn't want to admit it. And he was afraid of the cost of defending himself. So he copped a plea, and now regrets it.
Judges won't let you plead guilty unless they are convinced that you understand what you are agreeing to, and what rights you are giving up by pleading guilty. But they can't stop you from making a stupid decision. That's why you have a lawyer.
Incidently, in many cases a public defender is going to get a better deal for a defendant than an average defense lawyer. (Texas is an infamous counter-example.)
Why? They're in the system all the time. They have a relationship with the judges and the prosecutors. In that plea negotiation process, they know how strong or weak the case is, and the judge and prosecutor know that someone with whom they work frequently isn't going to bullshit them. (Or they know the person is always full of shit, but I'm talking about a good public defender.)
Who are you more likely to offer a good plea agreement to -- someone you work with every week, who has pretty much backed up what he's said when you've gone to trial with a weak case before? Or someone you don't know or have worked with occasionally, who might be right that your case is weak or might be completely full of it?
Of course, none of this applies if you can afford a seriously elite defense lawyer. Like the Infoseek guy had, or OJ, or Martha Stewart. But many elite defense lawyers worked as public defenders for a few years early in their careers.
See if you had not posted that fact, you might have been able to game. That was a great ad and you picked a great place to put it.
I was certain you were going to get some offers...to game, but ya blew it.
I thought I'd get a few entertaining responses, but I didn't expect any that would make me laugh hard enough to draw funny looks from the adjoining cubes.
Mom didn't share any lurid stories -- I was only about 11 at the time. And it would have been unethical for her to tell me anything confidential anyway.
But IAAL, and as such, I'm sure that the game rights were hotly contested marital property. And most likely the most valuable property the Gygax family owned at the time. Although it would probably have been my Mom's job to argue that the game rights weren't worth that much and anyway shouldn't go to the wife.
But Wisconsin is a community property state, meaning anything acquired/earned during the marriage is considered to be equally owned by both partners. (With some exceptions, just to keep it interesting.:) ) So she would have had a reasonable claim on about half the value of his share of the game rights. And the company. Assuming that both were created during the marriage.
Incidently, doing Gary's divorce didn't make her less suspicious of RPG activities. I think she was relieved I couldn't find anyone to play with.
Liza
No Girls Allowed
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I tried to play D&D, fairly seriously, at three different points in my life.
In 7th grade, my next door neighbor declared openly that girls couldn't play. Unfortunately, my female friends weren't that interested. I made my sister play, but having never played myself, I was a rotten DM and kept killing her off.
I had all the books, though, because my Mom was Gary Gygax's divorce lawyer. (He, it seems, thought it was great for girls to play.)
In high school, a few of us were invited to join the gang playing, but the group was too large and unruly, so extremely little RPing actually got done. The (male) leader of the group blamed the girls and told us we couldn't come back.
And then a few years ago, when the last big D&D update came out, I thought I was FINALLY going to get to have a full bore D&D adventure.
Unfortunately, the relationship and social circle exploded fairly dramatically, and I was *not* invited to continue the game. That was the only time it actually felt fair to me, but I was still disappointed. And I've still never ACTUALLY played a game beyond creating a char and playing for an hour or so that day.
Ah well. On the up side, I'm married and have a great life.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Um. Are you kidding?
1) The courts don't make more money if there are more trials. They just schedule more trials and everyone going to trial has to wait longer. Courts are funded by your tax dollars.
2) Prosecutors don't make more money if there are more trials. They too are paid by your tax dollars. Having a new federal crime of "harmful to minors" material on the Internet, if it was ever enforced, would mean that prosecutors weren't prosecuting something else as fast. More time for bad guy child molesters to roam the streets?
3) OK, maybe the tiny percentage of lawyers who defend First Amendment cases make more money. But I PROMISE YOU, those were not the people advocating for this law. Those are the people giving $ to the ACLU and others to fight this law. They oppose it on principle.
The people who advocated for these laws were ONLY the "true believers" -- the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, etc.
Actually, COPA applies to all web site publishers. It would require the sites to keep minors from seeing their "harmful to minors" content.
You're thinking of CIPA, which applies to schools and libraries.
None of these laws apply to parents deciding what kind of Internet access to allow in their own homes.
It's true, the Christian Coalition and MoveOn are working together. Here's the list of coalition members supporting Internet neutrality legislation: http://www.savetheinternet.com/=coalition
Unfortunately, it isn't in alphabetical order. But it's entertaining reading.
Well, of course you should make up your own mind.
But are you honestly uninfluenced by expert opinions? In all areas?
Cuz if you are, I'd like to sell you my programming book. Why would you buy one from O'Reilly instead?
I blogged about this yesterday (http://lizawashere.typepad.com/liza_was_here/2006 /06/net_neutrality_.html), but in a nutshell, when a group of incredibly smart people like Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Gigi Sohn, Larry Lessig, Danny Wietzner, Susan Crawford, and others all agree...
AND they are joined by groups as diverse as Consumers Union, Gun Owners of America, Feminist Majority Foundation, the Christian Coalition, and MoveOn.org...
AND they're opposed by traditional telcos and cable companies...
Who do you think is right?
Here's the thing about subpoenas, or don't blame Google for having this particular information.
Once someone, like DOJ, asks you for this kind of information as part of a legal proceeding, you have to retain or create it unless it's an undue burden on you/your business to do so, or you don't routinely create/retain that information.
You can still fight in court about whether or not you have to turn over the info, and whether or not the request is actually valid. But imagine how obnoxious it would be if at the end of the challenge to the subpoena, the losing party could say "oh, it turns out we don't even have that data any more. Neener-neener-boo-boo!"
Obviously, for a company like Google, it isn't that big of a burden to retain search queries over a specified period of time, even if normally they only keep them cached for 24 hours, or to aggregate the top 100 search terms per day, or whatever their regular business practice is.
And that's why Google has to fight this based on privacy protection, not based on "we don't have the info."
BTW, in my comment above, I made a mistake. It isn't all searches and search results over the two month period that DOJ requested. DOJ actually requested a random sample from that period.
Actually, they were asked for all searches and search results over a two month period. IMO, the DOJ is trying to prove that lots of "innocent" searches generate porn results, therefore we need a law to protect children from seeing those "harmful to minors" search results.
Liza
I think we can all agree that the average /. reader has been familiar with spyware for a lot longer than the average person. Right? Right.
/. readers think?" (Except for each other. I'd guess that most of the people who were in those rooms are /. readers. Hi gang!)
/. readership, not that you're likely to be reassured, these guidelines DON'T prevent an anti-spyware software company from listing or removing a spyware product that works in some new and yet unimagined way. They don't give any of the member companies a free pass to avoid detection by each other's products.
/. reader -- can take issue with some member or some specific point in one or more of these documents. But overall, I think the ASC has done some great work and that it will help improve the media's understanding of spyware, and help policy makers do a better job of trying to deal with the problem of spyware.
/. readers are also welcome to come to the workshop.
As someone who was in the room for most of the ASC's work, I can assure you, we weren't spending a lot of time thinking "What will
Instead, these documents were written to try to explain to your parents, your elected officials, and your local newspaper reporters what "spyware" means, and to what degree they should be concerned about it.
As an added bonus, they help members of the anti-spyware industry communicate more effectively with one another.
So to reassure the
What the guidelines do is provide a common vocabulary so we can help ORDINARY PEOPLE understand what the heck we're talking about when we talk about spyware in the media, and so it's harder for spyware vendors to play anti-spyware companies off of one another by claiming that "Foo Co. says we aren't spyware, so you should de-list us too."
Coming to a general industry agreement on how to define spyware, and what the relative risk of various software "features" that may be part of privacy-compromising malicious code is a challenging task. Especially when you consider that nearly every member of the group wants to make sure that it's products aren't disadvantaged by the definitions.
Of course anyone -- especially any
If other anti-spyware companies want to join the group, contact info is on the web site, and you should go to the Public Workshop in Washington DC on 2/9.
Oh yes, and even more than usual, these opinions are my own.
Liza
One key point that is missing here is the question of whose responsibility it is to determine what gets viewed in my home or your home.
I'll be giving birth to a little boy early next year, and I would strongly prefer that he not be exposed to violent porn or images of people and animals in sexual situations. In my dream world, that's *ever*, but since I live in reality, I'll settle for 'until he's old enough to understand why in our house, we think that's wrong.' I feel the same way about neo-nazi, racist, and homophobic material.
Of course, I don't know how old my son will be when he reaches that level of maturity. It probably won't be the exact same age as the boy next door.
And the same time, I'm acutely aware of the fact that plenty of people think the family I'm creating is 'inappropriate' for young children to know about or see, because my son will have two mommies. And I want him to know how diverse families are, and that he isn't alone in having two mommies.
As a professional with eight years of experience in parental controls and web filtering technology, I know this is a tall order! I really can't have the filter I want 'out of the box.'
And as a former practicing First Amendment lawyer (my one and only jury trial was defending a video the state argued was obscene), I really don't think the government has a useful role in forcing one type of technology or one set of values on this situation. I can't imagine a constitutionally defensible way to make it work, and the effort to do so seems futile and wasteful.
Instead, the effort should be spent on parenting, teaching our children our values, having rules about what is acceptable -- both in the Real World and when using the Internet, and for some families, using technology tools. All of these are necessary to "protect" children from what we view as bad influences.
Liza
The idea of having parents and kids work out the rules, and the consequences, together is a great one. It only works once the kids hit some basic threshold of responsibility -- which obviously varies from person to person and family to family.
But after that point, not only are the kids more invested in following the rules, its also a good educational opportunity for both parents and kids.
Parents learn what their kids do and want to do on the computer, and kids are clear on what their parents consider appropriate, acceptable, and/or unsafe behavior, and what happens if they push those boundaries. Hopefully it even includes a conversation about WHY on all those topics too.
Here's the thing about the "monitor in the living room" issue.
Kids and teens love to chat, they love to blog, and they innocently expose a ton of personal information about themselves in blogs and chatting.
You may have told them not to give out their full name or address, but predators can learn identities using lots of other information: school names, team names, friends names, names of parks and malls and other places they like to hang out. Just as social engineering is used by phishers to get password or cc info from adults, it gets used by sexual predators to manipulate kids and teens into trusting the predators.
And I think most of you probably remember feeling like you could handle a lot more than those stupid controling adults thought you could, back when you were in in high school.
That combination of factors is what has teenagers, especially girls, make a shocking number of bad decisions about meeting people IRL who they've only met online.
Having your computer in a central location in your house isn't a foolproof way to protect your kids; there is no such thing. But if the computer is in the living room, you can see if your kids' behavior changes, if they get suddenly secretive about what's on the monitor, for example.
And then you can have a conversation with them about it and figure out whether or not you should be worried.
Different parents will make different choices on that front -- maybe you aren't worried about your teen checking out some naughty pictures, but maybe you are worried about her looking at violent rape fantasy sites or about his unwillingness to tell you who new people on the buddy list are....
Maybe you have a relationship with your kids where the conversation and reviewing what's acceptable at your house is all that is needed. Or maybe you decide to restrict computer use, or install parental controls software, or monitor the history & temp internet files -- all those choices make sense for some families and wouldn't work in others.
But paying attention to what your kids are doing with their time and who their doing it with, that's critical for parenting, and harder to do for a kid with a laptop in their room than a kid using the computer in a public part of the house.
Don't JUST talk about yourself and your interests.
I'll assume for the sake of easy to read sentences that I'm talking to straight male nerds, but this advice applies to all genders and sexual orientations.
Ask her about herself, about her interests, about her life, about her friends.
LISTEN to what she says.
Think about what she said, and comment or ask more questions related to the topic. Go ahead and share relevent anecdotes from your own life.
I trust you can all see how interrogation -- which is NOT attractive -- is distinct from what I've just described.
Also, when you are talking about yourself, don't just talk about how great you are. Admitting nervousness or some aspect of vulnerability is very attractive, so long as it doesn't cross the line into abject insecurity or whining.
One way to open up that area of conversation is to talk about things that you hope to do, but haven't yet been able to try or complete. NOTE: If 'have sex' is on this list, don't include it in this conversation! I mean things like write a novel or travel to antarctica.
Liza
I couldn't disagree more with the idea that self love == vanity. Self-delusion maybe, but not love.
Think about it. When you love someone, you know what their faults are, and although they might get on your nerves sometimes, you know that they're just part of what makes that person who they are. You know when they're going to do that thing, and sometimes you think it's cute or funny.
If you can't figure out what I'm talking about, think about your Mom or Dad for a moment.
Self-love is accepting yourself for all your traits, geeky and otherwise. Yes, not everyone finds your encyclopedic knowledge of FORTRAN or ST:TNG or crypto or as interesting as you find it. But the self-loving geek knows that, and has a sense of humor about it -- its just a PART of who you are.
And, it lays the foundation for love for someone else.
Not lust, or obsession, but actual love, the kind that could turn into a serious, long-lasting relationship.
Because EVERYONE has something geeky and quirky about them that will eventually either drive you crazy, or you'll accept and love it as part of what makes your love the person they are.
My love, for example, is a huge worrier and a geek in the areas of music and shoes. Sometimes this drives me nuts, but mostly I find it endearing and cute. At the moment, closet space is a problem, so the shoes are seeming less cute than they used to seem. And we've been married for 2.5 years.
Disclaimer: I think government censorship is wrong, and it makes me sad that major search engines are complying with it. BUT they are businesses, not governments, and they aren't blocking access to the sites, just making them harder to find.
= 5 even without google.de
A determined neo-Nazi or researcher of neo-Nazis will no doubt be able to find sites like http://www.whitepridehosting.com/ and http://www.whiterevolution.com/topsites/in.php?id
On to my real point:
If the content filtered out from the search results is really illegal, the authorities should go after those who put the contents online.
Therein lies the glory of the Internet.
Most likely, contemporary German neo-Nazis know that their content is illegal in Germany. It isn't as if these laws are only discussed in the context of the Internet. So they probably host their sites in places where the content is not illegal, like the US.
Raise your hand if you think a US neo-Nazi web hosting provider is going to take down a German-language neo-Nazi domain, not to mention all the other neo-Nazi domains they host, just because the German government asks.
The German gov't can't arrest the host provider if they aren't in Germany unless they can persuade the host country to extradite the person. And in the US, the First Amendment makes that pretty darn unlikely. (Now if the host provider can be considered a terrorist under the PATRIOT act, that's a whole other issue......)
Liza
I have had fabulous success with African Violets.
;-)
You can buy a small one at Home Depot for under $3. They come in a huge range of colors, so pick one you like.
The KEY to cube-grown African Violets is the pot. A pair of nested "self watering" pots will give your African Violet the right amount of water all the time, while you just have to remember to check it ~once/week.
Again, Home Depot is your friend. They have a few pretty options in the under $10 range for smaller pots. Google also provides a lot of alternatives.
I grew 2 in my cube, and over the course of 2 years, they went from being 2-inch baby plants to thriving plants approximately 12 inches in diameter. And both bloomed almost-constantly.
OH, and African Violets have a reputation of being difficult to grow. So you'll be able to impress non/. readers with your green thumb.
Unfortunately, mine still in VA while I'm down here in GA, so I can't link to any pictures.
Liza
Great, now my coworkers are looking at me funny because I burst out laughing at this.
Thanks alot!
Liza
The Do Not Call List was a creation of the Federal Trade Commission, or the FTC, not the FCC.
Personally, I was very surprised that Powell came down so hard on speech issues. Years ago, I heard him give a talk where he basically said that he didn't think speech regulation in broadcast media was justified any longer. I thought I would like him as a First Amendment friendly FCC Chair (although I expected to disagree on other matters). Surprise!
Liza
My employer does not know I'm writing this.
Liza
I think this is a great point about Stephenson's writing, but I have to make one observation.
;-)
your action scenes are far detailed...than are those of many authors, who gloss over the ways that...people interact at close range including...the awkwardness of in-car sex with Amy Shaftoe.
I can't remember reading any other author's descriptions of in-car sex with America Shaftoe.
Liza
Newsflash!
This is not an option in many states.
When Caller ID was first offered, the telcos didn't want anyone to be able to get out of it. This tended to upset groups like undercover police officers and domestic violence shelters, not to mention people who paid the phone company not to list there phone numbers.
Lobbyists for the telcos had a lot more time to spend convincing state telco regulatory bodies (generally "public utility commission" but the name varies from state to state) that the service was worthless if everyone wasn't forced to participate than the domestic violence shelters had to convince the regulators that this was an invasion of privacy. So the telcos mostly won.
Most states offer a "per call blocking" option where you dial something into the phone and it disables Caller ID for that call, if they don't offer "per line blocking" as recommended by the poster above. For example, in Wisconsin, the code was either *67 or *69 (I can't remember which). But that doesn't work in Virginia.
Not all states offer any way to disable Caller ID.
Liza
But as always, the language is a little tricky.
... any material that contains child pornography that has been mailed, or shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce by any means, including by computer."
:)
The bit I think people get in trouble for is "knowingly recieves
"knowingly" doesn't always require actual knowledge. If you should have known, you can't generally defend yourself by claiming you didn't actually know.
You can't claim you didn't know a chair would shatter and maybe hurt someone when you threw it off the roof, or that you didn't know there was someone around that corner when you turned too fast and ran them over.
It isn't a huge stretch for a finder of fact to say, "the guy was looking at all this 'Lolita' and 'barely legal' porn -- he knew or should have known that some of it was illegal."
That's my view of it, anyway. And I agree with the parent's sig. If you think this is legal advice, I think you're an idiot.
Liza
I'm a lawyer, not a law student. (I'm not your lawyer. I don't practice in your jurisdiction. This isn't legal advice. And I've never been a prosecutor or a criminal defense attorney. But I have worked a lot on issues related to kids, sexual content, and the Internet.)
Any possession, whatsoever, of child porn is a federal felony offense. It doesn't matter how you got it, that you didn't want it, or that the computer made you do it.
Maybe you could challenge the statute, but good luck finding a lawyer who wants to argue that possession of actual child porn shouldn't be illegal because the statute didn't include an element of mens rea. The ACLU had a hard enough time challenging the law prohibiting images that just looked like child porn, but didn't involve actual children.
Back in 1998 or 1999, there was a senior exec at Infoseek who was arrested for travelling interstate to have sex with a minor -- who turned out to be an FBI agent, not a little girl. He was also charged with possession of child porn.
When the case finally went to trial, he brought out expert witnesses, who were able to convince the jury that plenty of people go online and pretend to be someone other than they are to have sex. He said that he never thought she was a real child; he thought she was a woman who liked to pretend she was a child having sex.
As I remember it, he agreed to a plea during the trial. I think the prosecutors must have found the expert persuasive. Ultimately, he pled guilty to possession of child porn, and agreed to some sort of community service helping the FBI improve its enforcement of child sexual exploitation laws.
In this case, here's what I think happened: This shmuck was deliberately looking at porn that was, at the very least, borderline. But he didn't want to admit it. And he was afraid of the cost of defending himself. So he copped a plea, and now regrets it.
Judges won't let you plead guilty unless they are convinced that you understand what you are agreeing to, and what rights you are giving up by pleading guilty. But they can't stop you from making a stupid decision. That's why you have a lawyer.
Incidently, in many cases a public defender is going to get a better deal for a defendant than an average defense lawyer. (Texas is an infamous counter-example.)
Why? They're in the system all the time. They have a relationship with the judges and the prosecutors. In that plea negotiation process, they know how strong or weak the case is, and the judge and prosecutor know that someone with whom they work frequently isn't going to bullshit them. (Or they know the person is always full of shit, but I'm talking about a good public defender.)
Who are you more likely to offer a good plea agreement to -- someone you work with every week, who has pretty much backed up what he's said when you've gone to trial with a weak case before? Or someone you don't know or have worked with occasionally, who might be right that your case is weak or might be completely full of it?
Of course, none of this applies if you can afford a seriously elite defense lawyer. Like the Infoseek guy had, or OJ, or Martha Stewart. But many elite defense lawyers worked as public defenders for a few years early in their careers.
Liza
See if you had not posted that fact, you might have been able to game. That was a great ad and you picked a great place to put it.
I was certain you were going to get some offers...to game, but ya blew it.
I thought I'd get a few entertaining responses, but I didn't expect any that would make me laugh hard enough to draw funny looks from the adjoining cubes.
Thank you for cracking me up.
Mom didn't share any lurid stories -- I was only about 11 at the time. And it would have been unethical for her to tell me anything confidential anyway.
:) ) So she would have had a reasonable claim on about half the value of his share of the game rights. And the company. Assuming that both were created during the marriage.
But IAAL, and as such, I'm sure that the game rights were hotly contested marital property. And most likely the most valuable property the Gygax family owned at the time. Although it would probably have been my Mom's job to argue that the game rights weren't worth that much and anyway shouldn't go to the wife.
But Wisconsin is a community property state, meaning anything acquired/earned during the marriage is considered to be equally owned by both partners. (With some exceptions, just to keep it interesting.
Incidently, doing Gary's divorce didn't make her less suspicious of RPG activities. I think she was relieved I couldn't find anyone to play with.
Liza
I tried to play D&D, fairly seriously, at three different points in my life.
:)
In 7th grade, my next door neighbor declared openly that girls couldn't play. Unfortunately, my female friends weren't that interested. I made my sister play, but having never played myself, I was a rotten DM and kept killing her off.
I had all the books, though, because my Mom was Gary Gygax's divorce lawyer. (He, it seems, thought it was great for girls to play.)
In high school, a few of us were invited to join the gang playing, but the group was too large and unruly, so extremely little RPing actually got done. The (male) leader of the group blamed the girls and told us we couldn't come back.
And then a few years ago, when the last big D&D update came out, I thought I was FINALLY going to get to have a full bore D&D adventure.
Unfortunately, the relationship and social circle exploded fairly dramatically, and I was *not* invited to continue the game. That was the only time it actually felt fair to me, but I was still disappointed. And I've still never ACTUALLY played a game beyond creating a char and playing for an hour or so that day.
Ah well. On the up side, I'm married and have a great life.
Liza