Everyone is "potentially" a child molester. If we have become so paranoid that even an anonymous comment made in online is sufficient to assume that someone is a threat to children, then there truly is no hope for this society.
It is not as if we are talking about someone who was arrested on charges of child molestation, let alone someone who was actually convicted. We are talking about someone who is rumored to be a child molester by some anonymous person on an online forum (or forums), without any evidence. Anonymous online accusations could be made by disgruntled students at a previous school, or by an angry neighbor, or just by some trolls from 4chan who wanted a few lulz. I would have more faith in a note being passed between desks in a classroom than in anonymous online comments.
You need a "darned good" explanation for anonymous comments on the Internet? Which do not seem to be related to any court cases, arrests, news reports, etc.? Perhaps you would be better suited to sweeping the hallways than managing the staff.
So, basically, you are saying that a principal is going to see a candidate's name associated with accusations of child molestation, and without asking for an explanation, without checking for a trial or even so much as an arrest, simply assume that the person is unfit to teach? Maybe the principal himself needs to be fired, for utter and complete incompetence and a failure to spend more than 1 second thinking about the information he received.
People anonymously slandering your name online is a risk that you just have to take; the right to speak freely necessitates the right to speak anonymously. Yes, there is a risk of slander, or of people who produce child pornography hiding behind anonymity, but free speech is important enough that we need to be willing to accept those tradeoffs.
Don't support the act, but would it be illegal if I did this? What would I be charged with? Are we just hating on the FBI?
Well, you could probably be prosecuted under some sort of anti-stalking legislation, perhaps "harassment." If you start following me around, yes, I can actually report you to the police, and something may come of it.
There was an article a few months ago about "cyber" -- it basically said that you should be wary of anyone who chooses to use the word "cyber" to describe anything.
In any case, Anonymous is not a vigilante group; that description is more fitting for a group like perverted justice. Anonymous is just a bunch of protesters who are using the Internet for their protest. I see no difference between Anonymous and a campaign to bombard politicians or businesses with mail and telephone calls (especially since the attacks Anonymous is performing are pretty low level in terms of the skill that is needed -- these people are not writing the next stuxnet). The fact that it is happening online is nothing more than an artifact of 21st century life.
"Vigilante" is an idiotic term to use here. These people are protesters, nothing else, no different than people who block entrances to government buildings or bombard politicians with mail and phone calls. Why is it that when something happens on the Internet, it suddenly becomes something more than the same act happening in real life?
And why would there ever be grounds to reject a corporate charter application?
Well, if corporate charters expired, and people set up rolling assets for corporations (i.e. renewing the charter over and over), then abusive or law-breaking corporations (say, corporations that were found guilty) could have their application for another charter rejected.
An obvious one is to protect the assets of the corporation from unfair seizure or taxation. That's the historical examples that spurred the creation of corporate personhood in the first place.
Corporations are not the only way to organize businesses. If people had no other option, I would be more inclined to agree with you, but there are other options for running a business, and nobody is being denied their right to do so. Corporations are granted certain privileges like limited liability, because that appears to be a good way to encourage investment in certain risky businesses that we believe would benefit society. However, because corporations are granted special privileges, any notions about being "unfair" seem misplaced.
It took me 10 seconds to come up with the idea of rolling corporations. Roll over the assets and employees of a corporation into a successor.
Assuming that we give you your corporate charter.
Your "twisted and stretched" reading of the 14th amendment is just, as I said, a natural consequence of the need to protect the rights of the people involved with the corporation.
What rights, exactly, do you think need to be protected there? Those people are entirely free to operate a private, not-limited-liability business under whatever terms they want.
Groups of people do not have the same rights as individual people; if you are confused about this, just take a look at the government itself, which is a very large and well known group of people which is deliberately restricted from doing certain things (things that individual people can do).
We could avoid the serious problems that corporations have created by simply bringing back expiration dates for corporate charters. The 14th amendment was never intended to create perpetual corporations, that was just a twisted and stretched reading of it based on a legal fiction.
Was there ever any doubt that SCO knew full well that there was no infringing code in the Linux kernel? I think the matter was settled when the only evidence they could produce was errno.h.
Nothing is wrong with it, as long as the following conditions are met:
Spawning a fresh instance will happen quickly, faster than actually solving the problem (this is true of VMs, or situations where a backup system is available).
The problem will not affect the fresh instance. What is the point of reimaging, if the problem was a faulty piece of hardware or some poorly designed software (e.g. software from decades ago that assumed an 8 bit counter was enough, on a day when you had to count higher than 256)?
No one is going to confuse the window you have open on your screen with the Windows operating system.
Actually, outside of technical circles, people routinely confuse these things, and even more so when I say "X Windows" to refer to my graphical environment.
There are 7 windows on my screen right now -- what do you think "windows" refers to in that context? Let me assure you, I am not using any Microsoft software.
Actually, "windows" is also generic, since it refers to specific GUI elements -- I, for example, have 7 windows open right now, and I certainly do not use Microsoft's software. Additionally, I am using "X Windows," which has nothing to do with Microsoft's operating systems.
One could argue that "the app store" is a specific and well known software repository. The problem, in both cases, is that the term was already generic before some large corporation claimed a trademark on it. Microsoft has managed to maintain its "Windows" trademark for a long time, which is about the only thing that lends any credence to their claim.
That is like saying that a paper shredder implies guilt. If I run shred to securely delete some files, that does not mean that I am guilty; it could just mean that I am concerned about possibly selling the drive to someone else (perhaps as part of a sale of an entire laptop), disposing of the drive at an electronics recycling center, or having the drive stolen. Every reason for using whole disk encryption applies equally to using secure delete programs.
Oh, wait I forgot that I am supposed to feel sorry for the police, who need more power than they have already. Carry on with the panic, then.
Personally I'm in favor of Life + 19 years so if a wildly successful author dies in the process of impregnating his wife, they'll be covered.
Copyrights are not supposed to be a form of charity for authors. Copyrights were created for the sole purpose of encouraging the creation of books and other such art and science. It is a compromise, which restricts everyone's free speech rights for some period of time to allow authors to decide the terms under which their work can be published, which presumably allows the author to derive some income for their work (and recuperate the cost of spending a few years on writing).
With all due respect to Mark Twain, he fails on two points: one, copyrights are not a form of property, nor are copyrights a natural right, and two, publishers continue to make money by producing something (copies of books), not by just sitting around. If an author decides to stop writing, he might continue to live on royalty payments, despite the fact that he is producing nothing at all; if a publisher decides to stop printing, his income will be halted as well, as it should be since he decided to stop working. This is part of the reason why copyright terms are limited, and should remain limited: the goal is not to enrich anyone, it is to encourage people to do something we consider to be useful.
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potentially a child molester
Everyone is "potentially" a child molester. If we have become so paranoid that even an anonymous comment made in online is sufficient to assume that someone is a threat to children, then there truly is no hope for this society.
It is not as if we are talking about someone who was arrested on charges of child molestation, let alone someone who was actually convicted. We are talking about someone who is rumored to be a child molester by some anonymous person on an online forum (or forums), without any evidence. Anonymous online accusations could be made by disgruntled students at a previous school, or by an angry neighbor, or just by some trolls from 4chan who wanted a few lulz. I would have more faith in a note being passed between desks in a classroom than in anonymous online comments.
You need a "darned good" explanation for anonymous comments on the Internet? Which do not seem to be related to any court cases, arrests, news reports, etc.? Perhaps you would be better suited to sweeping the hallways than managing the staff.
So, basically, you are saying that a principal is going to see a candidate's name associated with accusations of child molestation, and without asking for an explanation, without checking for a trial or even so much as an arrest, simply assume that the person is unfit to teach? Maybe the principal himself needs to be fired, for utter and complete incompetence and a failure to spend more than 1 second thinking about the information he received.
People anonymously slandering your name online is a risk that you just have to take; the right to speak freely necessitates the right to speak anonymously. Yes, there is a risk of slander, or of people who produce child pornography hiding behind anonymity, but free speech is important enough that we need to be willing to accept those tradeoffs.
I thought COPA had been struck down?
Don't support the act, but would it be illegal if I did this? What would I be charged with? Are we just hating on the FBI?
Well, you could probably be prosecuted under some sort of anti-stalking legislation, perhaps "harassment." If you start following me around, yes, I can actually report you to the police, and something may come of it.
Don't you know? Jail is supposed to last forever. Criminals should never actually go free. Jail is a black hole where we toss people we do not like.
Is the war on drugs over?
Of course not, there was never any plan for it to be over.
Will there be a "war on piracy", the copyright kind?
You bet! After all, in the USA, everyone seems to be brainwashed into thinking that copyright represents some sort of natural right.
There was an article a few months ago about "cyber" -- it basically said that you should be wary of anyone who chooses to use the word "cyber" to describe anything.
In any case, Anonymous is not a vigilante group; that description is more fitting for a group like perverted justice. Anonymous is just a bunch of protesters who are using the Internet for their protest. I see no difference between Anonymous and a campaign to bombard politicians or businesses with mail and telephone calls (especially since the attacks Anonymous is performing are pretty low level in terms of the skill that is needed -- these people are not writing the next stuxnet). The fact that it is happening online is nothing more than an artifact of 21st century life.
"Vigilante" is an idiotic term to use here. These people are protesters, nothing else, no different than people who block entrances to government buildings or bombard politicians with mail and phone calls. Why is it that when something happens on the Internet, it suddenly becomes something more than the same act happening in real life?
And why would there ever be grounds to reject a corporate charter application?
Well, if corporate charters expired, and people set up rolling assets for corporations (i.e. renewing the charter over and over), then abusive or law-breaking corporations (say, corporations that were found guilty) could have their application for another charter rejected.
An obvious one is to protect the assets of the corporation from unfair seizure or taxation. That's the historical examples that spurred the creation of corporate personhood in the first place.
Corporations are not the only way to organize businesses. If people had no other option, I would be more inclined to agree with you, but there are other options for running a business, and nobody is being denied their right to do so. Corporations are granted certain privileges like limited liability, because that appears to be a good way to encourage investment in certain risky businesses that we believe would benefit society. However, because corporations are granted special privileges, any notions about being "unfair" seem misplaced.
It took me 10 seconds to come up with the idea of rolling corporations. Roll over the assets and employees of a corporation into a successor.
Assuming that we give you your corporate charter.
Your "twisted and stretched" reading of the 14th amendment is just, as I said, a natural consequence of the need to protect the rights of the people involved with the corporation.
What rights, exactly, do you think need to be protected there? Those people are entirely free to operate a private, not-limited-liability business under whatever terms they want.
Should people working together as a group have less rights than those same people if they are working on their own?
Actually, yes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_states_government
Groups of people do not have the same rights as individual people; if you are confused about this, just take a look at the government itself, which is a very large and well known group of people which is deliberately restricted from doing certain things (things that individual people can do).
We could avoid the serious problems that corporations have created by simply bringing back expiration dates for corporate charters. The 14th amendment was never intended to create perpetual corporations, that was just a twisted and stretched reading of it based on a legal fiction.
Was there ever any doubt that SCO knew full well that there was no infringing code in the Linux kernel? I think the matter was settled when the only evidence they could produce was errno.h.
No one is going to confuse the window you have open on your screen with the Windows operating system.
Actually, outside of technical circles, people routinely confuse these things, and even more so when I say "X Windows" to refer to my graphical environment.
Someone still has to maintain the machines that are actually running the VMs.
Not to get nit-picky, but Unix was a multitasking operating system long before X11.
There are 7 windows on my screen right now -- what do you think "windows" refers to in that context? Let me assure you, I am not using any Microsoft software.
"Windows" also refers to GUI elements: rectangular areas of the screen that can contain other GUI elements...
Actually, "windows" is also generic, since it refers to specific GUI elements -- I, for example, have 7 windows open right now, and I certainly do not use Microsoft's software. Additionally, I am using "X Windows," which has nothing to do with Microsoft's operating systems.
One could argue that "the app store" is a specific and well known software repository. The problem, in both cases, is that the term was already generic before some large corporation claimed a trademark on it. Microsoft has managed to maintain its "Windows" trademark for a long time, which is about the only thing that lends any credence to their claim.
That is like saying that a paper shredder implies guilt. If I run shred to securely delete some files, that does not mean that I am guilty; it could just mean that I am concerned about possibly selling the drive to someone else (perhaps as part of a sale of an entire laptop), disposing of the drive at an electronics recycling center, or having the drive stolen. Every reason for using whole disk encryption applies equally to using secure delete programs.
Oh, wait I forgot that I am supposed to feel sorry for the police, who need more power than they have already. Carry on with the panic, then.
Personally I'm in favor of Life + 19 years so if a wildly successful author dies in the process of impregnating his wife, they'll be covered.
Copyrights are not supposed to be a form of charity for authors. Copyrights were created for the sole purpose of encouraging the creation of books and other such art and science. It is a compromise, which restricts everyone's free speech rights for some period of time to allow authors to decide the terms under which their work can be published, which presumably allows the author to derive some income for their work (and recuperate the cost of spending a few years on writing).
With all due respect to Mark Twain, he fails on two points: one, copyrights are not a form of property, nor are copyrights a natural right, and two, publishers continue to make money by producing something (copies of books), not by just sitting around. If an author decides to stop writing, he might continue to live on royalty payments, despite the fact that he is producing nothing at all; if a publisher decides to stop printing, his income will be halted as well, as it should be since he decided to stop working. This is part of the reason why copyright terms are limited, and should remain limited: the goal is not to enrich anyone, it is to encourage people to do something we consider to be useful.
Why give people a lifetime copyright? Why not go back to the original copyright term, 14 years, and build a strong public domain?