Off Topic Crap - Stop It Now!

On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Zane H. Healy wrote: Normally I'd agree, but I don't see that the issues in the most contentious segment of the thread are all that off-topic, given things like the Australian Parliament's moves to criminalize "hacking", what happened with the Sydex tools, and that whole paranoid, projective, cop mentality, setting up for the day when some over-zealous opportunist of a prosecutor tries a list member for "virus" (ie. non-Windows) code on his PDP-8 or something. Go ahead and laugh; yes, it's aburd, but we've seen way too much absurd shit in this vein in the last few years. To wit, hot off the wire, apparently, the State of GA is bringing much shame and embarrassment on itself by prosecuting a former admin at Dekalb Tech for running distributed.net RC5 clients on school computers. http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?start=1&catid=39&thread… The exact circumstances are unclear to me at the moment, but the state remains to show he actually acted improperly or caused any harm. At the worst, it appears this *might* have warranted a reprimand at most, here in the "it may not be easier to get forgiveness than permission, but it's necessary, just don't get caught" state, where poor families daily face choices such as "do I drive without a license and/or insurance to get to work today, or do I obey the law like a good citizen, only to face prosecution for child neglect and have DFACS take my kids", not a 15 yr., $415,000 fine felony conviction. Or should we shoot him, Dick? By the way, I see your points, and I think you and Sellam are actually arguing from the same position, I just don't think you realize there may not always be an honorable way to address things the way you say should be done without having to break a few laws here and there. The deck is stacked, and the other side is not fighting fair. Voice of bitter experience. My 2 cents, jbdigriz