Brainsmasher,

I think the point is, to borrow your example of a criminal breaking your window, is that it doesn't mean we outlaw hammers because they CAN be used illegally. As someone else pointed out, there are legitimate uses for these types of computer tools. I don't think it should be illegal to possess them, only illegal to commit crimes with them against others' rights.

There is a legitimate use for automatic weapons, but we don't allow everyone to have them.

There is a legitimate use for race cars and dragsters too, but it's illegal to drive them on public streets

There's even legitimate medical uses for cocaine......but possession by "Joe Blow" is illegal.

Sorry guys, I agree with this proposal and so far no one has offered an example of a need for use of these type of programs by anyone other than a network administrator.

Just as with automatic weapons, the only way to protect the majority of the populace is to place limits on who is legally allowed to possess them. I realize this isn't a perfect solution.....guess what, we don't live in a perfect world either. As I stated earlier, I don't believe in waiting for the crime to be committed before doing something about it....and I never will.

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Just like the port scanner, telnet isn't a malicious piece of software by itself, nor was it written for the sole purpose of exploiting other computers.

What's the confusion here? If the feds make this a law, you can come up with all kinds of excuses like any common criminal, in order to justify your actions (to yourself)......but that won't put you in the right or save you from legal prosecution.

Ask all the hippies in Cali who got their doctor to perscribe pot for them.....

Well, first, let me be clear about something BrainSmashR. There's nothing on my box that came from any third party source that can be used for any kind of hacking, and the only networking stuff I have is part of the OS. So it's not necessary to throw in the suggestion about "like any other criminal, in order to justify your actions (to yourself)" part.

It shouldn't be made a crime by the government to distribute information about software and networking vulnerabilities because people have the right to freely have access to that information, since these vulnerabilities are a reality of computing knowledge in general, and thus shouldn't be hidden from public access. Information like that is not the private property of any goverment or business. This is different from distributing information about things that are physically located on their property. In that case it really would be a crime to distribute information that is on their property. The point here is: Computing knowledge, which includes knowledge about how to crack scripts and penetrate networks, is general knowledge. And nobody owns it. And since nobody owns it, the government shouldn't have the right to outlaw the distribution and possession of software tools that might exploit those vulnerabilities.

They chose to adopt a system for information storage and exchange knowing that such a system had certain flaws. This kind of free general knowledge and information about software and networking vulnerabilities existed since the dawn of the popular computer age, and governments and institutions were aware of it. Now, they want to contain that general knowledge.

Here's another problem with these laws. Many hackers participate in harmless wargames using software that can be considered illegal by these laws. So by criminalizing the production, distribution and possession of these kinds of software hacking tools, the government is saying that hackers don't have the right to use certain software for wargames. Hmm.

Guess what, they don't have the "right" to smoke pot in order to enhance their game play, or rob the corner store to fund their game play either...so I fail to see what difference this would make if the feds decide to outlaw the software.....

You don't seem to understand. It's a matter of fact that hacker wargames are harmless. Nothing illegal is done. The suggestion of committing some other illegal acts like smoking pot to enhance game play, or robbing a store to fund such games doesn't make sense. The issue here is the reasons why free access to certain software and information shouldn't be made illegal by goverment.

To me it just sounds like your continuing reasoning is more like: This kind od free access to software and information should be illegal beacause the the government tells you so, without understanding the arguement of why it shouldn't be made illegal.

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The San Diego Police Department

The U.S. must intervene in Gaza

BY TRUDY RUBIN
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

July 12, 2006

No one should be surprised that Israel would react harshly when Palestinians shell its towns, and kidnap an Israeli soldier from within its pre-1967 borders. A Hamas government that tolerates – or can't control – such behavior is asking for drastic retaliation.

But let's hope the spiraling violence in Gaza will shake the White House out of its dangerous lethargy on the Palestinian issue. Israel and the Palestinians on their own can't keep the situation from deteriorating further.

Unless President Bush embarks on a major effort to get the sides back on a negotiating track, things will get worse. Israeli-Palestinian violence will escalate (watched by the Arab world on satellite TV). And this violence will shred the remnants of Bush policy in the Middle East.

To salvage the situation, the White House first must recognize its folly in endorsing a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza – the brainchild of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Bush said the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza would create a chance for a proto-democracy in Gaza. This was a gross misreading of the situation on the ground.

As I wrote a year ago, a unilateral pullout not linked to broader peace negotiations was bound to benefit Hamas, the radical Palestinian group that refuses to recognize Israel and wants to fight, not talk. Hamas claimed the unilateral pullout proved that only violence would push Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza. (Palestinians also saw the Gaza pullout as a ploy to solidify Israel's hold on the West Bank, while still controlling Gaza's borders, sea space and airspace.)

Had Sharon openly coordinated the transfer with the moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas' appeal might have been blunted. Abbas' Fatah party might have won the January elections. But Bush never urged his close ally Sharon to take this approach. So Palestinians, who were frustrated at the lack of talks and fed up with corruption inside Fatah, elected a Hamas government to power.

Yet the Bush team claimed it never saw a Hamas victory coming. Even more amazing, Bush recently hailed the “bold ideas” of Israel's new premier, Ehud Olmert, when he proposed another unilateral withdrawal from a large portion of the West Bank. Doesn't anyone in the administration get the message being pounded into our heads by the noise from Gaza: Unilateral withdrawals, delinked from negotiations, do not work.

Pulling back from parts of the West Bank while keeping other chunks and all of Jerusalem won't end the fighting. It will provoke more bloodshed: shelling from outside the security fence, more Palestinian attacks against Israeli settlers, and more suicide bombs.

But Israelis rightly ask: Which Palestinians can they talk to? They can't negotiate with Hamas as long as it won't recognize the existence of their state.

This brings us to the vital role of the United States in salvaging the impasse, a role the White House has been trying hard to avoid.

The reason Bush officials glommed on to the idea of unilateral withdrawals was that it relieved them of having to mediate this messy conflict. They were mindful of the failures of previous administrations – including Bill Clinton's.

They also once dreamed that success in Iraq would make it easier to resolve the Palestinian issue. That dream is dead.

At this point the White House faces very difficult choices. The president can cling to the hope that Gazans' suffering will turn the population against the radicals who shell Israel, and that the Hamas government will be toppled. He can hope the current violence dies down.

These hopes are misplaced.

Pressure on Hamas can yield results only if Palestinians see that its violence is blocking their chances of gaining a viable state. Only then will they turn against Hamas.

But that won't happen unless the White House – together with European and Arab allies, and maybe the Russians – formulates a plan for two states that gives Palestinians an incentive to look for better leaders. It must be a detailed plan, one that holds out a long-term carrot for Palestinian leaders willing to recognize Israel and control the violence. Washington and its allies must together guarantee Israel's security under such a plan.

The current violence in Gaza threatens Israel's future, America's interests, and the fate of the entire region. Past negotiations failed because final details of a state were never laid out in advance of talks, and held out as a reward for prescribed Palestinian behavior. If President Bush wants to leave his mark on the Mideast, he should summon the courage to produce such a plan.

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me@rescam.org

Must CEOs be multimillionaires?

ROBERT J. SAMUELSON
NEWSWEEK

July 12, 2006

The controversy over CEO pay is not just an accounting matter. Love them or hate them, corporate chief executive officers preside over a vast segment of America's wealth. How they manage or mismanage it enriches or impoverishes their shareholders and the entire nation.

CEOs are often unfairly stereotyped as heartless because they shut plants and cut jobs – unpopular actions that are often necessary. Still, the public pounding of CEOs for their lavish pay packages is amply justified.

Any tally of CEO pay suggests jarring disproportion. Fortune magazine recently ran a scathing pay story illustrated by these examples: $405 million to retired Exxon Mobil Chairman Lee Raymond (his 2005 pay, plus the value of his pension and stock grants); $90 million to Franklin Raines, the former CEO of Fannie Mae (his compensation from 1998 to 2003); $99 million to Hank McKinnell, the CEO of Pfizer (2005 pay plus his pension's value).

The minority of CEOs who deserve massive payouts (because they contributed uniquely to a company's success) or whose pay is properly restrained are tainted by their peers. The Business Roundtable, a group of 160 CEOs, argues that a few huge pay packages create a distorted picture. Not really. Consider a Business Roundtable study, using data collected by Mercer Human Resource Consulting on 350 major companies. The idea was to examine median CEOs – those in the middle – as typical. Here's what the study found:

- From 1995 to 2005, median CEO compensation at these companies rose 151 percent, from $2.7 million to $6.8 million;

- In the same period, the median sales of these companies increased 51 percent to $7.6 billion, and the median profits 126 percent to $591 million;

- By contrast, the median pay increase for full-time, year-round workers aged 25 to 64 in these years was only 32 percent, to $38,223 (that's all workers, not just those at the study's firms).

Remember, these are run-of-the mill CEOs, not the superstars or the super-greedy. Even they seem to regard being a multimillionaire as an entitlement befitting their position. In 1995, the median CEO pay was 94 times median worker pay; by 2005, it was 179 times.

How CEOs are paid –– their incentives – matters, for them and society.

Through the 1970s, CEOs were the ultimate Organization Men. Usually company careerists, they were compensated mainly “like bureaucrats in the sense that they were primarily paid for increasing the size of their organizations,” economists Michael Jensen and Kevin Murphy argued in several studies in 1990. Because pay increased with company size, CEOs often created ever-expanding, unwieldy and inefficient conglomerates. This approach was bad for America and for shareholders.

The recognition of that led to change. Compensation for CEOs and other top executives in the 1980s and 1990s was increasingly tied to a company's stock performance. The aim was to motivate executives to improve efficiency and profitability, driving up the firm's share price. The usual instruments were stock options: the right to buy shares at a fixed price (called the “strike price”). If the stock rose, the CEO would get rich.

Up to a point, the shift succeeded. It rewarded good management. But it also inspired abuses, because option grants were excessive and unconditional (providing huge windfalls, for instance, from a general rise in stock prices). Executives manipulated reported profits to sustain stock prices. Enron exemplified illegal methods. Legal channels also existed. One survey of executives found that 80 percent would decrease advertising or research and development spending to hit profit targets.

CEO pay has accelerated so rapidly mainly because it lacks normal disciplines. If you and I set our pay, we'd do well, too. That's essentially the CEOs' prerogative. Some modest market pressures exist. In the 1990s, about a quarter of CEOs of big firms were hired from the outside, up from 15 percent in the 1970s. But CEO pay is mostly set by sympathetic directors, often other CEOs.

“Nobody has any idea what the right level should be,” Pfizer's McKinnell told Fortune. True. There is no ideal way to set CEO pay. Any system can have bad, unintended consequences. That's why the current CEO pay explosion is primarily a moral failure. Would Exxon's Lee Raymond have worked just as effectively for $50 million, instead of $400 million? If so, he was overpaid. By that standard, so are many CEOs.

But they have contrived a moral code that exempts them from self-control – a moral code that justifies grabbing as much as they can. Because almost everyone else sees their code as self-serving and selfish, CEOs have undermined their moral standing and their ability to be taken seriously on other issues. They are slowly becoming a threat to the very system they claim to represent.

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me@rescam.org

.....Sorry guys, I agree with this proposal and so far no one has offered an example of a need for use of these type of programs by anyone other than a network administrator.....

And that's bassically it. You agree with the proposal but ignore the arguement against it.

Well technically anyone that owns a computer is a network administrator.

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YOU just don't post anything original...

You're a one man spam source. over and over and over and over....
-------------------------------

Do you know what it means?
Let me tell you what it means....it means you endeavor to take other peoples' ideas and resell themwholesale as your own.....It means you are a con man. You don't advocate your own ideas by any means that are createive or original.

Some just keep going over and over and over with their criticisms/indirect/ with others without one iota of new thoughts.

Happy Life! But you've got a couple of funnt buddies to back you up in place of rational people, men and women included. All you do is post....

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

You don't seem to understand. It's a matter of fact that hacker wargames are harmless. Nothing illegal is done. The suggestion of committing some other illegal acts like smoking pot to enhance game play, or robbing a store to fund such games doesn't make sense. The issue here is the reasons why free access to certain software and information shouldn't be made illegal by goverment.

To me it just sounds like your continuing reasoning is more like: This kind od free access to software and information should be illegal beacause the the government tells you so, without understanding the arguement of why it shouldn't be made illegal.

No, you don't seem to understand. My stance is that your entire argument is there are legitimate uses for the software, therefore it shouldn't be made illegal....and I disagree based on the fact that there are numerous items in our society that are considered legal in the hands of those authorized to possess said items, and illegal for everyone else, such as fully automatic weapons even though every American has a 2nd amendment right to bare arms.

All of this for no reason other than "the government said so"....after all, they do make the laws.

WHY? Because the potential harm to our society posed by these items is far greater than the potential good that would come from their wide spread use by the general population.

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.....Sorry guys, I agree with this proposal and so far no one has offered an example of a need for use of these type of programs by anyone other than a network administrator.....

And that's bassically it. You agree with the proposal but ignore the arguement against it.

Well technically anyone that owns a computer is a network administrator.

I hate to bring politics back into the conversation, but lies and/or misinformation are typical of arguments presented by "the left".

First you accuse me of ignoring your position when it's clear to any rational human being we are carrying on a conversation about the issue and our differences of opinion. In the second place, "technically" you're a liar since I'm pretty sure you know the difference between a single computer and a network.....if not, then you really don't have a place in this conversation, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because I understand your debating tactics are not a reflection of your computer expirence. In fact, I'd go as far as to say every BOINC user has above average computer intelligence.

Of course this is just my opinion, but I don't see anyone else making outrageous claims like anyone who owns a computer is a network administator.

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Brainshamsher, you haven't really addressed my points..

What gives anyone the right to sieze or direct usage of property, regardless of it's potential usage, imagined or real. ?

come on, now. Tell me where you derive the right!>?

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

YOU just don't post anything original...

You're a one man spam source. over and over and over and over....
-------------------------------

Do you know what it means?
Let me tell you what it means....it means you endeavor to take other peoples' ideas and resell themwholesale as your own.....It means you are a con man. You don't advocate your own ideas by any means that are createive or original.

Some just keep going over and over and over with their criticisms/indirect/ with others without one iota of new thoughts.

Happy Life! But you've got a couple of funnt buddies to back you up in place of rational people, men and women included. All you do is post....

. . . 'ave another shot - rationale might return thus

YOU just don't post anything original...

You're a one man spam source. over and over and over and over....
-------------------------------

Do you know what it means?
Let me tell you what it means....it means you endeavor to take other peoples' ideas and resell themwholesale as your own.....It means you are a con man. You don't advocate your own ideas by any means that are createive or original.

Some just keep going over and over and over with their criticisms/indirect/ with others without one iota of new thoughts.

Happy Life! But you've got a couple of funnt buddies to back you up in place of rational people, men and women included. All you do is post....

. . . 'ave another shot - rationale might return thus

Brainshamsher, you haven't really addressed my points..

What gives anyone the right to sieze or direct usage of property, regardless of it's potential usage, imagined or real. ?

come on, now. Tell me where you derive the right!>?

They're called elected officials. We, the voters, give them the right to set the laws that we follow.

Where have you been since July 4, 1776?

I understand that sounds a little condesending, but you act like you don't know where our laws come from, or how our system has operated for the last 200+ years

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It's not a legal issue, really.

We're talking about the basis for our whole legal system, or so I thought.

I want to reduce it to philosophic primaries so we know where we started from (on July 4th, 1776 -- for example) and then work from there.

My question addresses the Constitution and our founding fathers' ideas of what kind of nation we want to create along with its accompanying laws. What some fly by night politician dreams up in the meantime is irrelevent. I'm talking about what should be and how we can make the 'should' into 'is'.

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

I was going to calmy remark that nobody has been able to justify the recent unconstitutional actions by the Supreme Court, but since we actually have someone here named 'nobody' if I had said that I'd be wrong!

So I must say that nobody hasn't been able to justify the Supreme Court decision, and that just looks like really bad grammar.

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

I was going to calmy remark that nobody has been able to justify the recent unconstitutional actions by the Supreme Court, but since we actually have someone here named 'nobody' if I had said that I'd be wrong!

So I must say that nobody hasn't been able to justify the Supreme Court decision, and that just looks like really bad grammar.

LOLOLOLOLOL...

I'm drooling on my keyboard in an unsophisticated fashion...

YOU'RE KILLING ME, MAN!!! KILLING ME!!! LOL

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

I was going to calmy remark that nobody has been able to justify the recent unconstitutional actions by the Supreme Court, but since we actually have someone here named 'nobody' if I had said that I'd be wrong!

So I must say that nobody hasn't been able to justify the Supreme Court decision, and that just looks like really bad grammar.

Of the three co-equal branches of government, the Judiciary has the final say. How do we know this is true? The Supreme Court said so in Marbury v. Madison about two centuries ago. That's why the present administration has calmly started to change their policies toward detainees at Guantánamo (not quite the "backing down" trumpeted by the left leaning media), in deference to the recent Supreme Court decision applying Geneva protections to those terrorists.