Child pornography is illegal even if the pictures are drawn, a federal appeals panel said in affirming the first conviction under a 2003 federal law against such cartoons.

Dwight Whorley is serving 20 years in prison, convicted in 2005 of using a public computer for jobseekers at the Virginia Employment Commission to receive 20 Japanese cartoons, called anime, illustrating young girls being forced to have sex with men. Whorley also received digital photographs of actual children engaging in sexual conduct and sent and received e-mails graphically describing parents sexually molesting their children.

This case has been bothering me.

1. This guy ought to be in prison as there was real child porn involved. That fact might make it easy to overlook the rest of this case but I think that is a mistake.

2. 20 years is an extreme prison sentence. It seems overzealous here.

3. How much of that prison sentence was the product of the obscenity convictions? In my view, there is absolutely no place for obscenity laws in modern society. They were tossed upon the pyre of history in the 1960s alongside such barbarism as segregation and their resurrection by the federal government in 2005 is nothing less that social regression. It is a crime to posses and distribute real child pornography because those pictures violate the privacy of the children depicted. A cartoon has no privacy rights. This is pure thought crime. Its also a hole that has no bottom. If obscenity prosecutions are ignored in this context they'll spread to other contexts, consuming and banning as much as they can until their progress is halted.

4. Because there is no limit to what obscenity laws might prevent, WE have to decide where to draw the line. If we are unwilling to express offense at convictions for obscenity in this context, when and where will we express offense? In my view, there is a bright line that you can draw that says that ideas themselves, no matter how offensive, should not be a crime to express. I'm comfortable with that line. Holding that line means opposing this conviction. A conviction on child pornography possession ought to have been enough here. The overzealousness here serves no good.

Child porn cartoon conviction upheld - MSNBC Wire Services- msnbc.com

This collection is very interesting. Don't miss part 2 and part 3.

The year 2008 in photographs (part 1 of 3) - The Big Picture - Boston.com

People who are regular viewers of films like the Runaway Bride and Hitch are often bad communicators.

Psychologists found that lovers frequently thought their partner should know what they want without the two of them having to talk.

Ha!

Rom Coms Can Ruin Relationships Say Psychologists | UK News | Sky News

I much enjoyed this article.

6 Myths About GM, Ford, and Chrysler

Twitter can be used to network, make friends or keep up with Britney Spears. And soon it will become a way to transfer money over the Web.

Twitpay made the New York Times.

Send Money Through Twitter With Twitpay - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

The parliament justly thought, that the king was too eminent a magistrate to be trusted with discretionary power, which he might so easily turn to the destruction of liberty. And in the event it has hitherto been found, that, though some sensible inconveniences arise from the maxim of adhering strictly to law, yet the advantages overbalance them, and should render the English grateful to the memory of their ancestors, who, after repeated contests, at last established that noble, though dangerous, principle.

From Hume's History of England

Just in case there was anyone out there who hadn't already figured this out, the NSA is spying on the entire country.

Two knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that the clash erupted over a part of Bush's espionage program that had nothing to do with the wiretapping of individual suspects. Rather, Comey and others threatened to resign because of the vast and indiscriminate collection of communications data. These sources, who asked not to be named discussing intelligence matters, describe a system in which the National Security Agency, with cooperation from some of the country's largest telecommunications companies, was able to vacuum up the records of calls and e-mails of tens of millions of average Americans between September 2001 and March 2004...
The NSA's powerful computers became vast storehouses of "metadata." They collected the telephone numbers of callers and recipients in the United States, and the time and duration of the calls. They also collected and stored the subject lines of e-mails, the times they were sent, and the addresses of both senders and recipients.

None of which is protected by the 4th amendment according to our fancy legal system.

By one estimate, the amount of data the NSA could suck up in close to real time was equivalent to one quarter of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica per second. (The actual content of calls and e-mails was not being monitored as part of this aspect of the program, the sources say.) All this metadata was then sifted by the NSA, using complex algorithms to detect patterns and links that might indicate terrorist activity.
. . . By 2003, Yoo had moved on, and a new head of the OLC, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work. Goldsmith found Yoo's legal opinions justifying the program flawed. His reasons are based on a mind-numbingly complex area of federal law, but the basic analysis comes down to this: the systematic collection and digital transmission of huge amounts of telephone and e-mail data by the government constitutes "electronic surveillance" under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the exclusive law governing domestic spying in national-security cases. For such activities, FISA requires a court-approved warrant. Therefore, the program was illegal.

Its not clear to me what the current legal status of such a call records program would be in the wake of the FISA amendments.

The Volokh Conspiracy - Did the NSA Call Records Program Cause the Major Controversy Within DOJ, and If so, What Does It Tell Us About the Legal Issues?:

This guy Madoff lost billions of his clients money like all the hedge funds. Those losses are not covered by any agency. Only fraud is covered. So what do you do? I think that Madoff is just a fall guy. The losses of his fund were the same as other funds, mutual and hedge and personal losses. By saying it was a Ponzi scheme (fraud) by this one guy all those rich investors will be covered from their losses unlike the rest of the world. .

It turns out crime does pay.

Madoff is buying a tax payer bailout of his hedge fund.

I just wasted an entire day trying to inform Comcast about a problem with their network. This problem caused a service outage for me, and I'm sure that it has effected hundreds of other customers. Unfortunately, it will never be fixed.

Senior engineers at Comcast are not aware of the problem, and they will never be aware, because it is impossible to inform them. Comcast's first and second level support staff don't understand the problem and have been trained to aggressively blow off anyone who attempts to report it to them. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no way to get through the first and second level support barrier to someone who actually understands DHCP. Comcast's support staff does not know when to escalate something that they do not understand.

I am posting this mostly as a personal catharsis having spent an entire day being told that I don't know what I'm talking about by people who barely know the first thing about how the Internet works. Pushing this further is not worth the frustration. Perhaps someone else who is experiencing the same problem will come upon this blog post in a Google search and will be saved the same frustration. That is the only thing that I can do at this point.

The problem manifests as follows: Some devices are intermittently unable to obtain a DHCP lease. What makes this complicated is that other devices ARE still able to obtain a lease. In my case my router stopped getting IPs from Comcast, but I could get an IP with my laptop. The router had been working fine as my gateway for months and had no problems getting IPs and then one day I woke up and it wasn't working anymore. My router could not get a lease, but my laptop could get a lease if I plugged it into my cable modem directly.

The naive assumption when confronted with this set of circumstances is that the problem is with the router. The network is obviously able to hand a lease out. The router must just not be asking for one properly or accepting one as it should. The first time I encountered this behavior on Comcast's network, I bought into this assumption and went out and purchased a new router. Then, a few months later, it happened to my new router as well.

In this case, the naive assumption is wrong; both routers are working properly. Internet protocols are complicated and sometimes they fail in subtle ways that defy naive assumptions. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get Comcast to look at this problem more carefully, because their low level technical support staff don't understand how to look at it more carefully, and believe that the naive assumption is the only possible explanation.

Because Comcast's network has this problem, people likely call up technical support on a regular basis complaining about it, and they are told that their routers must be broken. Comcast's technical support staff has gotten good at arguing people down about their "broken routers" because they see it all time. Of co... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

A 56-year-old former prosecutor in the Justice Department named Thomas Tamm, whose "passion for justice" led him to make a fateful call to the Times one day in 2004 from a phone booth in a Washington, D.C., subway station.

New York Times' NSA Whistleblower Reveals Himself | Threat Level from Wired.com