That is apparently the case. I've been called to jury duty once in my life. I was actually excited about it. All my work peers cynically said some version of this: "Just tell them you've been to college and you'll be tossed from the pool." I was like, WTF?!? During selection, we were all asked our professions, our level of education, what periodicals we subscribed to, and if anyone in our family had been subject to domestic abuse (it was an wife battery case, IIRC). For whatever reason, we were *all* pruned out, and I never did get to sit.

For the life of me, I can't understand why people with *any* familiarity with a topic should be pruned from a jury pool. If I were on trial for some computer/tech crime, I'd rather a bunch of slashdotters or redditors (gods help me) be on the jury than the uninformed Joe Schmoe who rely on left- or right-wing hate media for their news sources.

The "-P32" (at least in FreeBSD "xargs") means to have 32 instances of the target command (wget, in this case) in parallel.

To hell with while loops. Do it in style and in parallel:

yes "http://www.amazon.com" | xargs -n1 -P32 wget -e robots=off -q --tries=2 --timeout=32 -H -p --output-document=/dev/null

Okay, "-P32" may be a *little* excessive. ;-) I'm sure the "wget" options can be optimized a little. Anyway, it's a good start.

I realize this, but ignorance by the populace is not my problem. It's not like we're doing so well on that front anyway. Half the problem, of course, is medicated livestock feed. Antibiotics are used as a feed additive because it somehow lets animals put on weight faster, so many grower/starter feed rations have antibiotics in them. But a huge problem is ignorant soccer moms who insist in a round of penicillin for ever little sniffle Little Johnny gets.

That said, my 12-year-old son has never once been administered antibiotics, as my wife and I know what a problem it is. I've only had them twice in the past 10 years, my teen-aged daughter maybe once in her life. Obviously, the ignorant reap what they sow (like in Mexico, though they've put a stop to OTC antibiotics), though it can obviously be a problem for the rest of us.

I prefer a more libertarian solution to health care, as the current system is far too restrictive and screws over the poor (and the self-taught).

Your valid criticism lost a lot a sway when you so lightly invoked prison rape. Don't be a douche and please stick to the facts.

I will point out that a lot of people (many of whom I will assume, like myself, have never been convicted of *anything*) are complaining about other people's sentences, so it's not like only those with a rap sheet have a monopoly on decrying the joke of a justice system we currently have.

The problem is that the medical establishment is a self-protectionist racket. I have no problem with astronomically-priced doctor salaries, drugs, and equipment. If the rich want to blow a $million+ on end-of-life care that buys them 1 month on life support, then who am I to argue. However, in return, I kindly ask that the AMA get kicked to the curb, licensing be a voluntary requirement for practicing, and that we allow effective OTC meds (like antibiotics) to be sold. There's no reason a retired army medic, nurse, or EMT should not be able to perform procedures for folks who want to avoid (or cannot afford) the high-price of a "real" doctor or ER. Nor is there a good reason why we shouldn't be able to effectively self-medicate if we're intelligent enough to do so. (Yes, I have successfully self-medicated with feed-store antibiotics. It's not rocket science.)

That's a little harsh. I personally think that *The Last Airbender* has been one of the best cartoons to be produced in recent memory, from a normal US TV source anyway. I haven't been so hooked on a cartoon since *Animaniacs* and *Batman: The Animated Series*".

It's worse, given an over-zealous prosecutor. Search for the "little lupe child porn case". Poor dude had videos of an obvious, over-18 "pro" and even though a phone call and a fax would have produced the age custodial records, the prosecutor refused to cooperate and plowed head-on with trying to ruin the defendant. I hope there's a special hell for this woman (the prosecutor).

I've used FreeBSD since 6.0 as my daily workstation, and I have few complaints. I'm currently running 8.1-RELEASE/amd64 on a 4-core machine, 8GB ram, and almost a TB of ZFS space. ZFS isn't the best performer, granted, but I beat it up pretty good and have nightly snapshots running, and stability has never been an issue.

I can count the number of times FreeBSD has locked these past 5 years on 1 hand. 3 were due to the 3rd-party fuse-ntfs3 port (non-stock, try to avoid it when I can), and 2 from reading the entirety of /dev/mem with certain programs (not sure why this happens, and it surely must be a bug).

And I don't know why people dis the ports system, as I find it far more functional than anything in the Linux arena I've ever used. Yes, gentoo fans, this includes portage.

You forgot the output to "mount" or "zpool status" or "zfs list".

UFS supports the geom journal (gjournal) journaling system, which reduces fsck times to something reasonable. It's not 100% absent, as with ZFS, but it works very well. Still not as fast a filesystem as straight UFS2, but faster than ZFS. I hear there's a journaling system being bolted onto soft updates, so that should prove to be an interesting development. Not sure what it offers over gjournal.

Boucher was unique in that he was compelled to reveal *again* what he already revealed to the border guards: the data on the encrypted drive. Since he already gave up the evidence once voluntarily, compelling him to give the means to show them the same evidence didn't qualify for 5th Amendment protection. I personally think this makes sense. Had he never consented to the border search, the case (if any) would have hinged on the very issue we're all interested in.

The Cybercrime link above elaborates a bit on U.S. v. Kirschner, which supports the assertion that divulging unknown passwords constitutes testimony which can qualify to be protected under the 5th.

The specific issue of passwords may be unclear, but I think that the generic question of testimony of unknown facts leading to unknown incriminating evidence is pretty straight forward. It would be nice to see the SCOTUS address this issue once and for all, but I'm thinking it will take a while before this happens.

Not sure why you mentioned typing the password vs reciting it, but the same blog had an interesting article about how typing a cellphone password was ruled to have the same protections under Miranda as verbal testimony. I love that blog; it makes for some very interesting reading.

Fortunately, you are wrong. See this Cybercrime blog entry (written by a law professor) for the gory legal details. The meat and potatoes of the post:

The Supreme Court has held, basically, that you're giving testimony - testifying - when you're communicating, i.e., when you're revealing your knowledge of certain facts or sharing your thoughts or opinions with the government. U.S. v. Kirschner, supra. You can't claim the 5th Amendment privilege to refuse to surrender physical evidence such as your blood, hair or saliva; it only applies to communications, i.e., to something that look like what a witness does when she takes the stand at trial.

I don't know about that.

I've recently begun following the Cybercrime blog, and this article talks about legal expectations of privacy, and (as I see it) the bar seems set pretty high. As usual with her blog entries, lots of supporting case law sprinkled throughout, so don't expect to coast through or skim these posts (unless you happen to be a lawyer). Sadly, the trend I've seen over my time of reading her stuff is that the courts seem to provide law enforcement with most of the wiggle room based on legal minutia, while denying that same wiggle room to the defendants. To my layman's eye, the system seems skewed in favor of the state.

In any case, if you have the time I heartily recommend adding this site to one's daily reading regimen. I think admins and users alike could stand to have a half-decent understanding of how the laws are currently being applied to our trade/hobby.

FreeBSD/amd64 8.1-PRERELEASE with firefox-3.6.3,1. Uptime 2.75 days, with the browsing being open almost as long without shutdown. At this moment, I have 11 tabs split across 2 windows (one fullscreened on 2 different virtual desktops). Virtual: 1252M. Resident: 1100M. It starts fresh at between 200 and 400MB, then continues to climb. By the end of the week, it'll be pushing 2GB resident. Glad I have 8GB to throw around.

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