They did real physical disabling not that long ago... remember the early celerons? Up spec P3's underclocked and a laser dragged over the connection to half the L2 cache. Also, not a Mac fanboy, but i feel compelled to point out your sig is referring to IE for Mac, which used the Tasman rendering engine, not Trident like the one on windows and was quite impressive in its time, actually.

This is a moronic comment. Study history yourself, there was and still is a pressing need for child labor laws. And your distinction between attendance and education strike me as the supposedly bulletproof legal theories spouted on slashdot that get blown up in real courts routinely. Remember the response to Reiser's conviction?

Until last year I had never had the opportunity to purchase unlimited internet. Hell, until 2005 the biggest chunk i could buy was 5 gigs, every gig after that was 20 bucks. And im not out in the sticks, im in a state capital. Regulation should have come to the internet 20 years ago.

Thats the most bullshit argument ever. I mean really, it flabbergasts me that its been used. Even Joe Strummer called this one out... You have the right to free speech, as long as your not dumb enough to actually try it.

replace 'al Qaeda' with '4chan' and you've pretty much nailed it.

The hardness scale isn't what determines how quickly a knife blade dulls. Hell, the quickest way to need a new edge on a knife is to cut paper with it. A knife blade isn't the nice coherent surface you see, its made of thousands, probably million of these little tiny teeth or burrs. When they're all straight your knife is sharp, as it gets used they start spreading, going in opposite ways and being bent back over themselves. Thats what gives you a dull knife. A sharpening steel or oiled leather doesn't carve a new blade, it properly aligns those little teeth again.

How awesome, I got some /. love in the summary.

Not the East Bay Examiner. Writer was thinking about the San Francisco Examiner, which did not run the story.

there was a great bash quote along the lines of 'if i want to look like a "1337 haxx0r" in front of my friends I just compile KSolitaire or something and it looks like im breaking into the NSA for 40 minutes'

the paywall on the financial times and the wsj makes sense from a business stand point. They're both highly specialized news outlets doing work no one else really does, or if they do they don't do it well. It's business analysis by well trained people doing popular, but ultimately niche work compared to standard reporting. And heavily utilized by businesses, who just feel more comfortable paying for things. Ad supported news makes more sense in general reporting: The reporter doesn't need a post graduate degree in economics and experience interpreting SEC filings to tell you whats going on at the rally down town last week.

That's crap. The stress doesn't 'cause' him to do that, he chooses to if thats what he wants to do. It's the same trick a 4 year old tries when they threaten to hold their breath till you give them what they want. He needs to grow up.

He tried to quench that 'thirst' by breaking in to a highly sensitive military computer network directly or indirectly depended on by many people in harms way every day. Sounds a hell of a lot like it SHOULD fall under terrorism laws. Think of it this way, if he had bypassed and broken security in person, slipping in to the heart of an actual highly sensitive military base because he was 'curious' his motivation would hardly matter. I'm just glad the terrorism laws are being applied to someone who actually broke them rather then the usual trumped up charges.

Why would it be inappropriate to extradite him? The fuckwit caused massive amounts of damage, and committed what is unquestionably a criminal act, breaking in to the Pentagon computer network. If he had taken it a step farther and sold the information found in there lives could have been lost. He was intelligent enough not to do something leading to murder charges, so it's obvious he knew what he had already done was wrong and illegal. This contrasts nicely with copyright cases that are only a civil issue. It's easy to tell the people who want to reform internet law with those who want to do away with it altogether in threads like these.