Nope, DC and VA both prohibit them, but they're OK in MD.

Why was this modded troll? AC may or may not be demonstrably wrong, but was he trolling?

And I argue just fine, by the way. I seldom actually lose. I have been wrong time to time, but not all that often.

In any case, just so you won't have to look it up, here is part of what Thomas wrote:

"The fact that the federal government has the authority to imprison a person for the purpose of punishing him for a federal crime -- sex-related or otherwise -- does not provide the government with the additional power to exercise indefinite civil control over that person."

Pretty much what I was saying, all along. As I stated before, I was fully expecting people to claim I was full of BS. The reason is because much of the history that many of us were taught in school was either a distortion or a gross oversimplification. Sure, slavery was an issue in the civil war. But it wasn't THE issue. The war was not mainly about slavery (even though politicians claimed it was). The main reason was simple economics.

Why is any gov't willing to settle for an arrangement where a vendor agrees to provide specifics regarding the nature of a product's flaws rather than questioning why to use the product at all? And mind you, this is after two decades of a lot of knowledgable people saying said product is flawed by design, by implementation & both to such a degree that it can never be safe.

In regards to point 3, one can still be responsible while staying up with the latest hardware. When I decide it's time to build a new PC my current one either goes to server or media duty, whatever gets replaced goes to my parents as it's still a decent upgrade for them and will last awhile for what they're going to use it for. Whichever PC they replace either goes to some of their friends or they donate it to a local charity that will make use of it.

Yet recently the signal-to-noise ratio went up again. Oddly, with the advent of phpbb and other web based bbs systems. Not so oddly when you look at it closely.

The average user does not want to learn. He knows how to use a browser, so he will invariably prefer a web based bbs to usegroups any day. Now, spammers and trolls go where? Right. Where the larger amount of clueless users congregates.

If we gave it a while, we'd have a great signal-to-noise ratio on usenet again!

This is mostly a joke, but not 100% a joke. I sincerely hope it's not true. However, the thought occurs to me that maybe this "key" is nothing more than, say, a copy of Windows 98 on floppy discs. Seriously, without more information about this supposed "key" we have no way to know if those involved actually did include something that might really be useful to future generations who want to get at the data or if they did something as stupid as what I suggested.

If we assume that your fingerprint is assembled wholly at your side, then I would say you are RELATIVELY safe from it being disassembled into components that could compromise your realworld identity. One way to make the fingerprint irreversible like that is to encrypt it with a throw-away random key, also at client side. The unique but absolutely meaningless string arriving at the other end will uniquely identify YOUR END, NOT YOU. You can continue shopping and surfing porn, and all they got is a random string. If the porn site wants a fingerprint, they will get another value which will also identify you ACROSS THEIR DOMAIN. The two parties will not be able to cross-correlate their "databases" for any result. They will each contain a database of non-colliding pieces of data, one per each unique user, but they will not make any sense of comparing these.

Good points... I am not sure, though, that the issues you mentioned necessarily reflect the cultural ideas. They represent issues that ended up changing the culture, but did that represent the culture at the time?

I would argue that because TV has to make a profit based on their viewing audience, they have to cater to said viewing audience, which means they typically have to provide shows that the viewing audience likes and/or identifies with. It's interesting to note when the shows you mentioned went off the air, presumably due to profitability. I don't remember seeing many of the happily-married-couple-with-2.5-kids-and-a-white-picket-fence TV shows after the 60s.

Of course, I'm not any sort of expert on this in the least. It's mostly just from watching and listening to (e.g., music or radio shows) media from those decades and observing how they changed throughout the decades. There WAS a big shift, as you say, in the 60s with regards to sexuality. And that, I think, was pretty clearly portrayed in er, consumer media (TV, music, movies). (Example: not being allowed to show a husband and wife in the same bed in TV shows, hence having separate twin/double beds ... e.g., in the Dick Van Dyke show, Laura and Rob had separate beds).

Just like unpopular speech is still free, Slashdot posts aren't modded up for correctness or popularity. They're modded up for being interesting and well-communicated. Just because someone's wrong doesn't mean they should be modded down. I want to see the comments with which I disagree, so I can argue with them. Which is what happened here. I was actually meta-moderating, and your comment came up. I just had to jump in.