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Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

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Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#121

Post by noduerme »

xwdv wrote: post #111
wkat4242 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of incidents involving firearms is astonishing. I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals. I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people. I'm really a bit surprised to hear this. I did a similar job…

The rule of thumb is you are still way more likely to be killed by other things before being killed with a firearm. It’s not really that bad. Once you graduate from school your risk of being shot dead dramatically lowers and other normal causes of death take the top spot.

I'm a gun owner and I believe in the rights of citizens to be armed, but I'm still not sure this is a good argument. On principle, anything that causes unnecessary deaths should be curtailed unless the benefits somehow outweigh the damage. We still have people driving cars who kill each other every day by accident, but there's a general feeling that it would be better to do away with that if we could find a way to eliminate private transportation without destroying our economy in the process. To make a strong argument for firearms ownership requires not just downplaying the harm but actually explaining why the public good of an armed populace outweighs the many and obvious evils it inflicts on innocent people. That's a much tougher case to make to someone who's lost a family member to gun violence, but nonetheless it's a case that needs to be made (in my opinion) if we're going to remain an unruly bunch who won't be led down the road to either a right-wing or left-wing police state.

[edit: Just to clarify, I think there's an equally strong argument to be made about freedom of movement as a societal benefit, and an individual right, that outweighs the harms caused by humans driving their own cars.]

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#122

Post by kube-system »

wkat4242 wrote: post #118
dreamcompiler wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing or murdering people. I take it you have not actually visited the United States.

[flagged]

It is impossible to lump all US gun owners into a single stereotype, when a third of Americans own one. Any chunk of the population that large includes people of all kinds. In my experience, the people who are most responsible are the ones who you don't even know own guns, because they keep them locked up and out of sight.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#123

Post by xormapmap »

blahedo wrote: post #120
xwdv wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule of thumb is you are still way more likely to be killed by other things before being killed with a firearm. It’s not really that bad. Once you graduate from school your risk of being shot dead dramatically lowers and other normal causes of death take the top spot.

Firearms are the second-leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the US. 15%. [0] [0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754

That doesn't mean the death rate of children due to firearms is high, it could just mean there isn't really anything else that kills children i.e. they mostly have parents looking out for them, don't have to work dangerous jobs, and haven't lived long enough for lifestyle factors to take effect yet.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#124

Post by acheron »

torstenvl wrote: post #41
Larrikin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This comment is deeply inappropriate. Engaging in ideological flamewar is against HN guidelines and is just plain rude to all of the HN folks who actually work in the field you're being casually dismissive of.

What a thread. Guy randomly claiming “the racism” with literally no evidence gets upvoted, while you who know what you’re talking about try pointing out that it’s nonsense and get downvoted and flagged.

I know it’s an old guideline to not claim HN is turning into Reddit, and I used to agree with it, but at least since Reddit killed Apollo etc and drove people away a lot of them seem to have come here, so it may really be happening this time. HN was pretty good while it lasted I guess.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#125

Post by PrivateButts »

wkat4242 wrote: post #89
thatoneguy wrote: post #31

I was a "broadband technician" around then and AT&T Broadband did not give AF if you were stealing cable or not. I only handled cable modem installs and quit after a year to go major in philosophy and because: - Getting quietly threatened once (with AR-15 up against the customer's front door) on a troubleshooting call that I wasn't able to leave until "the internet started working". - Having to increasingly go do cab…

The amount of incidents involving firearms is astonishing. I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals. I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people. I'm really a bit surprised to hear this. I did a similar job…

I think it's mostly a numbers thing. Willing to bet that most people take owning a gun seriously, but there's a loooooooooot of guns in the US. There's enough in US circulation alone to give a gun to every citizen of the US, Canada, and the UK. That much floating around and there's bound to be some dumb fuck in the news waving around their new bang stick.

Like others have said, you've got a lot of other things in the US to worry about than guns. However, since we're sharing gun incidents, mine is that I had a sheriff's deputy LARPing as a SWAT officer bust in to the bathroom at work and point a rifle at me while I was trying to use the urinal. Lots of yelling until they realized that I was not a part of the drill and had my pants unzipped. Not happy that they didn't inform us that the cops were going to use the building we're in for school shooting training. Dangers of working in a repurposed school I guess?

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#126

Post by geodel »

wkat4242 wrote: post #89
thatoneguy wrote: post #31

I was a "broadband technician" around then and AT&T Broadband did not give AF if you were stealing cable or not. I only handled cable modem installs and quit after a year to go major in philosophy and because: - Getting quietly threatened once (with AR-15 up against the customer's front door) on a troubleshooting call that I wasn't able to leave until "the internet started working". - Having to increasingly go do cab…

The amount of incidents involving firearms is astonishing. I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals. I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people. I'm really a bit surprised to hear this. I did a similar job…

> I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism

Well, in US so many times heavily armed police act like chump in face of serious criminals so not sure that general populace are proud of professionalism.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#127

Post by jjulius »

Zuiii wrote: post #110
dylan604 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Its using a service without paying for it which is theft if proven that it was done intentionally. Not sure how copyright was brought into this conversation.

No, it can't be theft unless the service provider lost the channel being "stolen" to the "thief" which makes no sense. Things quickly become silly when we insist on using the wrong concept where it doesn't apply. Charges like disrupting business operations or unauthorized access I can see, but theft? nah.

Think of it as "theft of services". Here's one example...

>ORS 164.125

>Theft of services

>(2) ... “Communication service” includes, but is not limited to, use of telephone, computer and cable television systems.

https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_164.125

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#128

Post by jandrese »

usaar333 wrote: post #119
jandrese wrote: post #8

This is what life is like on the bleeding edge. In 1999 he was one of the first to "cut the cord" and it was a situation that Comcast was not yet ready to understand.

Seems also like too much talking with the company. I had cable internet only around this time and for some time a trap wasn't set. Why would you tell the company? Just don't watch cable TV if you have concerns.

That's what was tried, but Comcast still started a criminal case.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#129

Post by euroderf »

boneitis wrote: post #56
thatoneguy wrote: post #31

I was a "broadband technician" around then and AT&T Broadband did not give AF if you were stealing cable or not. I only handled cable modem installs and quit after a year to go major in philosophy and because: - Getting quietly threatened once (with AR-15 up against the customer's front door) on a troubleshooting call that I wasn't able to leave until "the internet started working". - Having to increasingly go do cab…

I guess it really did depend on the mood and demeanor of whatever technician got sent out on a given day. Back in those same years, it was a painful, nonstop pendulum swing every month-or-two, between a) cripplingly unusable internet, and b) working Internet but with absolutely every channel unlocked for free. Everytime something happened that required a technician to come out while it was in state "b", it always tri…

The invisible hand of the free market has clearly worked to perfection.

Re: Get a cable modem, go to jail (1999)

#130

Post by cortesoft »

cogman10 wrote: post #17

I thought this might be fiction because the amount of time for pirating cable seemed crazy.. However [1] there are indeed up to 6 month penalties for stealing cable. That's just ludicrous. How could copyright theft ever be anything other than a civil action? Jail time for stealing cable, that's just insane. Nobody gets hurt from stolen cable. We really need to look long and hard at what we allow jail time for. Jail t…

I was thinking about this. It is crazy that a private company gets to deputize the state legal apparatus to enable their business model. They want to be able to sell something that is very difficult to restrict access to, so they use the legal system to make sure it stays restricted.

They want to be able to install a cable all the way to someone’s house, and then have the state prosecute them if they dare touch it.

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