Re: Colorado Supreme Court: Using a Stolen Social Security Number is Not Identity Theft

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 02:25:55AM -0500, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> I view the criticism as "sharp tongued" and nothing more. A sharp
> tongue is one of my redeeming qualities :)

I concur.  I don't suffer fools gladly either [1] and I'm not shy about
expressing my contempt.  But it does seem that some (weak) people are
simply not equipped with the fortitude to endur withering criticism, and
so they whine to The Authorities about the imagined and/or fabricated
threats to their well-being in order to intimidate and silence others.

These cowards really don't grasp the principles of free speech --
which includes speech that's assinine, insulting, critical, offensive,
insensitive, mocking, juvenile, incoherent and everything else that none
of us (probably) want to have directed at us, but which all of us *must*
accept as the price for our own freedom of expression.

<shrug> I've been told that I'm a terrorist because I think spamming
should be criminalized and should carry the death penalty as a mandatory
sentence.  (Of course anyone claiming that they feel "threatened"
by such a statement is publicly confessing that they're a spammer,
but let's skip over that for now.)  I suppose that means Dan K's one too,
and we can add former former FTC Commissioner Swindle to the list...plus any
number of other people who've expressed similar sentiments over the years.
Well, at least we'll be able to have some interesting conversations
over our bread and water.

And good grief, let's not tell anyone about alt.flame.  Or any of the
other myriad places where folks have spent somewhere between "minutes"
and "decades" verbally pummeling...well...pretty much everyone.

What's even worse is that every minute, every dollar spent chasing after
this nonsense is one that's NOT spent going after those who've actually
done something truly horrific.   There are a *mountain* of unsolved rape
and murder and arson &etc. cases in every major city in the US (and I've
no doubt elsewhere as well), abandoned because sufficiently-compelling
evidence was not discovered in a short enough time frame.  And yet law
enforcement (sometimes) wastes its time on nonsense like this, or on the
non-problem of "cyberbullying", or on tracking down which college kid is
torrenting the latest piece of crap from Hollywood, rather than actually
going after Very Bad People *who have actually done something very bad*.

---rsk

[1] That includes the occasions when I'm one of them; but better to be
criticized/corrected/flamed than to remain ignorant.
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