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mananaysiempre 10 hours ago

A fair few things are boilerplate and also complete bullshit in their conception, and thus far I haven’t been able to determine why this isn’t one of them.

(The only actual argument made in this subthread, as far as I can see, is impaired judgment. Which, maybe? But I’d want to see something other than vibes to weigh the risks of worse judgment against the additional recidivism, and my current intuition is that alcohol probably should make the list of risk factors but cannabis probably shouldn’t.)

tptacek 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It wouldn't have mattered. There were a bunch of things in the warrant, not just the wax.

mananaysiempre 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, in this particular case, sure. I even find myself in the unusual position of approving of the original CFAA conviction (assuming of course the list of allegations is true as stated), because it does sound like something you might need a separate law for—as opposed to the extra-hard punishment for X-with-a-computer when plain X is already illegal that’s typical of laws involving computers.

I guess what I’m trying to understand is why that particular part is on the boilerplate to begin with, and more importantly whether it’s doing any good there rather than putting people in prison that otherwise wouldn’t need to be. (I pretty much immediately guessed it’s boilerplate, because that’s the only way it makes sense for it to be among the parole conditions for, essentially, a disgruntled sysadmin that took it out on their ex-employer.) It just trips my righteousness alarm, for things that sound right and proper rather than actually helping. And thus the justification of it being there because it’s how we’ve always done it this way annoyed me especially hard.