California Cyberstalking Law May Be Model
April 27, 2007 – 5:42 am
California legislators are considering a new law that would extend the state’s antistalking laws to prevent individuals from using websites and social networking sites such as MySpace.com and Craigslist to deliberately incite harassment or abuse against an individual. (See AB 919)
The prohibited harassment includes the posting of digital images or messages in an effort to cause fear, harassment or harm to an individual. Cops would be able to use stalking charges against the people responsible for the messages.
More than 40 states already have some form of cyberstalking legislation on their books but most prohibit acts involving intimidation and harassment of a person via e-mail, pagers, phones and cell phones.
The California bill is thought to be the first state law that extends the concept of stalking to messages and images posted on websites. The genesis of this bill was a situation where someone posted a minor’s picture and cell phone number on the web, along with a sexual solicitation in an adult section on Craigslist. Needless to say the female victim received numerous calls that she found very frightening.
In another creative revenge situation, a rental home in Tacoma, Washington, was ransacked after an individual believed to be an evicted tenant posted an advertisement on Craigslist inviting people to take whatever they wanted from the unlocked house for free. As a result, people descended on the home and stripped it of everything right down to the electrical fixtures and kitchen sink.
Although I hate to be the one to recommend a new law, this may be one that Virginia legislators should consider proposing.
Jack E. Call, who is a professor of criminal justice at Radford University, has written another great overview of a recent Virginia Supreme Court decision. In the overview, entitled “
As a public service worker, you may not realize that you have an opportunity to build a nice tax deferred retirement nest egg. Many state and local employers offer their employees the opportunity to participate in 457 or 403(b) plans. These retirement savings plans are designed to help you build a healthy retirement. Most public employees are provided with a pension upon retirement but the pension is no where near the amount of your salary. A 457 or 403(b) plan that may be available to you through your employer can provide a healthy supplement to a pension.
PowerPoint’s AutoShapes feature enables you to insert items such as lines, connectors, basic shapes, arrows, flowcharts, stars and banners, callouts, and action buttons. You can draw almost any shape you need using the AutoShapes feature by simply clicking and dragging. You can also move, resize, and delete AutoShapes as you would clip art or other graphics. You can even change the colors, lines, and orientation of your AutoShape object.
I think that anyone who is in a position of command gets frustrated by the know-it-alls who make a habit of second guessing virtually everything they do. I have to admit that I have a lot of work to do in my effort to develop a more patient attitude toward these folks. Sometimes, (OK, quite often) I am not as politically correct in my responses as I could be. I guess that’s why I enjoyed the following quote that a friend recently sent to me. The e-mail was actually about a topic that was unrelated to the war in Iraq but the quote could have been taken from today’s newspaper.
During a recent town hall meeting with presidential candidate John Edwards, the folks who were in attendance were given the opportunity to ask questions.
I have written about free, open source software alternatives in past but I thought it might be time to bring up the topic again since Microsoft recently introduced Office 2007. Open source projects are cooperative efforts to develop a variety of software alternatives. The software is developed by highly qualified software engineers as a service to users and best of all the software is freely available for download.
I think I have uncovered one of those “facts of life” that you hear so much about. It seems that every time you have a birthday that ends with a zero, your body changes (usually not in a good way). The best description of this phenomenon I have every heard goes something like this, “I used to be able to stop exercising for a month and get back in shape in a week. Now, if I take a week off, it takes me a month to get back in shape!” I don’t know about you but I need all the help I can get to keep the weight off and keep my body in decent condition.
Every now and then you want a special font style to add just the right touch to a document, report or special project. Purchasing a commercial font program can be very expensive – and you know how I hate expensive. So what should you do? Turn to the internet like I always do.
My wife recently attended an art conference in New York and she took a bunch of digital photos using our Sony Cybershot camera. She was using a 128 MB memory stick but the camera has a little “bug” that will let you take more photos than the card had space for. Unfortunately, the “bug” part is once you exceed the available space, the pictures on the card are no longer available. That’s right, it deletes the pictures that are on the card. Sucks doesn’t it?
The older I get and the closer I get to retirement, the more concerned I have become about hanging on to my money. I have been working since I was sixteen so I have paid my share of taxes. However, I never really paid too much attention to what that money was being used for until recently. They say ignorance is bliss and that may be something to keep in mind if you want to keep your blood pressure in check.
Have you ever watched a streaming video on the net that you would have liked to capture for later use. Unfortunately, you can’t just save a streaming video like a normal file – until now. Keepvid uses the slogan “want it, keep it†and that’s what you can do. All you need to do is paste the URL of the video, clip or movie from a variety of video sites and save it on your local machine for viewing when ever you want.
On February 12, 2007, an 18 year old Salt Lake City resident entered the historic Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City around 6:44 P.M., armed with a handgun, a shotgun and several rounds of ammunition. He began shooting randomly at customers, ultimately killing five people and wounding four others before being killed by police.
Several years ago, when I worked for the Division of Forensic Science, we were responsible for a statewide police Breathalyzer operator certification program. During an internal review of operator performance, we realized that a higher than acceptable number of operators were not retaining sufficient job knowledge and technical skills. In an effort to correct this situation, we examined every facet of the program and instituted several changes to the training procedures.
