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Prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense.

They did so knowing that they were violating the law, and did so deliberately to influence the result of an election.

The election results, at the very least, deserve to be thrown out. This was despicable. Moreover, as far as Democrats, this was just business as usual.

Rape is illegal, yes. So a contract including something like that would indeed be void. Searching property, however, is not illegal.

Here is a small collection of sources that refutes your argument:

http://www.barronstad.com/res_044.htm:

Do private school students have the same rights? No. Public school officials are subject to Fourth Amendment limitations on searches because public schools are government entities and those officials are government employees. Because a private school is not a government entity, private school students have no constitutional protection against unreasonable searches by private school teachers or administrators.

http://www.courttv.com/archive/legalcafe/home/search/search_background.html

There is an important difference between public and private or parochial schools because the Constitution was written to protect individuals from actions by the government. Therefore, a search can violate the Constitution only if the person conducting it is acting "on behalf" of the government, and the Supreme Court has decided that public school officials are acting on behalf of the government when they search students' belongings. Private school faculty and administrators are not usually acting on behalf of the government and thus are not subject to constitutional prohibitions. They would thus be free to conduct a search any time they wanted to without violating the Constitution.

http://www.hklaw.com/id24660/PublicationId1691/ReturnId31/contentid47764/:

The Court held that neither the Fourth Amendment nor Article 14 apply to a search by private school officials, and, therefore, the search of the students and their hotel room was legally permissible. The Court stressed the importance of who was conducting the search. For the constitutional protections to apply, the search had to be conducted by agents of the state or federal government. The Court found that the school officials involved in the initial search and questioning of the students were not agents of the government.

Related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause

One of the main limitations in the Equal Protection Clause is that it limits only the powers of government bodies, and not the private parties on whom it confers equal protection.

Different Amendment, but still relevant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Cases:

Congress lacked the constitutional authority under the enforcement provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals and organizations, rather than state and local governments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_power_of_enforcement

The Court stated that since the Fourteenth Amendment only restricted state action, Congress lacked power under this amendment to forbid discrimination that was not sponsored by the state.

I remember when MSIE made the web, when they started putting it with the OS is when the internet started taking off.

MS created IE because the web was taking off without them. Netscape Navigator was supposedly $14.95, but IIRC the Beta's were free. MS didn't want to lose control of the desktop and was actively discouraging a the pre-installation of Netscape.

Until then, it was still a geeks paradise, Mom and pop's had to pay hundred's to be hooked up. Around that time, it was Click on MSIE, the computer would dial up, make an account, and you could use the internet.

What the heck are you talking about? MSN? MSN was created in response to CompuServe and AOL and morphed into an ISP in response to the already prevalent trend. There was nothing magical about it. I guess the bundling made it easier to get started, but all the pieces were in place and MS was actively fighting others trying to thread together the pieces. Again, this was created in response to the existing trend, not the cause. Existing ISPs were price competitive and covered the spectrum of AOL hand-holding to mom and pop ISPs.

Peoples hate of MS blinds them to the fact that they have done some hugely good things in the process to get to were they are.

The vision and momentum of the Internet came from outside of MS. If it weren't for efforts like Mosaic and Netscape, MS would not have created it. If it were not for efforts like Firefox, than the Internet would be IE only and we'd be stuck with IE 6 and ActiveX hell. I'm not saying that MS is evil, they are simply opportunistic (as they should be) and I don't feel like giving credit were credit is not due.

with Windows 95. Then they started acting like a monopoly.

Exhibit 1: "Government interest in Microsoft's affairs had begun in 1991 with an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission over whether Microsoft was abusing its monopoly on the PC operating system market. ... the Department of Justice opened its own investigation on August 21 of [1993], resulting in a settlement on July 15, 1994 in which Microsoft consented not to tie other Microsoft products to the sale of Windows ..." (timeline)

See MS Litigation page and Court TV Library for more details.

Another former competitor, approximately coëval with Windows 95, was BeOS. Microsoft settled an anti-competitive complaint brought by Be Inc. in 2002.

Windows 95 had barely been released when Sun launched complained of breach of contract followed by serious anti-competitive claims in 2002 regarding Microsoft's Java tactics.

This is not the legal record of an honest company. The leopard never changes its spots. Gates was a "sharp" businessman from the day he opened office. (Which is a polite way of saying, white collar criminal.)

This case notwithstanding, am I the only one who has a problem with judges who throw out jury verdicts? I've been a jurist on a couple of cases, one civil and one criminal. Nobody in there was stupid or took their duty lightly. I take offense that when something like this comes up, the jury is labeled as being "stupid". A lot of times we don't hear evidence that everyone else reading the paper does, because it's not allowed. That's not our fault--blame the system. Or the opposite, we hear things that the paper isn't going to include if it doesn't fit their slant on the case.

If the judge thought the lawyers were going beyond their scope, why didn't he: A) Throw the case out; or B) Make his ruling before the jury went to deliberate?

It seems to me these judges want the jury to do the dirty work and when they don't rule the way the judge would, the judge just throws it out and rules the way he wants. It insults the jury (and you wonder why people don't want to serve) and wastes their time. No better example could be seen in the mauling case of Diane Whipple. Although the jury found neighbor and lawyer Marjorie Knoller guilty (IMO, rightfully so) of 2nd degree murder, the judge struck it down to involuntary manslaughter which meant 4 years instead of a possible 15 years--she served only 2 before being paroled. (The jury verdict in this case may seem extreme, but if you saw the case or read it at the link above, you'll see why the jury reached that verdict.) Now--if that judge thought that second degree murder sentence was too harsh or there was not enough evidence to convict on that, he could have removed it from the choices the jury had before they went to deliberate. But, once again, we had a judge who hoped the jury would do his dirty work for him.

And regarding people who don't want to serve on trials: Personally, if I was a defendant I sure would NOT want people on the jury who REALLY don't want to be there.

Tell that to the Melendi family.

They're the good guys!

Bingo! As good an example of any is the DR-DOS debacle, the court filings of which may be found at http://www.courttv.com/archive/legaldocs/cyberlaw/ microsoft/msnsued.html. The point is that Microsoft lied to their customers, over-sold their own 'coming soon' versions of DOS, and built checks into Win 3.1 startup code to refuse to start over DR-DOS, even though their was no technical impediment to running Win 3.1 over DR-DOS.

And per-processor pricing was the real kicker - if you didn't sign into the multi-year per-processor license agreement, you couldn't get product and even if you could the dollars would kill you. It was brutal.

I've no doubt their are very competent, bright people doing good work at Microsoft; look at Mark Russinovich, who is a freakin' genius, and whose work has brought me much joy at critical moments when his tools saved my day.

But collectively, Microsoft is a predatory marketing machine that will kick the fsck'ing shit out of you without slowing down. I have, honestly, met members of the [insert internationally known motorcycle enthusiast/club here] who are interesting and intelligent, but get in a conflict with one of them and the whole club will stomp you, without a moment's hesitation before, nor any remorse after the fact.

And that's Microsoft business character. So if /. is a little corner of the world where Bill et al takes it on the chin, fairly and even unfairly, then that's okay with me.

Hint: there's this concept we have called 'innocent until proven guilty'.

"Innocent until proven guilty" establishes the ultimate burden of proof. It does not mean that the defendant can afford to leave significant questions unanswered.

For example:

[and borrowing a little from the Danielle Van Dam murder case}

The victim was your neighbor.

Thousands of images of child pornography and rape were found on your computer. Blood and hair from the missing girl were found in your R.V. Something about the size and shape of the child's head was smashed against the wall above your bed.

Where is the sleeping bag you bought at WalMart last week? What sudden impulse drove you to take a 200 mile run to nowhere out in the desert?

These are the kind of questions that left unanswered end in a verdict of "guilty as charged." Danielle Van Dam Murder Case

Hint: there's this concept we have called 'innocent until proven guilty'.

"Innocent until proven guilty" establishes the ultimate burden of proof. It does not mean that the defendant can afford to leave significant questions unanswered.

For example:

[and borrowing a little from the Danielle Van Dam murder case}

The victim was your neighbor.

Thousands of images of child pornography and rape were found on your computer. Blood and hair from the missing girl were found in your R.V. Something about the size and shape of the child's head was smashed against the wall above your bed.

Where is the sleeping bag you bought at WalMart last week? What sudden impulse drove you to take a 200 mile run to nowhere out in the desert?

These are the kind of questions that left unanswered end in a verdict of "guilty as charged." Danielle Van Dam Murder Case

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276372,00.html
http://www.courttv.com/trials/yates/

While most of us here can understand and sympathize with your situation, some folks first thought is that you "could be" another Mucko:

http://www.courttv.com/trials/mcdermott/keyplayers .html

While I doubt that's the case with you, some of the items you have mentioned could fit that profile in some folks mind. Since the we US folks are a-scared bunch, you probably wouldn't get a job. The number of publicized incidences of Mucko-style office carnage, or even what happened at Virginia tech, does have a lot of people on edge.

If you're a cop, you can have some marijuana and still get a way with it.
http://www.courttv.com/news/2007/0510/pot_ap.html

Yay monkeys! (My favorite news quote of 2002.)

Link

His actions had nothing to do with the religion of the people at Waco or Ruby Ridge. Read the letter and the interview afterwards. I think they explain his motivations very well. Read This book.

His association with white supremacist groups was because he identified with their anti government stance, money, and assistance.

There is no way they can blame games for this. Thompson is just trying bring as many cases as he can to civil trial and blame them on games, hoping that he can brainwash enough people who only hear the headline, "Violent Video Games Blamed for..." Cody Posey was a sick individual. He watch his mother die in a car accident at age 10 and was sexually and physically abused by his father and his step-mother. He probably would have been found been found innocent if he hadn't shot his step-sister so that she wouldn't tell on him and then try to hide the murder. In the end the courts found him guilty and charge him as a juvenile because, "There is evidence that the situational nature of the violence makes it less likely that the respondent will pose a future danger to the public." [courttv.com] Basically thecourt says the killings were a result of the abuse and that Cody was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Not a desire to kill ignited by video games.

I found this linked from that article
http://www.courttv.com/trials/posey/?link=yhlk

It's not just that shooting lawyers is illegal, it's that it doesn't work! Damn lawyers must be playing in God mode or something...

Mal-2

You have no idea what the case was about, do you? They were convicted of abusing their monopoly, and there were far more complaints than just the integrated (not just simply included) browser.

Whatever

Do some research into OS/2 to find out why Windows 3.1 was also bundled. So you mean to tell me that applications and drivers written for another operating system don't run well under OS/2! How enlightening. The reasons for this will become clear when you dig a little more into the origins of OS/2.

I'm sure that's exactly how it happened

Videogames are indirectly teaching young people "violent" behaviour?!?!?

The primary activity of the Army is train young people to kill. Give them lots of hard experience with and remove all reservations about killing.

Not to mention torture, nay, "interrogate".

http://www.goarmy.com/JobDetail.do?id=152
Human Intelligence Collector (97E)
Some of your duties as a Human Intelligence Collector may include:

Conducting debriefings and interrogations of HUMINT sources in English and -foreign languages-
Performing difficult interrogations

Do the millions of ex-military people suddenly forget all their violence when coming back home? Doesn't look like it.

http://www.courttv.com/news/2005/0210/armydoctor_a p.html
Army doctor who killed wife and daughters delays parole hearing

http://www.courttv.com/news/2005/0805/soldier_ap.h tml
A soldier who returned from Iraq nine days earlier apparently shot and killed his wife and then himself

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,89236, 00.html Army officials have recommended a court-martial for a Purple Heart recipient accused of stabbing his young wife 71 times with knives and a meat cleaver.

The Army is needs of lots of violent, nay, "energetic", young people to kill people overseas, nay, "defend america". They pay salaries, promise bonuses, honors, and train assassins.

http://www.goarmy.com/

And they have their own videogame - America's Army. http://www.americasarmy.com/

Videogames are indirectly teaching young people "violent" behaviour?!?!?

The primary activity of the Army is train young people to kill. Give them lots of hard experience with and remove all reservations about killing.

Not to mention torture, nay, "interrogate".

http://www.goarmy.com/JobDetail.do?id=152
Human Intelligence Collector (97E)
Some of your duties as a Human Intelligence Collector may include:

Conducting debriefings and interrogations of HUMINT sources in English and -foreign languages-
Performing difficult interrogations

Do the millions of ex-military people suddenly forget all their violence when coming back home? Doesn't look like it.

http://www.courttv.com/news/2005/0210/armydoctor_a p.html
Army doctor who killed wife and daughters delays parole hearing

http://www.courttv.com/news/2005/0805/soldier_ap.h tml
A soldier who returned from Iraq nine days earlier apparently shot and killed his wife and then himself

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,89236, 00.html Army officials have recommended a court-martial for a Purple Heart recipient accused of stabbing his young wife 71 times with knives and a meat cleaver.

The Army is needs of lots of violent, nay, "energetic", young people to kill people overseas, nay, "defend america". They pay salaries, promise bonuses, honors, and train assassins.

http://www.goarmy.com/

And they have their own videogame - America's Army. http://www.americasarmy.com/

Hey, they're online... though not exactly a respected unbiased news source, I'd be happy to read the article... don't suppose you remember the title? Still, you didn't answer my question ( and it wasn't rhetorical ), how easy do you think it should be for law enforcement to wiretap, search, or seize property ? What needs to be streamlined in FISA, and why didn't G.W. get that put into PATRIOT rather than potentially break the law with a secret program?

I don't have regular chats with foreign Al Qaeda agents! And that is what this program was targetted at.

The truth is, you don't know who this program was targeting. I could be targeting you, or democratic national party members, or anyone else, and nobody would know. Somehow, you don't see a problem with that? You trust the government that much? What did G.W. do to earn such trust?

I don't take phone calls from Al Queda ( or anyone overseas, actually ) now that you mention it... but I do care about freedom, and I do know that it's not just a slogan. It's worth dying for, though... when it's actually threatened. Right now, I'm afraid, Al Queda doesn't pose a threat to our freedom near as much as ( admittedly well-intentioned ) guys like you. Al Queda threatens the lives of some of our citizens- not our freedoms. I do think we can protect the lives of our citizens without forcing them to give up their freedoms.

Go ahead and ask me if our right to privacy is not worth the lives of a few thousand Americans; I think it is worth our lives, and from what you're saying, it's not. But I'm also thinking you believe privacy to have nothing to do with freedom... and that leaves me wondering what you think freedom is and how it comes to be...

Remember that procedural barriers designed to "protect civil liberties" absolutely prevented reading Zacarias Moussaoui's hard drive (according to http://www.courttv.com/trials/moussaoui/background .html , it was a FISA court that did so).

No, that was the fault of an incompetent investigator who thought they had a warrant which covered searches it did not cover, not the fault of "procedural barriers". But... was Moussaoui convicted, or not? Did not being able to use the information on his hard drive at trial stop him from being convicted ? Are you really trying to convince me that the FISA court stopped investigators from reading his hard drive? I'm pretty sure they just said it couldn't be used as evidence *in his trial*... let's not exaggerate the facts here. BTW, the link you posted is invalid.

When you put "civil liberties" in quotes like that... replace it instead with the word freedom and consider if that changes how you feel... because you really can't separate the two.

Your appeal to the memory of Nixon is as lame as the canonical use of Hitler or Naziism in internet debate.

No, it is directly on point. Do you want to give the executive branch the ability to tap anyone's phone, any time, for any reason? Answer that question before you acuse me so, please.

If your answer is not "yes, the government should be able to wiretap anyone, any time, and should be able to search anyone, any time, and should be able to seize any property, any time", then please elucidate what civil protections you do support. Remember, I asked, "how easy do you want it to be ?"... it wasn't a rehtorical question. Apparently FISA isn't easy enough. How easy should it be?

So what are you proposing? That we should end this program? How will that make you safer?

Has this program made anyone safer ? The program is *illegal*, it should never have been started, and those responsible should be *prosecuted* to the full extent of the law.

How would it stop evil Hillary or Tricky Dick of the future fr

I don't keep my sources in my pocket. I would suggest you check a recent issue of The Weekly Standard for details. There was an article in the last week or two by someone who used to have to get FISA warrants, and it details the actual, not theoretical, process that is involved.

Oh, and I have always considered it likely that the other side will gain the presidency. In this regard, my main concern is that, like under Clinton the First, they will put too many obstacles in the way of surveillance, or they will fail to appreciate the gravity of the threat from our enemies.

Regarding whether surveillance would have prevented 9-11, the answer depends on how competent the people who got the information were. Remember that procedural barriers designed to "protect civil liberties" absolutely prevented reading Zacarias Moussaoui's hard drive (according to http://www.courttv.com/trials/moussaoui/background .html , it was a FISA court that did so). Read the article I just mentioned and notice the other clues that could have been obtained.

Furthermore, if you knew anything about war fighting (or counterintelligence), you would understand that there are no absolutes. You fight with what you have, and you erect what barriers you can against the enemy. To expect those barriers to be perfect is utter folly. Likewise, to argue that since they aren't perfect, we shouldn't erect them is silly. Those barriers have to be consistent with the level of threat and the cost (including the cost to civil liberties). I am simply weighing those costs differently. I recognize that privacy has always been violated by our government, and there are really very few instances of abuse - especially of people who really were innocent. Just as war cannot be fought without casualties, surveillance measures cannot be erected without mistakes and perhaps some level of abuse. That is simply not an excuse to not do so.

As for your utterly unsupported assertion that the NSA and CIA are only competent at domestic surveillance, all I can say is: you have really got to be kidding. The CIA is certainly not the most competent organization, although we don't really know about the NSA (and we really *shouldn't* know).

Yes, surveillance could have prevented 9-11, and probably would have. It *might* have gotten enough information to show the depth of the plot, and it was clear just from the Moussaoui arrest that the target was commercial aircraft. There are a number of informational threds tying him to others involved in the plot.

As for the big brother stuff, I don't particularly like the idea of Big Brother listening in on my calls, but then I don't have regular chats with foreign Al Qaeda agents! And that is what this program was targetted at.

Furthermore, don't forget that Congress was overseeing this activity from the time it started.

And yes, I think we will eventually discover, at the cost of many lives, that we do indeed have too many of certain civil liberties - specifically privacy, to adequately defend ourselves in a war we did not declare.

Let me ask you: do you truly believe that Al Qaeda and friends, and the state sponsors who cooperate with them, are not planning on causing grievous damage to America, causing much death and economic damage? Do you really want us to avoid what are reasonable (and long established) measures to attempt to stop them?

Or are you one of those who seems to believe that our privacy rights are so gosh darned important that we should simply let the terrorists do whatever they want once they get into our country?

In other words, do you think we are at war or not?

Just as happened with the Vietnam War, our enemies are counting on many people in the US to weaken us. It worked for the North Vietnamese, and it may very well work for Al Qaeda (not to mention nuclear Iran, etc).

Attempting to have some degree of balance between civil liberties absolutism, and a total

I was more interested in a story that recently appeared on CourtTV's Forensic Files. It was about the first known (at least what they claim as such) forensic analysis of computer disks that had been cut (with pinking shears).

From their website:

"Shear" Luck"

When the wife of an Air Force Sergeant is found dead on a Philippines air base, investigators are baffled. With no leads and no new suspects, they are forced to re-examine the man they suspected all along. Using a pioneering technique in computer forensics, authorities are able put together the pieces of a chilling puzzle. TV-14 V

Basically they used "post-it-note" like glued Scotch tape to piece the 5 1/4" floppy back and read it. What they originally believed would take 1+ million dollars to do ended up costing less than $150 -- $50 of which was a blown/tossed floppy drive head due to a poorly reconsructed disk.

Needless to say Tivo has been nabbing every one of these episodes and I'm hopelessly hooked.

It shoudln't suprise you. It's the same reason the police officers drive around in very obvioulsy marked cars while on patrol. (Except for undercover cars of course, but they are doing a different type of work) While driving for instance, when you see a policeman pull up behind your car the first thing that comes to my mind at least is some form of "am I doing anything wrong at this point in time?" and that's kind of the effect they're after. They want you to know they are there and patroling hopefully keeping you from doing something you shouldn't because you just saw a cop.

I think the same thing goes for a Casino owner. The more that you know about the measures they are using to keep you away, the more likely you are not to try to cheat in the first place. There is also a show on TV currently on Court TV called The Takedown. It's a team of prior casino cheats and thieves that are now hired to go and test the security in casinos by beating them at their game. Interesting show, even more interesting concepts.

It shoudln't suprise you. It's the same reason the police officers drive around in very obvioulsy marked cars while on patrol. (Except for undercover cars of course, but they are doing a different type of work) While driving for instance, when you see a policeman pull up behind your car the first thing that comes to my mind at least is some form of "am I doing anything wrong at this point in time?" and that's kind of the effect they're after. They want you to know they are there and patroling hopefully keeping you from doing something you shouldn't because you just saw a cop.

I think the same thing goes for a Casino owner. The more that you know about the measures they are using to keep you away, the more likely you are not to try to cheat in the first place. There is also a show on TV currently on Court TV called The Takedown. It's a team of prior casino cheats and thieves that are now hired to go and test the security in casinos by beating them at their game. Interesting show, even more interesting concepts.

You might want to look at http://reactor-core.org/in-microsoft-we-trust.html It's obviously constructed out of bias, but presents factual information.
Here's the per-processor announcement for the OS, http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/Pre_96/July94/94387.tx t.html as you can see it's 1994. This antitrust investigation was started by the FTC in 1990.
http://www.courttv.com/archive/legaldocs/cyberlaw/ microsoft/state_suit.html section 11 details the case against Microsoft's bundling of Office.
NOTE: I never said Microsoft Office overtook Lotus and Wordperfect unfairly (although there has been comment on Microsoft using hidden APIs in their Office software to their advantage). Liebowitz's analysis is true in this respect. Microsoft just unfairly closed the market once they overtook the competition.

Really? Thats one of those things people say a lot, but which is clearly not true. I can think of plenty of instances where publicity has been a bad thing.

They would send out the same catalog to the same address but would have different prices for the same items depending on how much you had previously bought or were male or female. People began to figure this out and complained.

Link 1 about this issue and another link from a 1998 Forbes article on the issue of price discrimination.

For a more in-depth look at price discrimination, see this link which is a muli-page essay from the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology from 2001.

There's a term called "informed consent". Even if a child gives their consent, the developmental stage of the child prevents them from fully understanding what it means to give consent and thus negates any consent they may give, even if it's given quite willingly.

Have you ever spent time relating to a nine-year-old child? They dont know what the hell they're doing. If they did, we'd let them vote, drink and buy property, as well as give their consent to engage in sexual activity. But they don't. Thats why we love them and protect them instead of subjecting them to situations that will give them nightmares as their lives progress.

Now I agree with you and the intentions of the law against statutory rape (which is what covers informed consent) and the like. Now I don't believe that something magical happens on someone's 18th birthday in the US or 16th birthday in the UK. The maturity required to give informed consent is gradual, and occurs at different times for different people. But the law requires an age to be set, so it quasi-arbitrarily sets an age. The fact that different countries draw the line at different places, but in roughly the same age range is a testament to the well-natured, but arbitrariness of any law drawing line between when someone is mature enough to make adult decisions, and when they are not.

Now here's where the fun begins.

In the United States we had a juvenile justice system. When a minor committed a crime, they were tried under a juvenile justice system. The idea was that kids aren't mature enough to make decisions, and as you said "Don't know what the hell they're doing." Also the kids are still young, so society can still "fix" them before they become an adult. Sentences were much lighter in the juvenile system, since society was dealing with kids and not adults. Another key component of the juvenile system was that all records were sealed on a kid-criminal's 18th birthday. The idea is that someone shouldn't be stigmatized and punished their entire lives for something they did when they were 12.

Then in the 80s, conservatives began to complain that the juvenile justice system was joke, and let repeat offenders out into society too early, and the sealed records harmed society and police. So under the guise of "We're only going to apply this to the hardest of the hard. We're only going to apply this to those that are almost 18," laws were passed that allowed kid defendents to be "tried as an adult". Upon conviction, these minors would be given adult prison sentences in adult jail. Society was scared of 16-17 year old black gang banging crack dealers, so the law was changed.

After the law was changed, the "adult trials" were few and far between. Were they in and out of juvenile hall most of their short lives? Yeah. Was it likely they were going to commit another crime in the future? Yeah. Did the defendents know what they were doing? Eh....maybe. They were going to be 18 in a year anyway. So society didn't have much qualms about trying these minors as adults.

Over the years since, society has pretty much gutted the juvenile justice system. Lots of kids are now being tried as adults. Lots of kids who never before committed a crime are being tried as adults. 10-12 year old kids are being tried as adults. In some states, kids can even be executed.

Right now there's a case being tried in Florida where a boy killed his grandparents when he was 12. He's now 15. If convicted, he will spend the rest of his life in jail. By all accounts, this kids was pretty messed up when he was 12. The kid was on Zoloft, for crying out loud. (I can't imagine how messed up he is now after being in police custody for 3 years.) The prosecution has been saying the 12 year old knew what he was doing, and killed his grandparents in cold blood. Furthermore, he knew it was wrong, and tha

The history here is very instructive. When we first included browser capabilities in Windows they did not get much use. Netscape continued to have over 80% share and there was no pressure on its price. Only when our browser won the overwhelming majority of all reviews did our share move up and Netscape have to come back down to a competitive price. It took a great deal of innovative work for us to not only catch up but move ahead in the browser business and we can be very proud of our contributions on behalf of consumers.

From Bill Gates' memo to his executive staff on the AOL/Netscape merger
http://www.courttv.com/archive/trials/microsoft/le galdocs/120198_gates.html/

Time to get back to work.

If you read the whole memo, you'll see that the "competitive price" is zero.

IMDB doesn't mention a lot of things.

I think Tim McVeigh has prior art on the idea - Facts about Tim McVeigh

15. McVeigh once lied to some neighbors of Terry Nichols and told them the Army had implanted a computer chip in his butt.

Of course he's dead, so it might be in the public domain now : )

you too can make it big, buy that pool you wanted for your second home, fill up that hummer hourly !

YOU TOO CAN MAKE MONEY FROM HOME

INVEST IN YOUR FUTURE !

The thing about American Justice though... it's based on money. If an individual kills someone, and everybody realizes it, but they have a ton of money, they might have a shot at convincing a judge and jury to let them get away with it.

It's much more complicated. The OJ Simpson's trial is an example of the fundamental flaw of what was considered 600 years ago a great advancement of the Magna Charta - the trial by jury. The problem is that most people are biased in one way or another and they usually have their opinion ready prior to seeing the evidence (and then they believe only that part of the evidence that supports their a priori judgement). The art of fooling the American Justice is not the art of convincing the jury, it's the art of selecting the jurors that are already convinced. It's brilliantly descripted in the John Grisham's novel "Runaway jury" (adapted to a great movie with Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman). If you prefer a more scholar approach, here's a scholar analysis of the OJ Simpson jury.

I'm not accusing anyone of being biased - I can't cast the first stone, I'm not sure how would I behave during a trial of an Apple employee who killed a Microsoft employee. I might tend to believe him he was acting on self defense just because I have better feelings towards him. Actually, the OJ Simpson trial was only the most famous case of the jury bias, but definitely not the first one - and certainly not the last one. It wasn't important if Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty or not, the jury just didn't like all of them, the foreign anarchist scum.

So the real question is not exactly about the money - it's the question if the trial by jury is really such a good idea after all?

It's not all THAT bad.
It's not like there are other useless channels out there.

Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you have to worry about proving that if you are accused of wrongdoing. It will take your time and energy and considerable amounts of money to prove that.

Even if you are cleared of the charge, you may never recover your reputation. If you are lucky, you end up like Richard Jewell. If you're not lucky, you end up like Fatty Arbuckle.

Any why is racial profiling bad when it comes to terrorism? It would be intellectual dishonest at best and complete idiocy at worst to suggest that there isn't a pattern as to what types of people are more likely to be terrorists.

Better round up all those White Christians before they do it again!

When it comes to cruelty, violence, and stupidity, there is no single race or nationality that can claim dominance. All cultures and ethnic groups have committed these sins against whatever convenient enemy at various times throughout history for whater reason presented itself. I doubt that creating a scapegoat, whether it be an individual or a race, does anything but begin the next cycle of violence.

Shooting Lawyers appears to be really popular lately...

Damn, forgot the article. Me smart.

/* DISCLAIMER

This is not legal advice. You are not a client. I'm not even an attorney. If you want legal advice, contact an attorney. What I am saying here is probably 100% wrong and if you do anything based on it, you are a flaming idiot who deserves whatever bad shit is very likely to befall you.

DISCLAIMER */

Arrite, now that that's outta the way . . .

File sharing IS a crime under the No Electronic Theft ("NET") Act if the material infringed has a retail value of greater than $1,000. Read it - if you're convicted, the court will order your computer destroyed AND order you trotted off to chokey.

The poster is correct that Canada and the US have an extradition treaty. However, as evidenced by the recent abortion killer case, extradition treaties are not absolute. France only agreed to give him up on the condition that the US would not seek the death penalty against him.

For me, a hometown example of this is a contemptible piece of human garbage named Martin Pang. This guy torched his family's frozen food warehouse so he could collect the insurance money, resulting in the deaths of four firefighters. Brazil refused to extradite him unless we agreed to not charge him with murder. (Under Washington's felony murder rule, if someone gets killed during the course of a felony, you go down for murder one.)

Bum deal, huh? Well, not always. Especially during the Cold War, the US and other civilized countries regularly refused to extradite people back to their communist shitpiles^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H countries who were wanted for political "crimes" on the grounds that those were not extraditable offenses. So, it works both ways.

The point is, I'm sure that if someone were charged with a file-trading related crime in America and fled to Canada, the latter would take the position that file trading-related "crimes" are not extraditable offenses. They did so with the Vietnam war draft dodgers - Canada took the position that crimes related to avoidance of military service were not extraditable. In fact, if it's not a crime in Canada, the odds are that they would not extradite.

Hope this clears up any confusion. But read the disclaimer above carefully before you do anything. Plus, I haven't read the extradition treaty, so I could be wrong and it could be an extraditable offense.

And certainly not someone like winona ryder would need to steal.

It will be interesting to see if any lawyers are disbarred or fined for even bringing this argument to court.

Time to call my cable company and get Court TV switched on. This ought to be the funniest of the reality shows on the TV when it gets under way. I really hope we get some live TV coverage of this thing.

Er, if you make a habit of bragging on the net about what sluts the girls you used to date are, doesn't it make it a little difficult to get a date?

Well, when you consider the fact that letters from female admirers are apparently pouring in for probable wife-and-unborn-son-murderer Scott Peterson*, I sincerely doubt that Tucker Max merely bragging online about babes he bagged will keep him from finding more willing women.

*The only conclusion that I can draw from this fact is that women are complete fucking idiots. I can kinda see Tyson and O.J. still being able to get dates, because they had fame before what they did. But this Peterson dude is a nobody who offed his pregnant wife, and women are lining up to spread their legs for him.

You mean like this rich, white dentist who just got 20 years?

It's really wonderful to know that the system mostly works.

The problem is it doesn't always work that way. Don't forget Cointelpro, and more recently the Ramparts case in LA and the Riders case in Oakland. As if to disprove that wide-spread, systematic abuse was part of the past, the DOJ brought us their post 9/11 roundup policy.

Getting a warrant is trivial. It is not an impediment to law enforcement and represents only the most inconsequential of protections (no wiretap request was turned down last year). What it does provide is a paper trail a tiny bit of oversight, and that means some recourse for the Abner Louima's of the world, and possibly a moment of reflection for the cops to question their own actions, even if the judge really isn't likely to.

It's right to help law enforcement in their legitimate business, but it's not up to a private company to determine legitimacy, it's up to the courts. That everyone has the right (I think still) to refuse to cooperate without a warrant is our only fig leaf; dropping it voluntarily just encourages abuse. We all owe it to our police forces to make it harder for the bad apples to ruin things for the good cops.

Hopefully some bad cop somewhere will misuse this policy of eBay's and the injured party will file a massive lawsuit against eBay for aiding and abetting the crime and collect a meaningful punitive reward. Probably not, but we can hope. In the mean time, eBay makes it easy for anyone who wants a few credit card numbers to pay their bills.

Genious! Then somebody like David Westerfield can opt to represent himself in court and spend $0 on defense. The investigation itself would break the prosecutor's spending ceiling and the child rapist/murderer will go home free! Although your motivations are good, the implementation still needs work.

of course, you could always just sue Pepsi if you want a Harrier.

Your cell phone already does this to within 5-10 mi (soon to be several feet with E911). It's a transmitter that has to announce its presence to the nearest cell. It's real, it's happening now and it's all logged in your permanent record. Already been used in the Westerfield trial. It might be for a murder trial now, but what next? Traffic tickets?

Several states, including Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, have controversial laws that allow persons to use deadly force to protect property against unwanted intruders (whether or not the property owner is confronted with deadly force). These are also known informally as "make my day" laws.