The way I explain it is to say that, contrary to all movies on the topic, computers can lie. Here is what I say:
Computer do exactly what they're supposed to do, and if they're supposed to lie about who won an election, they will. We have no idea how the manufacturer, or anyone with physical access to the machine, may have rigged the election.
Most of the people are convinced at this point.
Some are more knowledgable and ask things like 'Don't they check each machine and certify the code?'
Although they check the code, 'this check' consists people carefully looking at the code the computer is supposed to be running.
Which is fine, but then they just ask the computer if that's the code they're running. Which, obviously, the computer can lie about.
There are programs called rootkits, and their entire purpose is to lie during system checks, to present one set of files to be 'checked' and another set to actually run. This is how many viruses operate, presenting one set of files, without the virus, to the virus scanner, and actually executing another set with the virus.It would be easy enough to activate such a program on voting machines, and it would be undetectable without removing the hard drive to scan it in another machine.
Furthermore, remember those cards you carry to the voting machine? Anyone, before the election, could have used them to get such a rootkit onto the machine. Behind that pretty voting application is a standard Windows machine that can run all sorts of rootkits, and the code to write your own rootkit is readily available.
And all computer scientists understand this, that it is in fact a fundamental concept of computer security that there is no way to stop a computer from lying, even to itself. Computer programmers have cracked all the security protocols set up to keep us from copying CDs and DVD and satellite signals, and voting machine security is much much crappier.
I think this gets the point across without being too technically inaccurate.
I'm with the 'remove them' crowd. It seems to be an absurd amount of work for something that does not actually appear to affect anything except sundials.
More to the point, it appears to average out, so we could be inserting them just to have to remove them a decade later.
I think, policywise, we should wait until we're 10 second ahead or behind, and then insert or remove them every year for a decade straight, which at least is less work setting up and removing.
If we wait long enough, and three or four decades are probably long enough now, almost everything will be hooked into automated time-synchronization systems anyway, and it honestly won't matter.
'Contempt of court' is limited to doing something the court said not, or violating the basic rules within the court. They can't get you for things that happen before the court gives you instructions. (This is including instructions to simply show up in court.)
As for 'destruction of evidence', there is no law against destroying whatever property of yours you want, or rigging that destruction to happen whenever you want. (Within the bounds of basic safety, of course.) It would be illegal to do that after the police arrest you, or when they tell you to stop...which is why you rig it up beforehand.
Granted, if the police show up with a warrant and present it to you, or if you even know they are there, and you let them trip it, a case can be made you allowed evidence to be destroyed if you didn't attempt to stop them, so do that...but you can't magically know that they're about to pull a surprise raid on you.
This is why I didn't suggest putting the system on a timer where you have to enter a deadman's code, or a screen-lock with a timed erase. If there's any way you can stop what is happening after you know the police have a warrant, you will, indeed, be found guilty of destruction of evidence if you fail to do that.
So do not give yourself that option. Yeah, getting a CD from someone else is a pain in the ass, but failing to inform the police that someone else has evidence that can be used to convict you is certainly covered by the fifth amendment.
Destroying 'evidence' before the police inform you you're under investigation is not illegal. I know people think it is, but it isn't. This is because it is not evidence until then.
The Gutmman method has been disclaimed by Gutmann as needed on modern drives.
Which is the damn point the article is trying to make: There is not a single shred of evidence that anyone has ever recovered data on a hard drive overwritten once with zeros.
No one saying they're scams, you tool. Plenty of people successfully use them every day. Some are people who don't know how to image a drive and search for data on it, but, hey, not everyone is a computer expert and piecing together files does take time and tools. And some people who had a drive physically fail, and even geeks will admit that's a very valuable service to be able to swap out drive motors and controllers.
Granted, most computer geeks think they're overpriced, but most computer geeks think all computer services are overpriced. (This is because geeks forget about profit and overhead and location costs and advertising and liability and all sorts of junk.)
No, this guy is saying that the idea they can recover overwritten data is just wrong. That no one can, in fact, recover data that was overwritten just once.
He is not alone in this theory. There are a lot of security experts who believe it, and the guy whose original paper started that idea that drives should be overwritten 35 times has explicitly stated he was, as the paper said, talking about old MFM drives, not modern drives.
The contest is stupid, but the argument is sound: There is absolute no evidence, despite what everyone asserts, that data overwritten from a drive can be recovered.
The theory is that overwriting data isn't total. But, even in the ideal universe, which is a drive that starts out totally zero, gets some data written on it, and then zerod again, no one has demonstrated you can read 'the leaks' of the data, the non-overwritten portions, and recover anything.
For drives that have been in use for a while, where, presumably, all locations have had 'data leaks' on them, no one has even come up with a plausible method to distinguish the 'last' leak from the dozens or more of overwrites, or link one bit with another bit.
All that it would seem to be possible to say is that 'This bit has been, at various times, a one and a zero, and the same with this bit, and this one, and this one has apparently never been a one, but this one was both, etc.', which is not 'data recovery' and is easily foiled by overwriting the entire drive with 10101010 and 01010101 before starting to use it.
And, because of the way drives store data, even if a '1' was never written to a specific bit, you don't know that bit was one. A '0' on a disk means not to flip the output stream, and a '1' means to flip it. So 11010110 does not mean 11010110, it means flip flip stay flip stay flip flip stay, or, starting with 0, it means 10011011. So all you know, if a bit was never '1', that it was always the same as the previous bit, which is rather useless if you don't know what that bit was.
That's complicated, but the end result is that you have to recover bytes from one end. You can learn the first 3 bits, or the first 7, but you can't learn the last 7. Which means a probability analysis of each bit is spectacularly useless.
Of course, TrueCrypt has a hotkey for dismounting all volumes (or you can just hit the power button for start an emergency shut-down in Windows) and it's hard to see how anyone storming your house could do it fast enough to prevent you pressing one key.
That will get you in all sorts of legal trouble. The second you know it's the police, any sort of tampering is 'interfering in an investigation' and itself a crime.
However, you can use the fact the police have started carrying out 'no knock' raids against them. The power switch in modern computers is just a low voltage button, and you can easily splice in another cord and run that to wherever you want. Such as a button that gets clicked whenever the front door opens all the way.
It's not your fault that they pushed the button when they slammed open the door. If they had just asked you would have left your computer as-is, like you are required by law, but they stormed in and triggered the power saving switch you'd rigged up to shut down your computer as you went out the front door.
Right. The trick isn't to hide information, the trick is to hide information within the bounds of the law.
My theory: What you should do is overwrite the encrypted header on bootup, and rewrite it before shutting down. (Obviously, you'll need a UPS and a non-crashy OS.)
Then leave your computer on all the time, and rig up a tripwire on the door that cold powers it off. Or, even better, one that fries the memory.
Tada. Now you cannot decrypt the drive for the police. (To make sure you can prove this, be sure to overwrite the header with a specific string like 'DEADBEEF' or just all zeros, instead of random information they can claim is a real header.)
Just in case that happens accidentally, or your OS crashes, make a backup header CD and give it to someone else. You're still clear, because they can't make you tell who you gave it to, or that you have a backup at all, as that is clearly a Fifth amendment violation. (As opposed to making you tell the decryption key, which is not. At least, not legally, although it should be.)
Explain all this to the police the moment they break in. And tell them your password.
For all those who think this is somehow immoral, the decision that encryption keys are not protected by the fifth amendment is wrong and unconstitutional. My method would just restore them to where they should be. (The fact it can be turned into a fifth amendment issue is pretty clear evidence it was to start with.)
Alternately, you can just try hiding that CD instead of giving it to someone else. Legally, the police cannot make you tell them the location of things. For more fun, hide it outside of any logical scope of a warrant.
The problem isn't that laws against spam are not tough enough. As you correctly point out, almost all spammers could be arrested on things besides antispam laws.
As for enforcement, with the resources of random people, spammers may be hard to track down, but with the resources of law enforcement, they are laughable easy. Seriously. It's like hiding evidence of criminal activity in a safe in your house. Yeah, it's hard for a random person to get that stuff, but how long, exactly, do you think that would stand up to a warrant?
The problem is that the Federal government castrated state antispam laws, and then doesn't bother enforcing the ones at Federal level. It is purely a political issue.
I love how 'fire violations' turned into 'gross fire violations' in your mind. They were not, in fact, 'gross' violations.
First of all, no, you aren't supposed to check buildings for fire code violations. That is, in fact, the job of the inspectors. Who had checked the building on the regular schedule and determined it was just fine.
The law includes that possibility to avoid several ways of people not being responsible for their actions. Otherwise, thugs like those could just rent the building using cash and a fake name and just go home with impunity after being questioned by the cops.
You are a complete moron, you realize that, right? Yes, people could rent buildings with fake names, but the problem is that people who rent buildings that have been inspected by fire marshals and determined to be within code should not be responsible at all if the building is not, in fact, within code.
It's not a matter of possibly 'escaping punishment', it's a matter of fact they shouldn't be punished. The owner of the building should be.
Actually, he shouldn't be. People who rent property have a requirement to make sure their building is within code. The government said it was within code. If it changes its mind, it actually is required to either wait until the next inspection or inform him.
The only time they can barge in like this and remove people (let's not even talk about the arrest, just simply removing people), is when a building has become dangerous due to being overcapacity. Which this one was not.
These people weren't just shoppers. They were USING the building for THEIR purposes. So violations are also their responsibility.
Hey, dumbass. People shopping are also using the building for their own purpose.
I like how you're talking about 'official activity', like this is some corporation and the people arrested were all officers. This was not a corporation, this was an organization with some volunteers. Members of an organization, as opposed to officers, are no more responsible for criminal behavior they don't know about on the part of the organization than cashiers are responsible for a company buying old meat and relabeling it.
However, you're rather explicitly wrong anyway. Several of the people who were arrested were simply visiting. Some of them were, in fact, outside.
And, about the the fire violation arrest: if you don't want to get arrested for fire violations, don't violate the building codes. It's pretty easy.
Hey, moron. They didn't violate the building codes. They rented a building that the cops claim is in violation of the fire code, which mysteriously means they can arrest everyone in the building.
I can't even imagine how that works. Maybe I can see some misapplication of the law that lets them arrest the people who rented the building, but being physically located in it? How are you supposed to check for fire code violations without entering the building?
You've just argued that it's illegal to be in a specific place that it is impossible to know beforehand. That is, for example, illegal to shop in Walmart because Walmart has, in a back area that is offlimits to shoppers, paint stored next to gasoline.
You are truly an idiot.
Oh, and the cops also broke down the front door to a private residence, arrested everyone in it, and then attempted to have the building condemned that same day because it didn't have a front door. Probably because no one had repaired it because they were all in jail.
It's worth pointing out that these 'fire code violations' are in buildings they rented.
It's also worth pointing out they rented buildings because in New York the police arrested them in the street, even when they were meeting in areas like public parks.
If there are actual violations, the correct people to arrest would be the people who rented unsafe buildings, not the victims who were rented them.
Even if, under some logical contortions, you can arrest people for renting a building with fire code violations...you can't arrest people who just happen to be inside that building. There are only one or two people who rented the building.
In a juxtaposition that is becoming familiar in Denver, two worlds seemly unconnected are living side-by-side, only streets apart â" the polished Democratic showcase and the simultaneous protests in the parks and streets where the voices of ordinary people remain unheard by the Democratic dynasty.
Oh, how horrible for the DNC protesters...no one paid them any attention.
It wasn't a troll-protest. The Iraq Veterans Against the War are somewhat...stupid...in protesting that the one person who's pleaded to withdraw troops has a plan that 'takes too long', but they're a legit group. Although, frankly, they'd be better off protesting anyone but Obama, like the Democratic Congress.
I love the fact some of the guns were later 'taken from suspects' so they know they're back on the streets.
Man, if I were one of those suspects, I'd be asserting that the gun wasn't taken from me at all, and that the guns are not, in fact, on the streets at all. But rather some of the police stole them to plant on people.
Exactly. Salon's no friend of the Democrats. They're where I learned that a reporter was arrested for apparently taking pictures of Democratic politicians and businessmen coming out of a hotel together.
Which is, of course, a horrible abuse of power.
Along with a few other petty abuses of power, like arrests of protesters that were blocking a road, along with plenty of them that weren't. OTOH, they appears to treat other protesters with respect, so it appears to be a case of police tight-assery.
That doesn't begin to compare to what happened in Minnesota, where there was orchestrated preemptive raids of rented warehouses and houses, citing them for magically disappearing 'fire code violations' and people being imprisoned until, apparently, Wednesday with no charges, at which point I'm sure they'll all just be quietly released. With Federal involvement.
It's one thing for the police to get out of hand a protest, and start arresting random people at the first sign of any lawbreaking. It's not a good thing, and the police should be punished for their behavior, but it's not even in the same class as 'Hello, we're federal agents, and we've decided to impound all your stuff and throw you in jail because you're planning to protest later.'.
Completely forgetting that Abe Lincoln was a Republican and the southern Democrats were all pro slavery once...
And the Republican party completely forgets, even though it's within living memory, where those southern Democrats ended up.
The Democrats used to be racist. They rejected that, and half the damn party left...for the Republicans. You still have currently elected officials who left the Democratic party for the Republicans because the Democrats stopped the racism.
Of course, the real problem is why we have tied so much personal information to a single government-issued number...perhaps because it's the only nationally unique identification number issued by the Federal government...
That's not the real problem. The real problem arrives with the assumption that knowing the number is proof of identity.
I wonder whether "identity theft" is not just an utterly brilliant public relations tactic used by the credit card companies to deflect responsibility away from themselves.
Don't just wonder about it. Refuse to use the term, like I do.
The correct term is fraud, and the victim is the business that got defrauded.
These businesses use the term 'identify theft' so their reaction to their own defrauding, which 'blame some random person who has nothing to do with it', isn't recognized as the criminal action it is. But the injury to 'victims' isn't coming from the person who committed the fraud. People whose identities are 'stolen' are not the victims of identity thieves. They're the victims of the victims of identity thieves.
People who have had their 'identity stolen' need a good lawyer to sue the ass off everyone who, when they got defrauded, didn't immediately fix the issue. It is in no way your responsibility that other individuals and businesses do not have stricter checking of identity, and you should be able to sue that business for every second of time and money their lax policies cost you in cleaning it up.
They can, of course, then sue to recover that money from the person who defrauded them, but that's not relevant to the 'identity theft' 'victim'.
If someone steals my car, I do not have the right to steal your car. Even if the person stealing my car used your name to do so. Even if I'm clever enough to invent the term 'indirect car thief' for the original thief, and 'indirect car thief victim' for you, and hope that no one catches on that he didn't steal your car, I did.
It was about STEEL structured buildings. If you can come up with a valid counterexample to THAT, then I will admit I am wrong and go away.
The steel structure of the building collapsed where the fire was. That demonstrates that fire can, in fact, buckle steel to the point it no longer supports anything. Unless you've got some evidence that people went around with blowtorches taking it apart, you have have to admit that the steel frame did fall down solely due to fire. Ergo, steel buckles in a fire.
That example is even more spectacular because it's not like the steel was holding that much up. It's entirely possible the steel actually melted to get it to do that.
In fact, it is even likely that weaker steel was used because the structure relied on its concrete core.
The amount of carbon used in carbon steel framing does slightly affect the plastic deformation point, but not to any useful extent. And it would make it weaker normally, so actually you're do it the other way around...put the stronger-normally but weaker-in-a-fire steel in the entirely steel building. It's entirely possible that the WTC's steel framework was weaker, when in a raging fire, than that building's was.
You know, I think anyone reading this knows the truth.
I repeat: Steel buckles in normal fires. It doesn't take a physics degree to figure this out. Fires regularly burn at around 1000 C. Steel deforms at about 600 C, depending on how it's made. Hell, it melts at 1400 C, and there are substances in buildings that can burn that hot.
Anyone who asserts this does not happen is a moron. It's not some magical physics idea that has just shown up.
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The way I explain it is to say that, contrary to all movies on the topic, computers can lie. Here is what I say:
Computer do exactly what they're supposed to do, and if they're supposed to lie about who won an election, they will. We have no idea how the manufacturer, or anyone with physical access to the machine, may have rigged the election.
Most of the people are convinced at this point. Some are more knowledgable and ask things like 'Don't they check each machine and certify the code?'
Although they check the code, 'this check' consists people carefully looking at the code the computer is supposed to be running.
Which is fine, but then they just ask the computer if that's the code they're running. Which, obviously, the computer can lie about.
There are programs called rootkits, and their entire purpose is to lie during system checks, to present one set of files to be 'checked' and another set to actually run. This is how many viruses operate, presenting one set of files, without the virus, to the virus scanner, and actually executing another set with the virus. It would be easy enough to activate such a program on voting machines, and it would be undetectable without removing the hard drive to scan it in another machine.
Furthermore, remember those cards you carry to the voting machine? Anyone, before the election, could have used them to get such a rootkit onto the machine. Behind that pretty voting application is a standard Windows machine that can run all sorts of rootkits, and the code to write your own rootkit is readily available.
And all computer scientists understand this, that it is in fact a fundamental concept of computer security that there is no way to stop a computer from lying, even to itself. Computer programmers have cracked all the security protocols set up to keep us from copying CDs and DVD and satellite signals, and voting machine security is much much crappier.
I think this gets the point across without being too technically inaccurate.
I'm with the 'remove them' crowd. It seems to be an absurd amount of work for something that does not actually appear to affect anything except sundials.
More to the point, it appears to average out, so we could be inserting them just to have to remove them a decade later.
I think, policywise, we should wait until we're 10 second ahead or behind, and then insert or remove them every year for a decade straight, which at least is less work setting up and removing.
If we wait long enough, and three or four decades are probably long enough now, almost everything will be hooked into automated time-synchronization systems anyway, and it honestly won't matter.
'Contempt of court' is limited to doing something the court said not, or violating the basic rules within the court. They can't get you for things that happen before the court gives you instructions. (This is including instructions to simply show up in court.)
As for 'destruction of evidence', there is no law against destroying whatever property of yours you want, or rigging that destruction to happen whenever you want. (Within the bounds of basic safety, of course.) It would be illegal to do that after the police arrest you, or when they tell you to stop...which is why you rig it up beforehand.
Granted, if the police show up with a warrant and present it to you, or if you even know they are there, and you let them trip it, a case can be made you allowed evidence to be destroyed if you didn't attempt to stop them, so do that...but you can't magically know that they're about to pull a surprise raid on you.
This is why I didn't suggest putting the system on a timer where you have to enter a deadman's code, or a screen-lock with a timed erase. If there's any way you can stop what is happening after you know the police have a warrant, you will, indeed, be found guilty of destruction of evidence if you fail to do that.
So do not give yourself that option. Yeah, getting a CD from someone else is a pain in the ass, but failing to inform the police that someone else has evidence that can be used to convict you is certainly covered by the fifth amendment.
Destroying 'evidence' before the police inform you you're under investigation is not illegal. I know people think it is, but it isn't. This is because it is not evidence until then.
The Gutmman method has been disclaimed by Gutmann as needed on modern drives.
Which is the damn point the article is trying to make: There is not a single shred of evidence that anyone has ever recovered data on a hard drive overwritten once with zeros.
No one saying they're scams, you tool. Plenty of people successfully use them every day. Some are people who don't know how to image a drive and search for data on it, but, hey, not everyone is a computer expert and piecing together files does take time and tools. And some people who had a drive physically fail, and even geeks will admit that's a very valuable service to be able to swap out drive motors and controllers.
Granted, most computer geeks think they're overpriced, but most computer geeks think all computer services are overpriced. (This is because geeks forget about profit and overhead and location costs and advertising and liability and all sorts of junk.)
No, this guy is saying that the idea they can recover overwritten data is just wrong. That no one can, in fact, recover data that was overwritten just once.
He is not alone in this theory. There are a lot of security experts who believe it, and the guy whose original paper started that idea that drives should be overwritten 35 times has explicitly stated he was, as the paper said, talking about old MFM drives, not modern drives.
The contest is stupid, but the argument is sound: There is absolute no evidence, despite what everyone asserts, that data overwritten from a drive can be recovered.
The theory is that overwriting data isn't total. But, even in the ideal universe, which is a drive that starts out totally zero, gets some data written on it, and then zerod again, no one has demonstrated you can read 'the leaks' of the data, the non-overwritten portions, and recover anything.
For drives that have been in use for a while, where, presumably, all locations have had 'data leaks' on them, no one has even come up with a plausible method to distinguish the 'last' leak from the dozens or more of overwrites, or link one bit with another bit.
All that it would seem to be possible to say is that 'This bit has been, at various times, a one and a zero, and the same with this bit, and this one, and this one has apparently never been a one, but this one was both, etc.', which is not 'data recovery' and is easily foiled by overwriting the entire drive with 10101010 and 01010101 before starting to use it.
And, because of the way drives store data, even if a '1' was never written to a specific bit, you don't know that bit was one. A '0' on a disk means not to flip the output stream, and a '1' means to flip it. So 11010110 does not mean 11010110, it means flip flip stay flip stay flip flip stay, or, starting with 0, it means 10011011. So all you know, if a bit was never '1', that it was always the same as the previous bit, which is rather useless if you don't know what that bit was.
That's complicated, but the end result is that you have to recover bytes from one end. You can learn the first 3 bits, or the first 7, but you can't learn the last 7. Which means a probability analysis of each bit is spectacularly useless.
Of course, TrueCrypt has a hotkey for dismounting all volumes (or you can just hit the power button for start an emergency shut-down in Windows) and it's hard to see how anyone storming your house could do it fast enough to prevent you pressing one key.
That will get you in all sorts of legal trouble. The second you know it's the police, any sort of tampering is 'interfering in an investigation' and itself a crime.
However, you can use the fact the police have started carrying out 'no knock' raids against them. The power switch in modern computers is just a low voltage button, and you can easily splice in another cord and run that to wherever you want. Such as a button that gets clicked whenever the front door opens all the way.
It's not your fault that they pushed the button when they slammed open the door. If they had just asked you would have left your computer as-is, like you are required by law, but they stormed in and triggered the power saving switch you'd rigged up to shut down your computer as you went out the front door.
Right. The trick isn't to hide information, the trick is to hide information within the bounds of the law.
My theory: What you should do is overwrite the encrypted header on bootup, and rewrite it before shutting down. (Obviously, you'll need a UPS and a non-crashy OS.)
Then leave your computer on all the time, and rig up a tripwire on the door that cold powers it off. Or, even better, one that fries the memory.
Tada. Now you cannot decrypt the drive for the police. (To make sure you can prove this, be sure to overwrite the header with a specific string like 'DEADBEEF' or just all zeros, instead of random information they can claim is a real header.)
Just in case that happens accidentally, or your OS crashes, make a backup header CD and give it to someone else. You're still clear, because they can't make you tell who you gave it to, or that you have a backup at all, as that is clearly a Fifth amendment violation. (As opposed to making you tell the decryption key, which is not. At least, not legally, although it should be.)
Explain all this to the police the moment they break in. And tell them your password.
For all those who think this is somehow immoral, the decision that encryption keys are not protected by the fifth amendment is wrong and unconstitutional. My method would just restore them to where they should be. (The fact it can be turned into a fifth amendment issue is pretty clear evidence it was to start with.)
Alternately, you can just try hiding that CD instead of giving it to someone else. Legally, the police cannot make you tell them the location of things. For more fun, hide it outside of any logical scope of a warrant.
The problem isn't that laws against spam are not tough enough. As you correctly point out, almost all spammers could be arrested on things besides antispam laws.
As for enforcement, with the resources of random people, spammers may be hard to track down, but with the resources of law enforcement, they are laughable easy. Seriously. It's like hiding evidence of criminal activity in a safe in your house. Yeah, it's hard for a random person to get that stuff, but how long, exactly, do you think that would stand up to a warrant?
The problem is that the Federal government castrated state antispam laws, and then doesn't bother enforcing the ones at Federal level. It is purely a political issue.
I love how 'fire violations' turned into 'gross fire violations' in your mind. They were not, in fact, 'gross' violations.
First of all, no, you aren't supposed to check buildings for fire code violations. That is, in fact, the job of the inspectors. Who had checked the building on the regular schedule and determined it was just fine.
The law includes that possibility to avoid several ways of people not being responsible for their actions. Otherwise, thugs like those could just rent the building using cash and a fake name and just go home with impunity after being questioned by the cops.
You are a complete moron, you realize that, right? Yes, people could rent buildings with fake names, but the problem is that people who rent buildings that have been inspected by fire marshals and determined to be within code should not be responsible at all if the building is not, in fact, within code.
It's not a matter of possibly 'escaping punishment', it's a matter of fact they shouldn't be punished. The owner of the building should be.
Actually, he shouldn't be. People who rent property have a requirement to make sure their building is within code. The government said it was within code. If it changes its mind, it actually is required to either wait until the next inspection or inform him.
The only time they can barge in like this and remove people (let's not even talk about the arrest, just simply removing people), is when a building has become dangerous due to being overcapacity. Which this one was not.
These people weren't just shoppers. They were USING the building for THEIR purposes. So violations are also their responsibility.
Hey, dumbass. People shopping are also using the building for their own purpose.
I like how you're talking about 'official activity', like this is some corporation and the people arrested were all officers. This was not a corporation, this was an organization with some volunteers. Members of an organization, as opposed to officers, are no more responsible for criminal behavior they don't know about on the part of the organization than cashiers are responsible for a company buying old meat and relabeling it.
However, you're rather explicitly wrong anyway. Several of the people who were arrested were simply visiting. Some of them were, in fact, outside.
At a certain point, with long hair, you go from 'hippy' to 'long hair country boy'.
I haven't worked out exactly where or how that happens, but it does.
And, about the the fire violation arrest: if you don't want to get arrested for fire violations, don't violate the building codes. It's pretty easy.
Hey, moron. They didn't violate the building codes. They rented a building that the cops claim is in violation of the fire code, which mysteriously means they can arrest everyone in the building.
I can't even imagine how that works. Maybe I can see some misapplication of the law that lets them arrest the people who rented the building, but being physically located in it? How are you supposed to check for fire code violations without entering the building?
You've just argued that it's illegal to be in a specific place that it is impossible to know beforehand. That is, for example, illegal to shop in Walmart because Walmart has, in a back area that is offlimits to shoppers, paint stored next to gasoline.
You are truly an idiot.
Oh, and the cops also broke down the front door to a private residence, arrested everyone in it, and then attempted to have the building condemned that same day because it didn't have a front door. Probably because no one had repaired it because they were all in jail.
After all the perjury by police in New York in 2004? Um, yes.
What do you want to bet the 'hatchet' is actually a fire ax that came with the rented building?
It's worth pointing out that these 'fire code violations' are in buildings they rented.
It's also worth pointing out they rented buildings because in New York the police arrested them in the street, even when they were meeting in areas like public parks.
If there are actual violations, the correct people to arrest would be the people who rented unsafe buildings, not the victims who were rented them.
Even if, under some logical contortions, you can arrest people for renting a building with fire code violations...you can't arrest people who just happen to be inside that building. There are only one or two people who rented the building.
Fun quote:
In a juxtaposition that is becoming familiar in Denver, two worlds seemly unconnected are living side-by-side, only streets apart â" the polished Democratic showcase and the simultaneous protests in the parks and streets where the voices of ordinary people remain unheard by the Democratic dynasty.
Oh, how horrible for the DNC protesters...no one paid them any attention.
It wasn't a troll-protest. The Iraq Veterans Against the War are somewhat...stupid...in protesting that the one person who's pleaded to withdraw troops has a plan that 'takes too long', but they're a legit group. Although, frankly, they'd be better off protesting anyone but Obama, like the Democratic Congress.
I love the fact some of the guns were later 'taken from suspects' so they know they're back on the streets.
Man, if I were one of those suspects, I'd be asserting that the gun wasn't taken from me at all, and that the guns are not, in fact, on the streets at all. But rather some of the police stole them to plant on people.
Exactly. Salon's no friend of the Democrats. They're where I learned that a reporter was arrested for apparently taking pictures of Democratic politicians and businessmen coming out of a hotel together.
Which is, of course, a horrible abuse of power.
Along with a few other petty abuses of power, like arrests of protesters that were blocking a road, along with plenty of them that weren't. OTOH, they appears to treat other protesters with respect, so it appears to be a case of police tight-assery.
That doesn't begin to compare to what happened in Minnesota, where there was orchestrated preemptive raids of rented warehouses and houses, citing them for magically disappearing 'fire code violations' and people being imprisoned until, apparently, Wednesday with no charges, at which point I'm sure they'll all just be quietly released. With Federal involvement.
It's one thing for the police to get out of hand a protest, and start arresting random people at the first sign of any lawbreaking. It's not a good thing, and the police should be punished for their behavior, but it's not even in the same class as 'Hello, we're federal agents, and we've decided to impound all your stuff and throw you in jail because you're planning to protest later.'.
Completely forgetting that Abe Lincoln was a Republican and the southern Democrats were all pro slavery once...
And the Republican party completely forgets, even though it's within living memory, where those southern Democrats ended up.
The Democrats used to be racist. They rejected that, and half the damn party left...for the Republicans. You still have currently elected officials who left the Democratic party for the Republicans because the Democrats stopped the racism.
Of course, the real problem is why we have tied so much personal information to a single government-issued number...perhaps because it's the only nationally unique identification number issued by the Federal government...
That's not the real problem. The real problem arrives with the assumption that knowing the number is proof of identity.
It is a good primary key.
The problem is that quite a few places decided to use it as authentication, which isn't a programming or indexing issue at all.
I wonder whether "identity theft" is not just an utterly brilliant public relations tactic used by the credit card companies to deflect responsibility away from themselves.
Don't just wonder about it. Refuse to use the term, like I do.
The correct term is fraud, and the victim is the business that got defrauded.
These businesses use the term 'identify theft' so their reaction to their own defrauding, which 'blame some random person who has nothing to do with it', isn't recognized as the criminal action it is. But the injury to 'victims' isn't coming from the person who committed the fraud. People whose identities are 'stolen' are not the victims of identity thieves. They're the victims of the victims of identity thieves.
People who have had their 'identity stolen' need a good lawyer to sue the ass off everyone who, when they got defrauded, didn't immediately fix the issue. It is in no way your responsibility that other individuals and businesses do not have stricter checking of identity, and you should be able to sue that business for every second of time and money their lax policies cost you in cleaning it up.
They can, of course, then sue to recover that money from the person who defrauded them, but that's not relevant to the 'identity theft' 'victim'.
If someone steals my car, I do not have the right to steal your car. Even if the person stealing my car used your name to do so. Even if I'm clever enough to invent the term 'indirect car thief' for the original thief, and 'indirect car thief victim' for you, and hope that no one catches on that he didn't steal your car, I did.
It was about STEEL structured buildings. If you can come up with a valid counterexample to THAT, then I will admit I am wrong and go away.
The steel structure of the building collapsed where the fire was. That demonstrates that fire can, in fact, buckle steel to the point it no longer supports anything. Unless you've got some evidence that people went around with blowtorches taking it apart, you have have to admit that the steel frame did fall down solely due to fire. Ergo, steel buckles in a fire.
That example is even more spectacular because it's not like the steel was holding that much up. It's entirely possible the steel actually melted to get it to do that.
In fact, it is even likely that weaker steel was used because the structure relied on its concrete core.
The amount of carbon used in carbon steel framing does slightly affect the plastic deformation point, but not to any useful extent. And it would make it weaker normally, so actually you're do it the other way around...put the stronger-normally but weaker-in-a-fire steel in the entirely steel building. It's entirely possible that the WTC's steel framework was weaker, when in a raging fire, than that building's was.
Oh, yes, you've certainly out-clevered me.
You know, I think anyone reading this knows the truth.
I repeat: Steel buckles in normal fires. It doesn't take a physics degree to figure this out. Fires regularly burn at around 1000 C. Steel deforms at about 600 C, depending on how it's made. Hell, it melts at 1400 C, and there are substances in buildings that can burn that hot.
Anyone who asserts this does not happen is a moron. It's not some magical physics idea that has just shown up.