This is why the movie industry is going apeshit over movies that sneak out before the release date.
Why? It's not spoilers, or they wouldn't have prereleases. And people who care about spoilers are going to watch the movie anyway.
It's not about getting money from people who will spend hours download a crappy video camera capture. Those people are few and far between, and those people wouldn't see a movie anyway.
And doesn't explain why they care so much more about pre-release movies. These people aren't going to look for a screener on opening day, not find it, and decide 'Instead of waiting two days, I will go pay money'. That doesn't make any sense at all.
It's for one reason and one reason only. See, they could usually count on ads to carry the opening weekend of completely shitty movies. Maybe even two weekends. And then the facade would collapse and the movie would go away.
Well, first the internet cut into the second weekend. Well, damn, but even they are smart enough to know trying to do something about people who come in, pay money, then dislike the movies won't fly, at least until they purchase all the government, and that could take years.
And a few screeners got out, usually of amazingly popular movies, and they didn't give a damn. That really just promoted the movie, and the music industry, unlike the recording industry, seems to understand that.
But now there have been quite a few craptaculars that snuck out before the opening day (I'm thinking 'The Incredible Hulk' for some reason.) and the opening weekened sales stunk. The obvious conclusion was that word of mouth happened before the opening.
I feel like I'm in a Dilbert comic:
Premise: People don't want to see shitty movies.
MPAA solution: Make sure that they don't know it's shitty until after they have paid.
Right, and those CDs are legal for you to record music to and give out to others without any payment. This is from the era of DATs, when the RIAA basically destroyed the market, but the laws are still in place.
And I hilariously suspect the music tax is based on the concept you'll copy one CD onto one CD. Instead of, oh, filling them up with MP3s. So I suspect we're only paying about 1/15th of the tax we should be. But, hey, the law doesn't specify a format to use.
Anyway, for people who download MP3s, get a 50 pack of these. Burn your MP3s to them. Delete them from your computer. Hand them to someone. Have them hand them back to you. (If you want to be nice, make two copies, let them keep one.) Copy them off the CDs. Stick the CDs deep in your closet.
Magic legal MP3s.
The next time someone rants and raves about the evils of downloading MP3s, stand secure in the knowledge your MP3s are legal, because you got them via a perfectly legal means.
Yes, seriously. Perfectly legal. There is nothing in the law about where the copies come from, it is the act of copying that is legal or not. Copying MP3s onto a music CD to give to a friend is completely legal, even if the MP3s were obtained illegally. And getting the CD back is legal regardless if they have no copies of it.
Not that they can actually get you for downloading MP3s, but it's the principle of the thing.
At that point, about the only way you might even be vaguely in violation of the law is because you copied them from CD to your computer. But the courts are pretty okay with format shifting.
You CANNOT get away with this in court unless you are damn lucky. I'm not saying 'Yeah, no one gets arrested for joyriding'. People clearly do. (And joyriding is more 'uncaring about depriving' than 'failing to intend to deprive'.)
However, there have been a few, very rare cases, where people do indeed gotten away with 'theft' because it was quite obviously borrowing. Like moving neighbor's lawn ornaments into their yard to complete a Christmas scene. That would just be a damn stupid thing to do if you weren't planning on giving them back.
Actually, there's a very very very obvious example of this that happens all the time...accidental taking. If I drive away with my friend's briefcase in the backseat, I rather obviously wasn't intending to 'deprive' him of anything.
However, that's a harder point to make, as all crimes require 'intent'...theft requires 'intent to deprive', instead of 'intent to take without permission', as some people think, but that example doesn't prove it.
And just in case you people think I'm crazy. Look at this. Scroll down to the bottom, Company Rule 5.
A Pepsi employee destroyed his own handtruck, borrowed (without permission) a handtruck of someone's, and got fired for it. The case is over his firing, not the 'theft' he wasn't charged for, but Pepsi fired him for the 'theft', and his lawyer argued it wasn't theft, as under no circumstances could he have been intending to keep the handtruck as a replacement for his (It was the wrong color), and in fact returned it himself, and turned in his broken one at the end of the day.
And he got his job back! Admittedly, this was an arbitration over a firing and not a criminal charge, but the arbitrator seems to accept the concept that it was not 'theft'. While theft may be permissionable grounds to fire someone in the Pepsi union, borrowing is apparently not.
Despite what you and everyone else apparent think, that legally isn't theft. To commit theft you have to intend to deprive someone of their property. Which does not happen if you intend to return it before they could notice it missing.
So, despite what your parents told you, borrowing without permission isn't theft.
Of course, that's a damn stupid example, as no jury would ever believe it. And merely breaking into someone else's car and starting it is usually illegal.
Now, there are few limited circumstances where, legally, you can get away with arguing you intended to return it. (And you can't ever do it if you 'use up' the thing.)
Usually it works best when it's something you physically couldn't steal but merely move a little, or something that, under no circumstances, could you expect to get away with stealing.
But it can happen. Imagine an island in the middle of a small lake. There is a boat tied up, so you take it to the island. Sadly, while the island was public, the boat was not. And the owner tries to have you arrested for theft.
Can he? No. You rather obviously intent to bring the boat back...it's not like you could go anywhere else. (Assuming you have no boat trailer.) You did not intend to deprive him of his property.
Regardless of the problem that it's near impossible to demonstrate 'intent to return' in court, if you didn't intent to deprive the owner of it, it's legally not theft.
In fact, there is an even more obvious example of this, and, hey, I'll use cars. If someone loans me his car, and I drive off intending not to return it, I have just committed car theft at that moment. Likewise, if I drive off intending to return it, but, say, have a heart attack at the store and end up in the hospital for a week, I have not committed car theft. (And if I total it, I have not committed theft by conversion.)
So it's not even the actual returning that has anything to do with anything. It's merely intent.
There are only three causes of car accidents, no matter what anyone says.
1) Driver impairment. Despite what people think, the major thing causing impairment is sleep deprivation. Not that drunk driving isn't bad.
2) Driver distraction. Cell phones, eating, radio/AC adjustments. Also distractions outside the car, as I learned when I rear-ended someone because I was watching weirdness on the sidewalk. (They were stopped because that weirdness had escaped onto the road ahead.)
(Arguable, those two are the same thing. Being distracted is being temporarily impaired.)
3) Speed difference. People driving near other people going more than 15 mph faster or slower. The faster people often end up misestimating what they can do, and clip the other people. (This is not to put the blame on the faster people.)
90% car accidents have been caused by one of these things, or combinations of them.
The rest being caused by random mechanical failures like brakes failing and tires popping, or road conditions. Or random traffic violations like running red lights.
Get an old laptop, make sure it doesn't do something stupid powerwise like keep the LCD on even when closed. (If it does, figure out how to unplug it.) If you can, turn the speed down all the way...MP3s can run on 300 Mhz computers easily. Don't suck needless power.
You'll probably want a USB wifi adapter, even if one is built in, because trying to get a signal through inches of steel is stupid. Grab a USB one and an extension cable and mount it in your rear window or something.
You'll also need some sort of control device. You can get a USB joystick for 15 bucks to control music and whatnot. You'll need to turn off when the car stops, which is trivial if you know how car wiring works, or if you're willing to spend 20 dollars at Radio Shack for a 'Turn on when your car comes on' cigarette lighter extender.
If you want to get fancy, you can get a screen for it, they make thing specifically for cars.
For security, you have two options. Either make it not connect to any wifi network until you push a button (That's what I'd do.), or use the ever popular boot CD with the hard drive merely storing music files, and not worry about it. Someone hacks in, just resync from your desktop.
Actually, I'd have it as both. And only connect to known networks. Driving around autoconnecting to random wifi networks is dumb, as it constantly scanning to see if a certain one is in range. (And sucks power.)
If I was really clever, I'd get something that merely sensed if the engine was on, and would let me turn on and off power from the car battery. So if the engine cut off, it'd normally shutdown, but if I'd pushed the 'wifi' button when I parked, it would stay on but cut off power from the car battery so I could resysnc.
Then if it hadn't finished by the time its battery was dead, it could flip back on the car battery and run for another 2 hours or so. Then force a shutdown no matter what I thought. All it would take is some 12-volt computer controlled relays and sensors.
Also, it would be nice to make it automatically boot when you turn the car on. Can't think of a way to do that without opening the laptop up, though.
And I'd be sure to have a crossover cable leading to the driver's seat, so you can hook in another laptop.
You'd have to open the 'car storage' door, drive the car out, park, get out, close the door, and drive off.
When you return you'd have to do the same thing in reverse.
And, even more fun, you'd have to keep a key to this door on something besides your car key ring, otherwise when returning, you'd have to turn the car off, get out, unlock the door, go back, start the car, and drive it in. (Hopefully it would lock automatically so you don't have to do that in the morning too.)
And bear in mind this is a solution presented for extremely cold climates. Have fun hiking around in the snow for five minutes when you get back from work to get your car under-cover.
I think you need to go back to school, Mr. External-Car-Storage Man.
Unless librarians can teleport, walkthroughs are pretty pointless.
Why? Because everyone will have a browser window open to some harmless google search, and when the librarians comes through, they will quickly minimize or close every other window.
Come on, what is this, elementary school? Who hasn't figured that one out yet?
Libbraries should be doing this anyway. Just like they keep records of what books you check out confidential, they should be keeping what websites you surf to confidential, and the best way to do that is to not let others see them.
But the real point of these laws isn't to protect children walking by or even others who might not want to see it. It's to use government resources to make a moral judgement about material on the internet.
Likewise, no person under 18 should have the ability to use a computer without parental permission, at which point he has permission to look at whatever the hell he wants.
Considering how opposed to censonship librarians are, it's sad they've let this farce of 'inapproriate material' get this far. I can only conclude it's because they aren't that wired, but the mere existence of any material dubbed 'inapproriate' should have been a major red flag to them. The ALA needs some shaking up if they are going to continue to allow this.
And the first person to mention 'child porn' that this person may or may not have had will get a kick in the head. You know, it's entirely possible to access child porn from home. At least if they do it at a public library, there are logs, and we know exactly who the person is, instead of 'someone in the house', and we have a (theoritically) clean machine, so they can't assert some malware did it. If people are going to download child pron, we want them to do it at the library vs. their home.
People who have hissy fits over people using public funds to commit crimes need to have a reality check, because people who use public funds have a much higher chance of getting caught. We want people to rob banks and catch a bus to escape.
I don't even think I can begin to explain how utterly and completely wrong you are, and I don't think I need to.
The Supreme Court has already decided kids have freedom of speech in school. They certainly have it outside of school.
Kids have whatever rights adults have, with the except that their legal guardians can remove some, but not all, of them.
And the only reason that schools have extra rights is they are acting as guardians for the students in them. And even then they do not have as much power as real parents, because they are a government agency.
But outside of a school, the police have no more right to harrass kids walking down the street than adults. Period. Now, there can be stricter laws about minors, but those laws, like everything else any government does, must be constitutional.
As for issuing citations, local governments do a lot of things that are unconstitutional. Doesn't mean if someone takes them to court they won't have their ass kicked. In the US, the government simply cannot restrict someone 'communicating' with someone else (who want to hear it) in any way, even if the second person is underaged. We've already had this argument, about abortion materials being provided to minors, and the courts ripped that law to shreds.
The only thing that can be restricted is obscenity (It can be restricted to everyone, not just kids.), and yes, one of the prongs of the test is 'patently offensive'. The one I didn't mention is 'prurient interest' and the third one, that I did, is that it lacks a 'literary, artistic, political, or scientific value'. It has to flunk all the prongs. I just didn't mention the second because that's the easist to flunk...even PG-13 movies can flunk that with enough T&A. They put things that fail that prong on billboards.
And I have no idea why you're suddenly talking about what 'private organizations' can do. Private organizations can deny admittence to PG-13 rated movies for everyone between the ages of 27 and 29 on every other Tuesday, and let in everyone else, and no one could say anything about it. I didn't say anything to the contrary.
However, we were talking about the government disallowing theaters from communicating in a certain way. It's not allowed to do that. It's certainally not allow for the government to require one party to censor their speech to another party based on a third party's opinions!
There's no way in hell to keep from 'exposing' kids from computers now, much less ten years from now.
I've often thought that was how we should categorize this generation, people born from 1980 to now, instead of the stupid 'Generation Y'. It's the generation that's the transition to everyone having cellphones and computers and video games. Call it the Information Transition Generation, although it needs a catcher name. We grew up with computers and electronic devices, and our parents didn't understand them.
The next generation will grow up will a cellphone in their hand, an iPod on their hip, and a computer in their lap. (Arguable, this generation is already being born.) And, perhaps more importantly, parents will not be able to monitor what they see and hear.
Your state does not enforce movie ratings by law, as that is UNCONSTITUTIONAL, you moron.
While the court has decided the government can restrict 'obscenity', the R and NC-17 ratings are not solely for obscenity.
And obscenity doesn't mean what you think it does. Even the cheesiest softcore porn probably has some 'educational or social value' and/or isn't 'patently offensive'. (In fact, that's basically the dividing line between softcore and hardcore porn.) But it's easier to demonstrate my point using movies without sex or nudity at all.
For example, to pick a random R-rated movie without sex or nudity in it, Cecil B. DeMented. It has violence, drug use, and strong language. And it would be completely unconstitutional for a state to pass a law saying that people under 17 could not be sold that movie.
And it's just as unconstitutional to do that indirectly via a private rating organization.
Flat out, no exceptions, that movie is legal to give or sell to minors as long as the 1st amendment stands. Stores can chose not to do that, and many do, but it's legal.
Now, it is legal to restrict sale of 'obscene' (Again, you probably do not know legally what obscene means, so look it up before you go off.) materials to minors, and it might even be legal for the government to get a private organization to mark obscene materials in advance as a warning, as long as there is an appeals process. However, no organization claims to do this at all.
And even if that did happen, the government would have to wait until someone did violate the law, and demonstrate that the material was actually obscene.
Why the hell should people in Canada have to comply with US law?
If the law in Canada says it's legal for him to sell pot seeds, then it's legal for him to sell pot seeds. If the law in Canada says it's legal for him to ship them to US addresses, then it's legal for him to ship them to US addresses. Responsibly on keeping things from being shipped into the country the government doesn't like is the responsiblity of the receiving government.
The only way they got him is that it technically isn't legal to sell pot seeds in Canada. It's just there's no local support of arresting people on drug related charges, especially not merely selling pot seeds, in Canada, and juries always fail to convict. It's dead letter law.
However, based on the fact it was technically illegal, the US is trying to get him extradited. (You can only extradite people for something if the same thing is illegal in the country you're being extradited from.)
This, incidentally, isn't because he's selling pot seeds. As long as the police turn a blind eye to it, anyone and everyone can sell pot seeds to Americans. It's because he's the leader of the Canadaian drug legalization party, and is very good at what he's doing.
Luckily, it sounds like he might get a jury trial locally on whether or not he should be extradited.
If you want an analogy of what's going on, it would be like Saudi Arabia asserting that someone from the US brought some alcohol there, and drank it, and sold it to some friends, then managed to escape.
As selling alcohol is illegal without a license in the US, he should be extradited back to Saudi Arabia to stand trial for selling alcohol. Which completely ignoring the large disaparity in enforcement and penalties. Here, we don't bust people for splitting the cost of a six pack with the friends, even if it is technically illegal. No jury would convict.
But let's say this person had been upsetting a lot of people with his political party. So the US say, 'Sure thing' and rounds him up to ship to Saudi Arabia, to convict him for something that has much harsher penalties than here, and he wouldn't be convicted of anyway.
That's why I don't get what this is talking about.
They specifically say this law isn't about tapping calls that do not use the phone system. Although why 'the internet' is a private system and 'the phone system' is a public system is slightly confusing to me. I certainly don't have the ability to use the phone system however I want, and it appears to be owned by private companies.
Anyway, logically, all calls that do not use the internet solely use the telephone system, and thus go through a switch. Probably more than one.
Now, granted, it might be had to track to which call was which, so I can see the FBI and whatnot requiring more information from VoIP carriers, along the lines of 'every time number X makes a landline call, tell us what switch you've connected to'.
But trying to tap the net data is just idiotic when they have perfectly good methods of taping calls on the phone network, and all calls the interact with the phone network have to, duh, cross the phone network.
The only reason to add the ability to tap the net data is because, later on, they want to add the ability to tap net-to-net calls.
Well, gun control does have minor success at keeping gun away from people, even criminals. So the parallel is clear, in that they both make things slightly harder to get. (Although, in all cases, 'harder to get things' are much less harder to get for serious criminals than for normal people who just want to break that specific law.)
However, this minor success is outweighed by the fact that having guns in the hands of random people noticably decreases random assaults.
So, really, gun control has less going for it than 'phone control'. At least criminals, knowing I lack an untappable phone, aren't more likely to target me.
Unless, of course, they start tapping my phone themselves, but that's a whole nother problem.
So we'll just Darwin out all the stupid terrorists and assassins.
Sounds like a plan to me. A fucking stupid one.
People are always going to have untappable means of communication. Untappable because they actually cannot be tapped (Strong encryption, people carrying messages by hand.) or just that no one can find out where they are. (Calls between two disposible cell phones, message drops.)
Tapping phones works fine for catching normal criminals. That's because if you know who a criminal is, you can just follow him around anyway until he commits a crime. While criminals are caught using phone taps, very few of them are discovered using phone taps, and in fact that makes no sense. At best, they merely 'spread' one known suspect onto five known guilty parties. Which is good, but doesn't work if we don'thave one suspect to start with.
And we don't know who are planning 'big plans', and we don't know what they're planning. Yes, sometimes we get very lucky and randomly intercept a big plan while doing a tap for some other reason, but that is not a 'success' of a phone tap, it is arguable a 'failure', because we were tapping converstations that weren't relevant to what we were looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
Tada
And spammers reproduce via cellular mitosis, like they're supposed to.
What? Are they going to release more if I buy it?
Why? It's not spoilers, or they wouldn't have prereleases. And people who care about spoilers are going to watch the movie anyway.
It's not about getting money from people who will spend hours download a crappy video camera capture. Those people are few and far between, and those people wouldn't see a movie anyway.
And doesn't explain why they care so much more about pre-release movies. These people aren't going to look for a screener on opening day, not find it, and decide 'Instead of waiting two days, I will go pay money'. That doesn't make any sense at all.
It's for one reason and one reason only. See, they could usually count on ads to carry the opening weekend of completely shitty movies. Maybe even two weekends. And then the facade would collapse and the movie would go away.
Well, first the internet cut into the second weekend. Well, damn, but even they are smart enough to know trying to do something about people who come in, pay money, then dislike the movies won't fly, at least until they purchase all the government, and that could take years.
And a few screeners got out, usually of amazingly popular movies, and they didn't give a damn. That really just promoted the movie, and the music industry, unlike the recording industry, seems to understand that.
But now there have been quite a few craptaculars that snuck out before the opening day (I'm thinking 'The Incredible Hulk' for some reason.) and the opening weekened sales stunk. The obvious conclusion was that word of mouth happened before the opening.
I feel like I'm in a Dilbert comic:
Premise: People don't want to see shitty movies.
MPAA solution: Make sure that they don't know it's shitty until after they have paid.
And I hilariously suspect the music tax is based on the concept you'll copy one CD onto one CD. Instead of, oh, filling them up with MP3s. So I suspect we're only paying about 1/15th of the tax we should be. But, hey, the law doesn't specify a format to use.
Anyway, for people who download MP3s, get a 50 pack of these. Burn your MP3s to them. Delete them from your computer. Hand them to someone. Have them hand them back to you. (If you want to be nice, make two copies, let them keep one.) Copy them off the CDs. Stick the CDs deep in your closet.
Magic legal MP3s.
The next time someone rants and raves about the evils of downloading MP3s, stand secure in the knowledge your MP3s are legal, because you got them via a perfectly legal means.
Yes, seriously. Perfectly legal. There is nothing in the law about where the copies come from, it is the act of copying that is legal or not. Copying MP3s onto a music CD to give to a friend is completely legal, even if the MP3s were obtained illegally. And getting the CD back is legal regardless if they have no copies of it.
Not that they can actually get you for downloading MP3s, but it's the principle of the thing.
At that point, about the only way you might even be vaguely in violation of the law is because you copied them from CD to your computer. But the courts are pretty okay with format shifting.
You CANNOT get away with this in court unless you are damn lucky. I'm not saying 'Yeah, no one gets arrested for joyriding'. People clearly do. (And joyriding is more 'uncaring about depriving' than 'failing to intend to deprive'.)
However, there have been a few, very rare cases, where people do indeed gotten away with 'theft' because it was quite obviously borrowing. Like moving neighbor's lawn ornaments into their yard to complete a Christmas scene. That would just be a damn stupid thing to do if you weren't planning on giving them back.
Actually, there's a very very very obvious example of this that happens all the time...accidental taking. If I drive away with my friend's briefcase in the backseat, I rather obviously wasn't intending to 'deprive' him of anything.
However, that's a harder point to make, as all crimes require 'intent'...theft requires 'intent to deprive', instead of 'intent to take without permission', as some people think, but that example doesn't prove it.
And just in case you people think I'm crazy. Look at this. Scroll down to the bottom, Company Rule 5.
A Pepsi employee destroyed his own handtruck, borrowed (without permission) a handtruck of someone's, and got fired for it. The case is over his firing, not the 'theft' he wasn't charged for, but Pepsi fired him for the 'theft', and his lawyer argued it wasn't theft, as under no circumstances could he have been intending to keep the handtruck as a replacement for his (It was the wrong color), and in fact returned it himself, and turned in his broken one at the end of the day.
And he got his job back! Admittedly, this was an arbitration over a firing and not a criminal charge, but the arbitrator seems to accept the concept that it was not 'theft'. While theft may be permissionable grounds to fire someone in the Pepsi union, borrowing is apparently not.
So, despite what your parents told you, borrowing without permission isn't theft.
Of course, that's a damn stupid example, as no jury would ever believe it. And merely breaking into someone else's car and starting it is usually illegal.
Now, there are few limited circumstances where, legally, you can get away with arguing you intended to return it. (And you can't ever do it if you 'use up' the thing.)
Usually it works best when it's something you physically couldn't steal but merely move a little, or something that, under no circumstances, could you expect to get away with stealing.
But it can happen. Imagine an island in the middle of a small lake. There is a boat tied up, so you take it to the island. Sadly, while the island was public, the boat was not. And the owner tries to have you arrested for theft.
Can he? No. You rather obviously intent to bring the boat back...it's not like you could go anywhere else. (Assuming you have no boat trailer.) You did not intend to deprive him of his property.
Regardless of the problem that it's near impossible to demonstrate 'intent to return' in court, if you didn't intent to deprive the owner of it, it's legally not theft.
In fact, there is an even more obvious example of this, and, hey, I'll use cars. If someone loans me his car, and I drive off intending not to return it, I have just committed car theft at that moment. Likewise, if I drive off intending to return it, but, say, have a heart attack at the store and end up in the hospital for a week, I have not committed car theft. (And if I total it, I have not committed theft by conversion.)
So it's not even the actual returning that has anything to do with anything. It's merely intent.
1) Driver impairment. Despite what people think, the major thing causing impairment is sleep deprivation. Not that drunk driving isn't bad.
2) Driver distraction. Cell phones, eating, radio/AC adjustments. Also distractions outside the car, as I learned when I rear-ended someone because I was watching weirdness on the sidewalk. (They were stopped because that weirdness had escaped onto the road ahead.)
(Arguable, those two are the same thing. Being distracted is being temporarily impaired.)
3) Speed difference. People driving near other people going more than 15 mph faster or slower. The faster people often end up misestimating what they can do, and clip the other people. (This is not to put the blame on the faster people.)
90% car accidents have been caused by one of these things, or combinations of them.
The rest being caused by random mechanical failures like brakes failing and tires popping, or road conditions. Or random traffic violations like running red lights.
Get an old laptop, make sure it doesn't do something stupid powerwise like keep the LCD on even when closed. (If it does, figure out how to unplug it.) If you can, turn the speed down all the way...MP3s can run on 300 Mhz computers easily. Don't suck needless power.
You'll probably want a USB wifi adapter, even if one is built in, because trying to get a signal through inches of steel is stupid. Grab a USB one and an extension cable and mount it in your rear window or something.
You'll also need some sort of control device. You can get a USB joystick for 15 bucks to control music and whatnot. You'll need to turn off when the car stops, which is trivial if you know how car wiring works, or if you're willing to spend 20 dollars at Radio Shack for a 'Turn on when your car comes on' cigarette lighter extender.
If you want to get fancy, you can get a screen for it, they make thing specifically for cars.
For security, you have two options. Either make it not connect to any wifi network until you push a button (That's what I'd do.), or use the ever popular boot CD with the hard drive merely storing music files, and not worry about it. Someone hacks in, just resync from your desktop.
Actually, I'd have it as both. And only connect to known networks. Driving around autoconnecting to random wifi networks is dumb, as it constantly scanning to see if a certain one is in range. (And sucks power.)
If I was really clever, I'd get something that merely sensed if the engine was on, and would let me turn on and off power from the car battery. So if the engine cut off, it'd normally shutdown, but if I'd pushed the 'wifi' button when I parked, it would stay on but cut off power from the car battery so I could resysnc.
Then if it hadn't finished by the time its battery was dead, it could flip back on the car battery and run for another 2 hours or so. Then force a shutdown no matter what I thought. All it would take is some 12-volt computer controlled relays and sensors.
Also, it would be nice to make it automatically boot when you turn the car on. Can't think of a way to do that without opening the laptop up, though.
And I'd be sure to have a crossover cable leading to the driver's seat, so you can hook in another laptop.
You'd have to open the 'car storage' door, drive the car out, park, get out, close the door, and drive off.
When you return you'd have to do the same thing in reverse.
And, even more fun, you'd have to keep a key to this door on something besides your car key ring, otherwise when returning, you'd have to turn the car off, get out, unlock the door, go back, start the car, and drive it in. (Hopefully it would lock automatically so you don't have to do that in the morning too.)
And bear in mind this is a solution presented for extremely cold climates. Have fun hiking around in the snow for five minutes when you get back from work to get your car under-cover.
I think you need to go back to school, Mr. External-Car-Storage Man.
Why? Because everyone will have a browser window open to some harmless google search, and when the librarians comes through, they will quickly minimize or close every other window.
Come on, what is this, elementary school? Who hasn't figured that one out yet?
It's called 'No Child Left Behind'. If stupid people move into the school system, the test results go down and the school gets less funding.
It works almost as well as you'd expect.
Libbraries should be doing this anyway. Just like they keep records of what books you check out confidential, they should be keeping what websites you surf to confidential, and the best way to do that is to not let others see them.
But the real point of these laws isn't to protect children walking by or even others who might not want to see it. It's to use government resources to make a moral judgement about material on the internet.
Likewise, no person under 18 should have the ability to use a computer without parental permission, at which point he has permission to look at whatever the hell he wants.
Considering how opposed to censonship librarians are, it's sad they've let this farce of 'inapproriate material' get this far. I can only conclude it's because they aren't that wired, but the mere existence of any material dubbed 'inapproriate' should have been a major red flag to them. The ALA needs some shaking up if they are going to continue to allow this.
And the first person to mention 'child porn' that this person may or may not have had will get a kick in the head. You know, it's entirely possible to access child porn from home. At least if they do it at a public library, there are logs, and we know exactly who the person is, instead of 'someone in the house', and we have a (theoritically) clean machine, so they can't assert some malware did it. If people are going to download child pron, we want them to do it at the library vs. their home.
People who have hissy fits over people using public funds to commit crimes need to have a reality check, because people who use public funds have a much higher chance of getting caught. We want people to rob banks and catch a bus to escape.
I don't even think I can begin to explain how utterly and completely wrong you are, and I don't think I need to.
The Supreme Court has already decided kids have freedom of speech in school. They certainly have it outside of school.
Kids have whatever rights adults have, with the except that their legal guardians can remove some, but not all, of them.
And the only reason that schools have extra rights is they are acting as guardians for the students in them. And even then they do not have as much power as real parents, because they are a government agency.
But outside of a school, the police have no more right to harrass kids walking down the street than adults. Period. Now, there can be stricter laws about minors, but those laws, like everything else any government does, must be constitutional.
As for issuing citations, local governments do a lot of things that are unconstitutional. Doesn't mean if someone takes them to court they won't have their ass kicked. In the US, the government simply cannot restrict someone 'communicating' with someone else (who want to hear it) in any way, even if the second person is underaged. We've already had this argument, about abortion materials being provided to minors, and the courts ripped that law to shreds.
The only thing that can be restricted is obscenity (It can be restricted to everyone, not just kids.), and yes, one of the prongs of the test is 'patently offensive'. The one I didn't mention is 'prurient interest' and the third one, that I did, is that it lacks a 'literary, artistic, political, or scientific value'. It has to flunk all the prongs. I just didn't mention the second because that's the easist to flunk...even PG-13 movies can flunk that with enough T&A. They put things that fail that prong on billboards.
And I have no idea why you're suddenly talking about what 'private organizations' can do. Private organizations can deny admittence to PG-13 rated movies for everyone between the ages of 27 and 29 on every other Tuesday, and let in everyone else, and no one could say anything about it. I didn't say anything to the contrary.
However, we were talking about the government disallowing theaters from communicating in a certain way. It's not allowed to do that. It's certainally not allow for the government to require one party to censor their speech to another party based on a third party's opinions!
There's no way in hell to keep from 'exposing' kids from computers now, much less ten years from now.
I've often thought that was how we should categorize this generation, people born from 1980 to now, instead of the stupid 'Generation Y'. It's the generation that's the transition to everyone having cellphones and computers and video games. Call it the Information Transition Generation, although it needs a catcher name. We grew up with computers and electronic devices, and our parents didn't understand them.
The next generation will grow up will a cellphone in their hand, an iPod on their hip, and a computer in their lap. (Arguable, this generation is already being born.) And, perhaps more importantly, parents will not be able to monitor what they see and hear.
Parents really need to grasp this now.
And strong language, of course, is language that can get you of the door to make a difference in the world.
If you went at the right time, you saw a lot of kids, carefully brought in by moronic parents.
The Amish don't watch TV.
So the kids are free to leave the Playstation hooked to it all the time.
While the court has decided the government can restrict 'obscenity', the R and NC-17 ratings are not solely for obscenity.
And obscenity doesn't mean what you think it does. Even the cheesiest softcore porn probably has some 'educational or social value' and/or isn't 'patently offensive'. (In fact, that's basically the dividing line between softcore and hardcore porn.) But it's easier to demonstrate my point using movies without sex or nudity at all.
For example, to pick a random R-rated movie without sex or nudity in it, Cecil B. DeMented. It has violence, drug use, and strong language. And it would be completely unconstitutional for a state to pass a law saying that people under 17 could not be sold that movie.
And it's just as unconstitutional to do that indirectly via a private rating organization.
Flat out, no exceptions, that movie is legal to give or sell to minors as long as the 1st amendment stands. Stores can chose not to do that, and many do, but it's legal.
Now, it is legal to restrict sale of 'obscene' (Again, you probably do not know legally what obscene means, so look it up before you go off.) materials to minors, and it might even be legal for the government to get a private organization to mark obscene materials in advance as a warning, as long as there is an appeals process. However, no organization claims to do this at all.
And even if that did happen, the government would have to wait until someone did violate the law, and demonstrate that the material was actually obscene.
If the law in Canada says it's legal for him to sell pot seeds, then it's legal for him to sell pot seeds. If the law in Canada says it's legal for him to ship them to US addresses, then it's legal for him to ship them to US addresses. Responsibly on keeping things from being shipped into the country the government doesn't like is the responsiblity of the receiving government.
The only way they got him is that it technically isn't legal to sell pot seeds in Canada. It's just there's no local support of arresting people on drug related charges, especially not merely selling pot seeds, in Canada, and juries always fail to convict. It's dead letter law.
However, based on the fact it was technically illegal, the US is trying to get him extradited. (You can only extradite people for something if the same thing is illegal in the country you're being extradited from.)
This, incidentally, isn't because he's selling pot seeds. As long as the police turn a blind eye to it, anyone and everyone can sell pot seeds to Americans. It's because he's the leader of the Canadaian drug legalization party, and is very good at what he's doing.
Luckily, it sounds like he might get a jury trial locally on whether or not he should be extradited.
If you want an analogy of what's going on, it would be like Saudi Arabia asserting that someone from the US brought some alcohol there, and drank it, and sold it to some friends, then managed to escape.
As selling alcohol is illegal without a license in the US, he should be extradited back to Saudi Arabia to stand trial for selling alcohol. Which completely ignoring the large disaparity in enforcement and penalties. Here, we don't bust people for splitting the cost of a six pack with the friends, even if it is technically illegal. No jury would convict.
But let's say this person had been upsetting a lot of people with his political party. So the US say, 'Sure thing' and rounds him up to ship to Saudi Arabia, to convict him for something that has much harsher penalties than here, and he wouldn't be convicted of anyway.
You can see why the Canadians are annoyed.
Skype, unlike Vonage, isn't trying to be a phone company.
They specifically say this law isn't about tapping calls that do not use the phone system. Although why 'the internet' is a private system and 'the phone system' is a public system is slightly confusing to me. I certainly don't have the ability to use the phone system however I want, and it appears to be owned by private companies.
Anyway, logically, all calls that do not use the internet solely use the telephone system, and thus go through a switch. Probably more than one.
Now, granted, it might be had to track to which call was which, so I can see the FBI and whatnot requiring more information from VoIP carriers, along the lines of 'every time number X makes a landline call, tell us what switch you've connected to'.
But trying to tap the net data is just idiotic when they have perfectly good methods of taping calls on the phone network, and all calls the interact with the phone network have to, duh, cross the phone network.
The only reason to add the ability to tap the net data is because, later on, they want to add the ability to tap net-to-net calls.
Most of them do, but if they don't, we can just arrest them, so it's okay.
However, this minor success is outweighed by the fact that having guns in the hands of random people noticably decreases random assaults.
So, really, gun control has less going for it than 'phone control'. At least criminals, knowing I lack an untappable phone, aren't more likely to target me.
Unless, of course, they start tapping my phone themselves, but that's a whole nother problem.
Sounds like a plan to me. A fucking stupid one.
People are always going to have untappable means of communication. Untappable because they actually cannot be tapped (Strong encryption, people carrying messages by hand.) or just that no one can find out where they are. (Calls between two disposible cell phones, message drops.)
Tapping phones works fine for catching normal criminals. That's because if you know who a criminal is, you can just follow him around anyway until he commits a crime. While criminals are caught using phone taps, very few of them are discovered using phone taps, and in fact that makes no sense. At best, they merely 'spread' one known suspect onto five known guilty parties. Which is good, but doesn't work if we don'thave one suspect to start with.
And we don't know who are planning 'big plans', and we don't know what they're planning. Yes, sometimes we get very lucky and randomly intercept a big plan while doing a tap for some other reason, but that is not a 'success' of a phone tap, it is arguable a 'failure', because we were tapping converstations that weren't relevant to what we were looking for.
Do you like dating plains?