Uh, no. The police cannot, and do not, hit hitmen to kill people. That's entrapment.
And how you phrased it seems to imply that police hire them and then find them, which is idiotic. The police wouldn't ask someone to kill someone else and then let them leave...if they killed that person the police would have commited murder. I'm not saying the police haven't ever hired someone, but they can't arrest you for agreeing to a crime they suggested. (OTOH, if they were seen near a professional hit, the police might do that to get evidence you were a hitman, and thus get a search warrant to connect you to the other crime. I dunno if that would work, though.)
What they do, however, is the opposite. They learn someone wants to kill someone, so they show up as a hitman, and get hired to kill someone, at which point they arrest the person. You'd be amazed how many people ask hookers to find hitman for them, and how many hookers are happy to hook that person up with the police...they don't like murderers either, and having the police owe them one is nice.
You can't go around asking people to commit crimes and arrest them when they agree, that's always been entrapment and doesn't work pretty much everywhere, legally.
But like I said, the police can make it known they are a certain kind of criminal, and wait for someone to approach them with a job. As long as they say 'I'm a getaway driver, are you looking for one?' and not 'I can drive the getaway car next week from the bank if you guys are in.', it's not entrapment.
Entrapment for the police means they have no case. They can't arrest people for stuff the police encouraged them to do.
'Entrapment' for private citizens is just simply 'breaking the law'. It's no more entrapment than driving a getaway car is entrapment...it's just a crime, period. Doesn't matter if you were going to turn them in or not.
They don't tell us not to. Like I said, the box asks for a 'signature'. Anything written in the box for a signature is a signature, unless it's clearly designed to not be acceptance. 'Check ID' is just as valid as a signature as 'I can't wait to move in' is on a lease.
And if a business is displaying cerdit card logos, and you have already used your purchase, aka, bought gas or eaten food, they are required by law to accept valid credit cards in lue of cash. Your credit card is valid.
It doesn't matter what 'guidelines' they gave the business...you are not a party to the contract between the credit card company and the business.
Any business where you're attempting to purchase stuff that hasn't been used yet, of course, can reject your business for almost any reason they want, barring some sorts of discrimination. If they want to attribute that to a set of rules the credit card company has them follow, more power to them.
That's why I get annoyed when cashiers accept checks without checking ID, which they are always supposed to do. Me, I write like three checks a year, and don't carry a checkbook around, so it's no big deal to me, but I know people who have had their checkbook stolen.
It is you who are merely pretending to know anything about the law. Signatures do not have to be consistence, or contain your name, or anything like that.
All they have to be is a mark indicating acceptance. That's it. Which is why X is perfectly valid as one.
If you put stuff in a place for a signature, and it's not clearly denying acceptence, like 'I'm not signing this', than it is a signature, like it or not.
Now, legally, of course, the merchant accepting the card is under no obligation to follow the instructions that your signature apparently contains.
They say you can't use unsigned cards. They don't get to define what a signature is, that's defined in law.
And all the card requires is an 'authorized signature'. That's all they say on them. It doesn't say 'a signature that looks like a name'.
They can fail to consider it a valid signature all they want. Of course, then there's lots of fun, like: Where were they authorized to start billing me for purchases?
I don't really think arguing that I didn't agree to the contract is a very useful claim on their part, and I seriously doubt they make it.
Refusing unsigned cards doesn't have anything to do with security, despite what cashiers seem to think. (After all, thieves could just sign it first.)
It's because, unless you've signed your card, you can legally argue that you haven't entered into the contract with your credit card company. You haven't agreed to pay back the charges.
It would be a rather interesting experiment to take one of those credit cards they mail out randomly to people (I.e., not ask for it.) and start using it at gas station pumps without signing it. At most, after a court battle, they could force you to pay for the gas...but they couldn't get interest out of you. (They'd probably just offer that out of court.)
Probably you have to indicate acceptence when you call it up to activate it, though. And when you charge anything. And when you pay the bill. So don't think you can just run around wild charging stuff because your card isn't signed. There are a quite a few ways to accept the contract. (But merely swiping the card is not enough.)
I'm suddenly reminded of that Married with Children episode where the Bundys learned you can keep anything mailed to you, which is true, and started using a credit card mailed to the dog. And the first thing the repo man asked them was 'Did you sign the card?'.
This is why places that won't accept you signing the card in front of them are stupid, though. You can certainly accept a contract in front of them to start paying for things charged on the card. (Ask them to witness it, see what they do.)
The fact that they compare the signature accepting the contract of the card to the signature accepting the charges billed to the card as a security measure is not incredibly important to anyone but themselves. It doesn't matter if they don't match...if you signed them, you have to pay what you agreed to pay.
And it's certainly not a very good security measure, considering a large amount of stolen credit cards are stolen before the owner actually gets them, and thus were signed by the thief.
I hope you laughed at them and said 'Have fun absorbing $15K loses to fraud, suckers. Maybe next time you'll check signatures and IDs on a purchase that large.' and strolled off as the law protected you from all but the first 50 dollars, and your bank covered that.
2 - If you want someone to check your ID when you sign your card, please hand it to the cashier with your credit card.
The rest of that made sense, but this is dumb. People who do that don't want cashiers to check when they use the card, there's no point of that. They want cashiers to check when others use the card, so it can't be stolen.
So they write 'See ID' on the back so the cashier will do it all the time. If they have to do something to get the cashier to check ID, there is no point.
You realize how incredibly fucking stupid that policy was, right?
If someone steals a credit card, the first thing they'd going to do is check the signature to forge it. If there's no signature, they're going to sign it with something they can forge.
So all you accomplished was to piss off legit card holders. And, FYI, while there is a requirement that credit cards be signed, or you check ID, there is no requirement that they be signed in advance.
And it's prefectly valid to use 'CID' as your signature, so you quite possibly were violating your agreement with the credit card company by refusing to accept valid cards for no reason. If they signed the receipt with 'John Doe' and the credit card said their signature was 'CID', you know what you're supposed to do? The thing you always do when the signature doesn't match...check ID!
As an aside, what thief would use a credit card to get into a preforming arts center? It's almost as stupid as buying gas with it. Hey, this card's been stolen, let me use it somewhere with a lot of people and where I'm then going to hang out for two hours watching a play. No way they'll catch me!
I get pissed if they don't ask for ID and check my signature and there are no cameras on me or no other way to track me down.
OTOH, I got rather pissed when I paid for college classes with a check once and got asked for ID. I was like 'Look, if I stole this check, you have a whole quarter to track me down, I'll be walking around campus!'.
The rules say, you have to have a signed credit card to buy things. (This is actually a cerdit card company rule.) The rules also say that she has to compare them, and ask for ID if they don't match. She's not actually comparing them, she just saw you sign them. She's just pretending to compare them so she doesn't get in trouble.
I've worked as a cashier, and I had to do lots of stupid things. I've carded eighty year old women. If you don't like the waste of time, complain to management and get them to change the rules.
So, they can't take evidence, but they can take evidence?
You have to be one of the stupidest people I've talked to here. They can't just call something evidence, it has to actually be evidence, or might reasonably be evidence. If there's a hammer laying in the room with a murder victim who was shot, they can't take it because they want to collect hammers. If the victim was killed with a small, heavy, blow to the head, however, they can take it.
Maybe you should watch some Law and Order or something to notice how the police operate. They don't walk out with refridgerators while investigating jewel thefts, they don't walk out with extension cords while investigating armed robbery, they don't just randomly pick up stuff while investigating crimes.
No part of a computer except the data on a hard drive can be evidence of a crime, unless the crime is that said equipment is stolen. And thus they cannot take it. (And don't want to take it.)
1) They can look at the logs with the router IN PLACE No need to take it. Besides, if you unplug the router, there goes the logs in RAM.
And if the logs are in RAM only, they won't take the router, they will just take pictures. (Which is why I said, if they ask for your password tot he router, give it to them.)
If they aren't in RAM, they may take the router, or they may not. It depends on how important they think the evidence may be. Like I already pointed out, spoofed MAC addresses aren't incredibly useful.
So, if I use the Police radio frequences, for somethign illegal, I can force the cops to stop using the radio??
Are just stupid or something? How would they stopping using the radio stop you from using the radio?
Um, no. That's not a princple of copyright law at all, at least not in the US.
The point of copyright law is to encourage the creation of new works. It's not because creators have any sort of moral right to their works.
Other countries have the concept of a moral right to a work, but not the US. (Which is interesting, because the US Constitution has quite a few moral rights in it, but not that one.)
Do I think driving recklessly is a valid response to police abusing their authority? Of course not.
However, that's because the point of laws against driving recklessly are not to reward the police, but to protect people, whereas copyright laws are to reward people.
When the people who are getting the rewards start abusing to system to get even more (And, meanwhile, failling to do what they are supposed to be doing in the first place, keeping copyrighted works published so people can purchase them.), do I think it's morally okay to start breaking the law in response to that? Sure, if that's what you're actually doing.
You can, of course, be sure that's what you're doing if you're following the laws as originally written. The original copyright was 28 years max. Lookie, all Beatles songs are public domain except 'Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love'.
It didn't stop you from breaking DRM. (Yes, yes, there was no DRM then, but even if there had been, the law wouldn't have stopped you.) Lookie, DeCSS is legal.
I don't have any problem with copyrights. I do have a problem with companies wielding undue influence over the legislature and retroactively changing the amount of 'incentive' they get to do things. (I think anyone should have a problem with that.)
And, just in case people don't get it, that's why so many people here complain about EULAs, also. We already have the right to use the software, we don't need any extra rights granted to do so, and we certainly don't need to lose rights at the same time.
I'll comment, though I'm not a lawyer, I can read the law.
The only thing copyright law forbids is making copies. (And public performances.) Anything else is legal. That includes being in possession of a copy that was not made legally.
Why on earth would someone in the executive or legistilative branches of the government need to understand the Constitution they swore to upheld? I don't know when it suddenly became expected for them to, you know, know the law of the land.
And you're right. Putting Hatch on this is like asking the mafia to operate the legal system.
And both copyright violations and phishing give the government a perfect excuse to take control of your computer away from you.
In the case of phishing, that's a somewhat reasonable idea. If the government could come up with some way to keep people from being able to log into peypal.com, I'm all for that in theory, although it would probably be abused by the government. I really suspect the computer industry would be better equiped to handle that, and the government should just devote more resources to shutting down and tracking ownership of peypal.com, instead. But whatever.
But, see, this gives them an opening 'People cannot be trusted with doing whatever they want on computers'. So we're going to have to regulate what software they can run, for their own good of course.
You've managed to troll people into pointing out the moral difference between copying from the MPAA and people writing code in their spare time, and everyone missed the point:
What Orrin Hatch likes to propose are solutions for illegally copying fromt he big corporations and none at all for the programmer. Programmers do not have money to sue a company who uses their stuff, the MPAA, meanwhile, sends cease and desist orders to everyone, and is writing the law. They've managed to get jackbooted government thugs to enforce their copyrights.
It doesn't matter if the laws are theoritically identical. Programmers do not want infinite copyright, no, not even Bill Gates. (There's no point.) Programmers does not want huge fines for someone downloading prereleased copies of movies they've made. (That law doesn't even apply to programs.) Any GPL programmers don't even want the absurd EULAs the rest of the industry has moved to.
GPL programmers, in short, wish to use the original copyright law as it was originally intended: To write work and release it to the public, yet profit from it.
The MPAA and RIAA, however, do not. They are not only giant soulless corporations which not only doesn't produce anything themselves, instead merely providing funding to actual artists, but they constantly lobby to get laws in their favour and abuse the legal process.
If you can't see the difference between that, I point to you the difference between a cop who pulls someone over because he's weaving all over the road, and one who claims someone was weaving because the cop wanted to search his car because they know who he is and he's sometimes 'uppity' with the police. Exact same authority, exact same lwws, and one is an abuse of the system.
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Any, yes, that's the theory.
With the copy protection, it is impossible to resell.
Ergo, thanks to the DMCA, it is impossible to resell in a legal way. Which is another way of saying that reselling it is illegal.
Saying our 'rights' are not being violated is crazy. The laws in combination with DRM have made it illegal to exercise our rights.
They can do whatever they want to make it hard. It's when they get the government to come in to make it illegal that is a violation of our rights.
And it's not just first sale...fair use is rather inhibited, also.
And how you phrased it seems to imply that police hire them and then find them, which is idiotic. The police wouldn't ask someone to kill someone else and then let them leave...if they killed that person the police would have commited murder. I'm not saying the police haven't ever hired someone, but they can't arrest you for agreeing to a crime they suggested. (OTOH, if they were seen near a professional hit, the police might do that to get evidence you were a hitman, and thus get a search warrant to connect you to the other crime. I dunno if that would work, though.)
What they do, however, is the opposite. They learn someone wants to kill someone, so they show up as a hitman, and get hired to kill someone, at which point they arrest the person. You'd be amazed how many people ask hookers to find hitman for them, and how many hookers are happy to hook that person up with the police...they don't like murderers either, and having the police owe them one is nice.
You can't go around asking people to commit crimes and arrest them when they agree, that's always been entrapment and doesn't work pretty much everywhere, legally.
But like I said, the police can make it known they are a certain kind of criminal, and wait for someone to approach them with a job. As long as they say 'I'm a getaway driver, are you looking for one?' and not 'I can drive the getaway car next week from the bank if you guys are in.', it's not entrapment.
'Entrapment' for private citizens is just simply 'breaking the law'. It's no more entrapment than driving a getaway car is entrapment...it's just a crime, period. Doesn't matter if you were going to turn them in or not.
Yes, but we won't locate those people be radio waves sent to and received from space, which is what this is talking about.
And if a business is displaying cerdit card logos, and you have already used your purchase, aka, bought gas or eaten food, they are required by law to accept valid credit cards in lue of cash. Your credit card is valid.
It doesn't matter what 'guidelines' they gave the business...you are not a party to the contract between the credit card company and the business.
Any business where you're attempting to purchase stuff that hasn't been used yet, of course, can reject your business for almost any reason they want, barring some sorts of discrimination. If they want to attribute that to a set of rules the credit card company has them follow, more power to them.
That's why I get annoyed when cashiers accept checks without checking ID, which they are always supposed to do. Me, I write like three checks a year, and don't carry a checkbook around, so it's no big deal to me, but I know people who have had their checkbook stolen.
All they have to be is a mark indicating acceptance. That's it. Which is why X is perfectly valid as one.
If you put stuff in a place for a signature, and it's not clearly denying acceptence, like 'I'm not signing this', than it is a signature, like it or not.
Now, legally, of course, the merchant accepting the card is under no obligation to follow the instructions that your signature apparently contains.
And all the card requires is an 'authorized signature'. That's all they say on them. It doesn't say 'a signature that looks like a name'.
They can fail to consider it a valid signature all they want. Of course, then there's lots of fun, like: Where were they authorized to start billing me for purchases?
I don't really think arguing that I didn't agree to the contract is a very useful claim on their part, and I seriously doubt they make it.
It's because, unless you've signed your card, you can legally argue that you haven't entered into the contract with your credit card company. You haven't agreed to pay back the charges.
It would be a rather interesting experiment to take one of those credit cards they mail out randomly to people (I.e., not ask for it.) and start using it at gas station pumps without signing it. At most, after a court battle, they could force you to pay for the gas...but they couldn't get interest out of you. (They'd probably just offer that out of court.)
Probably you have to indicate acceptence when you call it up to activate it, though. And when you charge anything. And when you pay the bill. So don't think you can just run around wild charging stuff because your card isn't signed. There are a quite a few ways to accept the contract. (But merely swiping the card is not enough.)
I'm suddenly reminded of that Married with Children episode where the Bundys learned you can keep anything mailed to you, which is true, and started using a credit card mailed to the dog. And the first thing the repo man asked them was 'Did you sign the card?'.
This is why places that won't accept you signing the card in front of them are stupid, though. You can certainly accept a contract in front of them to start paying for things charged on the card. (Ask them to witness it, see what they do.)
The fact that they compare the signature accepting the contract of the card to the signature accepting the charges billed to the card as a security measure is not incredibly important to anyone but themselves. It doesn't matter if they don't match...if you signed them, you have to pay what you agreed to pay.
And it's certainly not a very good security measure, considering a large amount of stolen credit cards are stolen before the owner actually gets them, and thus were signed by the thief.
Nothing is stopping you from writing 'See ID' and signing it.
I hope you laughed at them and said 'Have fun absorbing $15K loses to fraud, suckers. Maybe next time you'll check signatures and IDs on a purchase that large.' and strolled off as the law protected you from all but the first 50 dollars, and your bank covered that.
The rest of that made sense, but this is dumb. People who do that don't want cashiers to check when they use the card, there's no point of that. They want cashiers to check when others use the card, so it can't be stolen.
So they write 'See ID' on the back so the cashier will do it all the time. If they have to do something to get the cashier to check ID, there is no point.
I don't know why the schools are falling down on educating people about contract law.
If someone steals a credit card, the first thing they'd going to do is check the signature to forge it. If there's no signature, they're going to sign it with something they can forge.
So all you accomplished was to piss off legit card holders. And, FYI, while there is a requirement that credit cards be signed, or you check ID, there is no requirement that they be signed in advance.
And it's prefectly valid to use 'CID' as your signature, so you quite possibly were violating your agreement with the credit card company by refusing to accept valid cards for no reason. If they signed the receipt with 'John Doe' and the credit card said their signature was 'CID', you know what you're supposed to do? The thing you always do when the signature doesn't match...check ID!
As an aside, what thief would use a credit card to get into a preforming arts center? It's almost as stupid as buying gas with it. Hey, this card's been stolen, let me use it somewhere with a lot of people and where I'm then going to hang out for two hours watching a play. No way they'll catch me!
OTOH, I got rather pissed when I paid for college classes with a check once and got asked for ID. I was like 'Look, if I stole this check, you have a whole quarter to track me down, I'll be walking around campus!'.
The rules say, you have to have a signed credit card to buy things. (This is actually a cerdit card company rule.) The rules also say that she has to compare them, and ask for ID if they don't match. She's not actually comparing them, she just saw you sign them. She's just pretending to compare them so she doesn't get in trouble.
I've worked as a cashier, and I had to do lots of stupid things. I've carded eighty year old women. If you don't like the waste of time, complain to management and get them to change the rules.
You have to be one of the stupidest people I've talked to here. They can't just call something evidence, it has to actually be evidence, or might reasonably be evidence. If there's a hammer laying in the room with a murder victim who was shot, they can't take it because they want to collect hammers. If the victim was killed with a small, heavy, blow to the head, however, they can take it.
Maybe you should watch some Law and Order or something to notice how the police operate. They don't walk out with refridgerators while investigating jewel thefts, they don't walk out with extension cords while investigating armed robbery, they don't just randomly pick up stuff while investigating crimes.
No part of a computer except the data on a hard drive can be evidence of a crime, unless the crime is that said equipment is stolen. And thus they cannot take it. (And don't want to take it.)
1) They can look at the logs with the router IN PLACE No need to take it. Besides, if you unplug the router, there goes the logs in RAM.
And if the logs are in RAM only, they won't take the router, they will just take pictures. (Which is why I said, if they ask for your password tot he router, give it to them.)
If they aren't in RAM, they may take the router, or they may not. It depends on how important they think the evidence may be. Like I already pointed out, spoofed MAC addresses aren't incredibly useful.
So, if I use the Police radio frequences, for somethign illegal, I can force the cops to stop using the radio??
Are just stupid or something? How would they stopping using the radio stop you from using the radio?
The point of copyright law is to encourage the creation of new works. It's not because creators have any sort of moral right to their works.
Other countries have the concept of a moral right to a work, but not the US. (Which is interesting, because the US Constitution has quite a few moral rights in it, but not that one.)
Do I think driving recklessly is a valid response to police abusing their authority? Of course not.
However, that's because the point of laws against driving recklessly are not to reward the police, but to protect people, whereas copyright laws are to reward people.
When the people who are getting the rewards start abusing to system to get even more (And, meanwhile, failling to do what they are supposed to be doing in the first place, keeping copyrighted works published so people can purchase them.), do I think it's morally okay to start breaking the law in response to that? Sure, if that's what you're actually doing.
You can, of course, be sure that's what you're doing if you're following the laws as originally written. The original copyright was 28 years max. Lookie, all Beatles songs are public domain except 'Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love'.
It didn't stop you from breaking DRM. (Yes, yes, there was no DRM then, but even if there had been, the law wouldn't have stopped you.) Lookie, DeCSS is legal.
I don't have any problem with copyrights. I do have a problem with companies wielding undue influence over the legislature and retroactively changing the amount of 'incentive' they get to do things. (I think anyone should have a problem with that.)
If he get voted out, the gays will come and seduce your children!
And, just in case people don't get it, that's why so many people here complain about EULAs, also. We already have the right to use the software, we don't need any extra rights granted to do so, and we certainly don't need to lose rights at the same time.
The only thing copyright law forbids is making copies. (And public performances.) Anything else is legal. That includes being in possession of a copy that was not made legally.
And you're right. Putting Hatch on this is like asking the mafia to operate the legal system.
In the case of phishing, that's a somewhat reasonable idea. If the government could come up with some way to keep people from being able to log into peypal.com, I'm all for that in theory, although it would probably be abused by the government. I really suspect the computer industry would be better equiped to handle that, and the government should just devote more resources to shutting down and tracking ownership of peypal.com, instead. But whatever.
But, see, this gives them an opening 'People cannot be trusted with doing whatever they want on computers'. So we're going to have to regulate what software they can run, for their own good of course.
You've managed to troll people into pointing out the moral difference between copying from the MPAA and people writing code in their spare time, and everyone missed the point:
What Orrin Hatch likes to propose are solutions for illegally copying fromt he big corporations and none at all for the programmer. Programmers do not have money to sue a company who uses their stuff, the MPAA, meanwhile, sends cease and desist orders to everyone, and is writing the law. They've managed to get jackbooted government thugs to enforce their copyrights.
It doesn't matter if the laws are theoritically identical. Programmers do not want infinite copyright, no, not even Bill Gates. (There's no point.) Programmers does not want huge fines for someone downloading prereleased copies of movies they've made. (That law doesn't even apply to programs.) Any GPL programmers don't even want the absurd EULAs the rest of the industry has moved to.
GPL programmers, in short, wish to use the original copyright law as it was originally intended: To write work and release it to the public, yet profit from it.
The MPAA and RIAA, however, do not. They are not only giant soulless corporations which not only doesn't produce anything themselves, instead merely providing funding to actual artists, but they constantly lobby to get laws in their favour and abuse the legal process.
If you can't see the difference between that, I point to you the difference between a cop who pulls someone over because he's weaving all over the road, and one who claims someone was weaving because the cop wanted to search his car because they know who he is and he's sometimes 'uppity' with the police. Exact same authority, exact same lwws, and one is an abuse of the system.