While other posters have addressed the 'consent' thing, I should point out that the police do not actually need your consent to search reported crime scenes. If you claim you saw a crime, they don't then need your permission to search, as long as the property owner isn't standing there with lawyers disagreeing and claiming you're lying.
Police don't need warrants or anything to search actual scenes of actual crimes, so unless it's in dispute by someone that a crime happened, they can search. They were just asking to be nice, and possibly wanted to search more of the house than they could get away with under 'crime scene'. (Which is legit...if you were asleep, you don't actually know all the locations that the trespassing occurred.)
In the circumstances you described, if you decided you didn't want the search, you could always claim you were mistaken and that a crime hadn't been committed, at which point you'd probably piss them off enough they'd slap you with wasting the police's time.
And if they suspect a possible threat, they can do a quick search even if you claim you were lying early, because it's possible that someone is still there and threatening you to get them to leave.
Granted, if you hadn't said yes in your specific circumstances, it's entirely possible they'd just shrug and walk out and not worry about your case if you're not going to cooperate, which is a hell of a lot easier than actually trying to solve the case.
As for whether they can search again...if they try, you can demand they explain what evidence they think they're going to find this time, and dispute that in court. If they're just using that as a pretext to get dirt on you, you'll probably win. If they have discovered that some armed robber commonly leaves a specifically bent paperclip in the hall closet that they would have missed before, and they want to legitimately look for it, they'll win.
Technically, it's only 'evidence' once it's being sought. Until the police say they want it(1), it's just 'stuff', and if it's yours, you can destroy it all you want. (Erm, unless laws exist to keep you from doing that.)
So the GGP is 'right', but stupid anyway, because no one 'destroyed evidence' to start with.
It always amazes me how people have so little knowledge of the law that they think someone attempting to hide the fact they committed a crime is somehow 'destroying evidence'. Which would essentially mean that literally 90% of criminals would be guilty of it.
1) What's more, the police have to specify it pretty exactly. The police can't come across a murder scene and declare 'We seek all physical objects somehow involved in this' and charge the murderer with destroying evidence because he washed his clothes after that. (If they could issue such a declaration they obviously would.)
The police would have to go to a specific person and order him not to wash his clothing, and then he does so, for it to be illegal.
If you think that the relatively weak obfuscating technique of reloading an O/S is somehow mitigating the extremely strong obfuscation provided by encryption, then you are really missing the point of encryption.
No, I suspect that he thinks installing a new OS will hide the fact that you ever encrypted the drive to start with.
Which it will, if you do a full format, but you could just do the full format without a new OS. (OTOH, if that's your primary drive, you sorta need an OS anyway.)
So the police will be looking at a fairly new OS install, which formatted the drive, and that's not really evidence of anything except you use Windows and need to reinstall your OS. (Even if you weren't using Windows before, heh.)
If you're not going to do that, you should at least overwrite the start of the drive with zeros.
Almost all encryption takes the password you type in, and encrypts and decrypts a different key with it, which is then used to on the rest of the drive. They store this key at the start. If you overwrite it, it is utterly impossible for you to ever give up the password. (Or, rather, you can give up the password, and still no one can read any files, because all the password did was decrypt what you overwrote already.)
What's more, you can prove this in court, so even if the courts do decide you can be required to give up the password, you can just do so, and then point out they're trying to decrypt something that isn't there anymore, and not even you know the actual key that the drive was encrypted with. (Because that's simply how the software works.)
Now, that's not quite the same as installing an OS, as it's clear you did have something you wished to hide on the drive...but they can't hold you in contempt for failing to reveal it, as you literally cannot reveal it.
Yeah, I pointed out how timothy was an asshole, looking at someone who apparently murdered his kid and now is more likely to be convicted of it, and decided...we needed to worry about privacy rights!
It's a privacy issue if the police are going through everyone's computer looking for 'suspicious' things (Which, incidentally, it's entirely possible that the government is doing to some extent.) Just like it's a problem if they're watching the local library to see who checks out certain books.
It's not a goddamn problem if they have a suspect and get a judge to order a search of his browser history, or even the books he checks out.
Here's an idea for a discussion:
How about we talk about the fact that recent abuses of stuff like this, things like the NSA witretapping and whatnot, drive demand that no records at all be kept, drive development of how to do these things in secret, give reasons for secretly using such methods...and thus could cause people to get away with fucking feeding their kid antifreeze.
I.e., abuses by the government (and even private individuals) are making more and more people aware of this, which makes it harder to solve actual crimes, involvng actual dead people, with actual search warrants issued by actual courts, where the police HAVE THE FUCKING RIGHT TO LOOK AT YOUR HISTORY.
Look, it's even anti-government-invading-your-privacy topic, but, you know, not one by an asshole who apparently doesn't understand that catching murderers is a good thing for the police to do.
Yes, but that just means people do it backwards. Have the link go one way, but have the javascript click event send you somewhere.
None of this really relevant, though, except to demonstrate that timothy is an asshole who apparently thinks it's a travesty of justice that someone got arrested for murdering their kid, because the internet was somehow used as evidence against them.
The problem is not URL shorteners, it is that courts are allowed to use what you have been reading as evidence against you.
No, that's not the problem, as evidenced by the fact that the discussion went from murder to child porn, where the laws actually do have a problem. The problem with trolls planting child porn is that possession itself of CP is illegal, which is one of the stupidest and nonsensical laws ever. That's the problem there, that 'possessing' information that is completely intangible and you have no way to refrain from possessing, or even knowing you possess it, because your computer got it automatically, is a crime.
But no one suggests that reading about murder should be illegal.
So there is no problem with your reading materials being used in a criminal case against you as evidence you actually planned a crime.
It might, indeed, a 'chilling effect' on speech, but is a chilling effect only for murderers. Which is a strange sort of problem to worry about ' People who are planning to kill other people might decided not to reading about murder, so the police don't use that as evidence.'. Well, yeah, and they'll probably refrain from talking about murder, also, which is surely a greater chilling effect, and hence punishing people for murder at all causes them to refrain from talking about the murder they will, or did, commit.
None of that is really a constitutional issue. No one is being punished for what they did or did not read (Unless it's child pron, which, as I said, is an insane law.), or what they did or did not say. They are being punished for the actual crime they committed, and what they did or did not read or say is just being used as evidence. This will, indeed, cause them to refrain from those things, or only do them in secret, but that's a not a speech issue, that's simply due to the act the things are illegal.
They've held a decade long, 24/7 vigil at the Chinese embassy here. They've taken it to the point that many people assume the building belongs to them.
Yes, strangely, when countries imprison people for religious beliefs, often people in other countries will protest at their embassy in another country. (Which is a hell of a lot safer than protesting in the actual country.)
They run a high production value propaganda newspaper, as linked to here.
There is no link there.
And, incidentally, all religions put out 'propaganda', or, as it's normally called, 'religious text'.
If that's not organized, what is?
Vigils are almost by definition not organized. The fact a local community of followers is organized enough to keep that up is does not mean it's anywhere near as organized as, for example, Methodists.
And, incidentally, 'organized' doesn't making it cult either. I was just pointing that out something as disorganized as the Falun Gong can't be a cult.
Things are cults only if, as I explained, they exhibit specific characteristics, which I listed. One of those is a fairly strict hierarchy, which Falun Gong does not appear to have. In fact, many 'followers' appear to have just read a book and show up to worship, aka, group exercise.
That is not how cults operate. Cults specifically isolate you from friends and family, replacing them in your life. They have leaders that must be obeyed. They teach you the outside world is against you.
Hell, there's not really any cults that are over multiple cities. Cults have to be heavily centralized. The closest is something like Scientology, which manages to maintain order and control via a corporate structure. (And is a rather atypical cult.)
Falun Gong is the most uncultlike religion that I am even aware of. It behaves nothing like a cult, and not even really like much of a religion, at least not a western one. (And cults are an exclusively western phenomenon, even when they borrow the trappings of eastern religions.)
Google 'confusopoly'. Scott Adams coined it to mean 'a group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price', and the most triumphant example is the airline industry.
Well, actually, as they have you trapped for long periods, sometimes they're required to serve food regardless of any payment, but that food is already in the purchase price of a ticket and you don't pay for it on the plane. (This is the reason for the soft drink and crackers. They are legally required to feed you.)
Of course, all this is extremely poorly planned anyway. There's no logical reason not to take cash. There's no logical reason not to have change. There's no logical reason to serve soft drinks out of cans. There's no logical reason not to have passengers order and pay for food at the gate so that the plane doesn't have to carry a bunch of extra food.
The food service on airplanes is apparently designed by trained horses stamping their feet. Even within the space, weight, and cost restrictions they're operating in, it would be pretty easy to have a very nice meal service...in fact, they used to have one! But they cut it back to nothing, people complained, so they rebuild it...stupid style.
Apparently, in their universe, it all has to operate out of that stupid cart. Heaven forbid sodas get poured in the back and carried out, or people sit with a menu in the terminal, figure what they want later, and pay for it there. Heaven forbid they actually stagger food service so they can take more time, or let people order whenever.
I have a friend who's a flight attendant, I need to ask him why food service is so stupidly-designed.
I've never understood why passengers have to sit down when the fasten seat belt light is on, but often flight attendants are pushing a 200 pound cart with a couple pots of scalding hot coffee on top of it down the aisles.
Often they've turned that on because food is being served. Because morons attempt to get past the food cart, which takes the entire isle. (They're always 'the exception' who think they can get past it.) They turn that light on so flight attendants can direct people back to their seat without argument.
Which is just stupid. They need a sign on the food cart that says 'You are not allowed to go past this cart for any reason whatsoever. If you are on the wrong side of it, tough.', and a light that lights up saying 'Food cart in movement, please check before leaving seat', and let everyone else sort it out. Normally, you can get to a bathroom in the other direction if you really really need to go.
If you leave before the cart gets to you, and try to come back after it's gotten past your seat, and hence would have to pass it, well, you lost the game and have to stand around like an idiot until the cart finishes. Sucks to be you. (OTOH, that's still better than not being able to get to the bathroom in the first place.)
None of this should be the same as the 'remain in your seat for safety' light, which should not be abused to stop idiots from trying to get past the food cart. And that light, incidentally, should be multiple levels...there's a difference between 'Do not walk around if you can help it because we got or are expecting some turbulence' and 'Stay buckled in you idiot, we're landing or crashing.'. I think a green, yellow, and red light is in order.
While you are normally right, being trapped on an airplane is exceptional circumstances.
If you had planned to eat on the airplane because you informed you you could purchase food there, and then, once you were trapped there, informed you that you could only purchase food in a specific way, you might, indeed, have a legal case against them.
People don't just have to accept US only in debt resolutions. They often have to accept them for new services when you get previous things from them under the impression you can get another service for them in cash.
Strange example: If you had an auto club subscription that said if you ever ran out of gas, they'd bring gas, that you could pay for, to your car. (Weird subscription, but whatever.) If you did, and asked them to do that, and they brought gas but demanded payment in pennies only, for the gas, you'd indeed have a legal case against them. You paid for something with the expectation that you could buy something else from them, and they failed to explain the restrictions on how you could buy that second thing when you bought the first thing.
Likewise, if I bought the airline ticket with the expectation that I could 'buy food', which they advertised was possible, and it turns out they meant I could only 'buy food' in specific ways but failed to note that before I paid for the ticket, I'd certainly have a case against them. (In fact, I'd have more a case against them then the gas thing, as I'm actually trapped and can't buy food elsewhere, and now because of their failure to live up their promise, I am starving.)
People generally have legal grounds for a suit if somewhere says they can buy X and Y, and someone buys X because they intend to buy Y later, and in fact Y is a selling point of X...and then it turns out Y has some restrictions on it that weren't made clear when they bought X. (Normally, though, 'What currency you can buy it with' wouldn't be grounds for a suit, as that is generally a trivially solvable problem, and courts don't like lawsuits that could be solved for less work than actually filing the suit...but you can't solve that problem in midair or on the side of the road.)
Of course, there's no free food anymore, but they'll SELL you a chicken sandwich for $10, or a can of Pringles for $4.50. What I found interesting was that they don't take cash anymore - just credit/debit cards - I guess that "...all debts, public and private..." printed on the money doesn't mean anything if you're an airline.
This is the thing that pisses me off because they have an idiotic justification for it.
Every pound on airplane costs money, and it does, indeed, cost to have them carry stuff back and forth, when they don't know how much they're going to sell. If they need enough sandwiches for whatever amount the plane might want, it can get costly.
The problem is there's an obvious way of handling this. Ask people beforehand. They could charge people three dollars before the flight to pack a sandwich on there, and then have just a few extras laying around which they charge $10 during the flight.
The fact they don't do this makes me think the entire 'We're having to fly extra food around so it costs a lot' is just nonsense.
Meanwhile, on Delta, I had the opposite problem. They only took cash. Luckily, I had enough.
Oh, and on a related note: What the hell is the deal with giving soda out of cans? Sure, they do all these penny pinching everywhere else, but for some reason they choose what is literally the most expensive way of distributing soda, which is to package it in cans, and then pour it half a can at a time into cups. I can't even think of how you'd make that cost more.
Has no one heard of a soda fountain? Install one in the middle of the plane, have someone run back and forth to it behind the food cart. I mean, they have plenty of people. Hell, at the very least you pour it out of two liter bottles, not cans.
A half a can of soda costs something like 10 cents at least, assuming you can buy in bulk and get cans at the rock bottom price of 20 cents a can, and that's not even including the price of flying the aluminum all over the place. 6oz of a fountain drink is immeasurable in cost..the plastic cup costs ten times as much, and it probably costs 2 cents.
I've heard crazy theories about air pressure, but they make no sense to me. I mean, the cans seem to have no problem. A soda fountain could easily be made adjustable with an barometer if that's really needed. The damn airplane is already carrying compressed air, it can carry compressed CO2.
Scott Adams refers to airlines a 'confusopoly', where companies don't compete on price at all, because no one knows what the hell is 'reasonable'. All markets have imperfect information, but airlines have managed to take imperfect information to an art form.
Even with comparison sites, it's always 'search for a specific trip and find specific prices now'. How much were those prices last week? Next week? How much are prices for the trips you're not seeing? How much are the prices to neighboring cities? Why is it cheaper to fly through two other cities?
What. The Hell. Is. Going. On?
You want to know how to cause a riot if you have magical powers? Go to an airport, have the price everyone paid for their ticket float over their head. Watch some people get very angry, very quickly.
In fact, that would be a rather funny airline protest movement. Everyone just wears the price of their ticket taped to their shirt. That's it. Just get 5% of fliers to do that.
Within hours, there'd be goddamn screaming fits at ticket counters.
You asked him to attempt to lower the price, and he called them, hung up, and then claimed the price was higher?
You did just walk out on him, right? I mean, it's not like you even had an oral agreement at that point. (Considering you were, you know, trying to change the price, which ipso facto means you haven't agreed on the price. Not that his changing of the price wouldn't have voided any agreement anyway.)
OTOH, maybe I misunderstood. If he can call up and get 50% off the total ticket, a 20% commission on the ticket, while seeming excessive, is still cheaper than the original ticket.
It's not unreasonable for someone who can actually get the airlines to get lower prices to say 'Either you take the listed price, or I do my magic and you pay me more'.
On the third hand, that's sorta implicitly already included in the commission for a travel agent. If they're not going to somehow magically get me lower prices to start with, I have no idea what I would be paying them for at all.
There are a few industries that basically cost the same amount to operate no matter how many people are there. For example, for a theatrical show, if they're about to start a show with an empty seat, and they can put someone in it for a quarter, they should do so, because, duh, they just made a quarter. There is no cost, the show is the same no matter what. (Hell, because of the possibility they might buy concessions, and because packed show give people better impressions of the show, they really should stick people in the seats for free.) The only 'cost' is that people might start attempting to have that happen so not buy tickets.
Now, hotels aren't quite to that point. An occupied room does cost the hotel slightly more than an empty one. They require someone to change and wash the sheets and towels, provide soap, there's a risk of damages (OTOH, they have insurance, and their insurance policy is not cheaper because a room was empty.), they're just normal wear and tear on the room, etc.
But all that is, at most, $15. Maybe $20. Ten minutes work for a min-wages person in the room, two minutes in the laundry, $3 worth of supplies. Everything else, from the internet to the check-in clerk to the room itself, was just sitting idle.
In fact, the reason hotels are the price they are is that they have to make up the cost of the stuff sitting idle. If a hotel actually was packed all the time, it could charge $25 a night. (Although that would be rather stupid of them. You don't charge less when demand is higher.)
Because they aren't packed, however, they have to pay the fixed costs, aka, taxes, bank loans for the property, cable TV, someone to sit at the desk, web site, etc, out of the people who are actually there, making their prices higher.
All businesses, obviously, have some fixed costs that aren't based on sales, but hotels have tons and tons of rooms just sucking up the profits if they aren't filled. It's not like a fast food place where less customers results in them ordering less food from their supplier so their costs go down a little.
And the thing about hotels is that they can scarcely go out into the street and find more people. People aren't 'not buying hotel rooms' because they don't want them, they're not buying hotel rooms because they aren't in town. There's not a group of people wandering around who've never considered staying at a hotel that the hotel can advertise to. They can only get more people by cannibalizing people from other hotels, which is a zero-sum game, or by having more people visit town. Hence giving kickbacks, excuse me, referrals, to people who cause other people to visit town is entirely reasonable.
Dude, Falun Gong is about as far from a 'cult' as possible. They're one of the most disorganized religions on the planet.
I don't think you understand what 'cult' actually means. They are religions with charismatic leaders that claims ultimate authority under a strict hierarchy that isolate and essentially brainwash followers by replacing their entire life. (Often in the Western world they will hijack Christianity and place themselves in the middle.)
Whereas Falun Gong is just another mix of Dao and Confusism and movement exercises and apparently mostly practiced by well educated middle-aged women, and something like half the 'followers' appear to just be people who read the philosophy book and show up at the exercises groups.(1) It's barely even a religion by western standards, and it's not a 'cult' in any of the legitimate sense of the word except the rather bigoted 'any new religion' sense. (And even then it's not really a new 'religion', it's more a new 'sect' of the rather amorphous eastern religions.)
1) China claims otherwise, claims it's a well-organized subversive movement, but China is lying
Similarly, there was a bit of a kerfuffle when one bank decided to let its customers handle their accounts on other bank sites by screenscraping. I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but they no longer offer it.
While that may or may not be a violation of copyright, it's almost certainly a violation of the other site's TOS.
If it's less than 10 dollars difference, I'm probably either going with people I've not had a bad experience with (Delta) or with one that's at a better time (Anytime that isn't rush hour or 4 in the morning.)
If you take 1000 scientists and give them all the same data, they will probably look at that data in several thousand ways. If you are dealing with 95% intervals, and the data is looked at in 2000 ways, then about 100 of those ways will present something 'significant' by simple random chance.
The problem is that they're so starved for funding that they then release it as data and the media picks up on it.
I'm wondering how useful it would be to split all datasets, from the very beginning, in half, and people only work on one of them. Find something interesting? See if it's true in the other half.
This probably would not work.
The entire thing, ironically, it's 'bad' science...it's just half science. Science is supposed to look around for oddities and make hypothesis about them. But that comes before the testing.
You can't look at data, notice something, make a hypothesis, and then run a hypothesis on that data. Of course if you noticed that people in your dataset who ate eggs each morning had a 5% lower chance of getting cancer, and you check that against your dataset, that is apparently true, but you cannot do that. You have to check it on something else.
The rest of us who have been willing to entertain less mainstream, more "fringe" theories that are easy to demagogue by people who have never investigated them already knew that the whole endeavor is pretty good but not nearly as good as it is made out to be by people who really want to believe in it.
It's exactly those types of experiments that are not repeatable, you twit.
The pharmaceutical industry indeed stopped being science, and started being 'How can we make money from this?' a long time ago.
That doesn't change the fact that there are actually scientists in other fields who know that zero point energy or whatever 'fringe' science you've decided to get behind is incorrect.
Read the article. The problem here is sciences who do a bunch of research and then sieve the data until it comes out in some 'new' way, which is exactly how 'fringe' science works and is exactly why none of it is ever repeated or even slightly useful.
'Sieving' research only works to 'discover' new stuff that doesn't exist. It would be impossible to actually disprove stuff that does really exist with it. If you look at nothing from enough angles, you can find some statistical anomaly that is 'something'. You cannot look at something and turn it into nothing.
I'm just imagining how that would work: Sure, you can guess what card I'm holding up 9/10 times, but you don't have ESP, because you have a zero chance of being correct when it's a circle, it's only the other shapes you can guess. As I've decided as of this moment to look only at circles, you don't have ESP.
I can't imagine any real scientist attempting to make that argument.
I think it was actually in the 1980's when the country started living more on borrowed money. It just didn't get bad enough to matter much until recently.
Yeah, obviously, some people have always lived on it. But in the 00s, wages remained steady, and inflation continued, so essentially everyone borrowed. Borrowed, mostly, from their houses.
This is, incidentally, why the nonsense about 'irresponsible borrowers' is bullshit. People didn't become irresponsibly, they did what we've always done throughout history...people who have money shortfalls end up borrowing money, hoping that things become better, but often they do not and the people can't pay it back. This is not the new thing, this is not what caused the problem.
It's just, previous, banks wouldn't loan to such people, whereas this time, the banks figured out how to make money by loaning money they knew couldn't be paid back. (By selling the loans to other people.)
Combine that with the fact that the amount of people who needed to borrow probably quadrupled, and, well, that's what happened, right there.
If banks, in an orgy of fraud and gluttony, hadn't made such loans, the people pointing out 'You can't have price inflation and not wage inflation without everyone ending up poor' would have been listened to years earlier.
And also the banks wouldn't have blown up, but that problem is orthogonal to the wage problem. The banks behavior caused their own problem, but just hide the wage problem. People should have started ending up homeless in 2000 or so, due to lack of jobs that actually paid enough money to live on, which would have been a lot more gradual and actually been a fixable problems.
Instead, they took jobs that didn't pay enough, and lived off their house, and, perhaps most importantly, assumed it was just them...when it was actually a huge section of society. The whole 'slowly boil a frog' metaphor is generally stupid, but one place it does work is for the economy. Instead of a few people getting angry each year, everyone just got poorer and poorer. But, eventually, just like the frog jumps out in real life, people do too. And discovered, hey, everyone else had been getting boiled also.
Sadly, apparently, Republicans have managed to make them angry at the debt, which literally has nothing at all to do with this.
In the 2000's the USA lost something like 44,000 manufacturing plants. There are some parts for US military hardware that aren't manufactured in the country anymore. How scary is that?
That is a serious national security risk. Not the second sentence, which is also a national security risk...but the fact that we cannot manufacture roughly the amount of goods we need is a serious security risk itself.
Counties are rarely entirely self-sufficient, and don't need to be, but they really should be self-sufficient in most things, and be able to overproduce enough things to trade for the rest.
And, of course, it's a pretty nonsensical economic policy on top of that. We can't all have jobs working in Best Buy selling stuff from China...at some point, all the money will end up in China. I mean, this is just blatantly obvious to anyone who glances at the problem.
Yeah. There are supposed to be tradeoffs in society, and the government really can restrict rights to some extent for safety. They can make you get a permit for a protest, they can stop you from handling actual poisonous snakes in your religion, they can set sort of reasonable restrictions.
But thanks to decades of total ownership by the oil industry and whatnot, we literally have no alternate to automobiles, so the idea that they can restrict people from operating those is legally dubious.
And the same thing applies to the no fly list, except ten times worse. For one thing, you literally cannot leave some parts of the US without flying. Not just Hawaii and other island...large areas of Alaska are unreachable without flight. Likewise, there's no way real way to leave North America, especially without the cooperation of Canada or Mexico. And, no, you cannot take a boat...there is functionally no international boat passenger traffic.
The US needs to stop pretending that the freedom to travel doesn't exist. As it's a right, it should only be restricted for two reasons:
A) As punishment, i.e., probation, house arrest, or even normal arrest, which comes after a trial and conviction.
b) or specific modes of travel should be restricted solely for demonstrable safety concerns, and the utmost attempt must be made to find and provide alternatives.
Somehow, drunk driving has gotten to the point where they claim it's for 'safety', but it's clearly a punishment. A suggested alternative to barring people from driving: Requiring ignition locks on cars, which would functionally stop all repeat offenders.
Of course, flying is even more absurd, where you can be barred for flying because of 'safety concerns' the government doesn't have to explain or justify to anyone.
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While other posters have addressed the 'consent' thing, I should point out that the police do not actually need your consent to search reported crime scenes. If you claim you saw a crime, they don't then need your permission to search, as long as the property owner isn't standing there with lawyers disagreeing and claiming you're lying.
Police don't need warrants or anything to search actual scenes of actual crimes, so unless it's in dispute by someone that a crime happened, they can search. They were just asking to be nice, and possibly wanted to search more of the house than they could get away with under 'crime scene'. (Which is legit...if you were asleep, you don't actually know all the locations that the trespassing occurred.)
In the circumstances you described, if you decided you didn't want the search, you could always claim you were mistaken and that a crime hadn't been committed, at which point you'd probably piss them off enough they'd slap you with wasting the police's time.
And if they suspect a possible threat, they can do a quick search even if you claim you were lying early, because it's possible that someone is still there and threatening you to get them to leave.
Granted, if you hadn't said yes in your specific circumstances, it's entirely possible they'd just shrug and walk out and not worry about your case if you're not going to cooperate, which is a hell of a lot easier than actually trying to solve the case.
As for whether they can search again...if they try, you can demand they explain what evidence they think they're going to find this time, and dispute that in court. If they're just using that as a pretext to get dirt on you, you'll probably win. If they have discovered that some armed robber commonly leaves a specifically bent paperclip in the hall closet that they would have missed before, and they want to legitimately look for it, they'll win.
They will. Evidence like the fact you researched how do it.
Technically, it's only 'evidence' once it's being sought. Until the police say they want it(1), it's just 'stuff', and if it's yours, you can destroy it all you want. (Erm, unless laws exist to keep you from doing that.)
So the GGP is 'right', but stupid anyway, because no one 'destroyed evidence' to start with.
It always amazes me how people have so little knowledge of the law that they think someone attempting to hide the fact they committed a crime is somehow 'destroying evidence'. Which would essentially mean that literally 90% of criminals would be guilty of it.
1) What's more, the police have to specify it pretty exactly. The police can't come across a murder scene and declare 'We seek all physical objects somehow involved in this' and charge the murderer with destroying evidence because he washed his clothes after that. (If they could issue such a declaration they obviously would.)
The police would have to go to a specific person and order him not to wash his clothing, and then he does so, for it to be illegal.
If you think that the relatively weak obfuscating technique of reloading an O/S is somehow mitigating the extremely strong obfuscation provided by encryption, then you are really missing the point of encryption.
No, I suspect that he thinks installing a new OS will hide the fact that you ever encrypted the drive to start with.
Which it will, if you do a full format, but you could just do the full format without a new OS. (OTOH, if that's your primary drive, you sorta need an OS anyway.)
So the police will be looking at a fairly new OS install, which formatted the drive, and that's not really evidence of anything except you use Windows and need to reinstall your OS. (Even if you weren't using Windows before, heh.)
If you're not going to do that, you should at least overwrite the start of the drive with zeros.
Almost all encryption takes the password you type in, and encrypts and decrypts a different key with it, which is then used to on the rest of the drive. They store this key at the start. If you overwrite it, it is utterly impossible for you to ever give up the password. (Or, rather, you can give up the password, and still no one can read any files, because all the password did was decrypt what you overwrote already.)
What's more, you can prove this in court, so even if the courts do decide you can be required to give up the password, you can just do so, and then point out they're trying to decrypt something that isn't there anymore, and not even you know the actual key that the drive was encrypted with. (Because that's simply how the software works.)
Now, that's not quite the same as installing an OS, as it's clear you did have something you wished to hide on the drive...but they can't hold you in contempt for failing to reveal it, as you literally cannot reveal it.
Yeah, I pointed out how timothy was an asshole, looking at someone who apparently murdered his kid and now is more likely to be convicted of it, and decided...we needed to worry about privacy rights!
It's a privacy issue if the police are going through everyone's computer looking for 'suspicious' things (Which, incidentally, it's entirely possible that the government is doing to some extent.) Just like it's a problem if they're watching the local library to see who checks out certain books.
It's not a goddamn problem if they have a suspect and get a judge to order a search of his browser history, or even the books he checks out.
Here's an idea for a discussion:
How about we talk about the fact that recent abuses of stuff like this, things like the NSA witretapping and whatnot, drive demand that no records at all be kept, drive development of how to do these things in secret, give reasons for secretly using such methods...and thus could cause people to get away with fucking feeding their kid antifreeze.
I.e., abuses by the government (and even private individuals) are making more and more people aware of this, which makes it harder to solve actual crimes, involvng actual dead people, with actual search warrants issued by actual courts, where the police HAVE THE FUCKING RIGHT TO LOOK AT YOUR HISTORY.
Look, it's even anti-government-invading-your-privacy topic, but, you know, not one by an asshole who apparently doesn't understand that catching murderers is a good thing for the police to do.
Yes, but that just means people do it backwards. Have the link go one way, but have the javascript click event send you somewhere.
None of this really relevant, though, except to demonstrate that timothy is an asshole who apparently thinks it's a travesty of justice that someone got arrested for murdering their kid, because the internet was somehow used as evidence against them.
The problem is not URL shorteners, it is that courts are allowed to use what you have been reading as evidence against you.
No, that's not the problem, as evidenced by the fact that the discussion went from murder to child porn, where the laws actually do have a problem. The problem with trolls planting child porn is that possession itself of CP is illegal, which is one of the stupidest and nonsensical laws ever. That's the problem there, that 'possessing' information that is completely intangible and you have no way to refrain from possessing, or even knowing you possess it, because your computer got it automatically, is a crime.
But no one suggests that reading about murder should be illegal.
So there is no problem with your reading materials being used in a criminal case against you as evidence you actually planned a crime.
It might, indeed, a 'chilling effect' on speech, but is a chilling effect only for murderers. Which is a strange sort of problem to worry about ' People who are planning to kill other people might decided not to reading about murder, so the police don't use that as evidence.'. Well, yeah, and they'll probably refrain from talking about murder, also, which is surely a greater chilling effect, and hence punishing people for murder at all causes them to refrain from talking about the murder they will, or did, commit.
None of that is really a constitutional issue. No one is being punished for what they did or did not read (Unless it's child pron, which, as I said, is an insane law.), or what they did or did not say. They are being punished for the actual crime they committed, and what they did or did not read or say is just being used as evidence. This will, indeed, cause them to refrain from those things, or only do them in secret, but that's a not a speech issue, that's simply due to the act the things are illegal.
ISKCON isn't a cult either. It's just a form of Hinduism that proselytizes to non-Hindus.
What exactly is your definition of a cult?
They've held a decade long, 24/7 vigil at the Chinese embassy here. They've taken it to the point that many people assume the building belongs to them.
Yes, strangely, when countries imprison people for religious beliefs, often people in other countries will protest at their embassy in another country. (Which is a hell of a lot safer than protesting in the actual country.)
You know, like here. Or here.
This is not the story you seem to think it is.
They run a high production value propaganda newspaper, as linked to here.
There is no link there.
And, incidentally, all religions put out 'propaganda', or, as it's normally called, 'religious text'.
If that's not organized, what is?
Vigils are almost by definition not organized. The fact a local community of followers is organized enough to keep that up is does not mean it's anywhere near as organized as, for example, Methodists.
And, incidentally, 'organized' doesn't making it cult either. I was just pointing that out something as disorganized as the Falun Gong can't be a cult.
Things are cults only if, as I explained, they exhibit specific characteristics, which I listed. One of those is a fairly strict hierarchy, which Falun Gong does not appear to have. In fact, many 'followers' appear to have just read a book and show up to worship, aka, group exercise.
That is not how cults operate. Cults specifically isolate you from friends and family, replacing them in your life. They have leaders that must be obeyed. They teach you the outside world is against you.
Hell, there's not really any cults that are over multiple cities. Cults have to be heavily centralized. The closest is something like Scientology, which manages to maintain order and control via a corporate structure. (And is a rather atypical cult.)
Falun Gong is the most uncultlike religion that I am even aware of. It behaves nothing like a cult, and not even really like much of a religion, at least not a western one. (And cults are an exclusively western phenomenon, even when they borrow the trappings of eastern religions.)
Google 'confusopoly'. Scott Adams coined it to mean 'a group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price', and the most triumphant example is the airline industry.
I think they probably should start using some sort of search engine.
It really does take a long time to find sites if you just punch in random numbers or words.
Yes, if they tell you beforehand, it's fine.
Well, actually, as they have you trapped for long periods, sometimes they're required to serve food regardless of any payment, but that food is already in the purchase price of a ticket and you don't pay for it on the plane. (This is the reason for the soft drink and crackers. They are legally required to feed you.)
Of course, all this is extremely poorly planned anyway. There's no logical reason not to take cash. There's no logical reason not to have change. There's no logical reason to serve soft drinks out of cans. There's no logical reason not to have passengers order and pay for food at the gate so that the plane doesn't have to carry a bunch of extra food.
The food service on airplanes is apparently designed by trained horses stamping their feet. Even within the space, weight, and cost restrictions they're operating in, it would be pretty easy to have a very nice meal service...in fact, they used to have one! But they cut it back to nothing, people complained, so they rebuild it...stupid style.
Apparently, in their universe, it all has to operate out of that stupid cart. Heaven forbid sodas get poured in the back and carried out, or people sit with a menu in the terminal, figure what they want later, and pay for it there. Heaven forbid they actually stagger food service so they can take more time, or let people order whenever.
I have a friend who's a flight attendant, I need to ask him why food service is so stupidly-designed.
I've never understood why passengers have to sit down when the fasten seat belt light is on, but often flight attendants are pushing a 200 pound cart with a couple pots of scalding hot coffee on top of it down the aisles.
Often they've turned that on because food is being served. Because morons attempt to get past the food cart, which takes the entire isle. (They're always 'the exception' who think they can get past it.) They turn that light on so flight attendants can direct people back to their seat without argument.
Which is just stupid. They need a sign on the food cart that says 'You are not allowed to go past this cart for any reason whatsoever. If you are on the wrong side of it, tough.', and a light that lights up saying 'Food cart in movement, please check before leaving seat', and let everyone else sort it out. Normally, you can get to a bathroom in the other direction if you really really need to go.
If you leave before the cart gets to you, and try to come back after it's gotten past your seat, and hence would have to pass it, well, you lost the game and have to stand around like an idiot until the cart finishes. Sucks to be you. (OTOH, that's still better than not being able to get to the bathroom in the first place.)
None of this should be the same as the 'remain in your seat for safety' light, which should not be abused to stop idiots from trying to get past the food cart. And that light, incidentally, should be multiple levels...there's a difference between 'Do not walk around if you can help it because we got or are expecting some turbulence' and 'Stay buckled in you idiot, we're landing or crashing.'. I think a green, yellow, and red light is in order.
While you are normally right, being trapped on an airplane is exceptional circumstances.
If you had planned to eat on the airplane because you informed you you could purchase food there, and then, once you were trapped there, informed you that you could only purchase food in a specific way, you might, indeed, have a legal case against them.
People don't just have to accept US only in debt resolutions. They often have to accept them for new services when you get previous things from them under the impression you can get another service for them in cash.
Strange example: If you had an auto club subscription that said if you ever ran out of gas, they'd bring gas, that you could pay for, to your car. (Weird subscription, but whatever.) If you did, and asked them to do that, and they brought gas but demanded payment in pennies only, for the gas, you'd indeed have a legal case against them. You paid for something with the expectation that you could buy something else from them, and they failed to explain the restrictions on how you could buy that second thing when you bought the first thing.
Likewise, if I bought the airline ticket with the expectation that I could 'buy food', which they advertised was possible, and it turns out they meant I could only 'buy food' in specific ways but failed to note that before I paid for the ticket, I'd certainly have a case against them. (In fact, I'd have more a case against them then the gas thing, as I'm actually trapped and can't buy food elsewhere, and now because of their failure to live up their promise, I am starving.)
People generally have legal grounds for a suit if somewhere says they can buy X and Y, and someone buys X because they intend to buy Y later, and in fact Y is a selling point of X...and then it turns out Y has some restrictions on it that weren't made clear when they bought X. (Normally, though, 'What currency you can buy it with' wouldn't be grounds for a suit, as that is generally a trivially solvable problem, and courts don't like lawsuits that could be solved for less work than actually filing the suit...but you can't solve that problem in midair or on the side of the road.)
Of course, there's no free food anymore, but they'll SELL you a chicken sandwich for $10, or a can of Pringles for $4.50. What I found interesting was that they don't take cash anymore - just credit/debit cards - I guess that "...all debts, public and private..." printed on the money doesn't mean anything if you're an airline.
This is the thing that pisses me off because they have an idiotic justification for it.
Every pound on airplane costs money, and it does, indeed, cost to have them carry stuff back and forth, when they don't know how much they're going to sell. If they need enough sandwiches for whatever amount the plane might want, it can get costly.
The problem is there's an obvious way of handling this. Ask people beforehand. They could charge people three dollars before the flight to pack a sandwich on there, and then have just a few extras laying around which they charge $10 during the flight.
The fact they don't do this makes me think the entire 'We're having to fly extra food around so it costs a lot' is just nonsense.
Meanwhile, on Delta, I had the opposite problem. They only took cash. Luckily, I had enough.
Oh, and on a related note: What the hell is the deal with giving soda out of cans? Sure, they do all these penny pinching everywhere else, but for some reason they choose what is literally the most expensive way of distributing soda, which is to package it in cans, and then pour it half a can at a time into cups. I can't even think of how you'd make that cost more.
Has no one heard of a soda fountain? Install one in the middle of the plane, have someone run back and forth to it behind the food cart. I mean, they have plenty of people. Hell, at the very least you pour it out of two liter bottles, not cans.
A half a can of soda costs something like 10 cents at least, assuming you can buy in bulk and get cans at the rock bottom price of 20 cents a can, and that's not even including the price of flying the aluminum all over the place. 6oz of a fountain drink is immeasurable in cost..the plastic cup costs ten times as much, and it probably costs 2 cents.
I've heard crazy theories about air pressure, but they make no sense to me. I mean, the cans seem to have no problem. A soda fountain could easily be made adjustable with an barometer if that's really needed. The damn airplane is already carrying compressed air, it can carry compressed CO2.
Scott Adams refers to airlines a 'confusopoly', where companies don't compete on price at all, because no one knows what the hell is 'reasonable'. All markets have imperfect information, but airlines have managed to take imperfect information to an art form.
Even with comparison sites, it's always 'search for a specific trip and find specific prices now'. How much were those prices last week? Next week? How much are prices for the trips you're not seeing? How much are the prices to neighboring cities? Why is it cheaper to fly through two other cities?
What. The Hell. Is. Going. On?
You want to know how to cause a riot if you have magical powers? Go to an airport, have the price everyone paid for their ticket float over their head. Watch some people get very angry, very quickly.
In fact, that would be a rather funny airline protest movement. Everyone just wears the price of their ticket taped to their shirt. That's it. Just get 5% of fliers to do that.
Within hours, there'd be goddamn screaming fits at ticket counters.
You asked him to attempt to lower the price, and he called them, hung up, and then claimed the price was higher?
You did just walk out on him, right? I mean, it's not like you even had an oral agreement at that point. (Considering you were, you know, trying to change the price, which ipso facto means you haven't agreed on the price. Not that his changing of the price wouldn't have voided any agreement anyway.)
OTOH, maybe I misunderstood. If he can call up and get 50% off the total ticket, a 20% commission on the ticket, while seeming excessive, is still cheaper than the original ticket.
It's not unreasonable for someone who can actually get the airlines to get lower prices to say 'Either you take the listed price, or I do my magic and you pay me more'.
On the third hand, that's sorta implicitly already included in the commission for a travel agent. If they're not going to somehow magically get me lower prices to start with, I have no idea what I would be paying them for at all.
Indeed.
There are a few industries that basically cost the same amount to operate no matter how many people are there. For example, for a theatrical show, if they're about to start a show with an empty seat, and they can put someone in it for a quarter, they should do so, because, duh, they just made a quarter. There is no cost, the show is the same no matter what. (Hell, because of the possibility they might buy concessions, and because packed show give people better impressions of the show, they really should stick people in the seats for free.) The only 'cost' is that people might start attempting to have that happen so not buy tickets.
Now, hotels aren't quite to that point. An occupied room does cost the hotel slightly more than an empty one. They require someone to change and wash the sheets and towels, provide soap, there's a risk of damages (OTOH, they have insurance, and their insurance policy is not cheaper because a room was empty.), they're just normal wear and tear on the room, etc.
But all that is, at most, $15. Maybe $20. Ten minutes work for a min-wages person in the room, two minutes in the laundry, $3 worth of supplies. Everything else, from the internet to the check-in clerk to the room itself, was just sitting idle.
In fact, the reason hotels are the price they are is that they have to make up the cost of the stuff sitting idle. If a hotel actually was packed all the time, it could charge $25 a night. (Although that would be rather stupid of them. You don't charge less when demand is higher.)
Because they aren't packed, however, they have to pay the fixed costs, aka, taxes, bank loans for the property, cable TV, someone to sit at the desk, web site, etc, out of the people who are actually there, making their prices higher.
All businesses, obviously, have some fixed costs that aren't based on sales, but hotels have tons and tons of rooms just sucking up the profits if they aren't filled. It's not like a fast food place where less customers results in them ordering less food from their supplier so their costs go down a little.
And the thing about hotels is that they can scarcely go out into the street and find more people. People aren't 'not buying hotel rooms' because they don't want them, they're not buying hotel rooms because they aren't in town. There's not a group of people wandering around who've never considered staying at a hotel that the hotel can advertise to. They can only get more people by cannibalizing people from other hotels, which is a zero-sum game, or by having more people visit town. Hence giving kickbacks, excuse me, referrals, to people who cause other people to visit town is entirely reasonable.
Dude, Falun Gong is about as far from a 'cult' as possible. They're one of the most disorganized religions on the planet.
I don't think you understand what 'cult' actually means. They are religions with charismatic leaders that claims ultimate authority under a strict hierarchy that isolate and essentially brainwash followers by replacing their entire life. (Often in the Western world they will hijack Christianity and place themselves in the middle.)
Whereas Falun Gong is just another mix of Dao and Confusism and movement exercises and apparently mostly practiced by well educated middle-aged women, and something like half the 'followers' appear to just be people who read the philosophy book and show up at the exercises groups.(1) It's barely even a religion by western standards, and it's not a 'cult' in any of the legitimate sense of the word except the rather bigoted 'any new religion' sense. (And even then it's not really a new 'religion', it's more a new 'sect' of the rather amorphous eastern religions.)
1) China claims otherwise, claims it's a well-organized subversive movement, but China is lying
Similarly, there was a bit of a kerfuffle when one bank decided to let its customers handle their accounts on other bank sites by screenscraping. I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but they no longer offer it.
While that may or may not be a violation of copyright, it's almost certainly a violation of the other site's TOS.
I don't fly that often.
If it's less than 10 dollars difference, I'm probably either going with people I've not had a bad experience with (Delta) or with one that's at a better time (Anytime that isn't rush hour or 4 in the morning.)
If you take 1000 scientists and give them all the same data, they will probably look at that data in several thousand ways. If you are dealing with 95% intervals, and the data is looked at in 2000 ways, then about 100 of those ways will present something 'significant' by simple random chance.
The problem is that they're so starved for funding that they then release it as data and the media picks up on it.
I'm wondering how useful it would be to split all datasets, from the very beginning, in half, and people only work on one of them. Find something interesting? See if it's true in the other half.
This probably would not work.
The entire thing, ironically, it's 'bad' science...it's just half science. Science is supposed to look around for oddities and make hypothesis about them. But that comes before the testing.
You can't look at data, notice something, make a hypothesis, and then run a hypothesis on that data. Of course if you noticed that people in your dataset who ate eggs each morning had a 5% lower chance of getting cancer, and you check that against your dataset, that is apparently true, but you cannot do that. You have to check it on something else.
The rest of us who have been willing to entertain less mainstream, more "fringe" theories that are easy to demagogue by people who have never investigated them already knew that the whole endeavor is pretty good but not nearly as good as it is made out to be by people who really want to believe in it.
It's exactly those types of experiments that are not repeatable, you twit.
The pharmaceutical industry indeed stopped being science, and started being 'How can we make money from this?' a long time ago.
That doesn't change the fact that there are actually scientists in other fields who know that zero point energy or whatever 'fringe' science you've decided to get behind is incorrect.
Read the article. The problem here is sciences who do a bunch of research and then sieve the data until it comes out in some 'new' way, which is exactly how 'fringe' science works and is exactly why none of it is ever repeated or even slightly useful.
'Sieving' research only works to 'discover' new stuff that doesn't exist. It would be impossible to actually disprove stuff that does really exist with it. If you look at nothing from enough angles, you can find some statistical anomaly that is 'something'. You cannot look at something and turn it into nothing.
I'm just imagining how that would work: Sure, you can guess what card I'm holding up 9/10 times, but you don't have ESP, because you have a zero chance of being correct when it's a circle, it's only the other shapes you can guess. As I've decided as of this moment to look only at circles, you don't have ESP.
I can't imagine any real scientist attempting to make that argument.
I think it was actually in the 1980's when the country started living more on borrowed money. It just didn't get bad enough to matter much until recently.
Yeah, obviously, some people have always lived on it. But in the 00s, wages remained steady, and inflation continued, so essentially everyone borrowed. Borrowed, mostly, from their houses.
This is, incidentally, why the nonsense about 'irresponsible borrowers' is bullshit. People didn't become irresponsibly, they did what we've always done throughout history...people who have money shortfalls end up borrowing money, hoping that things become better, but often they do not and the people can't pay it back. This is not the new thing, this is not what caused the problem.
It's just, previous, banks wouldn't loan to such people, whereas this time, the banks figured out how to make money by loaning money they knew couldn't be paid back. (By selling the loans to other people.)
Combine that with the fact that the amount of people who needed to borrow probably quadrupled, and, well, that's what happened, right there.
If banks, in an orgy of fraud and gluttony, hadn't made such loans, the people pointing out 'You can't have price inflation and not wage inflation without everyone ending up poor' would have been listened to years earlier.
And also the banks wouldn't have blown up, but that problem is orthogonal to the wage problem. The banks behavior caused their own problem, but just hide the wage problem. People should have started ending up homeless in 2000 or so, due to lack of jobs that actually paid enough money to live on, which would have been a lot more gradual and actually been a fixable problems.
Instead, they took jobs that didn't pay enough, and lived off their house, and, perhaps most importantly, assumed it was just them...when it was actually a huge section of society. The whole 'slowly boil a frog' metaphor is generally stupid, but one place it does work is for the economy. Instead of a few people getting angry each year, everyone just got poorer and poorer. But, eventually, just like the frog jumps out in real life, people do too. And discovered, hey, everyone else had been getting boiled also.
Sadly, apparently, Republicans have managed to make them angry at the debt, which literally has nothing at all to do with this.
In the 2000's the USA lost something like 44,000 manufacturing plants. There are some parts for US military hardware that aren't manufactured in the country anymore. How scary is that?
That is a serious national security risk. Not the second sentence, which is also a national security risk...but the fact that we cannot manufacture roughly the amount of goods we need is a serious security risk itself.
Counties are rarely entirely self-sufficient, and don't need to be, but they really should be self-sufficient in most things, and be able to overproduce enough things to trade for the rest.
And, of course, it's a pretty nonsensical economic policy on top of that. We can't all have jobs working in Best Buy selling stuff from China...at some point, all the money will end up in China. I mean, this is just blatantly obvious to anyone who glances at the problem.
Yeah. There are supposed to be tradeoffs in society, and the government really can restrict rights to some extent for safety. They can make you get a permit for a protest, they can stop you from handling actual poisonous snakes in your religion, they can set sort of reasonable restrictions.
But thanks to decades of total ownership by the oil industry and whatnot, we literally have no alternate to automobiles, so the idea that they can restrict people from operating those is legally dubious.
And the same thing applies to the no fly list, except ten times worse. For one thing, you literally cannot leave some parts of the US without flying. Not just Hawaii and other island...large areas of Alaska are unreachable without flight. Likewise, there's no way real way to leave North America, especially without the cooperation of Canada or Mexico. And, no, you cannot take a boat...there is functionally no international boat passenger traffic.
The US needs to stop pretending that the freedom to travel doesn't exist. As it's a right, it should only be restricted for two reasons:
A) As punishment, i.e., probation, house arrest, or even normal arrest, which comes after a trial and conviction.
b) or specific modes of travel should be restricted solely for demonstrable safety concerns, and the utmost attempt must be made to find and provide alternatives.
Somehow, drunk driving has gotten to the point where they claim it's for 'safety', but it's clearly a punishment. A suggested alternative to barring people from driving: Requiring ignition locks on cars, which would functionally stop all repeat offenders.
Of course, flying is even more absurd, where you can be barred for flying because of 'safety concerns' the government doesn't have to explain or justify to anyone.