Check the health insurance bill, where we take the criminal and immoral insurance companies...and subsidize their product if people can't afford it.
Of course, that's even more surreal than this, as their 'product' is, literally, money. People give them money, they give other people money.
At least you can argue the music industry might be doing something. Sure, France is subsidizing payment of something to buy that France itself made illegal to copy in the first place, but the recording industry does actually record music, or least appears to, in some vague manner, help that.
Here in the US, we subsidize industries that just move money around. Not just health insurance, we've started subsidizing, although we don't call it that, banks.
That it. That's all they do. Move money around. Not a single thought of saying 'Hey, why doesn't the government just give this money to the third party, instead of giving money to companies, and to people to give to companies, for them to give to the third party.'.
The are occasionally reason to subsidize businesses. For example, if farms were not subsidized to some extent, a single bad year would wipe out 75% of them, which would mean we wouldn't have enough food the next year. (Of course, at this point, farm subsidizes have gotten insane, but we do actually need them to exist in some form.)
Frankly, we should subsidize only to help critical industries past bad years, and only past bad years. No subsidizes should exist for long term. If a local industry can't compete with an out-of-country industry, and we want them local, then we should have damn trade restrictions, not subsidizes. All subsidizes should be temporary measures.
But, no matter what you think of subsidizes, it's totally insane to subsided the purchase of property that is not infinite solely because of a government! If there's a 'shortage of music' problem, (However crazy such a concept would be) there's a pretty obvious solution that will get the people all the music they need or even slightly want, and that's to reduce or remove copyright protections, or, hell, just have the government provide free copies without paying for them.
We don't subsidize industry to protect industry, we subsidize them so they can keep up a supply we need. And we do not need the music industry to 'make' more supply...because the entire premise of copyright is to restrict supply, so, duh, we could obviously increase it by changing the law.
Hey, let's give people a government-enforced ownership and monopoly over a thing, and then subsidize purchases of it.
If you want to let people download for free, weaken copyright somehow, you idiots. Demand that to have a copyright, you have to give the government X free copies of it or something, and the government can give those out.
I don't think Dollhouse is a reasonable example there. Dollhouse was certainly comparable to Buffy. So was Firefly, for that matter.
The problem is that Joss Whedon wasn't on the WB anymore, and Fox expected a lot more.
So the expectations were too high, but not from the fandom, or at least, that's not what killed it. It was the high expectations of Fox, who through Whedon could make a show with mass market appeal, when all signs indicate he cannot, and should just stick to genre stuff, which he's amazing at.
As for Whedon's fan...most of them became convinced he could 'do wrong' with season 6 of Buffy.
Dollhouse wasn't what they were expecting, with a lack of character interaction that Whedon is great at. I don't think there was anywhere near as much fan backlash as you seem to think, though...people weren't expecting another Buffy. Many of them were just bored and left. I'm sure some fandom, somewhere, had some giant flame war, but in general Whedon fandom has flame wars over things in the shows, not which of his shows are the best. (Quite possibly because most of Buffy fandom has experience with someone mocking their taste in TV, so are in the 'watch whatever TV show you want and stop complaining about ones you don't like' category.)
But by the start of season 2, when it became clear where the series was going, and we actually had 'the villains' become interesting and the good guys actually now exist, and were the same room as other characters, the Whedon fans were happy. A lot of them, who'd gotten bored halfway through the first season, came back.
Sadly, the rest of the universe was still not watching the show, and were in fact actively leaving, which is why it was killed.
No, I think there's a difference, in the eyes of the court, between words the police intend to use against you, which you don't have to say, and words they don't intend to use against you, which you do have to say, even if telling them helps their case in some other way.
The most obvious example of this is your name. You have to identify yourself to the police if the laws say so, and no, it's not self incrimination, as they're not asking your name as any sort of 'evidence'. In fact, all the legal challenges to the police demanding that have been about whether or not the police need a warrant....because it's not a fifth amendment issue at all, your name is not incrimination, and thus you can be compelled, by the court at least, to state who you are. (And apparently you can even be compelled by a law, without a warrant, but that's a side issue. If it was self incrimination, you couldn't be compelled at all, even by a court.)
Don't argue with me, argue with the courts. I don't think you should have to say anything to help the police at all.
The courts have been somewhat hesitant to make people turn over passwords in the US, but not because of self-incrimination issues, but because of the rather obvious problem that the courts could end up punishing people for not turning over passwords they don't have. However, several courts have, indeed, demanded people turn over passwords and held them in contempt when they didn't.
I was just pointing out that, if the cops have a GPS tracker on your car, it's pretty strong proof that the location of your car is intended for use against you, and ipso facto you don't have to tell the police or even the courts where it is, even if that means they can't get back their GPS. (I guess they could issue you immunity for the current location of your car, and then force you, which would be pretty hilarious to have to do.)
f it could, this would be known well in advance, since it's trivial to compare the proof with the code to see if they differ, and trivial to inspect a proof to see if the code could do that.
Really? You can somehow walk up to a computer and know the code on it is the same code that other people inspected?
That is...implausible to say the least.
This is because, of course, security certifications don't protect against the people installing the software. At all. Not a single one of them is even slightly designed to let users verify things administrators have done.
Seriously, you sound so knowledgeable, but somehow you think there's a way to walk up and verify that computers have had the software installed on them that you think they've had installed on them, and nothing else. That is so cute.
No, nobody can tamper with it, that's why I've stipulated so much bloody security. Machines that are input-only (where the voter registration office adds users) have mandatory access control, as do the voting machines themselves (by definition, since that is part of what A1 means). The counting system is essentially output only from the users perspective and therefore has no user account to crack. Input over the network would be via IPSec-utilized certificates with both client and server validating each other. Since the server has a pre-programmed list of acceptable voting machines, additional machines cannot be added in.
And, of course, nowhere in the list is there any way, nor can there be any way, to stop someone from sitting down at one of the machines and using a dozen of public keys to vote. (Which, as I pointed out, anyone working in a vote registration office can get.)
Because that is not, in any sense, 'tampering' with the machine.
Now, you'll probably assert they'd have to each vote individually, limiting their effect to a couple of dozen votes before they'd obviously be caught, because of the magical software you're sure will be there.
I will point out that, in no circumstances, would any TCSEC requirement restrict doing thousands of perfectly valid inputs in a few seconds, although obviously that could be an additional requirement of the system. TCSEC systems verify input. Ten thousand votes with public keys attached are correct input.
I will also point out that A1 security ranking is, um, impossible without physical security...and they get tested after being installed. You can't stick a computer in a box, pull it out six months later, and claim it's A1 security, unless you had someone watching the box at all times.
And note you've added at least two other computers to each polling site. And each voting computer needs some way to read the public key, so you've added a barcode reader, at least, to them.
To actually install A1-level security computers, you would spend millions of dollars per site.
Which makes the whole thing rather idiotic to start with, as we could never afford it, on top of the problem that A1 security is not designed to protect against a) programmer/administrative tampering (Which is what we're fucking talking about when we talk about tampering...we're not assuming voters figure it out.), and b) there's a rather obvious hole in the system of assigning public keys, so people can have entirely, utterly, completely 'valid' inputs that rig an election.
Here are the three specific security issues I've pointed out, that do not exist under paper voting. Please explain how your system catches them:
a) The person who loads the software onto a machine alters it before doing so.
b) Someone in the voter registration office adds extra voters to the roles, and takes their public keys, and they and others vote multiple times when they enter the booth. (This actually is fixable.)
c) b, but with one poll worker also helping them. Perhaps by, when setting up the computers, they simply set one up in another room, so someone can
No system even vaguely close to what you pretend is ideal is even close to existing in the real world.
Meanwhile, your support of some sort of perfect electronic election has resulted in goddamn voting machines running MS Access that anyone can walk up to and tamper with.
Yes, I have a fucking chip on my shoulder about sophisticates who yammer about how something could, in some hypothetical universe, work magically and perfectly. Something that is actually being done, in the real world, in such a horrible and treasonous way.
If we hadn't invented circuit breakers and fuses, or required them to be installed in building, yes I'd damn well object to light bulbs, because they'd cause more fires then well-understood lanterns.
The fact that we could hypothetically stop them from catching fire wouldn't change that fact that anyone advocating light bulbs in that world is a fool at best, and in the business of repairing fire damage at worse.
I swear to god, you people are worse than communists, yammering about how things work in some magical ideal world that nothing is even vaguely close to, and meanwhile all practical implementations happily destroy any semblance of the democratic process.
A better analogy: You're standing there arguing that the unpopular group X have the free speech right to march down the street, which is a fine thing to argue, and I'd normally agree with you...but right now the Xs are running around burning down houses and calling it a 'march'. You should perhaps, you know, shut the fuck up about some idealized thing and actually look at the reality of what's happening, and at least stop being part of the problem by defending something that sounds identical, from the POV of the general public, to some very bad thing.
Incidentally, as I've explained in other posts, the 'ideal' implementations are no such thing, either. All of the 'crypto' solutions offload security from a single physical box to hundreds of voter registration sites where any minimum wage employee can steal thousands of your precious magical encryption keys, and use them to make perfectly valid votes, which they can easily slip into the rather insecure vote. Which makes things less secure than physical ballots, as many many people have pointed out. It's more secure than what we use now electronically, but that's damning with faint praise.
But that's really an issue for another time, because, right now, you are arguing for shitty MS Access databases storing voting records, with no security at all. You don't intend to be arguing that, but you are.
Technically, monarchies can be republics. Because monarchs can be elected. 'Monarch' just means 'one person is the state'.
Ancient Rome, for example, was an elective monarchy, and a Republic. It eventually devolved into unofficial hereditary monarchy, at roughly the same time it devolved into an official empire, although those were not, strictly speaking, related. Even the emergency powers of 'emperor' still allowed the Senate to vote for the next one...the heredity stuff happened because of the Senate's failures and cowardice, and a trick of leaders getting 'co-elected' with their chosen successor, so the Senate didn't get to vote for the next guy. The Senate still officially picked the leader of Rome until the end.
Granted, in modern times 'monarchy' usually means hereditary, and we use other words to describe other forms of monarchy.
Just because you read Atlas Shrugged yesterday doesn't mean shit to anyone else. Crawl back over the Drudge Report, where you can eat up the talking points regurgitation with the rest of the libertarian zombies.
Indeed. Anyone who thinks saying 'The US isn't a democracy' is a valid political point is probably some glibertarian fresh out of his government-sponsored education.
Why would you need to do that? The tabulator is probably being watched carefully.
No, just add a few thousand people to the voter rolls, generate entirely valid votes for them, and put them in there from the outside, like they're entirely normal votes.
Ultimately, whether your proposal is better than paper ballots depends on the ease being able to make fraudulent registrations. Under a decentralized registration process as we have now, it would be just as easy.
Not really. Right now, it would be a zillion times easier to make fraudulent registrations. Voting precincts are watched to an amazing level.
The voter registration roll is a giant state-wide database with hundreds of access points, and probably ten thousand people a state who could alter it.
It's not even vaguely comparable, security-wise, to a ballot box. Ballot boxes have one location, and are inspected, sealed, watch, and unsealed. Voter registration computers are just sitting in offices.
And once you've added five thousand voters, all it takes is a rogue voting machine, just like now. His system is basically exactly the same, security-wise, as current electronic voting. (Except he apparently wants to network it.)
And a 'more centralized system' would be akin to barring poor people from voting. They already have enough trouble getting to their voter registration office.
Oh, they'll assert that even computers can't fake signing.
When, of course, they could indeed trivially sign a vote different than the one you actually tried to cast, and yet present you the other one.
Of course, all this is made pointless by the fact that anyone with access to the computers in the voter registration office could just add a bunch of voters, and thus get a bunch of valid votes in advance. The poster mentioned 'election officials being supplied with hashes of votes as they're cast', which was presumably a way to try to avoid this, but that's nonsense. For one thing, now you've networked the damn computers together (So they be 'supplied' with this information), making any attacks easier, and for another that's just another database to put more records in, it doesn't actually solve anything at all. If you can add the votes, you can add the damn records that shows the hashes being displayed.
That's really all this 'signing' accomplishes...it spreads the voting, and the security, thinner and thinner:
Under his system, you'll go and get the ability to cast valid ballots at the voter registration office. (Instead of the poll, where they physically won't let you near the box unless you've proved it there.) So it's okay if there's an invisible box that votes end up in that anyone can tamper with, because only valid votes can be counted, and deleted votes get noticed.
This doesn't make things more secure, it makes them less.
We now have three things that cannot be tested with any paper ballot and one corrective action that cannot be achieved by paper ballot.
Uh, no.
The problem here is that if election officials are corrupt, they're corrupt. Changing to a new system that stops specific behavior is just idiotic.
In this example, you've traded off having to physical secure election sites with having to physical secure and electronically voter registration offices and having to electronically secure election sites.
Please note by 'secure', I mean election level security. That means having observer watch a voter registration location. All the time. 24 hours a day. With people peering over worker's shoulders to make sure they're only adding one person for each person in.
Otherwise, people can just, you know, add new people to the rolls, or steal existing people's public keys. And then, with a tiny amount of software or a card reader or just ten minutes 'fixing' a 'broken' machine, electronically add entirely valid votes. In a manner much much easier, and much less detectable, than adding paper ballots.
The voting process requires security. Any idiot can set up a process that works if you've already verified every single person in advance and know there's no issue there, but that's patently impossible. and if you can do that, you should have just had them vote there.
The only way to make voting secure is to make the part that requires security as small as possible, and to make it observable to all. In a paper election, the part that requires security is a ballot box, which can be kept track of easily (Let's note that most of the manipulation comes from moving the box, and simply not move boxes anymore.), and an ID check at the start, which can also be kept track of easily.
You've invented some entirely different location, namely, all the places where keys get added, and some giant database, that also must be watched, and you've changed the level of security needed at actual voting locations from 'watching a box and license check', which any idiot can do, to 'watching all machines at all times to make sure that someone isn't doing something'.
You've functionally moved the 'voting' process off the voting site, which is all well and good for 'secure elections', but as you've now made 'adding valid votes' much much easier (a few milliseconds if you can hack a computer, an extra memory card brought in or one with a few votes on it to start if not.) now you have to 'secure the voter roll', too. To the election level security.
...none of which actually get followed. See blackboxvoting.org for more information about uncertified 'patches' applied during elections, spare memory card lying around that non one can explain what they're for or what's one them, and obviously faked tallies to match reported tallies, and databases that don't match each other, etc, etc, etc.
That is not a ballot problem, that is a voter roll problem. It can happen just as easy with electronic voting.
ballot boxes appear in the counting room stuffed with "legitimate" ballots,
Yes, in 1920s Chicago. Not in the actual modern world, where ballot boxes are kept fairly careful track of.
people vote early and often
That is not a ballot problem, that is a voter roll problem. It can happen just as easy with electronic voting.
and ballots are simply miscounted
Uh, no. Ballots are not miscounted.
or lost.
Except they aren't.
Incidentally, your 'dead voting' and 'people voting multiple times' and 'ballot box stuffing' happen with the consent of the people working the voting site, and the system is often so observed it actually requires third parties to come in and actually cast those votes. I.e, they can't just add votes.
Whereas with electronic voting, they could just stick the card in a machine and put on as many votes as they want if they were corrupt, you moron.
Proper crypto should be better at providing both uniqueness and anonymity.
You are a fucking idiot, because absolutely none of the 'electronic voting' systems out there provide any sort of crypto at all, much less the hypothetical crypto that would allow people to confirm their vote was counted.
Which, incidentally, would only stop the problem in one direction. If the voting workers are corrupt (As they seem to be in your universe with their manipulation of paper ballots), all they have to do is put in a bunch more votes and mark some voters off as having voted.
You're comparing the absolute worse paper ballot problems, the sort of problems we don't have any more and show up only in extremely corrupt systems where the process itself is being run by corrupt people, with some hypothetical electronic voting that doesn't exist and no electronic voting has ever been attempted as.
That's a bit like arguing lions are safer than cars, because lions could be implanted with auto-traq devices that triggered when they got close to people, whereas the Model T is entirely unsafe.
Hey, imbecile, try arguing in the actual real world.
And while paper ballots are not trackable at the vote level, you can physically keep track of them and know where they are at all times. You can sit there and watch the box, you can watch people add and remove things to the box. You can see the 'vote container' without actually seeing the votes, and know that no one can actually change the votes without adding or replacing or removing them from the container, which you could see.
There's no way to do that with electronic voting. The votes can be tampered with without detection, because you're handing the entire ballot box to people every time they vote, where upon they take it into the booth with them and do whatever to it.
Moreover, the people voting can't actually see their vote to start with.
It's just insecure in so many ways, the entire concept is insecure. It's a lot like DRM, in fact...the fact they currently get broken by stupid security issues is sorta masking the fact the entire idea is stupid and unworkable.
Electronic voting, incidentally, is a form of DRM. Except it's DRM where the programmers and system designers have motive to break it also, stopped only by a third party that doesn't understand any of this. So yeah.
To quote Douglas Adams, 'their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.' The problem isn't any specific security flaws discovered at any specific time, the problem is the idea of non-physical voting, period, full stop, because all the methods we have to stop fraud are via paying attention to physical objects.
But the point it he's not being sued for fraud for the content of that paper, which 90% of the people here seem to think. He's being absurdly sued for fraud for taking money to write that paper because it's claimed that his other paper wasn't very good and deliberately misleading.
Which is, frankly, the most absurd legal theory of fraud ever. It criminalizes ever mentioning, to people who've hired you, things that someone, anywhere, might have a problem with how well you did them.
'Hey, look, Obama claimed he was a Senator when he got elected. While that appears to be factually true, I think he wasn't a very good Senator so I shall have him charged with fraud.'
Seriously? This is totally insane. He claimed he wrote a paper, he did write a paper. There was, at no point, any sort of lie he gave to the people who hired him.(1) If they had a problem with his references (Which his actual employers do not.), they should have checked them, by, I dunno, reading his paper. The idea that 'didn't do a good job at a job listened on resume' is actual fraud is just so patently absurd it's hard to talk about.
What's even more absurd is that the paper he wrote that supposedly 'wasn't very good' was a paper hired by a third party that had no fault with it. At this point we're getting almost surreal in the legal theory...if I hire you to do X, and you do X to my satisfaction, you have done your job. Presumably, the people who paid him to write that paper had no problem with it.
Then, another party comes along and claims that you didn't do the job to their satisfaction, when of course they weren't involved in the job whatsoever. Moreover, you did so poorly that just mentioning it as a list of things you've done, as a way to get money, is fraud. This is a really interesting legal theory, that jobs have objective goals and ways to judge the results, that I can pay you to do something, and be happy with it, but it's somehow 'not good'. Especially when the results of the job are available for anyone to read, including, presumably, potential employers.
This is a very interesting governmental stretch. Is the government now in charge of what non-governmental workers are doing good and bad, and able to punish the bad ones? Did we somehow become North Korea when I wasn't looking? What do you want to bet this idiot bring the suit is also a fan of 'small government'?
1)Not that lying on a resume should be fraud either, but the fraud laws could be twisted to mean that. For, you know, actual lies. Which this wasn't.
As I mentioned above, you have no responsibility for property deliberately put into your possession. (As opposed to stuff accidentally dropped or left, which you do have a minimum standard.)
You are not allowed to damage it, as that is vandalism...but I can't think of any reason you wouldn't be allowed to remove it.
Or even leave it laying around anywhere, as long as you don't leave it somewhere it obviously would get damaged. (Like the middle of the road.) You are not responsible for it. You have neither tacitly taken responsibility for it by agreeing to be left it, nor is it 'lost property'.
It's just something in your possession, like a couch an ex left at your house. You can't damage it, you can't sell it or give it away, but you don't have to leave it in the damn living room either.
Of course, the easiest thing to do is just bring it inside. Which is, hilariously, exactly what you're supposed to do if someone forgets something and you end up with it, so you can always claim you thought the FBI set it down (attached to your car?) and then forgot to take it with them when they left. Get a box, label it 'Lost and Found', and stick it in there. When they show up asking where their tracker is, go and check the lost and found, and, hey, there it is...they should be more careful with their stuff.:)
Oh, and after 30 day or so, check your local laws, you're supposed to turn forgotten property over the police if no one claims it.
Heh. That part I didn't know. So it's even crazier.
But you simply cannot charge someone with fraud for 'Not doing a good job at their previous job, and then listing that job as one of the places they worked.'. That is really batshit insane.
I can just see the legal theory now: Your honor, we assert that not only should all resumes be 100% truthful, they aren't even allowed to omit any negative options that anyone holds. He should have stated, when listing this paper, that people disagree with him.
So everyone's resume has to change to look like:
Captain D's 2003-2005: Called an asshat several times, dropped two plates on floor, a customer once said I was 'rude', etc etc.
I'm somewhat sad the law doesn't even apply, because that means it's going to get dismissed without the court having to look at this batshit insane case and making a statement to that effect.
No, passwords are not evidence, and there's no constitutional reason you can't be ordered to turn one over.
Passwords unlock evidence, but are not themselves evidence, unless your password is 'I killed Jake'. (And if so, the court would just demand that the police set up a computer where you can decrypt the information but don't have to reveal your password.)
That's not, of course, to say that laws couldn't regulate forced password disclosure, and obviously they need a warrant, but a password, like the location of a car, isn't 'evidence', and if the police have a warrant for the encrypted stuff or the car itself, you'll have to let them access it.
However, in this specific case, the police are collecting, purposefully, deliberately, continually, expensively, the location of your car at all times, and it's entirely reasonable to argue that, although you're not sure how or what for, clearly the police are intending to use the location as evidence, and hence you plead the fifth in telling them that information.
You don't normally have the right to refuse to disclose the location of your car. For example, if someone shows up with a warrant to search your car, you have to produce your car.
That is because it's not the location of the car that's evidence, it's the car itself. You aren't testifying against yourself when you disclose the location of your car. You have no fifth amendment right to keeping your car secret...if they've got a warrant, you have to let them search it.
However, as I pointed out, the FBI is collecting the location, presumably to use against you. That means it is evidence. Not 'the car', but the knowledge of the location is evidence. Otherwise it would be pretty dumb to collect it.
And that knowledge is in your head. So you can't be compelled to disclose that knowledge.(1)
Basically, you can be compelled to disclose things that aren't evidence themselves, that just 'unlock' evidence.
Hence things like password disclosure laws, although those obviously have other problems. And hence jokes like making your password itself be a confession of a crime, and thus you wouldn't have to disclose it. (This wouldn't work. Even if the police lost that case, they'd just have to set up an way for you to decrypt without them knowing the password.)
The courts can compel people to tell them stuff that can't be evidence of a crime, and the location of a car usually isn't. The key word is usually...if you parked your car out in the woods where you buried the bodies, technically, they can't make you tell where it i, because being parked there will be used against you in court.
And if you make the argument in court that that is why they're trying to find your car, that the search warrant is merely a way to demand you tell them where the car is...you do not, in fact, have to explain where it is. (Even if your car is parked elsewhere...you obviously don't have to prove or even admit your guilt when you plead the fifth.)
This argument would usually fail, but in this situation the police themselves have exhibited an amazing amount of interest in the location of your car, at all times, and it's entirely reasonable to assume that will be used as evidence in some criminal case. In other words, a GPS tracker is de facto proof of an otherwise rather hard-to-prove claim, and should logically render you able to plead the fifth on the location.
And, what's more, the fact they're trying to find it at all times means you have no damn way to actually get the car to them without them tracking the location. I mean, normally, if you argued to the court that they didn't want to search it, they just wanted the location, the court would just make you deliver it yourself. But here you can't without having to reveal the location, which you do not have to do.
1) Incidentally, if the location of a car starts regularly being 'evidence', then at some point even a warrant won't be enough to make anyone turn over the car, they'll have a valid fifth amendment argument if the location is normally being used against people in court.
You have no responsibility to care for things that people have deliberately left in your possession without your permission, even if you become aware they've done so.
Unlike things they've accidentally left in your possession, which you do have some responsibility for, if only to turn over to the police. Or things they left in your possession with your permission, for which you've accepted tacit responsibility for.
Sadly, the lack of responsibility doesn't let you actively destroy it, which is still vandalism or theft by destruction.
There are no laws covering that at all. Engagement rings are gifts, and no one is under any obligation to give them back whatsoever.
Giving back the ring if the woman breaks it off is just a societal convention.
Of course, the courts would probably consider deliberately lying, from the start, about an intent to marry someone to gain a ring as fraud, but that's not what people normally mean by 'broken engagement'.
All laws about this aren't the same. There are three different kinds of laws on this topic.
There's the 'forgot to pick up' law, where you accidentally put something somewhere and forget to get it, like setting your wallet down in a checkout line.
And there's the 'dropped' law, where you did not know it left your possession.
These are, believe it or not, often covered under different state laws.
For example, the rule with the first is often if you find something you think someone has accidentally left, you should keep it there, at least for some specified time. If a customer walks out of a restaurant without their purse, the restaurant should hold their purse for them.
Whereas with the second, if you find a wallet in the middle of the sidewalk, or even if you find one in the middle of the hall in the exact same restaurant, you're supposed to turn it in to the police. 'The Place' gets things left behind, where people can go back and get them, the police get things that just fell there, where people possibly have no idea where they are.
Generally. Of course, laws vary by state, but I thought it would be worth mentioning that even truly 'lost' items get treated differently depending on how they got lost.
And neither of those cover deliberately leaving something somewhere on someone else's property. If such a law exists, it's a different law. As far as I know, you don't have any obligation to take care of people's property and make sure they can find their stuff when they do that, like you do when they accidentally give you possession. OTOH, you can't deliberately break their stuff either.
I still think the best bet is to take the thing apart and claim you thought it was part of the car. (Or, rather, plead the fifth and have your lawyer point out they haven't proven you knew it wasn't part of the car.)
OTOH, if you really wanted to screw with the 'lost property' stuff, you put your car inside a giant metal box and hide it in a warehouse somewhere. You have not damaged their tracker at all.
And by them attaching the tracker, they've just admitted that they're recording the location of your car. So there's no way in hell they can force you to reveal the location of your car, because, duh, that's testifying against yourself. (Think about it for a second. If the FBI is collecting 'the location of the car', then 'the location of the car' is clearly being used as evidence in an investigation, presumably against you, so if you're forced to tell them 'the location of the car'...)
Now, a court could demand you turn it over, or be in contempt, but they're actually have to go through the court to do that. And you're still have a pretty interesting argument, namely, that you're not willing to remove something they attached to your car, as you have no experience in that sort of thing and they've threatened to sue you if you damage it.(And you still can't be forced to tell them where the car is.) So, while you'd like for them to get their tracker back, there appears to be no way to actually accomplish that.
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I'm pretty certain we've already done this.
Check the health insurance bill, where we take the criminal and immoral insurance companies...and subsidize their product if people can't afford it.
Of course, that's even more surreal than this, as their 'product' is, literally, money. People give them money, they give other people money.
At least you can argue the music industry might be doing something. Sure, France is subsidizing payment of something to buy that France itself made illegal to copy in the first place, but the recording industry does actually record music, or least appears to, in some vague manner, help that.
Here in the US, we subsidize industries that just move money around. Not just health insurance, we've started subsidizing, although we don't call it that, banks.
That it. That's all they do. Move money around. Not a single thought of saying 'Hey, why doesn't the government just give this money to the third party, instead of giving money to companies, and to people to give to companies, for them to give to the third party.'.
The are occasionally reason to subsidize businesses. For example, if farms were not subsidized to some extent, a single bad year would wipe out 75% of them, which would mean we wouldn't have enough food the next year. (Of course, at this point, farm subsidizes have gotten insane, but we do actually need them to exist in some form.)
Frankly, we should subsidize only to help critical industries past bad years, and only past bad years. No subsidizes should exist for long term. If a local industry can't compete with an out-of-country industry, and we want them local, then we should have damn trade restrictions, not subsidizes. All subsidizes should be temporary measures.
But, no matter what you think of subsidizes, it's totally insane to subsided the purchase of property that is not infinite solely because of a government! If there's a 'shortage of music' problem, (However crazy such a concept would be) there's a pretty obvious solution that will get the people all the music they need or even slightly want, and that's to reduce or remove copyright protections, or, hell, just have the government provide free copies without paying for them.
We don't subsidize industry to protect industry, we subsidize them so they can keep up a supply we need. And we do not need the music industry to 'make' more supply...because the entire premise of copyright is to restrict supply, so, duh, we could obviously increase it by changing the law.
Hey, let's give people a government-enforced ownership and monopoly over a thing, and then subsidize purchases of it.
If you want to let people download for free, weaken copyright somehow, you idiots. Demand that to have a copyright, you have to give the government X free copies of it or something, and the government can give those out.
This is just stupid.
I don't think Dollhouse is a reasonable example there. Dollhouse was certainly comparable to Buffy. So was Firefly, for that matter.
The problem is that Joss Whedon wasn't on the WB anymore, and Fox expected a lot more.
So the expectations were too high, but not from the fandom, or at least, that's not what killed it. It was the high expectations of Fox, who through Whedon could make a show with mass market appeal, when all signs indicate he cannot, and should just stick to genre stuff, which he's amazing at.
As for Whedon's fan...most of them became convinced he could 'do wrong' with season 6 of Buffy.
Dollhouse wasn't what they were expecting, with a lack of character interaction that Whedon is great at. I don't think there was anywhere near as much fan backlash as you seem to think, though...people weren't expecting another Buffy. Many of them were just bored and left. I'm sure some fandom, somewhere, had some giant flame war, but in general Whedon fandom has flame wars over things in the shows, not which of his shows are the best. (Quite possibly because most of Buffy fandom has experience with someone mocking their taste in TV, so are in the 'watch whatever TV show you want and stop complaining about ones you don't like' category.)
But by the start of season 2, when it became clear where the series was going, and we actually had 'the villains' become interesting and the good guys actually now exist, and were the same room as other characters, the Whedon fans were happy. A lot of them, who'd gotten bored halfway through the first season, came back.
Sadly, the rest of the universe was still not watching the show, and were in fact actively leaving, which is why it was killed.
No, I think there's a difference, in the eyes of the court, between words the police intend to use against you, which you don't have to say, and words they don't intend to use against you, which you do have to say, even if telling them helps their case in some other way.
The most obvious example of this is your name. You have to identify yourself to the police if the laws say so, and no, it's not self incrimination, as they're not asking your name as any sort of 'evidence'. In fact, all the legal challenges to the police demanding that have been about whether or not the police need a warrant....because it's not a fifth amendment issue at all, your name is not incrimination, and thus you can be compelled, by the court at least, to state who you are. (And apparently you can even be compelled by a law, without a warrant, but that's a side issue. If it was self incrimination, you couldn't be compelled at all, even by a court.)
Don't argue with me, argue with the courts. I don't think you should have to say anything to help the police at all.
The courts have been somewhat hesitant to make people turn over passwords in the US, but not because of self-incrimination issues, but because of the rather obvious problem that the courts could end up punishing people for not turning over passwords they don't have. However, several courts have, indeed, demanded people turn over passwords and held them in contempt when they didn't.
I was just pointing out that, if the cops have a GPS tracker on your car, it's pretty strong proof that the location of your car is intended for use against you, and ipso facto you don't have to tell the police or even the courts where it is, even if that means they can't get back their GPS. (I guess they could issue you immunity for the current location of your car, and then force you, which would be pretty hilarious to have to do.)
f it could, this would be known well in advance, since it's trivial to compare the proof with the code to see if they differ, and trivial to inspect a proof to see if the code could do that.
Really? You can somehow walk up to a computer and know the code on it is the same code that other people inspected?
That is...implausible to say the least.
This is because, of course, security certifications don't protect against the people installing the software. At all. Not a single one of them is even slightly designed to let users verify things administrators have done.
Seriously, you sound so knowledgeable, but somehow you think there's a way to walk up and verify that computers have had the software installed on them that you think they've had installed on them, and nothing else. That is so cute.
No, nobody can tamper with it, that's why I've stipulated so much bloody security. Machines that are input-only (where the voter registration office adds users) have mandatory access control, as do the voting machines themselves (by definition, since that is part of what A1 means). The counting system is essentially output only from the users perspective and therefore has no user account to crack. Input over the network would be via IPSec-utilized certificates with both client and server validating each other. Since the server has a pre-programmed list of acceptable voting machines, additional machines cannot be added in.
And, of course, nowhere in the list is there any way, nor can there be any way, to stop someone from sitting down at one of the machines and using a dozen of public keys to vote. (Which, as I pointed out, anyone working in a vote registration office can get.)
Because that is not, in any sense, 'tampering' with the machine.
Now, you'll probably assert they'd have to each vote individually, limiting their effect to a couple of dozen votes before they'd obviously be caught, because of the magical software you're sure will be there.
I will point out that, in no circumstances, would any TCSEC requirement restrict doing thousands of perfectly valid inputs in a few seconds, although obviously that could be an additional requirement of the system. TCSEC systems verify input. Ten thousand votes with public keys attached are correct input.
I will also point out that A1 security ranking is, um, impossible without physical security...and they get tested after being installed. You can't stick a computer in a box, pull it out six months later, and claim it's A1 security, unless you had someone watching the box at all times.
And note you've added at least two other computers to each polling site. And each voting computer needs some way to read the public key, so you've added a barcode reader, at least, to them.
To actually install A1-level security computers, you would spend millions of dollars per site.
Which makes the whole thing rather idiotic to start with, as we could never afford it, on top of the problem that A1 security is not designed to protect against a) programmer/administrative tampering (Which is what we're fucking talking about when we talk about tampering...we're not assuming voters figure it out.), and b) there's a rather obvious hole in the system of assigning public keys, so people can have entirely, utterly, completely 'valid' inputs that rig an election.
Here are the three specific security issues I've pointed out, that do not exist under paper voting. Please explain how your system catches them:
a) The person who loads the software onto a machine alters it before doing so.
b) Someone in the voter registration office adds extra voters to the roles, and takes their public keys, and they and others vote multiple times when they enter the booth. (This actually is fixable.) c) b, but with one poll worker also helping them. Perhaps by, when setting up the computers, they simply set one up in another room, so someone can
Here's the actual fact:
No system even vaguely close to what you pretend is ideal is even close to existing in the real world.
Meanwhile, your support of some sort of perfect electronic election has resulted in goddamn voting machines running MS Access that anyone can walk up to and tamper with.
Yes, I have a fucking chip on my shoulder about sophisticates who yammer about how something could, in some hypothetical universe, work magically and perfectly. Something that is actually being done, in the real world, in such a horrible and treasonous way.
If we hadn't invented circuit breakers and fuses, or required them to be installed in building, yes I'd damn well object to light bulbs, because they'd cause more fires then well-understood lanterns.
The fact that we could hypothetically stop them from catching fire wouldn't change that fact that anyone advocating light bulbs in that world is a fool at best, and in the business of repairing fire damage at worse.
I swear to god, you people are worse than communists, yammering about how things work in some magical ideal world that nothing is even vaguely close to, and meanwhile all practical implementations happily destroy any semblance of the democratic process.
A better analogy: You're standing there arguing that the unpopular group X have the free speech right to march down the street, which is a fine thing to argue, and I'd normally agree with you...but right now the Xs are running around burning down houses and calling it a 'march'. You should perhaps, you know, shut the fuck up about some idealized thing and actually look at the reality of what's happening, and at least stop being part of the problem by defending something that sounds identical, from the POV of the general public, to some very bad thing.
Incidentally, as I've explained in other posts, the 'ideal' implementations are no such thing, either. All of the 'crypto' solutions offload security from a single physical box to hundreds of voter registration sites where any minimum wage employee can steal thousands of your precious magical encryption keys, and use them to make perfectly valid votes, which they can easily slip into the rather insecure vote. Which makes things less secure than physical ballots, as many many people have pointed out. It's more secure than what we use now electronically, but that's damning with faint praise.
But that's really an issue for another time, because, right now, you are arguing for shitty MS Access databases storing voting records, with no security at all. You don't intend to be arguing that, but you are.
Those same folks who could -- if they'd a mind to -- tamper with plain old paper balloting too.
Which is why we make them do it in PUBLIC. Where we can SEE it.
You know, what we can't do with electronic ballots.
Technically, monarchies can be republics. Because monarchs can be elected. 'Monarch' just means 'one person is the state'.
Ancient Rome, for example, was an elective monarchy, and a Republic. It eventually devolved into unofficial hereditary monarchy, at roughly the same time it devolved into an official empire, although those were not, strictly speaking, related. Even the emergency powers of 'emperor' still allowed the Senate to vote for the next one...the heredity stuff happened because of the Senate's failures and cowardice, and a trick of leaders getting 'co-elected' with their chosen successor, so the Senate didn't get to vote for the next guy. The Senate still officially picked the leader of Rome until the end.
Granted, in modern times 'monarchy' usually means hereditary, and we use other words to describe other forms of monarchy.
Just because you read Atlas Shrugged yesterday doesn't mean shit to anyone else. Crawl back over the Drudge Report, where you can eat up the talking points regurgitation with the rest of the libertarian zombies.
Indeed. Anyone who thinks saying 'The US isn't a democracy' is a valid political point is probably some glibertarian fresh out of his government-sponsored education.
Why would you need to do that? The tabulator is probably being watched carefully.
No, just add a few thousand people to the voter rolls, generate entirely valid votes for them, and put them in there from the outside, like they're entirely normal votes.
Ultimately, whether your proposal is better than paper ballots depends on the ease being able to make fraudulent registrations. Under a decentralized registration process as we have now, it would be just as easy.
Not really. Right now, it would be a zillion times easier to make fraudulent registrations. Voting precincts are watched to an amazing level.
The voter registration roll is a giant state-wide database with hundreds of access points, and probably ten thousand people a state who could alter it.
It's not even vaguely comparable, security-wise, to a ballot box. Ballot boxes have one location, and are inspected, sealed, watch, and unsealed. Voter registration computers are just sitting in offices.
And once you've added five thousand voters, all it takes is a rogue voting machine, just like now. His system is basically exactly the same, security-wise, as current electronic voting. (Except he apparently wants to network it.)
And a 'more centralized system' would be akin to barring poor people from voting. They already have enough trouble getting to their voter registration office.
Oh, they'll assert that even computers can't fake signing.
When, of course, they could indeed trivially sign a vote different than the one you actually tried to cast, and yet present you the other one.
Of course, all this is made pointless by the fact that anyone with access to the computers in the voter registration office could just add a bunch of voters, and thus get a bunch of valid votes in advance. The poster mentioned 'election officials being supplied with hashes of votes as they're cast', which was presumably a way to try to avoid this, but that's nonsense. For one thing, now you've networked the damn computers together (So they be 'supplied' with this information), making any attacks easier, and for another that's just another database to put more records in, it doesn't actually solve anything at all. If you can add the votes, you can add the damn records that shows the hashes being displayed.
That's really all this 'signing' accomplishes...it spreads the voting, and the security, thinner and thinner:
Under his system, you'll go and get the ability to cast valid ballots at the voter registration office. (Instead of the poll, where they physically won't let you near the box unless you've proved it there.) So it's okay if there's an invisible box that votes end up in that anyone can tamper with, because only valid votes can be counted, and deleted votes get noticed.
This doesn't make things more secure, it makes them less.
We now have three things that cannot be tested with any paper ballot and one corrective action that cannot be achieved by paper ballot.
Uh, no.
The problem here is that if election officials are corrupt, they're corrupt. Changing to a new system that stops specific behavior is just idiotic.
In this example, you've traded off having to physical secure election sites with having to physical secure and electronically voter registration offices and having to electronically secure election sites.
Please note by 'secure', I mean election level security. That means having observer watch a voter registration location. All the time. 24 hours a day. With people peering over worker's shoulders to make sure they're only adding one person for each person in.
Otherwise, people can just, you know, add new people to the rolls, or steal existing people's public keys. And then, with a tiny amount of software or a card reader or just ten minutes 'fixing' a 'broken' machine, electronically add entirely valid votes. In a manner much much easier, and much less detectable, than adding paper ballots.
The voting process requires security. Any idiot can set up a process that works if you've already verified every single person in advance and know there's no issue there, but that's patently impossible. and if you can do that, you should have just had them vote there.
The only way to make voting secure is to make the part that requires security as small as possible, and to make it observable to all. In a paper election, the part that requires security is a ballot box, which can be kept track of easily (Let's note that most of the manipulation comes from moving the box, and simply not move boxes anymore.), and an ID check at the start, which can also be kept track of easily.
You've invented some entirely different location, namely, all the places where keys get added, and some giant database, that also must be watched, and you've changed the level of security needed at actual voting locations from 'watching a box and license check', which any idiot can do, to 'watching all machines at all times to make sure that someone isn't doing something'.
You've functionally moved the 'voting' process off the voting site, which is all well and good for 'secure elections', but as you've now made 'adding valid votes' much much easier (a few milliseconds if you can hack a computer, an extra memory card brought in or one with a few votes on it to start if not.) now you have to 'secure the voter roll', too. To the election level security.
Yes, there are a lot of rules and regulations...
the dead rise to vote,
That is not a ballot problem, that is a voter roll problem. It can happen just as easy with electronic voting.
ballot boxes appear in the counting room stuffed with "legitimate" ballots,
Yes, in 1920s Chicago. Not in the actual modern world, where ballot boxes are kept fairly careful track of.
people vote early and often
That is not a ballot problem, that is a voter roll problem. It can happen just as easy with electronic voting.
and ballots are simply miscounted
Uh, no. Ballots are not miscounted.
or lost.
Except they aren't.
Incidentally, your 'dead voting' and 'people voting multiple times' and 'ballot box stuffing' happen with the consent of the people working the voting site, and the system is often so observed it actually requires third parties to come in and actually cast those votes. I.e, they can't just add votes.
Whereas with electronic voting, they could just stick the card in a machine and put on as many votes as they want if they were corrupt, you moron.
Proper crypto should be better at providing both uniqueness and anonymity .
You are a fucking idiot, because absolutely none of the 'electronic voting' systems out there provide any sort of crypto at all, much less the hypothetical crypto that would allow people to confirm their vote was counted.
Which, incidentally, would only stop the problem in one direction. If the voting workers are corrupt (As they seem to be in your universe with their manipulation of paper ballots), all they have to do is put in a bunch more votes and mark some voters off as having voted.
You're comparing the absolute worse paper ballot problems, the sort of problems we don't have any more and show up only in extremely corrupt systems where the process itself is being run by corrupt people, with some hypothetical electronic voting that doesn't exist and no electronic voting has ever been attempted as.
That's a bit like arguing lions are safer than cars, because lions could be implanted with auto-traq devices that triggered when they got close to people, whereas the Model T is entirely unsafe.
Hey, imbecile, try arguing in the actual real world.
And while paper ballots are not trackable at the vote level, you can physically keep track of them and know where they are at all times. You can sit there and watch the box, you can watch people add and remove things to the box. You can see the 'vote container' without actually seeing the votes, and know that no one can actually change the votes without adding or replacing or removing them from the container, which you could see.
There's no way to do that with electronic voting. The votes can be tampered with without detection, because you're handing the entire ballot box to people every time they vote, where upon they take it into the booth with them and do whatever to it.
Moreover, the people voting can't actually see their vote to start with.
It's just insecure in so many ways, the entire concept is insecure. It's a lot like DRM, in fact...the fact they currently get broken by stupid security issues is sorta masking the fact the entire idea is stupid and unworkable.
Electronic voting, incidentally, is a form of DRM. Except it's DRM where the programmers and system designers have motive to break it also, stopped only by a third party that doesn't understand any of this. So yeah.
To quote Douglas Adams, 'their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.' The problem isn't any specific security flaws discovered at any specific time, the problem is the idea of non-physical voting, period, full stop, because all the methods we have to stop fraud are via paying attention to physical objects.
Well, granted.
But the point it he's not being sued for fraud for the content of that paper, which 90% of the people here seem to think. He's being absurdly sued for fraud for taking money to write that paper because it's claimed that his other paper wasn't very good and deliberately misleading.
Which is, frankly, the most absurd legal theory of fraud ever. It criminalizes ever mentioning, to people who've hired you, things that someone, anywhere, might have a problem with how well you did them.
'Hey, look, Obama claimed he was a Senator when he got elected. While that appears to be factually true, I think he wasn't a very good Senator so I shall have him charged with fraud.'
Seriously? This is totally insane. He claimed he wrote a paper, he did write a paper. There was, at no point, any sort of lie he gave to the people who hired him.(1) If they had a problem with his references (Which his actual employers do not.), they should have checked them, by, I dunno, reading his paper. The idea that 'didn't do a good job at a job listened on resume' is actual fraud is just so patently absurd it's hard to talk about.
What's even more absurd is that the paper he wrote that supposedly 'wasn't very good' was a paper hired by a third party that had no fault with it. At this point we're getting almost surreal in the legal theory...if I hire you to do X, and you do X to my satisfaction, you have done your job. Presumably, the people who paid him to write that paper had no problem with it.
Then, another party comes along and claims that you didn't do the job to their satisfaction, when of course they weren't involved in the job whatsoever. Moreover, you did so poorly that just mentioning it as a list of things you've done, as a way to get money, is fraud. This is a really interesting legal theory, that jobs have objective goals and ways to judge the results, that I can pay you to do something, and be happy with it, but it's somehow 'not good'. Especially when the results of the job are available for anyone to read, including, presumably, potential employers.
This is a very interesting governmental stretch. Is the government now in charge of what non-governmental workers are doing good and bad, and able to punish the bad ones? Did we somehow become North Korea when I wasn't looking? What do you want to bet this idiot bring the suit is also a fan of 'small government'?
1)Not that lying on a resume should be fraud either, but the fraud laws could be twisted to mean that. For, you know, actual lies. Which this wasn't.
Not if it's in your driveway or on the street, no. People can generally walk around the front of your house.
Might be interesting to put up a 'No Trespassing in Driveway' sign, though. But can't even try to stop them if you're parked in the street.
Of course, a better solution is to put the car in a garage.
As always, the laws are unfairly tilted against the poor.
Indeed.
As I mentioned above, you have no responsibility for property deliberately put into your possession. (As opposed to stuff accidentally dropped or left, which you do have a minimum standard.)
You are not allowed to damage it, as that is vandalism...but I can't think of any reason you wouldn't be allowed to remove it.
Or even leave it laying around anywhere, as long as you don't leave it somewhere it obviously would get damaged. (Like the middle of the road.) You are not responsible for it. You have neither tacitly taken responsibility for it by agreeing to be left it, nor is it 'lost property'.
It's just something in your possession, like a couch an ex left at your house. You can't damage it, you can't sell it or give it away, but you don't have to leave it in the damn living room either.
Of course, the easiest thing to do is just bring it inside. Which is, hilariously, exactly what you're supposed to do if someone forgets something and you end up with it, so you can always claim you thought the FBI set it down (attached to your car?) and then forgot to take it with them when they left. Get a box, label it 'Lost and Found', and stick it in there. When they show up asking where their tracker is, go and check the lost and found, and, hey, there it is...they should be more careful with their stuff. :)
Oh, and after 30 day or so, check your local laws, you're supposed to turn forgotten property over the police if no one claims it.
Heh. That part I didn't know. So it's even crazier.
But you simply cannot charge someone with fraud for 'Not doing a good job at their previous job, and then listing that job as one of the places they worked.'. That is really batshit insane.
I can just see the legal theory now: Your honor, we assert that not only should all resumes be 100% truthful, they aren't even allowed to omit any negative options that anyone holds. He should have stated, when listing this paper, that people disagree with him.
So everyone's resume has to change to look like:
Captain D's 2003-2005: Called an asshat several times, dropped two plates on floor, a customer once said I was 'rude', etc etc.
I'm somewhat sad the law doesn't even apply, because that means it's going to get dismissed without the court having to look at this batshit insane case and making a statement to that effect.
No, passwords are not evidence, and there's no constitutional reason you can't be ordered to turn one over.
Passwords unlock evidence, but are not themselves evidence, unless your password is 'I killed Jake'. (And if so, the court would just demand that the police set up a computer where you can decrypt the information but don't have to reveal your password.)
That's not, of course, to say that laws couldn't regulate forced password disclosure, and obviously they need a warrant, but a password, like the location of a car, isn't 'evidence', and if the police have a warrant for the encrypted stuff or the car itself, you'll have to let them access it.
However, in this specific case, the police are collecting, purposefully, deliberately, continually, expensively, the location of your car at all times, and it's entirely reasonable to argue that, although you're not sure how or what for, clearly the police are intending to use the location as evidence, and hence you plead the fifth in telling them that information.
You don't normally have the right to refuse to disclose the location of your car. For example, if someone shows up with a warrant to search your car, you have to produce your car.
That is because it's not the location of the car that's evidence, it's the car itself. You aren't testifying against yourself when you disclose the location of your car. You have no fifth amendment right to keeping your car secret...if they've got a warrant, you have to let them search it.
However, as I pointed out, the FBI is collecting the location, presumably to use against you. That means it is evidence. Not 'the car', but the knowledge of the location is evidence. Otherwise it would be pretty dumb to collect it.
And that knowledge is in your head. So you can't be compelled to disclose that knowledge.(1)
Basically, you can be compelled to disclose things that aren't evidence themselves, that just 'unlock' evidence.
Hence things like password disclosure laws, although those obviously have other problems. And hence jokes like making your password itself be a confession of a crime, and thus you wouldn't have to disclose it. (This wouldn't work. Even if the police lost that case, they'd just have to set up an way for you to decrypt without them knowing the password.)
The courts can compel people to tell them stuff that can't be evidence of a crime, and the location of a car usually isn't. The key word is usually...if you parked your car out in the woods where you buried the bodies, technically, they can't make you tell where it i, because being parked there will be used against you in court.
And if you make the argument in court that that is why they're trying to find your car, that the search warrant is merely a way to demand you tell them where the car is...you do not, in fact, have to explain where it is. (Even if your car is parked elsewhere...you obviously don't have to prove or even admit your guilt when you plead the fifth.)
This argument would usually fail, but in this situation the police themselves have exhibited an amazing amount of interest in the location of your car, at all times, and it's entirely reasonable to assume that will be used as evidence in some criminal case. In other words, a GPS tracker is de facto proof of an otherwise rather hard-to-prove claim, and should logically render you able to plead the fifth on the location.
And, what's more, the fact they're trying to find it at all times means you have no damn way to actually get the car to them without them tracking the location. I mean, normally, if you argued to the court that they didn't want to search it, they just wanted the location, the court would just make you deliver it yourself. But here you can't without having to reveal the location, which you do not have to do.
1) Incidentally, if the location of a car starts regularly being 'evidence', then at some point even a warrant won't be enough to make anyone turn over the car, they'll have a valid fifth amendment argument if the location is normally being used against people in court.
You have no responsibility to care for things that people have deliberately left in your possession without your permission, even if you become aware they've done so.
Unlike things they've accidentally left in your possession, which you do have some responsibility for, if only to turn over to the police. Or things they left in your possession with your permission, for which you've accepted tacit responsibility for.
Sadly, the lack of responsibility doesn't let you actively destroy it, which is still vandalism or theft by destruction.
There are no laws covering that at all. Engagement rings are gifts, and no one is under any obligation to give them back whatsoever.
Giving back the ring if the woman breaks it off is just a societal convention.
Of course, the courts would probably consider deliberately lying, from the start, about an intent to marry someone to gain a ring as fraud, but that's not what people normally mean by 'broken engagement'.
All laws about this aren't the same. There are three different kinds of laws on this topic.
There's the 'forgot to pick up' law, where you accidentally put something somewhere and forget to get it, like setting your wallet down in a checkout line.
And there's the 'dropped' law, where you did not know it left your possession.
These are, believe it or not, often covered under different state laws.
For example, the rule with the first is often if you find something you think someone has accidentally left, you should keep it there, at least for some specified time. If a customer walks out of a restaurant without their purse, the restaurant should hold their purse for them.
Whereas with the second, if you find a wallet in the middle of the sidewalk, or even if you find one in the middle of the hall in the exact same restaurant, you're supposed to turn it in to the police. 'The Place' gets things left behind, where people can go back and get them, the police get things that just fell there, where people possibly have no idea where they are.
Generally. Of course, laws vary by state, but I thought it would be worth mentioning that even truly 'lost' items get treated differently depending on how they got lost.
And neither of those cover deliberately leaving something somewhere on someone else's property. If such a law exists, it's a different law. As far as I know, you don't have any obligation to take care of people's property and make sure they can find their stuff when they do that, like you do when they accidentally give you possession. OTOH, you can't deliberately break their stuff either.
I still think the best bet is to take the thing apart and claim you thought it was part of the car. (Or, rather, plead the fifth and have your lawyer point out they haven't proven you knew it wasn't part of the car.)
OTOH, if you really wanted to screw with the 'lost property' stuff, you put your car inside a giant metal box and hide it in a warehouse somewhere. You have not damaged their tracker at all.
And by them attaching the tracker, they've just admitted that they're recording the location of your car. So there's no way in hell they can force you to reveal the location of your car, because, duh, that's testifying against yourself. (Think about it for a second. If the FBI is collecting 'the location of the car', then 'the location of the car' is clearly being used as evidence in an investigation, presumably against you, so if you're forced to tell them 'the location of the car'...)
Now, a court could demand you turn it over, or be in contempt, but they're actually have to go through the court to do that. And you're still have a pretty interesting argument, namely, that you're not willing to remove something they attached to your car, as you have no experience in that sort of thing and they've threatened to sue you if you damage it .(And you still can't be forced to tell them where the car is.) So, while you'd like for them to get their tracker back, there appears to be no way to actually accomplish that.