Police and doctors are in the news and on TV all the time. Most people interact with doctors frequently. Many people interact with the police as well. That may not tell a person how doctors and police do their jobs but it is a pretty good start. Ethics boards are made up of people from the community. The job is pretty self-explanatory.
Accident reconstruction experts tend to be expert witnesses. It is not often that they are on trial for committing a crime on the job. They also tend to be well-trained and follow clear well-established guidelines.
You are correct that the other fields are not very well understood by juries. That is one reason it is so hard to hold corporate officers, accountants, and fund managers responsible for white-collar crime. The issues have been litigated, the weak points of the law are well-known, so that's where fund managers, et al focus their exploits.
Hard-sciences are different. People view hard-sciences as having the answer. When someone is accused of doing something that doesn't work out well people assume the suspect knew what was going to happen and that the suspect's intentions must have been malicious. People have been taught that computers are deterministic machines so IT is put in the category of a hard science.
From another perspective, there are few fields where someone can become an 'expert' from a four-hour class. IT is one of those fields. The police will send an officer off to a class to be trained on how to use EnCase. Since most people use computers in their day-to-day lives and since computers record information so well this so-called 'expert' will incriminate all kinds of people on shabby evidence. Few defendants can afford a real expert to counter the police so juries are left with little to go on.
Re:No successful terrorist attacks since 9/11?
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Top Secret America
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· Score: 1
Al Qaeda has the weapons-grade Uranium (not very hard to get), and have been working on assembling a weapon. There are actual threats out there we have been fighting, and not just trampling innocent people's rights because we think it's fun.
Do you want to back that up with some evidence? Even Iraq did not have weapon's grade uranium. It is very difficult, dangerous, and expensive to refine. In contrast, once someone has enough weapon's grade uranium it is trivial to make a gun-type nuclear weapon similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima.
Firstly, only a proportion of people, probably a rather small proportion in some industries, is supporting the work that many people enjoy. Those people are getting screwed, because they are paying considerably more than their "fair share", while the freeloaders contribute nothing.
This is not how copyrighted works are priced. It costs the same amount to see Eclipse as it does to see Cyrus despite one having a much, much larger audience than the other. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly. The copyright holder charges whatever the market will bear. The only thing keeping the price down is competition. Since it is illegal for anyone but the copyright holder to supply the movie, it is pirates who provide competition and keep the price down. However, since piracy is so small compared to the size of the market it really doesn't have much affect.
Ask yourself how many popular sci-fi shows that plenty of geeks enjoy still get cancelled in their infancy, because they don't bring in enough money
Television shows use a completely different revenue model than movies and video games. The viewers don't pay anything directly. Instead, television shows get their money from advertising. It may well be the case that the target audience for sci-fi shows just doesn't succumb to advertisements as well as the audience for The Bachelorette. Viewers pay directly to see movies and there are certainly plenty of sci-fi movies produced.
Sci-fi has a second problem in that the setting is in an unfamiliar universe. The author must introduce the peculiarities of that universe to the viewers. The author can not describe the universe over-and-over in every episode so it generally builds up over the first several episodes. If I watch a couple episodes and think, hey, this is a great show; I'll tell my friends. My friends will have difficulty following the show because they are unfamiliar with the universe it is set in. Again, movies don't have this issue since it all happens in one episode.
much of the follow-up work winds up repeating a previously successful formula that is likely to be a safe bet, rather than going for something innovative that might be a better product with rich rewards, but also carries a much higher risk.
As we've already discussed the cost of a movie is the same no matter if it's a great movie or a terrible one. When an investor chooses whether to invest in a sequel which is nearly certain to sell millions of tickets versus a new work which might sell millions of tickets they are going to go with the sure thing. The rate of piracy is not going to change the ratio of innovative new works relative to tried-and-true formulas. Investors will always milk a successful franchise for all its worth before they take another big risk on something new.
Put simply, people choose the path of least resistance, which is usually the path of least cost.
If Eleanor needed some music for an audition, any reasonable music would do. She wouldn't pay money if a popular work were available for free
He's not going to argue that point either. If copyright law were reasonable copyrights would expire in a reasonable timeframe. The result would be a huge public domain where Eleanor could take her pick of free popular songs. Her instructors and mentors would point her to the rich public domain and that would not help Mr. Brown at all.
Really, copyright debate boils down to free-loaders demanding free access to everything, and copyright holders demanding restrictions on everything. So long as either side refuses to acknowledge the flaws in their arguments we are not going to see reasonable debate about where copyright ought to be.
Re:So you are taking Economist seriously.
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Behind Cyberwar FUD
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· Score: 1, Interesting
summary, one can easily say that this time the group they are licking the boots of is RIAA.
While it would not surprise me at all if that's true, the 'whitepaper' referenced in the summary reads like a poorly researched conspiracy theory. It says this about the Wall Street Journal without providing a reference:
So whats going on is that you have
one large corporation selling its product to
other large corporations, where the product
is the eyes and ears of the ruling class.
It also makes claims about attribution being NP Complete without providing a single citation in that entire section.
The driving force behind the cyberwar terminology really does need to be outed, but this paper doesn't do it.
According to your distribution list, the odds that a family would have a boy born on Tuesday, and another boy born on Tuesday are 1/196 while the odds that a family would have a boy born on Monday, and another boy born on Wednesday are 2/196. If the birth date of the two children were independent the odds would be the same. So your assumption that P=1/196 for each outcome may be flawed.
As another poster pointed out, your list actually has 28 boys born on Tuesday and 14 of them have a brother. So if the gender and birth date are independent the odds are 14/28=1/2.
The worst part is that the police will be using it.
Imagine if the courts actually believed that it was tamper proof.
For non-repudiation purposes, digital data can have a cryptographic hash computed on it. It can also be signed with a timestamp by a trusted third-party. If you're concerned about data being tampered with after it is on the card, the police can simply publish a cryptographic hash of every card they archive after they have written to it. In fact they can do that regardless of how they store the data.
As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans' civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training.
This should not be a difficult balance to find as it is spelled out in the constitution that this woman swore to uphold. Specifically, she needs to present a judge with probable cause and ask him to sign a warrant. Considering that judges practically rubber-stamp the things it should not be difficult.
slashdot has exactly zero stuff that needs encrypting. Yes, including slashdot login/password details.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wants to monitor everything you read so she can ascertain if you are the sort of person who is likely to go on a shooting spree.
"The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet," Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
Underscoring her comments are a number of recent terror attacks over the past year where legal U.S. residents such as Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad and accused Fort Hood, Texas, shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, are believed to have been inspired by the Internet postings of violent Islamic extremists.
When I worked at Freescale, there actually was no real IT department there: it was outsourced to an Indian company. They got paid based on the number of tickets resolved, so they were always trying to make up more work for themselves to do, such as creating tickets to set up IM on an employee's computer, or various other trivial tasks.
If they are anything like the company our desktop support was outsourced to, they did it one computer at a time. And for each computer their manual process messed up, they opened a new ticket to fix it. Every once in a while they may mess up every computer company-wide and fix it one machine at a time as users called in to complain. And if the users called about anything more than the most trivial of issues, they would close the ticket and open a new ticket with a different technician.
The numbers for an 'average' car assume there are 1.57 passengers in the car. Most travel involves people going to and from work. When people travel to and from work they typically do so alone so your initial read of the 'solo' car was correct. Also, those numbers leave a lot of room for argument. For example, poor ridership is the chief reason mass transit uses so much energy.
The author didn't provide any charts* but he makes a reference to Europe and Asia where their transit systems use 38% of the energy per passenger mile that US systems do. Europe and Asia do much better because they have higher ridership and because infrastructure (shops, entertainment, housing) tends to be build around rail access while the US tends to build around road access.
Also note the author was looking at transit systems as they are used today. As mentioned earlier, most transportation involves people going to and from work. That is when mass transit is most efficient due to high ridership. If everyone who drove to and and from work rode a train instead the energy savings would be phenomenal.
*Actually, the first chart does show East Japan Rail (combined) which is more efficient than a motorcycle.
wait until you or one of your family members get in a hit and run from an illegal person that does not have insurance
How would you know the person lacked insurance or was here illegally if they fled the scene? I have no doubt there are countless prejudiced people who blame every hit and run on "an illegal person that does not have insurance". Regardless, what does a person being in the US illegally have to do with an auto accident? I can certainly understand how making it illegal for that person to be in the US will encourage them to flee the scene before the authorities arrive.
Wait until you go to the hospital with a broken finger and you are 19th in line behind the many illegals there for exaggerated minor care or major care because they did not handle the problem when it was minor
When you go to the emergency room a triage nurse performs triage. The nurse will put you ahead of the "many illegals there for exaggerated minor care".
Again, how do you know these people are 'illegals'? Can you just look at them and magically tell they are illegal immigrants? Even if they are, would your emergency room have a higher doctor/patient ratio if all the illegal immigrants were kicked out? The emergency room is staffed based on demand, not based on the number of local legal residents.
Yes, some of that increase in local business does support come back to the community as a whole but it does not even out with the drain from other areas.
The economy is not a zero-sum game. Total wealth increases as more people contribute to the economy. The economy is global and complex. It is doubtful you have done the math to support your claim, even at the most basic level. Supposing your claim were true, local businesses do not operate in a vacuum. You can be quite certain that the moment the cost of operating locally exceeds the cost of moving operations to another country those businesses will shut down their local operations and move the jobs elsewhere.
I don't necessarily have an opinion one way or the other on immigration but your comments demanded a response. It looks like your opinion is driven, not by evidence, but by prejudice.
The point is, the drivers license is proof of identity, and once your identity has been proven your citizenship status can easily be looked up
There is no central database of US citizens. Most US citizens got their citizenship when they were born in the US. These people need a birth certificate to prove citizenship. Many, many birth certificates are still kept in paper files stored away in county records rooms. Some of those records have been misfiled, lost, destroyed in a fire, etc.
Other US citizens got their citizenship because one of their parents was a US citizen. Their mother may have been traveling/living abroad when she gave birth. So these people can't use a birth certificate. Instead, they need to prove one of their parents is a US citizen, then prove they are actually the child of that person.
I imagine there are a few US citizens born to women in foreign nations who were impregnated by US men traveling abroad.
Persons born in Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, etc before they joined the US were granted US citizenship. Some of these people are still alive.
People can immigrate to the United States and become naturalized citizens. Granted, recent cases would be easy to look up.
Finally, citizenship is not the only restriction on legally residing in the US. There are numerous channels through which someone may legally enter the US such as traveling on vacation, getting a work visa, student visa, etc.
The point is, there is no way for immigration officials to definitively conclude that someone is not legally in the US. Even if they can prove someone is a citizen of another nation and entered several months earlier without a visa, the person may still hold dual citizenship.
Any real journalist knows their defining characteristic is integrity.
I disagree. A journalist's defining characteristic is reporting the truth. The distinction is critical. One could certainly argue that anyone who publishes the Pentagon Papers lacks integrity since they potentially placed the nation's security at risk. Similarly, you argue Gizmodo lacks integrity because they broke the law and perhaps acted unethically. Nevertheless they reported the truth and that is what Apple is punishing them for. If Gizmodo had just made up the entire story they would be at WWDC just like all the other tech rags out there.
Common sense tells you that if you want greater access to a company, and someone offers to sell you something valuable belonging to said company, you buy it, then return it to said company without making a story about it.
Common sense tells you that if journalists only publish stories that please the companies they are writing about, many important stories will remain hidden in the dark.
But it can have the same effect on a newspaper or a blog. They make money when people look at ads or buy subscriptions. If you reproduce a large part of the article or somehow intercept the readers, it has the same effect as stealing some money directly from their bank account. So you can quibble over the word "theft", but the comptroller who needs to issue the paychecks and the people who have to write their mortgage checks feel the same thing.
Let's say I run a car dealership in Humphrey Arkansas. I run ads telling people to come to Humphrey for quality cars at fair prices. My dealership has a sign with the same motto. Everyone in the surrounding area knows Humphrey is the place to go for a car. One day another dealership opens up across the street. They put up a bigger sign that reads "Quality Cars at LOW Prices". People go to my competitor instead of me. This directly translates into fewer dollars in my bank account. So you can quibble over the word "theft", but the comptroller who needs to issue the paychecks and the people who have to write their mortgage checks feel the same thing.
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly. Copyright infringement is competition. It is illegal competition; if copyright law were balanced it would even be unethical competition, but it is not theft.
Research is a noncommercial endeavour, and as such patent infringement cannot occur.
You are not a lawyer (and neither am I). Granting patents is one of congress's 18 enumerated powers. Congress can grant patents that have nothing to do with commerce. In fact, patent law spells out four exclusive rights the patent holder has. A patent holder can stop other people from:
Making
Using
Selling
Offering for sale
the product or process that is described in the patent claims. There does not need to be any commercial activity involved.
You are thinking of a warrant which requires a signature from a judge. It is quite common for lawyers as "officers of the court" to have the power to issue subpeonas on their own. It is also common for prosecutors and Attorneys General especially, to have such power. I'm not familiar with the situation in Pennsylvania but if a court is involved it is probably just a clerical matter that a clerk rubber-stamps.
Someone so biased by your religion you fail to see the distinction between these cases
I assume the WW I cross issue you refer to is this. The Supreme Court ruled the cross can stay up. That seems to be the opposite of what you have been saying.
Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, I personally do not agree with it. How would you feel about a Muslim symbol being posted there instead? It is on public property, maintained at public expense. Just like the other cases you cite the issue is not whether or not someone can exercise their right to religion. The issue is whether or not the government can endorse a religion. The answer to that is spelled out in the constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
You will note there are two clauses. The first one applies to the government getting involved in religion. The second one involves the government interfering with religion. Most of the cases you refer to involve people deliberately trying to put these two issues in conflict with each other. Obviously when these two issues conflict one of them is going to lose. The other cases you cite clearly involve a violation of the establishment clause. Because it would be so easy for a government employee to violate the establishment clause by claiming they're just exercising their religion the court has been pretty strict about enforcing it.
Can you find any cases where someone was barred from exercising their religious rights without public funds and without representing the government? No you can't! All the cases the 'persecuted' Christians have complained about for the past few decades involve a violation of the establishment clause. They're complaining because they can't get the government to endorse their religion and they get shot down every time they try to find a loophole in the constitution (the WW I memorial you cited being an exception).
Undoubtedly one of the most controversial cases involved some students selected by the school administration to speak on behalf of their class. The students wanted to say a prayer during their public school graduation ceremony. You could debate this all day long but the fact remains the court looked at the evidence for that specific case and concluded the prayer would violate the establishment clause.
Your right to free exercise of religion has not been infringed. So long as you are not representing the government or exercising your religion with government funds, you are free to carry on.
With that said, this discussion is about citizens' right to speak in public. There is no issue regarding religion. The establishment clause does not apply. The controversies surrounding religion are irrelevant. This is a plain simple free-speech issue without any other constitutional issues conflicting with it.
Why would he run? He had not been arrested or even charged with a crime. He did not think he had committed a crime. Even after a trial there are plenty of people here who question if he had committed a crime. There was even a lone holdout juror who refused to convict (and was subsequently removed from the jury). In fact he was still employed at the time, albeit on administrative leave. Besides that he owned a house that he would have had to give up if he fled.
The city did not have any written policies to address this situation. There were no rules to nit-pick. Childs was acting based on industry standards. Giving out passwords, even to your boss, is considered a very bad practice in many places. It would have been far more appropriate for the city to write up and distribute some policies before pressing this issue.
Another poster cited the law. Reading the law I think the spirit of the law was to address things like denial of service attacks. Even the juror who responded to that post admits the law was not written to address a situation like this. Quite to the contrary it was the city that was nit-picking and arguing that the law was technically broken.
Here's a question, when he started on the job, did the mayor personally give him the admin passwords? No, well, either the person who did was unauthorized, or guess what, that whole line was specious and facile.
I doubt anyone gave him the password. He had worked there since 1998. According to news stories and the juror, Childs build the entire network. He was in charge of it. Childs reported to someone who let him do whatever he wanted. It wasn't until someone new came along that people began to question how Childs ran things.
Slashdot Mirror
Police and doctors are in the news and on TV all the time. Most people interact with doctors frequently. Many people interact with the police as well. That may not tell a person how doctors and police do their jobs but it is a pretty good start. Ethics boards are made up of people from the community. The job is pretty self-explanatory.
Accident reconstruction experts tend to be expert witnesses. It is not often that they are on trial for committing a crime on the job. They also tend to be well-trained and follow clear well-established guidelines.
You are correct that the other fields are not very well understood by juries. That is one reason it is so hard to hold corporate officers, accountants, and fund managers responsible for white-collar crime. The issues have been litigated, the weak points of the law are well-known, so that's where fund managers, et al focus their exploits.
Hard-sciences are different. People view hard-sciences as having the answer. When someone is accused of doing something that doesn't work out well people assume the suspect knew what was going to happen and that the suspect's intentions must have been malicious. People have been taught that computers are deterministic machines so IT is put in the category of a hard science.
From another perspective, there are few fields where someone can become an 'expert' from a four-hour class. IT is one of those fields. The police will send an officer off to a class to be trained on how to use EnCase. Since most people use computers in their day-to-day lives and since computers record information so well this so-called 'expert' will incriminate all kinds of people on shabby evidence. Few defendants can afford a real expert to counter the police so juries are left with little to go on.
Do you want to back that up with some evidence? Even Iraq did not have weapon's grade uranium. It is very difficult, dangerous, and expensive to refine. In contrast, once someone has enough weapon's grade uranium it is trivial to make a gun-type nuclear weapon similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima.
On a related note, the suspect in this case appears to have killed himself. A deputy found him hanging in his cell at 4:23 PM yesterday.
This is not how copyrighted works are priced. It costs the same amount to see Eclipse as it does to see Cyrus despite one having a much, much larger audience than the other. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly. The copyright holder charges whatever the market will bear. The only thing keeping the price down is competition. Since it is illegal for anyone but the copyright holder to supply the movie, it is pirates who provide competition and keep the price down. However, since piracy is so small compared to the size of the market it really doesn't have much affect.
Television shows use a completely different revenue model than movies and video games. The viewers don't pay anything directly. Instead, television shows get their money from advertising. It may well be the case that the target audience for sci-fi shows just doesn't succumb to advertisements as well as the audience for The Bachelorette. Viewers pay directly to see movies and there are certainly plenty of sci-fi movies produced.
Sci-fi has a second problem in that the setting is in an unfamiliar universe. The author must introduce the peculiarities of that universe to the viewers. The author can not describe the universe over-and-over in every episode so it generally builds up over the first several episodes. If I watch a couple episodes and think, hey, this is a great show; I'll tell my friends. My friends will have difficulty following the show because they are unfamiliar with the universe it is set in. Again, movies don't have this issue since it all happens in one episode.
As we've already discussed the cost of a movie is the same no matter if it's a great movie or a terrible one. When an investor chooses whether to invest in a sequel which is nearly certain to sell millions of tickets versus a new work which might sell millions of tickets they are going to go with the sure thing. The rate of piracy is not going to change the ratio of innovative new works relative to tried-and-true formulas. Investors will always milk a successful franchise for all its worth before they take another big risk on something new.
He's not going to argue that point either. If copyright law were reasonable copyrights would expire in a reasonable timeframe. The result would be a huge public domain where Eleanor could take her pick of free popular songs. Her instructors and mentors would point her to the rich public domain and that would not help Mr. Brown at all.
Really, copyright debate boils down to free-loaders demanding free access to everything, and copyright holders demanding restrictions on everything. So long as either side refuses to acknowledge the flaws in their arguments we are not going to see reasonable debate about where copyright ought to be.
While it would not surprise me at all if that's true, the 'whitepaper' referenced in the summary reads like a poorly researched conspiracy theory. It says this about the Wall Street Journal without providing a reference:
It also makes claims about attribution being NP Complete without providing a single citation in that entire section.
The driving force behind the cyberwar terminology really does need to be outed, but this paper doesn't do it.
According to your distribution list, the odds that a family would have a boy born on Tuesday, and another boy born on Tuesday are 1/196 while the odds that a family would have a boy born on Monday, and another boy born on Wednesday are 2/196. If the birth date of the two children were independent the odds would be the same. So your assumption that P=1/196 for each outcome may be flawed.
As another poster pointed out, your list actually has 28 boys born on Tuesday and 14 of them have a brother. So if the gender and birth date are independent the odds are 14/28=1/2.
How about the comments of Elena Kagan?
For non-repudiation purposes, digital data can have a cryptographic hash computed on it. It can also be signed with a timestamp by a trusted third-party. If you're concerned about data being tampered with after it is on the card, the police can simply publish a cryptographic hash of every card they archive after they have written to it. In fact they can do that regardless of how they store the data.
This should not be a difficult balance to find as it is spelled out in the constitution that this woman swore to uphold. Specifically, she needs to present a judge with probable cause and ask him to sign a warrant. Considering that judges practically rubber-stamp the things it should not be difficult.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wants to monitor everything you read so she can ascertain if you are the sort of person who is likely to go on a shooting spree.
If they are anything like the company our desktop support was outsourced to, they did it one computer at a time. And for each computer their manual process messed up, they opened a new ticket to fix it. Every once in a while they may mess up every computer company-wide and fix it one machine at a time as users called in to complain. And if the users called about anything more than the most trivial of issues, they would close the ticket and open a new ticket with a different technician.
The numbers for an 'average' car assume there are 1.57 passengers in the car. Most travel involves people going to and from work. When people travel to and from work they typically do so alone so your initial read of the 'solo' car was correct. Also, those numbers leave a lot of room for argument. For example, poor ridership is the chief reason mass transit uses so much energy.
The author didn't provide any charts* but he makes a reference to Europe and Asia where their transit systems use 38% of the energy per passenger mile that US systems do. Europe and Asia do much better because they have higher ridership and because infrastructure (shops, entertainment, housing) tends to be build around rail access while the US tends to build around road access.
Also note the author was looking at transit systems as they are used today. As mentioned earlier, most transportation involves people going to and from work. That is when mass transit is most efficient due to high ridership. If everyone who drove to and and from work rode a train instead the energy savings would be phenomenal.
*Actually, the first chart does show East Japan Rail (combined) which is more efficient than a motorcycle.
How would you know the person lacked insurance or was here illegally if they fled the scene? I have no doubt there are countless prejudiced people who blame every hit and run on "an illegal person that does not have insurance". Regardless, what does a person being in the US illegally have to do with an auto accident? I can certainly understand how making it illegal for that person to be in the US will encourage them to flee the scene before the authorities arrive.
When you go to the emergency room a triage nurse performs triage. The nurse will put you ahead of the "many illegals there for exaggerated minor care".
Again, how do you know these people are 'illegals'? Can you just look at them and magically tell they are illegal immigrants? Even if they are, would your emergency room have a higher doctor/patient ratio if all the illegal immigrants were kicked out? The emergency room is staffed based on demand, not based on the number of local legal residents.
The economy is not a zero-sum game. Total wealth increases as more people contribute to the economy. The economy is global and complex. It is doubtful you have done the math to support your claim, even at the most basic level. Supposing your claim were true, local businesses do not operate in a vacuum. You can be quite certain that the moment the cost of operating locally exceeds the cost of moving operations to another country those businesses will shut down their local operations and move the jobs elsewhere.
I don't necessarily have an opinion one way or the other on immigration but your comments demanded a response. It looks like your opinion is driven, not by evidence, but by prejudice.
There is no central database of US citizens. Most US citizens got their citizenship when they were born in the US. These people need a birth certificate to prove citizenship. Many, many birth certificates are still kept in paper files stored away in county records rooms. Some of those records have been misfiled, lost, destroyed in a fire, etc.
Other US citizens got their citizenship because one of their parents was a US citizen. Their mother may have been traveling/living abroad when she gave birth. So these people can't use a birth certificate. Instead, they need to prove one of their parents is a US citizen, then prove they are actually the child of that person.
I imagine there are a few US citizens born to women in foreign nations who were impregnated by US men traveling abroad.
Persons born in Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, etc before they joined the US were granted US citizenship. Some of these people are still alive.
People can immigrate to the United States and become naturalized citizens. Granted, recent cases would be easy to look up.
Finally, citizenship is not the only restriction on legally residing in the US. There are numerous channels through which someone may legally enter the US such as traveling on vacation, getting a work visa, student visa, etc.
The point is, there is no way for immigration officials to definitively conclude that someone is not legally in the US. Even if they can prove someone is a citizen of another nation and entered several months earlier without a visa, the person may still hold dual citizenship.
I disagree. A journalist's defining characteristic is reporting the truth. The distinction is critical. One could certainly argue that anyone who publishes the Pentagon Papers lacks integrity since they potentially placed the nation's security at risk. Similarly, you argue Gizmodo lacks integrity because they broke the law and perhaps acted unethically. Nevertheless they reported the truth and that is what Apple is punishing them for. If Gizmodo had just made up the entire story they would be at WWDC just like all the other tech rags out there.
Common sense tells you that if journalists only publish stories that please the companies they are writing about, many important stories will remain hidden in the dark.
That reminds me of an old joke:
A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country and bought a donkey from an old farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.
The next day the farmer drove up and said: "Sorry son, but I have some bad news. The donkey died."
Kenny replied, "Well then, just give me my money back."
The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."
Kenny said, "OK, then just unload the donkey."
The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?"
Kenny: "I'm going to raffle him off."
Farmer: "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"
Kenny: "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he is dead."
A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, "What happened with that dead donkey?"
Kenny: "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at $2 a piece and made a profit of $998.00."
Farmer: "Didn't anyone complain?"
Kenny: "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his $2 back."
Kenny grew up and eventually became the chairman of Enron
Let's say I run a car dealership in Humphrey Arkansas. I run ads telling people to come to Humphrey for quality cars at fair prices. My dealership has a sign with the same motto. Everyone in the surrounding area knows Humphrey is the place to go for a car. One day another dealership opens up across the street. They put up a bigger sign that reads "Quality Cars at LOW Prices". People go to my competitor instead of me. This directly translates into fewer dollars in my bank account. So you can quibble over the word "theft", but the comptroller who needs to issue the paychecks and the people who have to write their mortgage checks feel the same thing.
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly. Copyright infringement is competition. It is illegal competition; if copyright law were balanced it would even be unethical competition, but it is not theft.
You are not a lawyer (and neither am I). Granting patents is one of congress's 18 enumerated powers. Congress can grant patents that have nothing to do with commerce. In fact, patent law spells out four exclusive rights the patent holder has. A patent holder can stop other people from:
the product or process that is described in the patent claims. There does not need to be any commercial activity involved.
You are thinking of a warrant which requires a signature from a judge. It is quite common for lawyers as "officers of the court" to have the power to issue subpeonas on their own. It is also common for prosecutors and Attorneys General especially, to have such power. I'm not familiar with the situation in Pennsylvania but if a court is involved it is probably just a clerical matter that a clerk rubber-stamps.
I assume the WW I cross issue you refer to is this. The Supreme Court ruled the cross can stay up. That seems to be the opposite of what you have been saying.
Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, I personally do not agree with it. How would you feel about a Muslim symbol being posted there instead? It is on public property, maintained at public expense. Just like the other cases you cite the issue is not whether or not someone can exercise their right to religion. The issue is whether or not the government can endorse a religion. The answer to that is spelled out in the constitution:
You will note there are two clauses. The first one applies to the government getting involved in religion. The second one involves the government interfering with religion. Most of the cases you refer to involve people deliberately trying to put these two issues in conflict with each other. Obviously when these two issues conflict one of them is going to lose. The other cases you cite clearly involve a violation of the establishment clause. Because it would be so easy for a government employee to violate the establishment clause by claiming they're just exercising their religion the court has been pretty strict about enforcing it.
Can you find any cases where someone was barred from exercising their religious rights without public funds and without representing the government? No you can't! All the cases the 'persecuted' Christians have complained about for the past few decades involve a violation of the establishment clause. They're complaining because they can't get the government to endorse their religion and they get shot down every time they try to find a loophole in the constitution (the WW I memorial you cited being an exception).
Undoubtedly one of the most controversial cases involved some students selected by the school administration to speak on behalf of their class. The students wanted to say a prayer during their public school graduation ceremony. You could debate this all day long but the fact remains the court looked at the evidence for that specific case and concluded the prayer would violate the establishment clause.
Your right to free exercise of religion has not been infringed. So long as you are not representing the government or exercising your religion with government funds, you are free to carry on.
With that said, this discussion is about citizens' right to speak in public. There is no issue regarding religion. The establishment clause does not apply. The controversies surrounding religion are irrelevant. This is a plain simple free-speech issue without any other constitutional issues conflicting with it.
Does that still hold true a year after the city regained control of the network?
Why would he run? He had not been arrested or even charged with a crime. He did not think he had committed a crime. Even after a trial there are plenty of people here who question if he had committed a crime. There was even a lone holdout juror who refused to convict (and was subsequently removed from the jury). In fact he was still employed at the time, albeit on administrative leave. Besides that he owned a house that he would have had to give up if he fled.
The city did not have any written policies to address this situation. There were no rules to nit-pick. Childs was acting based on industry standards. Giving out passwords, even to your boss, is considered a very bad practice in many places. It would have been far more appropriate for the city to write up and distribute some policies before pressing this issue.
Another poster cited the law. Reading the law I think the spirit of the law was to address things like denial of service attacks. Even the juror who responded to that post admits the law was not written to address a situation like this. Quite to the contrary it was the city that was nit-picking and arguing that the law was technically broken.
I doubt anyone gave him the password. He had worked there since 1998. According to news stories and the juror, Childs build the entire network. He was in charge of it. Childs reported to someone who let him do whatever he wanted. It wasn't until someone new came along that people began to question how Childs ran things.