China can certainly ask, but the request would be complete bullshit and China probably knows it.
But technically there would be nothing stopping a chinese court from issuing a chinese arrest warrant for an american citizen for posting something on the internet that would be illegal under chinese law.
And it would be illegal under chinese law simply because the chinese court fucking said so. The warrant would be just as valid at least under chinese law as the warrant the US apparently has for Assange.
Whether anyone will pay attention to the chinese arrest warrant has nothing to do with the validity of chinese law. It has everything to do with international politics, which just boils down to what the people with the most clout will want to happen.
The only reason that the US warrant holds any validity that such a hypothetical chinese warrant would lack is simply because the US is an 800 pound gorilla and in a position to hurt anyone that gets in its way.
Not only because they apparently have a valid arrest warrant, but also because they're a political superpower and might makes right.
Whether the court that issued the arrest warrant in the first place had competence to begin with is another story and that's a can of worms of its own, but then again that's part of the package when it comes to international sovereignty.
Contempt may be "basic" but in most courts it's a serious offense on its own that is prosecuted quite separately from the charge in the underlying case.
Escaping from prison or jumping bail are likewise separate offenses from the crime you were respectively convicted or indicted for.
They are punished separately from the original crime and you can still be convicted of them even if you're found innocent of the first charge.
In the middle ages, if you skip court on a felony charge you were automatically convicted of the felony itself and sentenced to outlawry for it.
If you skipped court on a misdemeanor though they just nailed you for a separate charge of contempt of court which was a felony in itself and outlawed you anyway.
No. The tax code is too fucking complicated and besides being a train for pork that benefits special interests and corporate campaign donors it's only productive use is as job security for accountants and tax software coders.
There's nothing wrong with support programs, but those should be done directly and ala carte as needed, not shoehorned into a tax code that should be simple.
The guy should have been convicted, but the logic used is defective.
The phone didn't distract him.
However, what he SHOULD have gotten nailed for was for having his hearing partially obstructed by means of a foreign object inserted into his ear that blocked some of the sound from getting in. Things like car horns, sirens, and that sort of thing from outside the car.
I think it's just an opportunity for them to give the taxpayer room to make mistakes so that they can be penalized later.
Though that said, there's something to be said for giving taxpayers a chance to fib about their finances if it can weed people out of the market when they get caught
Children are themselves citizens and would be entitled to support from the government anyway via foster care or an orphanage if their parents were too broke to take care of them.
That said however I would opine that yes, supporting them shouldn't be subsidized directly through the tax code. However, using some sort of needs based welfare program to help the children out, possibly using taxes saved from revoking the dependency deductions, would be better.
Children don't deserve to suffer just because they have poor parents.
But yeah, mortgage interest deductions are a blatant subsidy and need to go.
That doesn't help when the debt slaves still wind up saturating the professional job market and crowding out competitors less eager to saddle themselves with debt to get the degree they need to remain in the market.
Those who get the jobs lose because of debt. Those who don't get the jobs lose because of opportunity costs of not getting the job. The colleges win because the surplus demand allows them to jack up tuition. And the backers of the loans probably win because of the interest they're collecting, especially given the nondischargeability in event of default.
Student loans need to go, period. They inflate supply for professional labor and demand for education. Student grants are a lesser evil but they may need to go as well. At least unlike debt they don't create slaves.
Google is being blatantly honest that they're censoring for China.
If it was anyone else they probably would have done it quietly and we'd never have found out about it.
In this case I see that Google is doing the censorship under protest because otherwise the powers that be in Beijing wouldn't let Google operate at all, so they're doing it while giving the authorities the biggest middle finger they can without putting themselves in jeopardy.
And to be quite blunt I would rather have Google give openly censored results than have someone else filling the void who would not only hide that they're censoring, but likely trace anyone even searching for it and hand the results over to the authorities for persecution.
A big part of the problem with robocalls and spam calls is that people can use fake IDs to disguise themselves.
If there was a way to hold them accountable this would stop overnight. But as long as people can spoof caller IDs to get away with it, it will continue.
What needs to happen is one set of rules to put the burden on the spammers somehow, or failing that, the phone companies that let it happen on their watch.
And another set of rules to personally penalize, at a criminal level, anyone who uses fraudulent identification to cheat their way out of being caught by the first set of rules.
It's very easy to stop robocalls with a combination of two things:
1. Hold people accountable for the calls they make.
It would be very easy for phone companies to disincentivize spam calls by charging them for it. The receiving phone company should be allowed to bill the sending phone company for spam calls. Or if necessary, bump it up the food chain and have a government utility middleman do the collection on behalf of the receiver. And whoever fails to do their job on the way down the food chain of watching the proverbial hen house should get stuck eating it until they collect from the next guy along the way. Make people accountable, or failing that anyone who protects them.
2. Criminalize caller ID spoofing at a federal level.
This makes sure the first part works and punishes people who put on disguises to get around it.
If you try to duck out of the first method of getting stuck with the burden of spamming, then you're cheating the accountabiliity process and deserve penalties. Making it a crime will also pierce any corporate veils and make sure that the human actors responsible for it are the ones that get nailed for it. It will also allow police and the like to investigate it as a crime instead of as a mere civil matter.
----
Make sure people who try to duck out on their rightful blame get burned, and you'll have a much easier time wrangling the finances to put the burden where it belongs.
Letting others pay for higher priority? Yes, that's ok.
Making someone slower on purpose? No, that's not ok. Whether it's by the ISP's own choice or because someone bribed them to screw over a competitor.
Letting prioritization be bought on equal terms by everyone? That's ok.
Giving sweetheart deals to partners and jacking up prioritization prices for competitors or someone else the ISP doesn't like? No, tha'ts not ok.
Basically, as long as the ISP doesn't cheat, it should be allowed to offer paid prioritization. Or better yet, allow somone to trade bandwidth for latency. Like, say, you have a quota of X megabytes a month of interactive traffic, beyond which you either have to pay for more, or you forfeit the privilege of prioritization.
There's nothing wrong with people hogging the pipes as long as they pay for the privilege. And if two different people want to hog the same pipe, then let the auction begin and the bandwidth go to the highest bidder.
The line is crossed when the ISP is sabotaging people who don't pay, or throttling in a discriminatory manner.
Aside, I would very much like if the low level TOS bits were given more exposure in higher APIs. Those bits exist for a reason and good network citizens are supposed to be catering to those bits.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you play Cow Clicker with them?
Being deaf is a handicap.
Manually obstructing your hearing by insertion of a foreign object (like earphones for example) is not.
A disability isn't the same thing as willful sabotage.
China can certainly ask, but the request would be complete bullshit and China probably knows it.
But technically there would be nothing stopping a chinese court from issuing a chinese arrest warrant for an american citizen for posting something on the internet that would be illegal under chinese law.
And it would be illegal under chinese law simply because the chinese court fucking said so. The warrant would be just as valid at least under chinese law as the warrant the US apparently has for Assange.
Whether anyone will pay attention to the chinese arrest warrant has nothing to do with the validity of chinese law. It has everything to do with international politics, which just boils down to what the people with the most clout will want to happen.
The only reason that the US warrant holds any validity that such a hypothetical chinese warrant would lack is simply because the US is an 800 pound gorilla and in a position to hurt anyone that gets in its way.
The US has a claim if they say they do.
Not only because they apparently have a valid arrest warrant, but also because they're a political superpower and might makes right.
Whether the court that issued the arrest warrant in the first place had competence to begin with is another story and that's a can of worms of its own, but then again that's part of the package when it comes to international sovereignty.
Contempt may be "basic" but in most courts it's a serious offense on its own that is prosecuted quite separately from the charge in the underlying case.
Escaping from prison or jumping bail are likewise separate offenses from the crime you were respectively convicted or indicted for.
They are punished separately from the original crime and you can still be convicted of them even if you're found innocent of the first charge.
Rather like outlawry.
In the middle ages, if you skip court on a felony charge you were automatically convicted of the felony itself and sentenced to outlawry for it.
If you skipped court on a misdemeanor though they just nailed you for a separate charge of contempt of court which was a felony in itself and outlawed you anyway.
Unfortunately, the real law is
"If you piss off a high powered politician, you are guilty"
No. The tax code is too fucking complicated and besides being a train for pork that benefits special interests and corporate campaign donors it's only productive use is as job security for accountants and tax software coders.
There's nothing wrong with support programs, but those should be done directly and ala carte as needed, not shoehorned into a tax code that should be simple.
The guy should have been convicted, but the logic used is defective.
The phone didn't distract him.
However, what he SHOULD have gotten nailed for was for having his hearing partially obstructed by means of a foreign object inserted into his ear that blocked some of the sound from getting in. Things like car horns, sirens, and that sort of thing from outside the car.
I think it's just an opportunity for them to give the taxpayer room to make mistakes so that they can be penalized later.
Though that said, there's something to be said for giving taxpayers a chance to fib about their finances if it can weed people out of the market when they get caught
The USA cannot see beyond the campaign contributions from the people they're putting loopholes in the tax code for.
I rebut.
Children are themselves citizens and would be entitled to support from the government anyway via foster care or an orphanage if their parents were too broke to take care of them.
That said however I would opine that yes, supporting them shouldn't be subsidized directly through the tax code. However, using some sort of needs based welfare program to help the children out, possibly using taxes saved from revoking the dependency deductions, would be better.
Children don't deserve to suffer just because they have poor parents.
But yeah, mortgage interest deductions are a blatant subsidy and need to go.
It would be better if we could fire^H^H^H^Hrecall our congress critters
Because the professional labor market is saturated with an excess of degrees that only serve to raise the bar.
That doesn't help when the debt slaves still wind up saturating the professional job market and crowding out competitors less eager to saddle themselves with debt to get the degree they need to remain in the market.
Those who get the jobs lose because of debt.
Those who don't get the jobs lose because of opportunity costs of not getting the job.
The colleges win because the surplus demand allows them to jack up tuition.
And the backers of the loans probably win because of the interest they're collecting, especially given the nondischargeability in event of default.
Student loans need to go, period. They inflate supply for professional labor and demand for education.
Student grants are a lesser evil but they may need to go as well. At least unlike debt they don't create slaves.
I hope it's an april fools prank
Google is being blatantly honest that they're censoring for China.
If it was anyone else they probably would have done it quietly and we'd never have found out about it.
In this case I see that Google is doing the censorship under protest because otherwise the powers that be in Beijing wouldn't let Google operate at all, so they're doing it while giving the authorities the biggest middle finger they can without putting themselves in jeopardy.
And to be quite blunt I would rather have Google give openly censored results than have someone else filling the void who would not only hide that they're censoring, but likely trace anyone even searching for it and hand the results over to the authorities for persecution.
What this means is that they're in on it.
For some reason the telecoms have an incentive to tolerate it, which means they're on the take.
The regulators have been taken hostage by lobbyists who successfully hijack state law to ban local competition.
One case where the feds *should* invoke interstate commerce to protect competition.
A big part of the problem with robocalls and spam calls is that people can use fake IDs to disguise themselves.
If there was a way to hold them accountable this would stop overnight. But as long as people can spoof caller IDs to get away with it, it will continue.
What needs to happen is one set of rules to put the burden on the spammers somehow, or failing that, the phone companies that let it happen on their watch.
And another set of rules to personally penalize, at a criminal level, anyone who uses fraudulent identification to cheat their way out of being caught by the first set of rules.
It's very easy to stop robocalls with a combination of two things:
1. Hold people accountable for the calls they make.
It would be very easy for phone companies to disincentivize spam calls by charging them for it. The receiving phone company should be allowed to bill the sending phone company for spam calls. Or if necessary, bump it up the food chain and have a government utility middleman do the collection on behalf of the receiver. And whoever fails to do their job on the way down the food chain of watching the proverbial hen house should get stuck eating it until they collect from the next guy along the way. Make people accountable, or failing that anyone who protects them.
2. Criminalize caller ID spoofing at a federal level.
This makes sure the first part works and punishes people who put on disguises to get around it.
If you try to duck out of the first method of getting stuck with the burden of spamming, then you're cheating the accountabiliity process and deserve penalties. Making it a crime will also pierce any corporate veils and make sure that the human actors responsible for it are the ones that get nailed for it. It will also allow police and the like to investigate it as a crime instead of as a mere civil matter.
----
Make sure people who try to duck out on their rightful blame get burned, and you'll have a much easier time wrangling the finances to put the burden where it belongs.
The US government AND Huawei AND china have one thing in common:
THEY ALL SUCK!
Letting others pay for higher priority? Yes, that's ok.
Making someone slower on purpose? No, that's not ok. Whether it's by the ISP's own choice or because someone bribed them to screw over a competitor.
Letting prioritization be bought on equal terms by everyone? That's ok.
Giving sweetheart deals to partners and jacking up prioritization prices for competitors or someone else the ISP doesn't like? No, tha'ts not ok.
Basically, as long as the ISP doesn't cheat, it should be allowed to offer paid prioritization. Or better yet, allow somone to trade bandwidth for latency. Like, say, you have a quota of X megabytes a month of interactive traffic, beyond which you either have to pay for more, or you forfeit the privilege of prioritization.
There's nothing wrong with people hogging the pipes as long as they pay for the privilege. And if two different people want to hog the same pipe, then let the auction begin and the bandwidth go to the highest bidder.
The line is crossed when the ISP is sabotaging people who don't pay, or throttling in a discriminatory manner.
Aside, I would very much like if the low level TOS bits were given more exposure in higher APIs. Those bits exist for a reason and good network citizens are supposed to be catering to those bits.
Not quite.
Paid prioritization is supposed to screw everyone else over equally.
Throttling by contrast is a direct and specifically targeted act of sabotage.
It is one sided on purpose, because it was written by lobbyists for Big Media.