Well, I believe (I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure) that there are laws against the police investigating you if they have no cause to believe you have committed a crime. So, the police would not be able to track you just because you went to an abortion clinic. That doesn't have anything to do with GPS, though. They wouldn't be allowed to put you under traditional surveillance either.
The GPS system is (legally) just like following you. The cops don't need a warrant to do it, but they do need to suspect you of something. Should it be that way? No, probably not. I personally agree that the cops should have to have a warrant before they can plant a GPS on your car. It's an issue for the legislatures, though, not the courts.
Take the tinfoil hats off and take a few deep breaths.
The fact of the matter is that this is probably legal. The Constitution doesn't provide a "right to privacy" or a "right to not be followed". All the Constitution provides is protection from unreasonable search and seizure. If the cops follow you, they aren't searching you, therefore they don't need a warrant. If they use a GPS to follow you, they still don't need a warrant. As for placing the tracking device, as far as I know there is no law against sticking something to someone else's car without their knowledge, as long as you don't do any damage.
Now, there are good arguments for making this sort of tracking illegal, but at the moment it is not. The courts don't (or at least shouldn't) get to make up their own laws based on how they think things should be. They're only there to interpret the law as it stands. If the law says it's illegal, then they should throw out evidence obtained that way. If the law doesn't say it's illegal, then that evidence should be allowed. If you don't think that's the way the law should be, lobby Congress to get it changed (or lobby your state legislature, as that's probably an easier place to start).
Because programmers are, as a rule, an incredibly lazy lot (I should know, I am a programmer). No programmer worth his salt isn't familiar with buffer overruns, but dealing with them can be extremely tedious work, and (being human) programmers will often skip over them--either because they miss a spot where they should check, because they figure they'll come back later and fix it (which never happens), or because they don't think the data will ever be malformed in that particular instance so they just don't worry about it.
That's not "informative". It's wrong. Using your link, there are only two places in the U.S. where a first offense for possession of small amounts of marijuana is potentially a felony. In Puerto Rico, it's always a felony, and in Arizona it's either a felony or misdemeanor (not idea how that determination is made). In many places it doesn't even matter if it's a first offense, and in some the amount doesn't even matter.
It seems that there is always some uninformed person who posts comments to stories like this who doesn't understand the definition of "alcoholic".
Alcoholism is an addiction to alcohol. One or two DUI arrests are not necessarily an indication of alcoholism, especially in the '60s and '70s, when driving after a few drinks was a much more accepted practice. I've not seen any evidence that either Bush or Cheney is in fact an alcoholic (note: you can't have been an alcoholic; once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic--there is no cure). It is true that Bush gave up drinking alcohol, but the circumstances under which he did it actually point to him not being an alcoholic. A true alcoholic would be unlikely to be able to simply stop using alcohol after a particularly bad hangover and a lecture from his wife. For most, recovery from alcoholism is a life-long struggle.
Someone could go to jail for life without parole for:
1) Getting into a fight in the schoolyard when they're 16...
2) Getting caught with the microscopic resin of cannibus on a pipe that they found on the ground..
3) Listening to music on an iPod or Walkman...
1) Unless the crime is especially heinous and results in trial as an adult (e.g. premeditated murder), the schoolyard fight would be expunged at age 21.
2) In most places, a first offense for possession of small amounts of marijuana is a misdemeanor.
3) I don't see anyone suggesting that possession of copyrighted works be criminalized. Hell, it's not even an actionable civil issue in the U.S. The only thing that's going to possibly get you in trouble is distribution.
Of course, it goes without saying that no rich, white, republican kid will ever be bothered by this type of insanity that passes for justice in the USA. Only blacks, latinos, and middle-class whites will be subjected to the guiding light of the American justice system.
Well, since nobody--black, white, rich, or poor--will be subjected to the insane suggestion you make above, there's not really anything more I can add to this.
It also goes without saying that the legislators who are pushing for these insane laws to be passed are being paid thousands of dollars in bribes ('campaign contributions') from the private prison corporations who will be making $30,000 a year for each new 'dangerous criminal' serving life-in-prison-without-parole in a corporate prison.
Well, since most states don't even have privately owned prisons, I somehow doubt Congress is cooking up laws aimed solely at providing more inmates to the private prison system.
If you are a citizen of the European Community or some other stable country with a basic tradition of justice, don't come to the USA. Don't even visit here. It's just too dangerous. The republicans have just gone fucking nuts. Visit Canada (in the summer) or Mexico (in the winter). Avoid the USA. Seriously.
You obviously know nothing about how things really work in the U.S. If you seriously think Mexico is a safer place to travel than the U.S., you're the one who's gone "fucking nuts".
Commercial software has been around for 40-50 years. OSS has been around for about half of that. I'd say there's a long enough history to extrapolate long-term trends, at least as much as there is for anything else in the software industry.
Your post came across to me as one of the many "don't buy anything if you can make it yourself, corporations are evil, fight the man" posts that proliferate on Slashdot. If I misinterpreted, I apologize. I agree that too many people are intellectually lazy and one should not allow themselves to become helplessly reliant on others (imo, regardless whether those others are corporations, individuals, religious institutions, or governments).
As a side-note: I've traveled the world fairly extensively, and intellectual laziness is far from a uniquely American problem, nor are all Americans intellectually lazy. I've not seen any studies that examined the issue, but anecdotally, I'd say it's probably about even internationally. If it is disproportional towards Americans, I'd place most of the blame on the abysmal public education in many parts of the U.S. For the most part, though, I think Americans are just culturally more brash, and therefore more likely to throw their ignorances out there for everyone to see.
Re:Could be good... could be bad
on
The Media in 2014
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And here I thought I use money to purchase goods and services from others so that I didn't have to waste time making them myself, and could instead spend my time pursuing things that actually interested me. I guess I was actually doing it to enrich my corporate masters. I'm now more informed. Thank you eno2001.
a large-scale switch to civil nuclear power. This has the benefit of being proven technology. We are aware of the problems, and current public unpopularity of this route, but we consider the dangers posed by global warming to be orders of magnitude greater than those likely to be caused by the controlled use of nuclear power. This energy source, additionally, could lie at the heart of future hydrogen-based transport systems.
Now, there's a solution I can get behind (no, I'm not joking). Nuclear energy, pursued with a strong eye towards safety and security, would be a step forward in terms of our efficiency and use of energy.
Bankrupting the industrialized nations of the world for an unproven solution isn't.
Show me some hard numbers that show the Kyoto treaty will do anything significant, other than redistribute wealth around the world and then we'll talk.
So what, exactly, is your point? Progress eliminates the need for some skill sets, while creating others. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it always will be. The only way to guarantee that we'll always need the same skills is to stop all progress. If the old way of doing it is better, then there will always be a need for the old skills, even if they are drastically reduced in number. You should always be looking forward to keeping current with the future, though. Take your spare time to learn CAD programs. They're all somewhat similar, so pick a few of the most common and get a passing skill in all of them (enough to be able to put them on your resume). Couple that with your old-school drafting skills and experience, and you're going to look a lot better to (many, but not all) employers than the hotshot just out of school. Any good firm worth their salt is going to want to have a few old-schoolers around to teach the young'uns.
Me, I practice what I preach. I skilled in a wide variety of programming languages, both new and old, and make a point of getting at least a little skill in any that look like up and comers. I'm also a published writer, and if the software falls through I can probably make a living as a tech-writer...and if all else falls through, I flip a mean burger.
Of course, I meant my comment more as a joke than anything else. You see, all of the former slave owners in the U.S. are dead now. So are all of the former slaves.
We'll never know for sure, but that's likely not true. Had Perot not been in the mix, the '92 election was more likely to go to G. H. W. Bush than to Clinton. Whether Clinton would have come back in '96 and won after losing the first time is impossible to say.
The problem with software patents is the frequency with which they seem to be used by people who have done nothing but file a patent to sue those who have put in the hard work of actually bringing a product to market.
Quite frankly these issues don't mean anything to the majority of the people. You listen to the majority in a democracy. Shocking, I know; but that's the way it does, and should, work.
What about when civil rights don't mean anything to the majority of the people? Or the environment? Or gay marriage?
One of the great strengths of the American democracy is that it tends to give favor towards minorities. There are a lot of reasons for that, of course, not just the electoral college, but to think that majority rules is always desirable is (IMHO) a huge mistake.
Add to that the increase in cultural diversity that immigrants bring ( I believe something the Yanks are sorely missing, by the way )
Excuse me?!? The U.S. is the most culturally/racially diverse nation in the world, and I defy you to show differently. Not only are we the most culturally diverse, but we're also one of the most culturally integrated, despite what you may hear. Yeah, we've still got a long way to go, but we're also a lot farther along than most countries out there.
That said, I agree with you that more immigration is a good thing.
If you'd been paying attention to the news lately, you'd have noticed that non-nerds have started picking up on FireFox. It's not an overwhelming number yet, but it is growing. You can be sure that MS is sweating this one a little bit.
The law of supply and demand applies to bank loans, the same as everything else. If there is a huge supply of loans and little demand, the interest rate will go down as banks compete with each other to get the borrowers, and as the interest rate goes down, more borrowers will enter the market until a median is reached.
Also, I believe most banks actually loan out more money than they take in, by borrowing from the Federal Reserve Bank at low rates and then loaning out at slightly higher rates.
Banks can also loan out money in excess of their deposits by selling their loans once they have made the loan (which is done in almost every case with mortgages, which are sold to someone like Fannie-Mae). By doing that, banks are able to make more loans without putting themselves at as much personal risk (Fannie-Mae can withstand a lot more defaulted loans than your small-town local bank).
In practice, the percentage of the economy that exists in hard currency is actually very low (I'm thinking something like 20%).
Banks are legally required to keep a fairly small percentage of their current deposit total on hand. The rest gets loaned out via various means. Thats HOW THEY MAKE MONEY. Do you really think that banks are going to sit on large sums of money that they could instead be using to make a larger profit? I'd be a little surprised if Chase Manhattan had $5 billion dollars on hand at any given point in time, let alone a mid to small sized bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I believe (I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure) that there are laws against the police investigating you if they have no cause to believe you have committed a crime. So, the police would not be able to track you just because you went to an abortion clinic. That doesn't have anything to do with GPS, though. They wouldn't be allowed to put you under traditional surveillance either.
The GPS system is (legally) just like following you. The cops don't need a warrant to do it, but they do need to suspect you of something. Should it be that way? No, probably not. I personally agree that the cops should have to have a warrant before they can plant a GPS on your car. It's an issue for the legislatures, though, not the courts.
Well, there's that, too. :-)
Take the tinfoil hats off and take a few deep breaths.
The fact of the matter is that this is probably legal. The Constitution doesn't provide a "right to privacy" or a "right to not be followed". All the Constitution provides is protection from unreasonable search and seizure. If the cops follow you, they aren't searching you, therefore they don't need a warrant. If they use a GPS to follow you, they still don't need a warrant. As for placing the tracking device, as far as I know there is no law against sticking something to someone else's car without their knowledge, as long as you don't do any damage.
Now, there are good arguments for making this sort of tracking illegal, but at the moment it is not. The courts don't (or at least shouldn't) get to make up their own laws based on how they think things should be. They're only there to interpret the law as it stands. If the law says it's illegal, then they should throw out evidence obtained that way. If the law doesn't say it's illegal, then that evidence should be allowed. If you don't think that's the way the law should be, lobby Congress to get it changed (or lobby your state legislature, as that's probably an easier place to start).
Because programmers are, as a rule, an incredibly lazy lot (I should know, I am a programmer). No programmer worth his salt isn't familiar with buffer overruns, but dealing with them can be extremely tedious work, and (being human) programmers will often skip over them--either because they miss a spot where they should check, because they figure they'll come back later and fix it (which never happens), or because they don't think the data will ever be malformed in that particular instance so they just don't worry about it.
That's not "informative". It's wrong. Using your link, there are only two places in the U.S. where a first offense for possession of small amounts of marijuana is potentially a felony. In Puerto Rico, it's always a felony, and in Arizona it's either a felony or misdemeanor (not idea how that determination is made). In many places it doesn't even matter if it's a first offense, and in some the amount doesn't even matter.
It seems that there is always some uninformed person who posts comments to stories like this who doesn't understand the definition of "alcoholic".
Alcoholism is an addiction to alcohol. One or two DUI arrests are not necessarily an indication of alcoholism, especially in the '60s and '70s, when driving after a few drinks was a much more accepted practice. I've not seen any evidence that either Bush or Cheney is in fact an alcoholic (note: you can't have been an alcoholic; once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic--there is no cure). It is true that Bush gave up drinking alcohol, but the circumstances under which he did it actually point to him not being an alcoholic. A true alcoholic would be unlikely to be able to simply stop using alcohol after a particularly bad hangover and a lecture from his wife. For most, recovery from alcoholism is a life-long struggle.
1) Unless the crime is especially heinous and results in trial as an adult (e.g. premeditated murder), the schoolyard fight would be expunged at age 21.
2) In most places, a first offense for possession of small amounts of marijuana is a misdemeanor.
3) I don't see anyone suggesting that possession of copyrighted works be criminalized. Hell, it's not even an actionable civil issue in the U.S. The only thing that's going to possibly get you in trouble is distribution.
Well, since nobody--black, white, rich, or poor--will be subjected to the insane suggestion you make above, there's not really anything more I can add to this.
Well, since most states don't even have privately owned prisons, I somehow doubt Congress is cooking up laws aimed solely at providing more inmates to the private prison system.
You obviously know nothing about how things really work in the U.S. If you seriously think Mexico is a safer place to travel than the U.S., you're the one who's gone "fucking nuts".
Commercial software has been around for 40-50 years. OSS has been around for about half of that. I'd say there's a long enough history to extrapolate long-term trends, at least as much as there is for anything else in the software industry.
Your post came across to me as one of the many "don't buy anything if you can make it yourself, corporations are evil, fight the man" posts that proliferate on Slashdot. If I misinterpreted, I apologize. I agree that too many people are intellectually lazy and one should not allow themselves to become helplessly reliant on others (imo, regardless whether those others are corporations, individuals, religious institutions, or governments).
As a side-note: I've traveled the world fairly extensively, and intellectual laziness is far from a uniquely American problem, nor are all Americans intellectually lazy. I've not seen any studies that examined the issue, but anecdotally, I'd say it's probably about even internationally. If it is disproportional towards Americans, I'd place most of the blame on the abysmal public education in many parts of the U.S. For the most part, though, I think Americans are just culturally more brash, and therefore more likely to throw their ignorances out there for everyone to see.
And here I thought I use money to purchase goods and services from others so that I didn't have to waste time making them myself, and could instead spend my time pursuing things that actually interested me. I guess I was actually doing it to enrich my corporate masters. I'm now more informed. Thank you eno2001.
Now, there's a solution I can get behind (no, I'm not joking). Nuclear energy, pursued with a strong eye towards safety and security, would be a step forward in terms of our efficiency and use of energy.
Bankrupting the industrialized nations of the world for an unproven solution isn't.
Show me some hard numbers that show the Kyoto treaty will do anything significant, other than redistribute wealth around the world and then we'll talk.
No he wouldn't have. Churchill was much too eloquent to recycle old Churchill quotes.
So what, exactly, is your point? Progress eliminates the need for some skill sets, while creating others. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it always will be. The only way to guarantee that we'll always need the same skills is to stop all progress. If the old way of doing it is better, then there will always be a need for the old skills, even if they are drastically reduced in number. You should always be looking forward to keeping current with the future, though. Take your spare time to learn CAD programs. They're all somewhat similar, so pick a few of the most common and get a passing skill in all of them (enough to be able to put them on your resume). Couple that with your old-school drafting skills and experience, and you're going to look a lot better to (many, but not all) employers than the hotshot just out of school. Any good firm worth their salt is going to want to have a few old-schoolers around to teach the young'uns.
Me, I practice what I preach. I skilled in a wide variety of programming languages, both new and old, and make a point of getting at least a little skill in any that look like up and comers. I'm also a published writer, and if the software falls through I can probably make a living as a tech-writer...and if all else falls through, I flip a mean burger.
Yeah.
Of course, I meant my comment more as a joke than anything else. You see, all of the former slave owners in the U.S. are dead now. So are all of the former slaves.
Andrew Jackson is dead, too.
I've long held that every former slave owner should take half of their net worth and split it up among all of their former slaves.
Seems like a similar tack would make sense for the Indians. Andrew Jackson should personally apologize to every single Indian run off of their land.
We'll never know for sure, but that's likely not true. Had Perot not been in the mix, the '92 election was more likely to go to G. H. W. Bush than to Clinton. Whether Clinton would have come back in '96 and won after losing the first time is impossible to say.
The problem with software patents is the frequency with which they seem to be used by people who have done nothing but file a patent to sue those who have put in the hard work of actually bringing a product to market.
What about when civil rights don't mean anything to the majority of the people? Or the environment? Or gay marriage?
One of the great strengths of the American democracy is that it tends to give favor towards minorities. There are a lot of reasons for that, of course, not just the electoral college, but to think that majority rules is always desirable is (IMHO) a huge mistake.
Excuse me?!? The U.S. is the most culturally/racially diverse nation in the world, and I defy you to show differently. Not only are we the most culturally diverse, but we're also one of the most culturally integrated, despite what you may hear. Yeah, we've still got a long way to go, but we're also a lot farther along than most countries out there.
That said, I agree with you that more immigration is a good thing.
Given the sad state of our inner city schools, I'm not sure that typo qualifies as incorrect.
Well, the other day, I did see a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac ;-)
If you'd been paying attention to the news lately, you'd have noticed that non-nerds have started picking up on FireFox. It's not an overwhelming number yet, but it is growing. You can be sure that MS is sweating this one a little bit.
The law of supply and demand applies to bank loans, the same as everything else. If there is a huge supply of loans and little demand, the interest rate will go down as banks compete with each other to get the borrowers, and as the interest rate goes down, more borrowers will enter the market until a median is reached.
Also, I believe most banks actually loan out more money than they take in, by borrowing from the Federal Reserve Bank at low rates and then loaning out at slightly higher rates.
Banks can also loan out money in excess of their deposits by selling their loans once they have made the loan (which is done in almost every case with mortgages, which are sold to someone like Fannie-Mae). By doing that, banks are able to make more loans without putting themselves at as much personal risk (Fannie-Mae can withstand a lot more defaulted loans than your small-town local bank).
In practice, the percentage of the economy that exists in hard currency is actually very low (I'm thinking something like 20%).
Wrong.
Banks are legally required to keep a fairly small percentage of their current deposit total on hand. The rest gets loaned out via various means. Thats HOW THEY MAKE MONEY. Do you really think that banks are going to sit on large sums of money that they could instead be using to make a larger profit? I'd be a little surprised if Chase Manhattan had $5 billion dollars on hand at any given point in time, let alone a mid to small sized bank.