D'oh! Didn't think about reloading. I've never done it, though it would probably save me some $$ in the long run. And are those silencers available to the general public or are they law enforcement only?
Federally, they're very tightly restricted under the 1934 National Firearms Act. However, it is theoretically possible for private citizens to own them.
State laws may be more restrictive. I'm willing to bet that the state/local laws in DC and Maryland are a LOT more restrictive.
Someone with evil intent can probably make one easily enough. Most of us already have one on our cars: What do you think mufflers do?
From discussions I'm seeing about these shootings, it may very well be a cop or someone in the armed forces. The ballistics of the gun/ammo being used just don't fit right since people are saying they don't hear the shots, or don't hear very loud shots, so people are theorizing that there's special subsonic rounds being used to minimize noise - not easy to find with these types of bullets, from what I gather..
Easy enough to make, though. It's not uncommon for hunters or competitive shooters to load their own ammunition at home. To make a slower bullet, just use less powder. (Okay, it's a tiny bit more complex than that, but you see the general idea.)
Also, it's not hard to mistake the sound of a gunshot for something else, and especially not in an urban area. A month or so ago, I took a complaint of a guy whose truck had been shot. With some sort of.30-caliber solid-construction bullet, original weight above 200 grains, and probably faster than 2700 feet per second from the muzzle based upon the deformation. If you don't know what that means, that's a damn loud round. I try and shoot an elk with a round like that every year, and thank god for Peltor earmuffs.
Anyway, almost nobody in the neighborhood remembers a gunshot. However, everybody remembers a car backfiring fairly loudly. Coincidence? Maybe, but I don't believe in them.
So, you see where I'm going with this? It's easy to mistake the sound of a gunshot for something else if you don't know much about them. I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess that people in an area where private firearm ownership is almost nonexistant (like much of the DC area) may not know what they did or didn't hear.
Speed cameras are a great idea, so long as they are used correctly. Having said that, I also think that radar detectors should be perfectly legal as well.
Speed cameras are a crappy idea, sayeth this traffic cop. Most traffic enforcement is deterrence and education. People are out-and-out nervous in the presence of police. When I pull someone over, I've yanked him out of his comfort zone. And folks don't like that and therefore won't do things that make it happen. In other words, we primarily provide negative reinforcement for unacceptable behaviors.
Speed cameras, on the other hand, don't. All they do is cause a penalty assessment notice to be mailed to someone's house. Not nearly the same negative reinforcement.
For those of you who live in a society where police carry guns (I don't BTW), isn't a gun simply a machine that the police use to do their job?
Less often than you might think. I probably draw mine about twice a week-the rough average for the entire US. I've NEVER ended up firing it except in training, in the 16 years I've been a cop. Statistically, fewer than five percent of all US police officers ever do use deadly force in the course of their careers.
Deadly force is an extreme response to an extreme situation. Our department mandates that it shall only be used to protect the officer or another person from an imminent threat of death or great bodily injury-which is basically the only time it's authorized by law in this state. (That circumstance, and to prevent certain of a very short list of violent crimes: sexual assault, arson of an occupied building, armed burglary, and armed robbery, when a reasonable person would deem lesser force as being unlikely to control the threat.)
I think people who travel 140kph in a 100kph area and get a $400 fine because of a speed camera have only themselves to blame.
Unfortunately, we're wimps in Colorado when it comes to traffic fines. 140kph in a 100 translates to about 85 mph in a 65. Eighty-four dollars on a state highway and $120 on any other public road in this city, unless it's a school zone or something.
BUT, surveillance should be used only to prevent crime or to catch criminals. Surveillance data of someone who has not broken any laws should not be used for anything. (all IMHO of course).
What about to determine if a crime had been committed or not? We had one, found a guy laying in a pile all beat to shit and claiming to have been jumped. This guy is one of our frequent fliers, and most of us were unsympathetic, karma being a bitch and so forth.
We snagged a surveillance tape from across the street. It turned out he actually jumped someone else and paid for it. Oops. We realized we were looking for a guy who didn't do anything all that illegal and whose only real mistake was not reporting it. After all, when you kick someone's ass in self-defense you want it on the record so that he doesn't try to tell the cops about how he's the real victim. First person to get his story in writing usually wins in those sorts of disputes.
Colorado Revised Statute 18-3-206, Menacing: Knowingly or recklessly placing a person in fear of death or serious bodily injury. It's a class five felony (two to six years) if done with a real or simulated deadly weapon.
Not to mention what it takes to justify deadly force in self-defense here in Colorado. Painting someone with a laser pointer could potentially be enough. "My son was just trying to be funny" makes you sound like an idiot when your idea of a joke was to put someone else in fear of being murdered and he had to act on the perceived immediate threat.
I actually had someone paint me once. He thought he was being funny. He actually said that at his sentencing. He lived mainly by having the only moment of good judgement in his life, when I covered him and he followed every order very carefully. He then got to live to see three years in the loving arms of CO DOC for felony menacing. I wasn't the only one he painted that day either.
FWIW: Still plenty of actual laser sights out there. Our tactical team uses them, and I may be the only guy on the department who doesn't own at least one.
Re:USSC doesn't give a rat's ass about civil right
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Eldred vs. Ashcroft
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· Score: 1
Remember this is the same USSC that ruled that a police officer can arrest you for **any** offense regardless of what the local/state law stipulates.
Not quite. I assume you mean the Texas Seat Belt case?
The ruling was, if some act is defined as a crime by statute, then a peace officer has the power to make custodial arrests for that act. No surprises. Even when it's a stupid little traffic misdemeanor (like seat belt violations in Texas) it's still criminal.
Besides, how can a police officer arrest someone for an offense when there's no statute defining the act as an offense? There are no common-law crimes anymore in the US and have not been for a VERY long time. When someone gets lodged in the county jail, there's a charge and that charge specifies some statute.
You do know that your fingerprints (and that of everyone else in the United States) are on file in the town in which you were born, right?
Wrong.
Some people are voluntarily fingerprinted. That's pretty rare.
Usually, in the US, people are only printed if they enlist in the armed forces, are booked into jail (or released on summonses for certain offenses-all felonies and Class One misdemeanors here in Colorado), or for the purposes of background checks for certain jobs: police, fire, teaching, and almost any real security clearance.
Here in Colorado, an index finger is LiveScanned when you get a driver's license. I don't think it's included in AFIS, however. I'm not sure but I'm guessing it's mostly just to keep the same person from having two licenses with different names.
It's almost impossible to get a useful print from a small child anyway. Believe me, I've tried. That's why those "Kidnap Kits" are a sad joke.
So, I'll rephrase. Go ask an old cop if they think that the crimes they observe on a day-to-day basis have become more or less violent.
I'm in my mid-30's, so I don't know that I'm old enough to qualify. That being said, not a whole lot has changed in the 14 years I've been doing this crap.
With one exception: Juveniles have become worse and worse. They're not all sweet innocent little darlings. The average juvenile hard case has always been someone with no acculturation, no understanding of right and wrong, and no understanding that society frowns on certain acts and employs cops because of this. However, there are a lot more of them now than there were when I first became a cop during the Bush the Elder administration.
It's changed, but even if you could quantify overall violence as a single scalar quantity, I don't think that's changed a whole lot. Dad sometimes gets loaded and beats the snot out of mom, who stabs dad with a fork, leaving Junior in the loving-but-overloaded hands of XXX County Social Services, and there is nothing new under the sun.
As I understand it, one of the more important pieces of information considered in constitutionality cases like this is the "intent of the signers"---why it is that those guys wrote what they wrote. In this case, copyright- & patent-granting powers were given to the Congress "to promote the progress of science and useful arts".
To a greater or lesser degree. It's a concept called "original intent" and there's actually some controversy about how broadly it should be applied.
The conventional wisdom is that conservatives (US definition) tend to favor a greater weight to original intent than do liberals. Personally, I think it's usually more likely to be advocates of judicial restraint who advocate the greater weight for original intent, while advocates of judicial activism (AKA "legislating from the bench") tend to not like anything that would constrain what they could do. But I digress...
At any rate, that's why legislators often put in a section in new acts which goes "The legislature of the State of Colorado finds..." so that an OI-favoring court will have some guidance. The line in the Constitution about promoting useful arts and sciences is exactly that kind of statement. It helps to understand the original purpose of Congress' power to establish a system of copyrights.
That being said, whether 17 years or 30 years or creator's-life-plus-seventy-years is the best length for promoting useful arts and sciences seems to me to be a question of fact, rather than a question of law. Traditionally, in systems derived from the English Common Law (UK, NZ, AU, and the entire US except for Louisiana state courts), juries decided questions of fact at the trial level and appellate courts were loath to touch questions of fact. If that's the operative question in Eldred v. Ashcroft, then the Supremes already threw me a curve ball by granting cert at all.
It seems to me that Lessig may want to try the Kitchen Sink theory of litigating: Brief everything but the kitchen sink. Then brief the kitchen sink. Retroactive changes to copyright terms could be construed as being ex post facto legislation (strictly forbidden by the Constitution) but for all I know that point has already been litigated and lost.
IANAL either.
Try your local police department. My agency sells off our bikes at auction every time someone gets a wild hair up his ass to get new ones.
Also, the same auctions often include recovered lost/stolen bikes where an owner couldn't be contacted or located, or wasn't interested in claiming it. We do one every year. My current bike, a Trek 930, came from an auction like that in pretty good shape, $75 plus new tires and tubes. It retailed once upon a time at $400 or so, and didn't look too used.
Suggestion: if it's a former patrol bike, and it was made by Smith and Wesson, don't touch it. They make good handcuffs and I like the IdentaKit, but the rest of their product line is (MHO) Slick and Worthless. A few of their branded bikes are actually repainted Giant Iguanas, but most suck.
Re:The changing culture of the public service...
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Politicizing Science
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· Score: 1
It used to be that senior public servants here in Australia would more or less have tenure, and maintain there positions regardless of what party was in office; their long-term expertise in running their particular department or committee was held to be of greater value than their own personal political views. they were, for practical purposes, politically neutral.
That's actually largely true in the US. A US Forest Service firefighter, a Bureau of Reclamation hydrologist, a General Services Administration office manager, a National Park Service ranger, or a US Public Health Service nurse-practitioner, is going to be hired for their competence in their professional area and will probably end up serving for a very long time without their politics becoming an issue.
In some positions, however, a person's value system does become relevant. Cops and prosecutors, for example, need to have a conviction that laws are worth enforcing and society's peace is worth keeping. Similarly, a defense attorney (especially the public defender) needs to be convinced that even the worst should have an advocate in court. Someone who can't make these leaps of faith needs to make other career plans.
Similarly, when an advisory board needs to make decisions on the ethical nature of a given project, their own ethics become an issue. You wouldn't give Lysenko a seat on any such panel, would you? When you want a panel to advise you on the ethical circumstances surrounding scientific questions, you want people who both have some understanding of the scientific issues and probably people with ethical and moral beliefs similar to your own.
Let me give you an example: My next-door neighbor is Catholic, and fairly devout. He's in a relationship with a woman, and needs advice about going to the next level. Who should he ask for advice that will help him: His father-confessor, or our other neighbor, who's a polyamorist Wiccan with a million purple-triangle-and-rainbow stickers on her car? (Forgive the stereotype. This really did happen a few months ago. I swear I'm not making it up.)
He ended up going to the priest for advice. Probably wise: It was the priest who could give my friend advice which would make sense in the context of his value system.
Nah,/. users are above shameless celeb watching, right?
I got a bucket of rotten apples with his name all over them. There was no excuse for allowing Wesley Crusher to exist on my TV screen. That character is why my latest campaign is for curbside execution of all smart and precocious teenage males. They're annoying the holy crap out of semiliterate midwestern jocks like me.
You forgot one thing, Paragraph D.5: George Peppard (Hannibal) ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS lit a cigar and said "I love it when a plan comes together" in every single episode.
Since graduating, I've gotten turned down for close to a hundred interviews and jobs, including IT jobs (my primary focus), retial jobs, secretary positions, police, customer service, you name it, I've been turned down for it. I was NEVER turned down for a job prior to getting my degree.
A degree doesn't translate into a skillset. Frankly, I don't know IT that well. However, to be competitive for secretarial positions it helps to know how to organize and (more importantly) how to type.
And a degree is almost meaningless in law enforcement. We get flooded with applicants who think they'd make good cops because they either made double my salary last year in IT or because they have a criminal justice degree. It's worth a few preference points on the written exam (usually the first stage of a 3-6 month hiring process) but less than veteran's preference.
Can a degree help? Sure, but don't expect it to be THAT valuable. It may mean eligibility to test for sergeant after only five years instead of ten, and a very few departments require a BA/BS, but that's the best it'll get you.
Mostly, what a degree (absent constant changes of majors) tells me is that the applicant is literate and can stick to a project for more than ten minutes without dropping it. Usually, anyway.
I guess that in the U.S. the same amount (~3000) people die every month in car accidents.
Worse. About 50K/year. And people wonder why us traffic cops do our thing. And the closest we get to support is MADD, who complained on me because I stopped a drunk driver, established that he was drunk, wrote him the summons for DUI, revoked his license, and had his brother pick him up instead of booking him into jail. That last step means I'm derelict in my duties and soft on DUI, apparently.
And what would you (or they) say if the same survey was made by a US company? If the company is reputable, that shouldn't change a thing to the results.
Exactly. It should be easy to evaluate the value of a survey. If the raw data and the methodology are available (as they are in published scientific research) then everybody should be able to look at it and either get the same results or be able to call "bullshit" on them.
There's probably a pro-OSS argument in there, but I'm not whoring karma today.
States in the US rather than the 'country' and you'll probably get a more accurate comparison
of scale.
Uhh... hold on, if you want to compair number of provinces then you might have something. Still, not something that is a relevant metric for this comparison.
There's a reason why we don't use the word "province" in the US. Traditionally (up until the reign of King Franklin the First), the states actually have been somewhat-sovereign entities. The Federal government really just had the role that the EU is starting to fill.
Okay, that's a little sweeping. Not too much. For a very long time, though, the several states were mostly just barred from having a foreign policy, making customs and immigration rules, or coining their own money.
Even today, there's a far more pronounced cultural difference between Cali ornia (also known as "hell") and Kansas (also known as "where I was born") than there is between, say, Belgium and France.
I got a.44 magnum, solid steel cast
and in the Blessed name of Elvis, I let it blast.
My TV lay in pieces right at my feet
and they arrested me for disturbing the almighty peace..
Judge, there was fifty-seven channels, and nothing on.
Granted, using firearms on home electronics is sometimes frowned upon. Henry Lightcap shoots a refridgerator and is considered (at best) badly misanthropic. Imagine if he'd shot the Fount of Wisdom in the living room instead!
(Yes, I own a TV. It only gets turned on when someone wants to watch a video.)
Since the posting-to-100-comments time for this article was relatively short, I'm guess most of us won't RTFA, and we'll just rehash the National ID cards in the US debate.
Snip...
You left something out. Invariably, some American and some European will get into a pissing contest about gun control. The American will throw a fit because he has more guns in his home than the London Metropolitan Police, and the European will scream and cry because the American also has more guns than the Icelandic Air Force and the UNSCOM peacekeepers in the Balkans combined.
Not to mention the obligatory Orwell/Huxley references. They stopped being insightful and all became redundant somewhere back when/. was still giving out four-digit UID's.
Uhm, while the convenience issue is a good way to sucker people in, more people need to be aware that no law enforcment agent can require a search without probably cause and/or a search warrant.
..unless the search is of an administrative nature with a primary purpose other than the gathering of evidence for criminal prosecution.
Closely-regulated businesses can be searched warrantlessly, for example. Try and imagine what would happen if the Wal-Mart told the ATF inspector where to go when he came to look at the gun rack, the dealer's inventory, and the Forms 4473.
Similarly, places at high risk for violence can require searches for the prevention of introduction of weapons. Airports, sports arenas, and jails are classic examples. The search is a condition of entry. If you don't want to be searched, you're free to refrain from entering. I don't fly and I don't like baseball, and there's rarely anybody in jail who I have any interest in seeing again.
It's not hard to imagine either of those countries having a Department of Homeland Security, especially when you consider that this Dept. will have authority over any Federal dept involved in protecting the mainland USA (FBI, NSA, Treasury, Justice, ATF, DEA, Border Patrol, Customs Service, US Marshals, Secret Service).
Except it's nowhere near that yet.
It's not getting the FBI, DEA, or Marshals-they're all staying in Justice. I don't see it getting any more than limited influence over Customs or BATF, both of which are taxation agencies. I don't see it getting a whole lot of sway over the Secret Service, which is primarily a financial-crimes agency.
In the end, it'll probably end up being just TSA, Border Patrol, and the Federal Protective Service (responsible for policing property managed by the General Services Administration.), the Dep't of Energy's security people (largely contractors anyway) and maybe parts of a few other agencies.
Some people outside of the US freak out over the US Department of the Interior. In the former Soviet Union, most policing was managed by the Ministry of the Interior, or similar ministries with similar names in other countries. Here in the US OTOH, Interior is basically just an umbrella for the Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, US Geological Survey, etc.
Damn park rangers are out to oppress us all. Trust me on this. I used to be one.
Military? I hear those guys carry weapons! Definitely search them.
It gets better.
I have an ID card which says, among other things, "Joe Q. Blow, whose name and signature appear below, is a Police Officer of the City of XXXX, Colorado, and is authorized by state law to make arrests, execute warrants, and carry weapons."
I usually carry it next to a 3" gold shield which says "Police; XXXX, Colorado, XXXX" on it.
Hell, I've been through the Rule 108 class, which means that, if I'm travelling on business, I actually AM allowed to be armed on airplanes.
Guess what: I still get the special search every time I fly out of DIA. I guess the contractors realize that traffic cops are not to be trusted.
More importantly, I would suggest that the shipments will not become targets for terrorists for the simple fact that it will be tightly controlled and secured.
Yep.
I don't know how many people here have actually met/worked with DOE guards. Trust me on one thing: They're not the rent-a-cops at the mall. DOE security is where Navy SEALS go when they leave the Navy. They tend to be better trained and equipped than my department's SWAT team.
I'm in reasonably-good shape. At 35, I still run a 24-minute 5K, bench my own weight for seven, etc. And from duty gear, I can put two into an index card, two seconds at five yards. And the DOE guys I've met pretty much all run, lift, and shoot circles around me.
I pity the dumb-assed terrorist who tries to hijack one of these convoys. It'll be a quick trip to Allah, is for damn sure.
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Federally, they're very tightly restricted under the 1934 National Firearms Act. However, it is theoretically possible for private citizens to own them.
State laws may be more restrictive. I'm willing to bet that the state/local laws in DC and Maryland are a LOT more restrictive.
Someone with evil intent can probably make one easily enough. Most of us already have one on our cars: What do you think mufflers do?
Easy enough to make, though. It's not uncommon for hunters or competitive shooters to load their own ammunition at home. To make a slower bullet, just use less powder. (Okay, it's a tiny bit more complex than that, but you see the general idea.)
Also, it's not hard to mistake the sound of a gunshot for something else, and especially not in an urban area. A month or so ago, I took a complaint of a guy whose truck had been shot. With some sort of .30-caliber solid-construction bullet, original weight above 200 grains, and probably faster than 2700 feet per second from the muzzle based upon the deformation. If you don't know what that means, that's a damn loud round. I try and shoot an elk with a round like that every year, and thank god for Peltor earmuffs.
Anyway, almost nobody in the neighborhood remembers a gunshot. However, everybody remembers a car backfiring fairly loudly. Coincidence? Maybe, but I don't believe in them.
So, you see where I'm going with this? It's easy to mistake the sound of a gunshot for something else if you don't know much about them. I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess that people in an area where private firearm ownership is almost nonexistant (like much of the DC area) may not know what they did or didn't hear.
Speed cameras are a crappy idea, sayeth this traffic cop. Most traffic enforcement is deterrence and education. People are out-and-out nervous in the presence of police. When I pull someone over, I've yanked him out of his comfort zone. And folks don't like that and therefore won't do things that make it happen. In other words, we primarily provide negative reinforcement for unacceptable behaviors.
Speed cameras, on the other hand, don't. All they do is cause a penalty assessment notice to be mailed to someone's house. Not nearly the same negative reinforcement.
For those of you who live in a society where police carry guns (I don't BTW), isn't a gun simply a machine that the police use to do their job?
Less often than you might think. I probably draw mine about twice a week-the rough average for the entire US. I've NEVER ended up firing it except in training, in the 16 years I've been a cop. Statistically, fewer than five percent of all US police officers ever do use deadly force in the course of their careers.
Deadly force is an extreme response to an extreme situation. Our department mandates that it shall only be used to protect the officer or another person from an imminent threat of death or great bodily injury-which is basically the only time it's authorized by law in this state. (That circumstance, and to prevent certain of a very short list of violent crimes: sexual assault, arson of an occupied building, armed burglary, and armed robbery, when a reasonable person would deem lesser force as being unlikely to control the threat.)
I think people who travel 140kph in a 100kph area and get a $400 fine because of a speed camera have only themselves to blame.
Unfortunately, we're wimps in Colorado when it comes to traffic fines. 140kph in a 100 translates to about 85 mph in a 65. Eighty-four dollars on a state highway and $120 on any other public road in this city, unless it's a school zone or something. BUT, surveillance should be used only to prevent crime or to catch criminals. Surveillance data of someone who has not broken any laws should not be used for anything. (all IMHO of course).
What about to determine if a crime had been committed or not? We had one, found a guy laying in a pile all beat to shit and claiming to have been jumped. This guy is one of our frequent fliers, and most of us were unsympathetic, karma being a bitch and so forth.
We snagged a surveillance tape from across the street. It turned out he actually jumped someone else and paid for it. Oops. We realized we were looking for a guy who didn't do anything all that illegal and whose only real mistake was not reporting it. After all, when you kick someone's ass in self-defense you want it on the record so that he doesn't try to tell the cops about how he's the real victim. First person to get his story in writing usually wins in those sorts of disputes.
Not to mention what it takes to justify deadly force in self-defense here in Colorado. Painting someone with a laser pointer could potentially be enough. "My son was just trying to be funny" makes you sound like an idiot when your idea of a joke was to put someone else in fear of being murdered and he had to act on the perceived immediate threat.
I actually had someone paint me once. He thought he was being funny. He actually said that at his sentencing. He lived mainly by having the only moment of good judgement in his life, when I covered him and he followed every order very carefully. He then got to live to see three years in the loving arms of CO DOC for felony menacing. I wasn't the only one he painted that day either.
FWIW: Still plenty of actual laser sights out there. Our tactical team uses them, and I may be the only guy on the department who doesn't own at least one.
Not quite. I assume you mean the Texas Seat Belt case?
The ruling was, if some act is defined as a crime by statute, then a peace officer has the power to make custodial arrests for that act. No surprises. Even when it's a stupid little traffic misdemeanor (like seat belt violations in Texas) it's still criminal.
Besides, how can a police officer arrest someone for an offense when there's no statute defining the act as an offense? There are no common-law crimes anymore in the US and have not been for a VERY long time. When someone gets lodged in the county jail, there's a charge and that charge specifies some statute.
Wrong.
Some people are voluntarily fingerprinted. That's pretty rare.
Usually, in the US, people are only printed if they enlist in the armed forces, are booked into jail (or released on summonses for certain offenses-all felonies and Class One misdemeanors here in Colorado), or for the purposes of background checks for certain jobs: police, fire, teaching, and almost any real security clearance.
Here in Colorado, an index finger is LiveScanned when you get a driver's license. I don't think it's included in AFIS, however. I'm not sure but I'm guessing it's mostly just to keep the same person from having two licenses with different names.
It's almost impossible to get a useful print from a small child anyway. Believe me, I've tried. That's why those "Kidnap Kits" are a sad joke.
I'm in my mid-30's, so I don't know that I'm old enough to qualify. That being said, not a whole lot has changed in the 14 years I've been doing this crap.
With one exception: Juveniles have become worse and worse. They're not all sweet innocent little darlings. The average juvenile hard case has always been someone with no acculturation, no understanding of right and wrong, and no understanding that society frowns on certain acts and employs cops because of this. However, there are a lot more of them now than there were when I first became a cop during the Bush the Elder administration.
It's changed, but even if you could quantify overall violence as a single scalar quantity, I don't think that's changed a whole lot. Dad sometimes gets loaded and beats the snot out of mom, who stabs dad with a fork, leaving Junior in the loving-but-overloaded hands of XXX County Social Services, and there is nothing new under the sun.
To a greater or lesser degree. It's a concept called "original intent" and there's actually some controversy about how broadly it should be applied.
The conventional wisdom is that conservatives (US definition) tend to favor a greater weight to original intent than do liberals. Personally, I think it's usually more likely to be advocates of judicial restraint who advocate the greater weight for original intent, while advocates of judicial activism (AKA "legislating from the bench") tend to not like anything that would constrain what they could do. But I digress...
At any rate, that's why legislators often put in a section in new acts which goes "The legislature of the State of Colorado finds..." so that an OI-favoring court will have some guidance. The line in the Constitution about promoting useful arts and sciences is exactly that kind of statement. It helps to understand the original purpose of Congress' power to establish a system of copyrights.
That being said, whether 17 years or 30 years or creator's-life-plus-seventy-years is the best length for promoting useful arts and sciences seems to me to be a question of fact, rather than a question of law. Traditionally, in systems derived from the English Common Law (UK, NZ, AU, and the entire US except for Louisiana state courts), juries decided questions of fact at the trial level and appellate courts were loath to touch questions of fact. If that's the operative question in Eldred v. Ashcroft, then the Supremes already threw me a curve ball by granting cert at all.
It seems to me that Lessig may want to try the Kitchen Sink theory of litigating: Brief everything but the kitchen sink. Then brief the kitchen sink. Retroactive changes to copyright terms could be construed as being ex post facto legislation (strictly forbidden by the Constitution) but for all I know that point has already been litigated and lost. IANAL either.
Try your local police department. My agency sells off our bikes at auction every time someone gets a wild hair up his ass to get new ones.
Also, the same auctions often include recovered lost/stolen bikes where an owner couldn't be contacted or located, or wasn't interested in claiming it. We do one every year. My current bike, a Trek 930, came from an auction like that in pretty good shape, $75 plus new tires and tubes. It retailed once upon a time at $400 or so, and didn't look too used.
Suggestion: if it's a former patrol bike, and it was made by Smith and Wesson, don't touch it. They make good handcuffs and I like the IdentaKit, but the rest of their product line is (MHO) Slick and Worthless. A few of their branded bikes are actually repainted Giant Iguanas, but most suck.
That's actually largely true in the US. A US Forest Service firefighter, a Bureau of Reclamation hydrologist, a General Services Administration office manager, a National Park Service ranger, or a US Public Health Service nurse-practitioner, is going to be hired for their competence in their professional area and will probably end up serving for a very long time without their politics becoming an issue.
In some positions, however, a person's value system does become relevant. Cops and prosecutors, for example, need to have a conviction that laws are worth enforcing and society's peace is worth keeping. Similarly, a defense attorney (especially the public defender) needs to be convinced that even the worst should have an advocate in court. Someone who can't make these leaps of faith needs to make other career plans.
Similarly, when an advisory board needs to make decisions on the ethical nature of a given project, their own ethics become an issue. You wouldn't give Lysenko a seat on any such panel, would you? When you want a panel to advise you on the ethical circumstances surrounding scientific questions, you want people who both have some understanding of the scientific issues and probably people with ethical and moral beliefs similar to your own.
Let me give you an example: My next-door neighbor is Catholic, and fairly devout. He's in a relationship with a woman, and needs advice about going to the next level. Who should he ask for advice that will help him: His father-confessor, or our other neighbor, who's a polyamorist Wiccan with a million purple-triangle-and-rainbow stickers on her car? (Forgive the stereotype. This really did happen a few months ago. I swear I'm not making it up.)
He ended up going to the priest for advice. Probably wise: It was the priest who could give my friend advice which would make sense in the context of his value system.
I got a bucket of rotten apples with his name all over them. There was no excuse for allowing Wesley Crusher to exist on my TV screen. That character is why my latest campaign is for curbside execution of all smart and precocious teenage males. They're annoying the holy crap out of semiliterate midwestern jocks like me.
You forgot one thing, Paragraph D.5: George Peppard (Hannibal) ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS lit a cigar and said "I love it when a plan comes together" in every single episode.
A degree doesn't translate into a skillset. Frankly, I don't know IT that well. However, to be competitive for secretarial positions it helps to know how to organize and (more importantly) how to type.
And a degree is almost meaningless in law enforcement. We get flooded with applicants who think they'd make good cops because they either made double my salary last year in IT or because they have a criminal justice degree. It's worth a few preference points on the written exam (usually the first stage of a 3-6 month hiring process) but less than veteran's preference.
Can a degree help? Sure, but don't expect it to be THAT valuable. It may mean eligibility to test for sergeant after only five years instead of ten, and a very few departments require a BA/BS, but that's the best it'll get you.
Mostly, what a degree (absent constant changes of majors) tells me is that the applicant is literate and can stick to a project for more than ten minutes without dropping it. Usually, anyway.
Worse. About 50K/year. And people wonder why us traffic cops do our thing. And the closest we get to support is MADD, who complained on me because I stopped a drunk driver, established that he was drunk, wrote him the summons for DUI, revoked his license, and had his brother pick him up instead of booking him into jail. That last step means I'm derelict in my duties and soft on DUI, apparently.
With friends like that, who needs an enema?
Yep. From a creche in front of the county courthouse, it's just a few inches before they revive Torquemada.
The separation of church and state is expressly stated in the constitution.
Where? It's certainly not in the First Amendment.
Exactly. It should be easy to evaluate the value of a survey. If the raw data and the methodology are available (as they are in published scientific research) then everybody should be able to look at it and either get the same results or be able to call "bullshit" on them.
There's probably a pro-OSS argument in there, but I'm not whoring karma today.
Uhh... hold on, if you want to compair number of provinces then you might have something. Still, not something that is a relevant metric for this comparison.
There's a reason why we don't use the word "province" in the US. Traditionally (up until the reign of King Franklin the First), the states actually have been somewhat-sovereign entities. The Federal government really just had the role that the EU is starting to fill.
Okay, that's a little sweeping. Not too much. For a very long time, though, the several states were mostly just barred from having a foreign policy, making customs and immigration rules, or coining their own money.
Even today, there's a far more pronounced cultural difference between Cali ornia (also known as "hell") and Kansas (also known as "where I was born") than there is between, say, Belgium and France.
and in the Blessed name of Elvis, I let it blast.
My TV lay in pieces right at my feet
and they arrested me for disturbing the almighty peace..
Judge, there was fifty-seven channels, and nothing on.
Granted, using firearms on home electronics is sometimes frowned upon. Henry Lightcap shoots a refridgerator and is considered (at best) badly misanthropic. Imagine if he'd shot the Fount of Wisdom in the living room instead!
(Yes, I own a TV. It only gets turned on when someone wants to watch a video.)
It does come back as being accessible in China, FWIW. Apparently, Tom Cruise hasn't reprogrammed the Great Firewall yet.
Yeah, but the person with custody of the 4473 forms and the FFL Dealer's Inventory is a person. One who can (and would) be prosecuted criminally.
And jailed upon conviction. ATF doesn't screw around with a refusal to permit an inspection by its licensees.
Snip...
You left something out. Invariably, some American and some European will get into a pissing contest about gun control. The American will throw a fit because he has more guns in his home than the London Metropolitan Police, and the European will scream and cry because the American also has more guns than the Icelandic Air Force and the UNSCOM peacekeepers in the Balkans combined.
Not to mention the obligatory Orwell/Huxley references. They stopped being insightful and all became redundant somewhere back when /. was still giving out four-digit UID's.
Closely-regulated businesses can be searched warrantlessly, for example. Try and imagine what would happen if the Wal-Mart told the ATF inspector where to go when he came to look at the gun rack, the dealer's inventory, and the Forms 4473.
Similarly, places at high risk for violence can require searches for the prevention of introduction of weapons. Airports, sports arenas, and jails are classic examples. The search is a condition of entry. If you don't want to be searched, you're free to refrain from entering. I don't fly and I don't like baseball, and there's rarely anybody in jail who I have any interest in seeing again.
Except it's nowhere near that yet.
It's not getting the FBI, DEA, or Marshals-they're all staying in Justice. I don't see it getting any more than limited influence over Customs or BATF, both of which are taxation agencies. I don't see it getting a whole lot of sway over the Secret Service, which is primarily a financial-crimes agency. In the end, it'll probably end up being just TSA, Border Patrol, and the Federal Protective Service (responsible for policing property managed by the General Services Administration.), the Dep't of Energy's security people (largely contractors anyway) and maybe parts of a few other agencies.
Some people outside of the US freak out over the US Department of the Interior. In the former Soviet Union, most policing was managed by the Ministry of the Interior, or similar ministries with similar names in other countries. Here in the US OTOH, Interior is basically just an umbrella for the Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, US Geological Survey, etc.
Damn park rangers are out to oppress us all. Trust me on this. I used to be one.
It gets better.
I have an ID card which says, among other things, "Joe Q. Blow, whose name and signature appear below, is a Police Officer of the City of XXXX, Colorado, and is authorized by state law to make arrests, execute warrants, and carry weapons."
I usually carry it next to a 3" gold shield which says "Police; XXXX, Colorado, XXXX" on it.
Hell, I've been through the Rule 108 class, which means that, if I'm travelling on business, I actually AM allowed to be armed on airplanes.
Guess what: I still get the special search every time I fly out of DIA. I guess the contractors realize that traffic cops are not to be trusted.
Yep.
I don't know how many people here have actually met/worked with DOE guards. Trust me on one thing: They're not the rent-a-cops at the mall. DOE security is where Navy SEALS go when they leave the Navy. They tend to be better trained and equipped than my department's SWAT team.
I'm in reasonably-good shape. At 35, I still run a 24-minute 5K, bench my own weight for seven, etc. And from duty gear, I can put two into an index card, two seconds at five yards. And the DOE guys I've met pretty much all run, lift, and shoot circles around me.
I pity the dumb-assed terrorist who tries to hijack one of these convoys. It'll be a quick trip to Allah, is for damn sure.