Well, it's like Moses said when he came down from the mountain: "Guys, I've got some good news and some bad news. I talked him down to ten, but adultery's still one of them."
The last time this happenned, the courts ruled in favour of the driver. The rental firm was not clear on what they were doing, hiding the clause in their contract.
Not quite. I assume you mean the case in CT. The company got their balls whacked because they had failed to give any prior notice of the monitoring. The implication is that prior notice would have legitimized the monitoring.
Also, you don't "hide" things in contracts. Either they're in there, or they're not. If someone can't be bothered to read a page and a half of grammatically-correct English, then they have other problems.
The rental firm doesn't care if the driver is speeding. If they did, they would contact the police. They just want to collect more money disguised as 'fines' for breaking the traffic laws.
Maybe you should ask a traffic cop about that.
We don't typically take 'cold' (after-the-fact) complaints about traffic misdemeanors. If we don't see it ourselves, we don't have any reliable evidence for the judge or referee. In other words, if a car rental company rep came to me to tell me about a customer who was speeding in one of the company's cars, I'd probably tell him that there's nothing I can do after the fact. And without a collision and the evidence involved, there isn't.
I mean, let's be realistic. I can spend four hours on a speeding ticket, or I can spend that four hours on an alarm, a domestic disturbance, and a detox hold. I know which is going to do more good.
A NASA engineer and his manager were asked to estimate the chances of failure of a critical component in the shuttle engine. This was a component that could cause loss of vessel and crew if it failed.
The engineer and manager's estimates differed by two orders of magnitude.
Just to source this: _What Do You Care What Other People Think?_ by Prof. Richard Feynman. It should still be in print.
Feynman was part of the Presidential Commission charged with investigating the Challenger explosion. One thing he did (unusual for a blue-ribbon panel, but utterly essential for any detailed investigation of anything at all) was to actually go to Florida and talk to people.
He asked about the odds that an SRB would catastrophically fail on any given mission. A NASA PR flack gave an answer on the other side of 1:10000. Various engineers who worked on the SRB program and related programs gave answers more like 1:150 or 1:300.
The moral of the story: PR people tend to pull numbers out of their asses.
Do you think that all law enforcement should be profitable, or just traffic related offenses?
If you're aware of any law enforcement being profitable, and have real evidence, let me know. I've had my head up my ass actually doing it for so long that I don't bother to read the NORML website anymore.
Just to clarify on thing, unless you are ticketed by a state or federal officier, i.e. State Trooper, speeding is a civil offense. You are not charged with a criminal offense, the municipality merely decides to sue you for a small fee. Makes it fun to fight, since "beyond a resonable doubt" changes to "beyond a preponderence of doubt", or in other words you only need to be most likely guilty.
At least in Colorado, you're damn wrong.
Traffic violations under the state code (of concern to park rangers and state troopers, mainly) are usually civil infractions. Traffic violations under municipal codes are almost always criminal.
Run a stop sign in my town. Then, fail to pay and fail to appear. There WILL be a muni court arrest warrant out for you.
And the city loses money big time doing that. We have to pay for the extradition if someone's picked up on our warrant in Denver or wherever. However, someone has correctly noted that letting FTA's run free is not exactly fair to the people who do the right thing and either pay their tickets or appear and contest them.
And I usually charge excessive speed as excessive speed. The points from one cite for 40MPH over the limit is enough to suspend an adult's license here.
If they had done something serious they *would have* been arrested.
Not necessarily. To file a felony case into a Federal court, the FBI and US Attorney need a true bill of indictment from the grand jury. To get that, they need to show the grand jury evidence amounting to probable cause to believe that a given person committed a given crime.
Hence, the seizure of evidence.
Also, this is a non-violent theft. When the suspects are not flight risks, it's actually fairly uncommon to arrest them. Unless there's a worry that the suspect will flee the jurisdiction or hurt someone, the usual method is to issue a summons. What that means is they're instead just arrested and forced to post bond if they miss a court date.
I don't think there was any need to take their computers, the cable modems themselves would be the evidence. Taking all the computers is standard way law enforcement acts as judge and jury for computer-related crimes.
Let me get this straight. You've been trained and have had experience as a criminal investigator. You know exactly what it takes for evidence to be reliable enough to be admitted at trial.
Wrong. We seize everything in the warrant, partly so that we can demonstrate to the court that this is exactly how a given system was set up, and partly because the computer forensics guys don't typically go on raids. Hell, the guys my department uses aren't even cops-they're contractors.
Do you think any of those people will get their computers back anytime soon, regardless of whether they're prosecuted or not?
No, the general media nowadays has no respectability. They cover nothing of substance. When's the last time I saw a mention in the paper about a bill going through my state's legislature? I'm lucky to see a mention of a federal bill outside of the budget, Medicare, or "terrorism". Meanwhile, there are giant cover stories on last year's dog mauling.
Suggestion: Either get a new paper or a new state. The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain Spews are actually pretty good at tracking what our fine useless drones in the dome are doing. (Nothing particularly useful, as in Colorado they're almost as worthless as Congress.)
As for Federal bills, try either the Wall Street Jwournal (for general stuff) or special-interest publications (for special-interest stuff). The Sierra Club will probably have more-detailed coverage of HR 12345, the "Stop Sodomizing Squirrels Act of 2002" than a general paper.
The WSJ is worth noting as being Stuff that Matters, as economics and trade have a much greater effect on people's lives than "ATI Releases Yet Another Graphics Card Which Will Do Nothing More Than Last Year's Model for 99% of Users" or "The Mainland Chinese Government are still a bunch of fascist bastards" or "Jack Straw and John Ashcroft Caught Surveilling Public Washrooms at the YMCA."
Besides, you need to cut the reporters some slack. They tend to be a bit better-educated than their readers, but that doesn't stop them from being ignorant, uninformed dolts. Have you EVER seen a reporter get something right, which concerns your profession? (I don't even know what you do. I wear a blue uniform on behalf of a city government, so I have massive examples of them getting it all wrong with respect to what I do. Examples of them knowing anything are distressingly rare.)
Besides, I grew up with the Kansas City Star and the Topeka Capitol-Journal before I moved to Colorado. And either one of them is a far better paper than the two examples you name. The NYT has some of the most ignorant writers on the planet. That these people are allowed to tie their own shoes in the morning is impressive enough.
It's very hard to go from one kind of government to another. There are many expectation that have been learned. So new governments generally "fit into" the space that the old one fit into.
Exactly right.
The American revolution was relatively tame. That's because surprisingly little changed from before to after. Some of the laws and most of the names changed. However, people still went to the same churches, used the same KJV Bible to teach children to read, went to the same town council meetings to yell at each other about the same problems, elected the same clowns and drunks to the same state/colonial legislatures, etc. There were some radical changes, but they were motivated by (no shit!) conservative aims.
The French revolution, OTOH and IMHO, was a bloodbath precisely because it WAS radical. A lot of institutions were tossed out almost overnight, with very little to replace them. Even if you have issues with a major social institution (and the eighteenth-century Roman Catholic Church was definitely both major and troubled), society as a whole tends to depend upon them. Take them away, and chaos results.
I've actually known China scholars who think of the current regime as the Communist Dynasty, not greatly different from the houses of the various emperors: absolutist during their reign, but not eternal.
What the PRC probably really needs is a whole bunch of cranky Jeffersonian intellectual horses' asses. However, I don't speak Chinese so it'll have to be a different horse's ass. I'll have to settle for donating to someone who wants to translate Thoreau's or Jefferson's or Edward Abbey's writing into Mandarin and smuggling it in.
(If anybody is involved in such a project, give yourself a hundred bucks and send the bill to Happy go Lucky, c/o Slashdot.net. I'll have a check in the mail promptly)
That is absolutely rubbish. Only because I don't agree with your opinion makes me evil? Doesn't that make you evil too because you don't agree with mine?
No, he said your government was evil. Claiming as a hero a mass-murdering pedophile, and then embalming him as though he were some sort of saint, and then killing a whole mess of peaceful protesters in the so-called "Square of Heavenly Peace," and then imprisoning Falun Dafa practitioners, tends to make one consider your government to be evil.
And the "Great Leap Backward" and "Hundred Flowers" campaigns were, at the very best, easy to misunderstand.
And deifying Mao isn't such a great idea. He was a mass-murderer to rival Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot.
And where shall we start in discussing the PRC's behavior to the Republic of China?
Face it. If you want your government to be respected by the rest of the world, then that government has to be respectable. And the communists are anything but respectable. And that's why the PRC is widely (and rightly IMHO) considered to be a fascist rathole.
'm sure that you are wrong, if you live in the US. Anyplace that I've lived since I was old enough to notice required that all businesses be licensed. Probably so that they could be taxed.
At least in CO, that's pretty much exactly why.
If they serve food, the kitchen needs to be inspected.
If they serve alcohol, then the licensing procedure is a little involved.
But if all they are is a T1, a dozen early Pentium machines, and a pop machine, then the only license required is the one allowing them to collect the appropriate sales tax.
And I've never heard of a legitimate reason to shut down every business of a given type in a whole city. It sounds too much to me like shutting down a thousand or so convenience stores here in Denver because the night clerk in one of them said something rude about the mayor.
But the People's Fascist Rathole apparently knows something that I don't.
We've been thru a civil war before. The rebels lost. If there are any new rebels, they'll lose as well.
Do you mean the civil war in the 1860's or in the 1780's?
If a colony wants to secede, then it'll be hard to stop them. How is a government on Earth going to enforce its will upon them? Are they going to send a Marine Expeditionary Unit a few hundred million miles to bust skulls on Mars?
I'm sure someday it'll be possible, but it'll be a long time before a Terrestrial government will be able to enforce its will on an extraterrestrial colony. Realistically, it won't be much less of a wait until there's actually a colony that can be independent in practical terms.
Because the bartender is not supposed to serve liquor to someone who is drunk. In some states the law says "visibly drunk". The bartender is supposed to know when the person is drunk. If the bartender makes the person drunk, that's one thing but if the person is drunk and then the bartender serves some more then they can be liable.
More than civilly liable. Here in Colorado, it is a CRIME for a visibly-drunk person to be served alcohol on licensed premises. Bartenders (in theory) can go to jail and businesses (in practice) can lose their liquor licenses.
It's akin to shooting an intruder more than once - once is considered self defense, more than once can be considered murder.
They're not that close. Especially because the alcohol thing is true and the "if you shot him once you meant to murder him" is crap and nonsense. If you were legally justified in using deadly force to protect yourself, then you were legally justified in shooting as many times as was required to control the threat.
I just find it funny.. the US must have sold them the planes in the first place.. and now that Iran falls into an area under the Axis Of Evil moniker, its suddenly a serious problem that they try and obtain parts? Perhaps you should have thought of that...
There've been a few changes between now and then. Iran bought a dozen or so F-14A fighters back in the 1970's. This was back when Shah Pahlavi was in charge over there and Ford or Carter was president here.
The Shah fell in 1979, to be replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeni, who indeed was the Hezbollah's best friend. We couldn't really take the planes back.
By cannibalizing most of the planes, Iran may have been able to keep two or three in the air. However, they probably still have 1970's avionics, and parts can't be that easy to find.
What state are you/they in where lock picks are legal? In most states (certainly in mine) they qualify as burglary tools and unless you can demonstrate a need (ie. being a locksmith) just possesion is a crime.
Colorado Revised Statute 18-4-205 (1993):
(1)A person commits possession of burglary tools if he possesses any explosive, tool, instrument, or other article adapted, designed, or communly used for committing or facilitating the commission of an offense involving forcible entry into premises or theft by a physical taking, and intends to use the thing possessed, or knows that some person intends to use the thing possessed, in the commission of such an offense.
(2) Possession of burglary tools is a class 6 felony.
In other words, for it to be a crime here, the person must have a specific intent to use such tools in the commission of a crime.
And I don't think we really license locksmiths here. Maybe Denver does, but they're also the only place in Colorado where armed guards need to be licensed. It's probably a way for the city tax office to make a little extra money.
Speaking of which, if any fellow Coloradans know of a storefront dealer in lockpicks, I'd love to know about it. I could use some for work.
So if you were in a Monty Python sketch a regular accountant job would be a step up... at least you are dealing with live numbers.
Yep. Forensic accountants step p to regular accountant, who step up to successful insurance salesmen, who can continue to climb until they're unsuccessful insurance salesmen. I'm sure there's a reason for having the latter up on the roof.
Is this the guys who show up to the Enron crime scene
You laugh, but almost.
They're the ones who look through umpteen million documents to reconstruct what happened. Then they get to spend another month testifying at trial while a jury's eyes glaze over.
It's very detailed (anal?) work. They're basically a private-sector financial-crimes investigator. (Hell, that's why the FBI required applicants to be either lawyers or accountants for many years-investigating white-collar crime often does require that kind of talent)
That being said, I'd rather they try to get the minimum penalty for thier clients when they know they're guilty, rather than allow criminal behaviour to go un-punished. Justice and all that.
There are ethical reasons for them to do otherwise.
The attorney's duty is to represent his client's interests by all means allowed by law. Pure and simple. Defense counsel does not work for you or me (especially not me!). He works for the defendant.
I'm a cop, and have been one for almost my entire adult life. Believe me, I have little reason to love the defense bar. However, we have to be fair. They're doing a job which is needed in our system of justice, and even mandated by our Constitution. And despite the ethical issues of an Alan Dershowitz or the circus theatrics of a Johnny Cochran, the profession of law has enough honorable practitioners that I think it can be called an honorable profession.
Yes, I think some of them are ignorant as hell and try to encourage ignorance. That's how they work in the cases that go to trial: their job is to create doubt in the mind of one juror. I had a vehicular assault case (a felony in my state) in which the central issue became whether or not the defendant was driving 70MPH on a wet 35MPH street, and was that speed the reason for his clobbering a pedestrian.
Northwestern University publishes some standard equations which are pretty much universal for determining speed. One of them takes in the percentage of braking (100% if all four wheels braked, as they did in this case), the drag factor of the road surface (wet new asphalt, empirically it was found to be about.48), and the lengths of the skidmarks. Plug those in and you know exactly how much speed was scrubbed off in the skid.
It's pretty straightforward, if you have a high school education. One juror did not, and the defense counsel's strategy was to try and twist my testimony to confuse the crap out of that juror.
He was representing his client's interests, just like the law and his canon require. It didn't work (his client was sentenced to three years, all but eight months suspended and restitution for ALL of the victim's medical bills. Probably reasonable, IMHO, for a case of felony stupid resulting in serious bodily injury to someone who didn't deserve it.)
They have their duty. I can hardly fault them for doing it as well as they know how. In the end, there are aspects of my job that bother me too. Real life is like that sometimes.
His class was often as amusingly off-topic as his Natural History articles, but he could talk about almost anything and make it sound interesting.
With him, nothing was off-topic.
Have you read Full House
? In it, he explores the disappearance of.400 batting and manages to use that to explain natural history. And it even got me slightly interested in baseball. Me! Baseball! I HATE baseball! (Maybe it was just being raised on the Kansas Shitty Royals)
I've never seen him in person, but his unwritten work is a sore loss for all of us. At least in his writing, he was a brilliant, (+5 Insightful, we'd call him here) teacher.
I suppose the delaration of independance, the constitution, the federalist papers, etc, those were just random scribblings, not any type of foundatation for a new government.
Look at the chronology.
The Declaration of Independence was released in 1776. Certain of the battles had occurred before then, but it was really 1776 and even later before even a majority of the revolutionaries actually came out for independence. And even then, there were actually voices calling for reunification for another twenty years.
Also, the DoI has very little legal significance. If you try to cite it in court, the judge will slap the shit out of you for wasting his time. It was mainly just a hate letter to George III and the Parliament.
When the First Continental Congress met, that was the beginning of the Confederacy. (Not the Civil war, but the Articles of Confederation confederacy.) It persisted for a decade and change, but around the middle and end of the war, people started to notice that its central government had almost no power whatsoever. Some of them also felt that to be a bad thing.
Accordingly, a convention was called in 1787, ostensibly for the purpose of revising the Articles. In practice, the convention came out with a brand-spanking-new Constitution. A masterpiece of compromise, in that nobody was really THAT happy with it, but just about everybody with a stake who wasn't in need of mental health care could live with it.
Its proponents began to release a variety of anonymous and psuedo-anonymous screeds to convince the populace to support their new Constitution. These later became collectively known as the Federalist papers, because they were released by proponents of a stronger Federal system.
Unfortunately (IMHO), their opponents couldn't get their thumbs out and get organized and find themselves a catchy title, so history ended up knowing them as the Anti-Federalists. Their major contribution was that of forcing the Federalists to include a bill of rights, which was largely modelled on the Virginia declaration.
We didn't descend into chaos at the departure of the British, like the French did when they deposed the various Bourbons a few years later. And there's a critical difference between the two revolutions that explains why:
We didn't change very much. Local government is the government that accounts for 99% of Americans' day-to-day life. Speeding tickets are written by city cops. Schools are run typically by county school boards. Zoning, water, fire-and-rescue, courts, etc. are muni and county functions in pretty much the entire US. Hell, even at the time, national defense was a local function. (It still is, but to a greatly reduced extent. In theory, the National Guard is supposed to be local, even though they can be Federalized at a whim and the courts have ruled that they're not actually the Militia.)
As a result, the institutions that really did keep order in the US in the late 1700's didn't really change, even when the British were tossed out. The middle class was relatively secure. Admittedly, I may be the only guy on/. who thinks a large and secure middle class is a GOOD thing...
Remember, "innocent until proven guilty" does not automatically prevent law-enforcement from taking any action. If it did, then they'd be forced to sit around during a bank robbery on the grounds that "they haven't proven in a court of law that the suspects did anything illegal." The standard flow of events goes: if police or other law enforcement have probable cause to suspect a crime is being/has been committed, they have the right to investigate; if they find evidence that someone has committed a crime, they can arrest him; and if a court of law determines that that evidence constitutes proof, they don't let him go.
Close, but not quite.
We can open an investigation based upon anything. Until a seizure or search (within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment) is conducted, no evidence is required.
Upon developing probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime, a police officer may arrest that person or seek an arrest warrant from a judge, or (in Colorado), issue a summons and release.
Upon developing probable cause to believe that a given place contains evidence, contraband, or the like, an officer may obtain a search warrant from a judge. Under certain circumstances, the officer can also search without a warrant.
Certain types of non-testimonial evidence for identifying suspects can be taken on less than probable cause. Hair or blood for DNA, for example, can be taken from a person by court order pursuant to Colorado Rule of Criminal Procedure 41.1 or analogous rules in other states.
Even if a person is taken into custody, 99% of the time he'll be able to post bond. No-bond arrests are actually very uncommon in this state. It pretty much has to be a pretty serious felony for a no-bond hold. And for non-violent misdemeanors, we USUALLY will scratch a summons into county court and release him on his signature.
And if some officer has a warrant, then that means some judge is satisfied that the probable cause exists to support it. Warrants basically don't exist in the US until some guy in a black muumuu signs them.
A gang member from south central LA can buy a computer, get addicted, cease their gang activities, and eventually after a few years, make friends with a korean person on the internet.
I'm willing to accept, for argument's sake, the general case: that it can be easier to keep an open mind without face-to-face contact.
In the specific case of the inner-city gang member, I have to disagree. They tend to be as paranoid as the Kremlin or the Communist Chinese, and only slightly less so than us cops. It's actually a relatively rare one who's been more than five miles from his place of birth, not counting hospitals and correctional facilities. People who get drawn into gangs tend to have a worldview that almost denies the existence of a world outside of their own turf and maybe that of their rivals.
Smaller cities (like my own, a city of under 150,000 in Colorado) tend to have gangs with less of an insular worldview, but it's still a much smaller world for them than for us. And there's not a whole lot of desire to expand that either.
You also have to remember that a number of these gangs are multigenerational, and especially California-based Hispanic gangs. There are plenty of people who are actually the third generation of their family to be inside. Grandpa, if he's still alive, is decidedly a veterano and that's one source of prestige for his grandson.
I'll give the internet this: I don't see how it's making things worse. The nazis, communists, and other related scrotesacks may have an easier time joining each other, but it also makes it easier for the rest of us to watch them.
Did you read his post? He was talking about rights explicitly denied by the Constitution. That means rights the Constitution denys to minors, and there is only one... At no point does it mention ANYTHING about ages to own a gun, speak freely, or any of the rest of your points. Your points are covered by LAWS, not the Constitution. Get it?
Did he (or anyone) read the Constitution?
It doesn't explicitly deny ANYONE the right to vote. It says that the right to vote shall not be denied on the basis of age, to any person 18 or older.
Important difference there. That leaves it open for a state to open the franchise to high schoolers. Just like a state could allow the vote by black people or women prior to the passage of those relevant amendments. Few did, but it was legal.
But since he wasn't talking about anything actually in the Constitution, I didn't think this thread was about the Constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
In your opinion exactly which 3 would those be?
Well, it's like Moses said when he came down from the mountain: "Guys, I've got some good news and some bad news. I talked him down to ten, but adultery's still one of them."
Yeah, and you can wander through a pasture all day and eat grass and I'll bet you end up pretty skinny too.
Not quite. I assume you mean the case in CT. The company got their balls whacked because they had failed to give any prior notice of the monitoring. The implication is that prior notice would have legitimized the monitoring.
Also, you don't "hide" things in contracts. Either they're in there, or they're not. If someone can't be bothered to read a page and a half of grammatically-correct English, then they have other problems.
The rental firm doesn't care if the driver is speeding. If they did, they would contact the police. They just want to collect more money disguised as 'fines' for breaking the traffic laws.
Maybe you should ask a traffic cop about that.
We don't typically take 'cold' (after-the-fact) complaints about traffic misdemeanors. If we don't see it ourselves, we don't have any reliable evidence for the judge or referee. In other words, if a car rental company rep came to me to tell me about a customer who was speeding in one of the company's cars, I'd probably tell him that there's nothing I can do after the fact. And without a collision and the evidence involved, there isn't.
I mean, let's be realistic. I can spend four hours on a speeding ticket, or I can spend that four hours on an alarm, a domestic disturbance, and a detox hold. I know which is going to do more good.
The engineer and manager's estimates differed by two orders of magnitude.
Just to source this: _What Do You Care What Other People Think?_ by Prof. Richard Feynman. It should still be in print.
Feynman was part of the Presidential Commission charged with investigating the Challenger explosion. One thing he did (unusual for a blue-ribbon panel, but utterly essential for any detailed investigation of anything at all) was to actually go to Florida and talk to people.
He asked about the odds that an SRB would catastrophically fail on any given mission. A NASA PR flack gave an answer on the other side of 1:10000. Various engineers who worked on the SRB program and related programs gave answers more like 1:150 or 1:300.
The moral of the story: PR people tend to pull numbers out of their asses.
If you're aware of any law enforcement being profitable, and have real evidence, let me know. I've had my head up my ass actually doing it for so long that I don't bother to read the NORML website anymore.
At least in Colorado, you're damn wrong.
Traffic violations under the state code (of concern to park rangers and state troopers, mainly) are usually civil infractions. Traffic violations under municipal codes are almost always criminal.
Run a stop sign in my town. Then, fail to pay and fail to appear. There WILL be a muni court arrest warrant out for you.
And the city loses money big time doing that. We have to pay for the extradition if someone's picked up on our warrant in Denver or wherever. However, someone has correctly noted that letting FTA's run free is not exactly fair to the people who do the right thing and either pay their tickets or appear and contest them.
And I usually charge excessive speed as excessive speed. The points from one cite for 40MPH over the limit is enough to suspend an adult's license here.
Not necessarily. To file a felony case into a Federal court, the FBI and US Attorney need a true bill of indictment from the grand jury. To get that, they need to show the grand jury evidence amounting to probable cause to believe that a given person committed a given crime.
Hence, the seizure of evidence.
Also, this is a non-violent theft. When the suspects are not flight risks, it's actually fairly uncommon to arrest them. Unless there's a worry that the suspect will flee the jurisdiction or hurt someone, the usual method is to issue a summons. What that means is they're instead just arrested and forced to post bond if they miss a court date.
I don't think there was any need to take their computers, the cable modems themselves would be the evidence. Taking all the computers is standard way law enforcement acts as judge and jury for computer-related crimes.
Let me get this straight. You've been trained and have had experience as a criminal investigator. You know exactly what it takes for evidence to be reliable enough to be admitted at trial.
Wrong. We seize everything in the warrant, partly so that we can demonstrate to the court that this is exactly how a given system was set up, and partly because the computer forensics guys don't typically go on raids. Hell, the guys my department uses aren't even cops-they're contractors.
Do you think any of those people will get their computers back anytime soon, regardless of whether they're prosecuted or not?
I guess it just sucks to be a thief.
Suggestion: Either get a new paper or a new state. The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain Spews are actually pretty good at tracking what our fine useless drones in the dome are doing. (Nothing particularly useful, as in Colorado they're almost as worthless as Congress.)
As for Federal bills, try either the Wall Street Jwournal (for general stuff) or special-interest publications (for special-interest stuff). The Sierra Club will probably have more-detailed coverage of HR 12345, the "Stop Sodomizing Squirrels Act of 2002" than a general paper.
The WSJ is worth noting as being Stuff that Matters, as economics and trade have a much greater effect on people's lives than "ATI Releases Yet Another Graphics Card Which Will Do Nothing More Than Last Year's Model for 99% of Users" or "The Mainland Chinese Government are still a bunch of fascist bastards" or "Jack Straw and John Ashcroft Caught Surveilling Public Washrooms at the YMCA."
Besides, you need to cut the reporters some slack. They tend to be a bit better-educated than their readers, but that doesn't stop them from being ignorant, uninformed dolts. Have you EVER seen a reporter get something right, which concerns your profession? (I don't even know what you do. I wear a blue uniform on behalf of a city government, so I have massive examples of them getting it all wrong with respect to what I do. Examples of them knowing anything are distressingly rare.)
Besides, I grew up with the Kansas City Star and the Topeka Capitol-Journal before I moved to Colorado. And either one of them is a far better paper than the two examples you name. The NYT has some of the most ignorant writers on the planet. That these people are allowed to tie their own shoes in the morning is impressive enough.
Exactly right.
The American revolution was relatively tame. That's because surprisingly little changed from before to after. Some of the laws and most of the names changed. However, people still went to the same churches, used the same KJV Bible to teach children to read, went to the same town council meetings to yell at each other about the same problems, elected the same clowns and drunks to the same state/colonial legislatures, etc. There were some radical changes, but they were motivated by (no shit!) conservative aims.
The French revolution, OTOH and IMHO, was a bloodbath precisely because it WAS radical. A lot of institutions were tossed out almost overnight, with very little to replace them. Even if you have issues with a major social institution (and the eighteenth-century Roman Catholic Church was definitely both major and troubled), society as a whole tends to depend upon them. Take them away, and chaos results.
I've actually known China scholars who think of the current regime as the Communist Dynasty, not greatly different from the houses of the various emperors: absolutist during their reign, but not eternal.
What the PRC probably really needs is a whole bunch of cranky Jeffersonian intellectual horses' asses. However, I don't speak Chinese so it'll have to be a different horse's ass. I'll have to settle for donating to someone who wants to translate Thoreau's or Jefferson's or Edward Abbey's writing into Mandarin and smuggling it in.
(If anybody is involved in such a project, give yourself a hundred bucks and send the bill to Happy go Lucky, c/o Slashdot.net. I'll have a check in the mail promptly)
No, he said your government was evil. Claiming as a hero a mass-murdering pedophile, and then embalming him as though he were some sort of saint, and then killing a whole mess of peaceful protesters in the so-called "Square of Heavenly Peace," and then imprisoning Falun Dafa practitioners, tends to make one consider your government to be evil.
And the "Great Leap Backward" and "Hundred Flowers" campaigns were, at the very best, easy to misunderstand.
And deifying Mao isn't such a great idea. He was a mass-murderer to rival Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot.
And where shall we start in discussing the PRC's behavior to the Republic of China?
Face it. If you want your government to be respected by the rest of the world, then that government has to be respectable. And the communists are anything but respectable. And that's why the PRC is widely (and rightly IMHO) considered to be a fascist rathole.
At least in CO, that's pretty much exactly why.
If they serve food, the kitchen needs to be inspected.
If they serve alcohol, then the licensing procedure is a little involved.
But if all they are is a T1, a dozen early Pentium machines, and a pop machine, then the only license required is the one allowing them to collect the appropriate sales tax.
And I've never heard of a legitimate reason to shut down every business of a given type in a whole city. It sounds too much to me like shutting down a thousand or so convenience stores here in Denver because the night clerk in one of them said something rude about the mayor.
But the People's Fascist Rathole apparently knows something that I don't.
Do you mean the civil war in the 1860's or in the 1780's?
If a colony wants to secede, then it'll be hard to stop them. How is a government on Earth going to enforce its will upon them? Are they going to send a Marine Expeditionary Unit a few hundred million miles to bust skulls on Mars?
I'm sure someday it'll be possible, but it'll be a long time before a Terrestrial government will be able to enforce its will on an extraterrestrial colony. Realistically, it won't be much less of a wait until there's actually a colony that can be independent in practical terms.
That's not an answer. The US is a collection of fifty sovereign entities (also known as "States," for good reason.)
In which state was the last execution of a person under the age of eighteen? In what year? What was the kid's name?
Yes, I am calling "bullshit" on this thread, in case you were wondering.
More than civilly liable. Here in Colorado, it is a CRIME for a visibly-drunk person to be served alcohol on licensed premises. Bartenders (in theory) can go to jail and businesses (in practice) can lose their liquor licenses.
It's akin to shooting an intruder more than once - once is considered self defense, more than once can be considered murder.
They're not that close. Especially because the alcohol thing is true and the "if you shot him once you meant to murder him" is crap and nonsense. If you were legally justified in using deadly force to protect yourself, then you were legally justified in shooting as many times as was required to control the threat.
There've been a few changes between now and then. Iran bought a dozen or so F-14A fighters back in the 1970's. This was back when Shah Pahlavi was in charge over there and Ford or Carter was president here.
The Shah fell in 1979, to be replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeni, who indeed was the Hezbollah's best friend. We couldn't really take the planes back.
By cannibalizing most of the planes, Iran may have been able to keep two or three in the air. However, they probably still have 1970's avionics, and parts can't be that easy to find.
Colorado Revised Statute 18-4-205 (1993):
(1)A person commits possession of burglary tools if he possesses any explosive, tool, instrument, or other article adapted, designed, or communly used for committing or facilitating the commission of an offense involving forcible entry into premises or theft by a physical taking, and intends to use the thing possessed, or knows that some person intends to use the thing possessed, in the commission of such an offense.
(2) Possession of burglary tools is a class 6 felony.
In other words, for it to be a crime here, the person must have a specific intent to use such tools in the commission of a crime.
And I don't think we really license locksmiths here. Maybe Denver does, but they're also the only place in Colorado where armed guards need to be licensed. It's probably a way for the city tax office to make a little extra money.
Speaking of which, if any fellow Coloradans know of a storefront dealer in lockpicks, I'd love to know about it. I could use some for work.
Yep. Forensic accountants step p to regular accountant, who step up to successful insurance salesmen, who can continue to climb until they're unsuccessful insurance salesmen. I'm sure there's a reason for having the latter up on the roof.
You laugh, but almost.
They're the ones who look through umpteen million documents to reconstruct what happened. Then they get to spend another month testifying at trial while a jury's eyes glaze over.
It's very detailed (anal?) work. They're basically a private-sector financial-crimes investigator. (Hell, that's why the FBI required applicants to be either lawyers or accountants for many years-investigating white-collar crime often does require that kind of talent)
There are ethical reasons for them to do otherwise.
The attorney's duty is to represent his client's interests by all means allowed by law. Pure and simple. Defense counsel does not work for you or me (especially not me!). He works for the defendant.
I'm a cop, and have been one for almost my entire adult life. Believe me, I have little reason to love the defense bar. However, we have to be fair. They're doing a job which is needed in our system of justice, and even mandated by our Constitution. And despite the ethical issues of an Alan Dershowitz or the circus theatrics of a Johnny Cochran, the profession of law has enough honorable practitioners that I think it can be called an honorable profession.
Yes, I think some of them are ignorant as hell and try to encourage ignorance. That's how they work in the cases that go to trial: their job is to create doubt in the mind of one juror. I had a vehicular assault case (a felony in my state) in which the central issue became whether or not the defendant was driving 70MPH on a wet 35MPH street, and was that speed the reason for his clobbering a pedestrian.
Northwestern University publishes some standard equations which are pretty much universal for determining speed. One of them takes in the percentage of braking (100% if all four wheels braked, as they did in this case), the drag factor of the road surface (wet new asphalt, empirically it was found to be about .48), and the lengths of the skidmarks. Plug those in and you know exactly how much speed was scrubbed off in the skid.
It's pretty straightforward, if you have a high school education. One juror did not, and the defense counsel's strategy was to try and twist my testimony to confuse the crap out of that juror.
He was representing his client's interests, just like the law and his canon require. It didn't work (his client was sentenced to three years, all but eight months suspended and restitution for ALL of the victim's medical bills. Probably reasonable, IMHO, for a case of felony stupid resulting in serious bodily injury to someone who didn't deserve it.) They have their duty. I can hardly fault them for doing it as well as they know how. In the end, there are aspects of my job that bother me too. Real life is like that sometimes.
With him, nothing was off-topic.
Have you read Full House
? In it, he explores the disappearance of .400 batting and manages to use that to explain natural history. And it even got me slightly interested in baseball. Me! Baseball! I HATE baseball! (Maybe it was just being raised on the Kansas Shitty Royals)
I've never seen him in person, but his unwritten work is a sore loss for all of us. At least in his writing, he was a brilliant, (+5 Insightful, we'd call him here) teacher.
Because only in a bad Tom Clancy novel will the Vikings ever make it to the Super Bowl.
Look at the chronology.
The Declaration of Independence was released in 1776. Certain of the battles had occurred before then, but it was really 1776 and even later before even a majority of the revolutionaries actually came out for independence. And even then, there were actually voices calling for reunification for another twenty years.
Also, the DoI has very little legal significance. If you try to cite it in court, the judge will slap the shit out of you for wasting his time. It was mainly just a hate letter to George III and the Parliament.
When the First Continental Congress met, that was the beginning of the Confederacy. (Not the Civil war, but the Articles of Confederation confederacy.) It persisted for a decade and change, but around the middle and end of the war, people started to notice that its central government had almost no power whatsoever. Some of them also felt that to be a bad thing.
Accordingly, a convention was called in 1787, ostensibly for the purpose of revising the Articles. In practice, the convention came out with a brand-spanking-new Constitution. A masterpiece of compromise, in that nobody was really THAT happy with it, but just about everybody with a stake who wasn't in need of mental health care could live with it.
Its proponents began to release a variety of anonymous and psuedo-anonymous screeds to convince the populace to support their new Constitution. These later became collectively known as the Federalist papers, because they were released by proponents of a stronger Federal system.
Unfortunately (IMHO), their opponents couldn't get their thumbs out and get organized and find themselves a catchy title, so history ended up knowing them as the Anti-Federalists. Their major contribution was that of forcing the Federalists to include a bill of rights, which was largely modelled on the Virginia declaration.
We didn't descend into chaos at the departure of the British, like the French did when they deposed the various Bourbons a few years later. And there's a critical difference between the two revolutions that explains why:
We didn't change very much. Local government is the government that accounts for 99% of Americans' day-to-day life. Speeding tickets are written by city cops. Schools are run typically by county school boards. Zoning, water, fire-and-rescue, courts, etc. are muni and county functions in pretty much the entire US. Hell, even at the time, national defense was a local function. (It still is, but to a greatly reduced extent. In theory, the National Guard is supposed to be local, even though they can be Federalized at a whim and the courts have ruled that they're not actually the Militia.)
As a result, the institutions that really did keep order in the US in the late 1700's didn't really change, even when the British were tossed out. The middle class was relatively secure. Admittedly, I may be the only guy on /. who thinks a large and secure middle class is a GOOD thing...
Close, but not quite.
We can open an investigation based upon anything. Until a seizure or search (within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment) is conducted, no evidence is required.
Upon developing probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime, a police officer may arrest that person or seek an arrest warrant from a judge, or (in Colorado), issue a summons and release.
Upon developing probable cause to believe that a given place contains evidence, contraband, or the like, an officer may obtain a search warrant from a judge. Under certain circumstances, the officer can also search without a warrant.
Certain types of non-testimonial evidence for identifying suspects can be taken on less than probable cause. Hair or blood for DNA, for example, can be taken from a person by court order pursuant to Colorado Rule of Criminal Procedure 41.1 or analogous rules in other states.
Even if a person is taken into custody, 99% of the time he'll be able to post bond. No-bond arrests are actually very uncommon in this state. It pretty much has to be a pretty serious felony for a no-bond hold. And for non-violent misdemeanors, we USUALLY will scratch a summons into county court and release him on his signature.
And if some officer has a warrant, then that means some judge is satisfied that the probable cause exists to support it. Warrants basically don't exist in the US until some guy in a black muumuu signs them.
I'm willing to accept, for argument's sake, the general case: that it can be easier to keep an open mind without face-to-face contact.
In the specific case of the inner-city gang member, I have to disagree. They tend to be as paranoid as the Kremlin or the Communist Chinese, and only slightly less so than us cops. It's actually a relatively rare one who's been more than five miles from his place of birth, not counting hospitals and correctional facilities. People who get drawn into gangs tend to have a worldview that almost denies the existence of a world outside of their own turf and maybe that of their rivals.
Smaller cities (like my own, a city of under 150,000 in Colorado) tend to have gangs with less of an insular worldview, but it's still a much smaller world for them than for us. And there's not a whole lot of desire to expand that either.
You also have to remember that a number of these gangs are multigenerational, and especially California-based Hispanic gangs. There are plenty of people who are actually the third generation of their family to be inside. Grandpa, if he's still alive, is decidedly a veterano and that's one source of prestige for his grandson.
I'll give the internet this: I don't see how it's making things worse. The nazis, communists, and other related scrotesacks may have an easier time joining each other, but it also makes it easier for the rest of us to watch them.
Did he (or anyone) read the Constitution?
It doesn't explicitly deny ANYONE the right to vote. It says that the right to vote shall not be denied on the basis of age, to any person 18 or older.
Important difference there. That leaves it open for a state to open the franchise to high schoolers. Just like a state could allow the vote by black people or women prior to the passage of those relevant amendments. Few did, but it was legal.
But since he wasn't talking about anything actually in the Constitution, I didn't think this thread was about the Constitution.