No, this is POP3 we're talking about. The only thing the client does is issue some commands to download mail. The messages are generated by the sender.
Sure it's POP3? I've got a pack of Camel Lights that say M$ either already has, or will in the near futute embrace and extend POP3 as we know it.
To be fair, I've never heard of Outhouse being used to send spam. Trying to sustain a connection that long would probably crash it.
Yeah, I was aware that it wasn't directly taking the money...but what happens once bin Laden dies, or the organizations/individuals with frozen assets are prosecuted and convicted. Does the money then go to the government, get wiped out of existence, or what?
Money doesn't just "get wiped out of existence."
What happens is eventually, the money either gets released or forfeited. Release basically requires the owner's petition for the release to be granted by a court, AIUI (I'm a little weak on Federal forfeiture law.) Forfeiture means that the government basically files a lawsuit with the money/assets as a defendant, and is required to show to a preponderance of the evidence that the money was either the proceeds of a criminal enterprise or the means to commit one.
If the money's traceable to ObL, well, he ain't getting it back. He'd have to appear in court to petition, and would be hooked in a heartbeat.
Or the money can stay frozen indefinitely. If he dies, that's not impossible.
I think it's worth noting that this is just another opt-out bill, giving each spambag his one bite at the apple.
Well, you let enough people take their bite, and you don't have any apple left for yourself. All the bill requires is contact information and some sort of remove link.
Just about every spam has some sort of contact, although that contact is the spam's payload. It's the toll-free phone number that you call to order the toner cartridges. It's the website that you visit to order the herbal viagra. It's the Post Office box that you use to piss money away on useless "credit repair" scams. Or it's the drop-box address on Yahoo/Hotmail/Netaddress/whatever to request more information on the laundry balls.
And the people who trust remove lists are either naive or not very bright. Spammers are well-known for using them merely to harvest more addresses to sell. Why would anybody trust them? You might want to look into Rodney Joffe's SafeEPS system. It was intended to be a remove list developed by a known and trusted anti-spammer, and the DMA pretended to be interested. Joffe offered to sell it to the US Direct Marketing Association for one dollar-and the DMA refused. They make their money by forcing their spew on people. Taking away their ability to market to people who don't want it takes away their reason-to-be. SafeEPS, of course, died after that. No spammer is going to use it.
If the gentleman from Texas wants a legitimate spam bill, he needs to think more in terms of opt-in. Opt-in means no marketing email unless you actually REQUEST marketing email. In other words, the whole thing goes only with the permission of ALL of the people involved. Considering that the recipient has to pay to receive the crap, it seems only fair that he should decide just what gets sent to him.
Or we could do something even more sensible and leave Congress out of it. MAPS had something going with their RBL. They're dying now, under the weight of frivolous but expensive lawsuits and a very questionable settlement with Exactis/Experian. However, SPEWS seems to be taking their place. Those two organizations, SPEWS in particular, are doing more to fight spam than even the best new law could hope for.
But the bills referenced in the article above? Somewhere between useless and worse-than-useless.
They make some professional "instant" cameras that take dynamite photos. However, there is only so big of a market for those.
And their so-called "professional" cameras don't measure up.
Every so often, I need to re-evaluate my section's equipment at work to see what's better than what we have and what needs to be replaced. Since my section is traffic and we do accident investigations, we need good cameras. The problem is, Polaroid has NOTHING that compares to a decent 35mm setup with professional-grade color print film.Not in our budget, anyway.
Digitals won't do us any good either. First of all, the very best (and most expensive) has resolution that MAY (on a good day) compare to the ASA100 that I carry for daylight, and the picture quality goes all to hell after dark.
More importantly, there exists a thing called "Photoshop." The time will come, and soon, that any dumb-assed law school student summer intern at the ACLU can get a digital photo suppressed in court for that.
The legal test for admissibility of a photo in court is that it: A., be of probative value that exceeds whatever tendency it may have to inflame the passions of a jury; and B., it must be an accurate representation of the scene at the time that it was taken.[1] When digital photo manipulation is within the hands of anybody with access to a w4r3z site, the court is less likely to automatically assume B and less likely to believe us about it.
OTOH, with a camera using normal film, it's simple enough to produce a negative to show that the photos were unaltered. The judge can see the negative. The defense cartooney can see the negative. Procedures exist for the defense cartooney to have the negative examined by his own specialist. In other words, everybody involved can see that the photos were undoctored. With a digital, they'd all have to take my word for it.
And getting polaroid duplicates is a bitch.
[1] There are other factors, but they don't really affect this discussion. You can violate the Fourth Amendment with any camera.
And without a touchy/feely/draggy/droppy/cutsie/wootsie GUI, Redhat 7.1 flies on a Dell Dimension XPS T450 (yes, 450 mhz) with 128 megs of RAM. Try the latest Gnome or KDE on this machine and it crawls. Or is the slowness part of the attempt to totally duplicate the Windows look-n-feel?
Maybe there's another issue with your system. I run KDE on top of Mandrake 8.0/2.4.12 on a Dell Inspiron, 333MHz and 96M, and it's not slow or choppy at all. I tried FVWM and AfterStep both, and there's not much speed difference between the three that I've noticed.
People don't buy computers to run GUI's, they buy computers to run apps.
So true. What linux needs now is an easy way to work with Word/Office/Access.
Pulmonary Anthrax can be treated with antibiotics up to a point. After serious symptoms develop, antibiotics aren't particularly effective.
ISTR that's true for all of the means of infection, not just pulmonary. A course of antibiotics (I want to say sixty days of Cipro, but I'm not a doctor) is generally effective, but only if it's started before symptoms manifest. Once the patient shows symptoms, though, his immune system has to fight the bug all on its own and antibiotics are irrelevant.
Treating the disease requires knowing that you've been exposed (or may have been exposed), then getting medicated ASAP. In a serious attack, there's no guarantee that these things could happen quickly enough to avoid a good number of deaths.
Very true. The Wall Street Journal has actually had a couple of good articles on the subject. One was about a city in Texas which conducted a drill to see if its fire/police/hospital services could handle an outbreak. The results were not good. In the end, they had to (simulated) quarrantine the town.
The other article that leaps to mind was about the company making the vaccine. They've been jumped on HARD by the FDA over the years for bad sanitary procedures, with no guarantees that the problems have been fixed. The article also noted that, while an estimated 40 million doses of the vaccine exist, they were mostly made in the 50's and 60's, and there is just no reliable information about how much of the stuff is still effective. And then there are the horror stories about side effects...
I expect our economy would completely self-destruct if direct marketing ceased.
I doubt it. When's the last time you bought something from a fourth-class mailing? Particularly an unsolicited one?
Looking through the last week's mail for me....one credit card bill. One bank statement. Something from my wife's professional association. A letter from my mom and some pictures of the farm.
Oh, and twenty-three bulk-rate mailings. A mixture of two credit cards with "low, low 9.9% introductory rates" and $100 annual fees, junk mail from John Elway's car dealership, three solicitations to invest in real estate in Denver's overpriced market, a solicitation for an investment services firm in CA (which ISTR that the SEC is on the verge of shutting down), and a pound of other circulars addressed to "resident."
Would you buy a car based upon junk mail?
The only people who would be out of business would be the frauds and scam artists who make up the DMA.
Not that I necessarily support a ban on junk pmail. Junk email, OTOH....
But the people of Afganistan are as much victims of their terror as we have been. They should be our allies in this, and any military action must be directed only at the Taliban and bin Laden, and must be accompanied by humanitarian aid to the millions of refugees in the area.
What they really need is what's called "nation-building." I have a personal theory, that peace and prosperity in a society require, above all else, the rule of law, rather than of men. IOW, the law must be made supreme over the lawmakers. We've tried that here in the US, and it's worked more often than not. (Although I do mind one particular perjurer a couple-three years back...) Similarly, it seems to be working in the UK and the more stable nations on the European continent.
They actually do have a religious tradition that implies some respect for democracy. I seem to remember, from a half-forgotten college class on the region, that the Islamic tradition includes a saying by the Prophet Muhammad that "the majority will not agree to error." Even though I doubt he meant universal suffrage the way that the US/UK/Continental Europe know it, that seems to me to be a clear signal that democracy wouldn't be completely foreign if sold in those terms.
They'll need to come up with their own laws, obviously. Afghanistan is not Colorado, and so translating the Colorado Revised Statutes into Pashtu probably wouldn't be what they needed. But that's something that they need to do, so that people can actually have justifiable faith in a "system" beyond personal revenge. IMHO, that's a prerequisite for any lasting development. Despite the jokes we all make, settling disputes with lawyers is a lot more civilized than settling them with blood feuds.
Secondly, we must allow the people of Afghanistan to decide the future course of their own country. Funding one militant group against another and setting up puppet governments is what got us into this situation (we funded the Taliban against the russians in the 80's),
Minor nitpick: We funded EVERYONE in Afghanistan who wasn't wearing a Soviet uniform. That some of the training and money landed on the people who now call themselves "Taleban" is unfortunate, but at the time the alternative appeared far worse.
and is in general why everyone in the middle east hates our meddling butts, and I don't blame them.
Well, everyone except for the people we keep bailing out of things. I do believe the king of Kuwait was ready to blow President GHW Bush on the White House lawn back in 1991, and the Saudi royal family doesn't mind us that much. Or the current government of Egypt. Not many people there really love us, but I doubt that many of them genuinely hate us either. Remember P.J. O'Rourke's story about the militiaman in Beiruit who condemned the US as Satanic in one breath, and then said his life's dream was to take his children to Disneyland to ride on the spinning tea cups? I'd be willing to bet that this kind of duality is fairly common.
The United States and its allies should stop pretending to take sides in conflicts in the region and allow them to pursue their own course. Our continued support of Isreal has been and continues to be a major sticking point for the region. But helping the other side(s) is not the solution. It's none of our fucking business.
The problem there is, it's usually in the US' interests to promote democracy and support freely-elected governments. Israel is a pretty sad example, I'll grant you. The Shin Bet (Israeli secret police) are a bunch of thugs, almost as bad as the goddamn PRC's Armed People's Police, and an embarassment to what I see as a normally-honorable profession. They have some major problems with their government. But damn it, the entire region has so very few democracies (Egypt and Turkey being the only two I can name offhand) that the ones that do exist are worth supporting.
Granted, shutting off the military aid wouldn't be such a bad thing, IMHO. Or at least using as a lever. "Hey, guys. You need to stop allowing torture in your prisons or this year's $3e9 goes to someone else."
We must protect ourselves against terrorists. But NOT by manipulating and destroying the entire region of the world that hates us. If we're not extrememly careful in our actions, we will create far more enemies in the region than we have now.
I actually agree. Ill-conceived action could alienate the allies we do have.
We should take a hint from post-WWII actions with Germany and Japan, who are now two of our greatest allies and economic partners. We must commit resources to the region to ensure their economic future of the region.
It's that whole "nation-building" thing again. Afghanistan needs real courts with real laws that were passed by a government with real consent from the governed. They need schools that teach something besides how to memorize the Koran and shoot an AK-47 (badly). And they need a real economy offering real goods and services that will bring in real money. Unfortunately, all they have is opium, and Golden Crescent opium (the variety grown in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan) is of very low quality. It's not capable of being refined for medical uses, and it's so poor that the heroin made from it just won't sell anywhere outside the region. It's bad enough when the entire economy is based upon drugs, but it's terrible when the entire economy is based upon drugs that no junkie in the US or Europe would touch.
Frankly, I'm not sure what would work best for them. I'm not an economist, just a dumb-ass traffic cop somewhere in the western US. But maybe, in the distant future, after a generation of them have graduated from real schools with real educations, they can work that out for themselves.
Plus, as the article says, running a nameserver is not against the Terms and Conditions of Optus, so there is little they can do about this.
They can change their TOS. They can forbid spam-support services from using their networks. They can refuse to renew their contracts with spammers.
Anti-Spam people often seem to be so wrapped up in their cause, they often don't realise they are doing more harm than good, i.e. blocking half of Australia's email.
Well, Optus got listed because they failed to respond to spam complaints. For this past month, I've been getting more spam volume than the volume from my Bugtraq subscription. About a quarter of that was connected to Optus in one way or another. In other words, Optus has been filling my mailbox with crap. I lose nothing by blocking them, and it makes my life easier.
The one response I've had from Optus that wasn't an autoack amounted to "Screw you. Hosting spammers is legal." If their customers consider that to be acceptable net behavior, then they don't need to email me. There is no legal right to send email, anywhere in any Constitution in any nation at all. Or any legal need for me to accept it.
If that situation did perpetuate itself, would there be any legal liability on behalf of either Optus or spews.org for the intentional breach of service to the rest of Optus' customers? You would think that after a while the customers would start suing either or both parties to the dispute.
Spews set itself up in a way that makes it hard to sue and harder to serve. It's not exactly incorporated, and most if not all the principals are unknown.
FWIW, spammers have tried suing blocklist operators before. MAPS has, thus far, beaten pretty much every legal challenge against them, although the latest one with Media3 came to a somewhat questionable settlement. At least in the US, the precedent is in favor of the blocklist operators.
As for suing the providers...I frankly don't know. If my own ISP managed to get itself listed, I'd consider suing them for failing to enforce its AUP and therefore interfering with my service.
Yeah, a bunch of them died, but I'd say 95% had no clue of the dangers (except for some firefighters who work the building collapse units) that awaited them in that death trap.
IOW, the officers all said to each other: "A plane just hit the building. It's perfectly safe, so we'd better go in and evacuate it right the fuck now!"
Unlikely.
Yeah they risk their lives every day but they get paid pretty well to do it (after top pay over 60+/ per annum with great benefits)
Which benefits? The comp time that we never get to take? The wonderful schedule that precludes having to be paged out of bed to investigate a traffic accident in which a five-year-old died? The cost-of-living adjustments that my jurisdiction hasn't had for about five years?
Also, command staff makes that kind of money. The working officers/detectives don't without working an assload of overtime, and the sergeants may not either. And ISTR that $60K isn't a whole lot in New York's housing market. Hell, I've been in this for a long time. I've got a number of instructor certifications. I've got special-unit certification two separate ways (SWAT and Traffic Accident Investigation). And I sure don't make $60K/year.
and, in the case of firefighters, get all the tang they can drink (I'm on the firefighter list myself and should be going in in a few months - maybe sooner now).
And with the ignorance you show above, I hope like hell you're not going to be a firefighter in my area.
So for the same reason we shouldn't profile all arabs as terrorists, we shouldn't paint all cops with the martyr brush. Many are good men and women, but just as many as before still have lubed up broomsticks.
Just as many cops of lubed up broomsticks as have been good men and women? In other words, you're either saying that most cops sexually molest suspects, or that there are about five good cops in the US. Now I really hope you were lying about being a firefighter.
Afghan e-Commerce : Commerce? You have to have something to sell, without opium, they have little the world, in general, wants.
Even with opium they have nothing. "Golden Crescent" (Afghan/Pakistani) opium tends to be of very poor quality. Almost none leaves the region, because the Mexican, Colombian, and Golden Triangle (SE Asia) stuff is of far higher grade. Why would hopheads with money, like Americans or Europeans, shell out for crap when good stuff is grown more cheaply in places that still have shipping?
[1] The really high-grade stuff, China White, has been grown in Mexico for maybe five years now. Some of the Colombian growers are experimenting with it, as the market for cocaine is slowly shrinking.
But has the thought crossed anyone's mind that what we ought to do is drag bin Laden and company's asses back here and try them in a criminal court? Better yet, try them in front of a war crimes tribunal in Geneva.
I very strongly agree with the 'trial' part. Not so strongly about the "war crimes tribunal' part.
IMHO it's wrong to call them soldiers. Real soldiers follow a certain code of conduct ('The Laws of Land Warfare,' I think it's called). These people do not. They don't need the respect accorded to real soldiers.
They're criminals, pure and simple. IMHO, the correct thing to do with them is to treat them as no more than a particularly vile sort of common criminal. Gather the evidence and arrest them. March them into the appropriate courtrooms, to be tried under the appropriate law[1]. And when the jury brings in the guilty verdict, give them Timothy McVeigh's seat in Terre Haute.
I have no doubt, at this point, that they'd be found guilty. And I find it hard to imagine that they wouldn't be executed, whatever the rules in Geneva are at the moment.
Bear in mind that only one First-World nation operates a death penalty. If they're tried in an international tribunal under any law but US law, they just plain won't get the death penalty.
But your point about humiliation is nice. The thought of a bunch of al-Qaida members making little rocks out of big ones in Leavenworth for the rest of their lives brings a smile to my face, especially coupled with the embarassment of owing their lives to a bunch of soft-hearted Americans.
On the other hand, I recognize that such action might involve unnecessary risk to the soldiers who'd have to carry it out... in which case, screw it, just take him and his out.
I know a few cops who'd be willing to chance it, given the proper support. Me, for instance. I've got some SWAT gear. I'm sure I could bs my way into a few weeks off for it.:)
[1] Jurisdiction would be interesting. The hijackings fall under a Federal 'air piracy' statute, which I believe is capital when the piracy results in death. The deaths fall under various states' murder statutes, Pennsylvania and New York. I don't remember if the Pentagon is in Virginia or DC, but DC law is something I don't know particularly well-it's a bizarre hodgepodge of Federal law and DC municipal code.
I don't know if any involved states have a death penalty. I'd be a little surprised if NY did, and a little more surprised if VA didn't.
Someone is over-reacting here alright, but it is Congress.
THat's what Congressmen do. When we're lucky, the overreaction dies in conference committee.
Point one -- our airport security has been greatly degraded by deregulation. Security guards get minimum wage and minimal training. Now that keeps airfares down sure enough, but it is not without a price, is it?
So what's the solution? The nearest real airport to me is Denver International. Denver Police does have a station at the airport. However, there's no way in hell they have enough officers to take over the security screening entirely. Better-trained staff? Maybe, but frankly I'm not sure that Pinkerton and Wackenhut can do it either.
There's been talk about target-hardening of the planes. I see the Federal Air Marshal program being revived, or maybe the airlines' in-house security people taking that role. It's certainly worked for El Al, and IIRC British Airways employs a number of former SAS troopers in smilar duties. When was the last time either airline has been hijacked?
Point two -- Customs stopped racial profiling recently and their "hit rate" in fact went up. In conjunction with probable cause racial background is just another piece of information. Without probable cause it is a red herring.
Exactly right. I teach Highway Drug Interdiction to police officers, and "racial profiling" is discussed. What I've been teaching, and what I stand by, is that it's already illegal (see the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution) and that it causes them to miss things. If they key in on a certain minority group, they're going to miss 75% of the drugs and fugitives.
Point three -- Jets at Andrews were not on ready status even though the Mossad and NSA both had strong indications of a major attack coming. Are Washington and NY not considered targets anymore? Let's rethink our air defense, even though the next attack will likely be different.
Did the indications give a timeframe? Did they indicate that the attack would take a form that would make it reasonable to roust the USAF? "Indications" are like anonymous tips. Sometimes they pan out. More often, they're a pain in the ass that serves no benefit and we can't act on them without violating someone's civil rights. Similarly, putting a flight of F16's on CAP over Washington might have kept the Pentagon from being hit. Or they might have resulted in uninvolved airliners being shot down. Or they might have had no effect either way.
When fighter pilots take off, they have Rules of Engagement assigned by their command authority. Whoever writes a RoE that involves shooting down civilian airliners is going to have a hard time of it-no matter what he does, someone's going to use 20/20 hindsight to say that it's wrong. And "wrong" in this case will generally involve a lot of dead people.
Point four -- banning strong encryption will not stop secure terrorist communications, but it will certainly and definitely weaken our personal, banking, and e-commerce security. This aids the terrorists, we shouldn't do it.
We shouldn't do it anyway. The terrorists wanted to make us change our way of life. Our way of life, as Americans, include the fact that "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." To sacrifice our liberty is to admit defeat and give these murderers a victory. THat sets a precedent that is best not set, as it encourages them. Worse, to surrender in that manner is COWARDICE.
Point five -- the adminstration isn't even telling Congress what is happening. Giving all of us real information might allow us to participate meaningfully instead of just randomly lashing out at any Arab-looking Americans. An Indian was shot to death today because someone thought him an Arab.
What meaningful participation do you mean? I had to stand in line for three hours to donate blood at a fully-staffed and efficient blood bank. That says to me that people are indeed participating meaningfully. As far as taking the fight to the people who killed about 5000 of our own...Slashdot isn't going to do that. That will be done either by police and the FBI or by our armed forces. The rescue is being done by FDNY and a number of search and rescue teams, and for very good reason they're turning away most volunteers.
One thing that might interest you is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the UN General Assembly in 1948. The US, like the vast majority of world nations, deems various parts of it "unnecessary,"
There's a reason for that.
I assume you're familiar with the difference between "positive rights" and "negative rights." A "positive right" is a right that requires real effort by other people. The "right to housing" requires someone to build the house. The "right to health care" requires someone to spend ten or twelve years in medical school and then give away their labor.
OTOH, "negative" rights only require inaction by others. A prime example is "freedom of speech" as practiced in the US. For the right to be secure, all that has to happen is that nobody actively tries to interfere.
In other words, it's fully possible to enjoy a negative right without interfering with the negative rights of others.It's just plain impossible to have a positive right without interfering with others. Lets take this "right to health care" that's been a topic of discussion in the US for the last decade. For you to receive health care, someone else must provide it. That means a doctor must either care for you gratis, thus violating his property rights to his own labor, or someone must pay the doctor.
Where does the pay come from? Probably some sort of taxation. Taxation is enforceable LAW. And when you look at the word 'enforceable,' you damn well better see that the word FORCE is right at the middle of it. That's what law is: FORCE. Law is meaningless without a bunch of guys with blue poly-blend clothes, tin badges, guns, and stupid-looking mustaches to make it happen.
So, how many positive rights do you really want to have? Just bear in mind that for each one that you decide to enshrine into law, someone will likely die for not providing it. How much blood is "the right to education" worth to you?
We're hoping to find evidence of criminal activity? WTF? Is a mere hope all it takes the FBI to get a freaking search warrant these days to carry things out in boxes?!
No, that's just the way police PIO's talk.
"Criminal evidence" is items, documents, statements, etc., which would tend to prove or disprove a fact in a criminal matter.
What our dear agent was saying was basically, "We conducted our search and seized the items defined in our warrant. Now we intend to examine them to determine their probative value in court. We hope they will shed light on the matter before us."
And the agents needed the same standard of proof that cops in the US have needed for two centuries or so now: Probable cause to believe that items would be present which constitute evidence of a crime.
FWIW, you don't need to have a suspect in order to get a search warrant. All you need is the probable cause to believe the evidence exists and is in a particular place, in an affidavit, given to a judge for his signature.
And yes, they carried them out in boxes. Would you prefer that they carried the items out in a stolen handbag?
However, the Skylab crews didn't punch a hole in their own craft by joyriding around it in a return vehicle. Let the jokes fly.
Give MIR's designers and builders some credit: Their creation gave fifteen years of service. The average American can't even keep a car running for fifteen years, and this in an environment where you don't need a space suit to change the oil.
A speeding ticket is not a criminal offense (in most jurisdictions, I'm sure there's an exception out there to make me wrong).
There's a very long list of exceptions. Look at the municipal code of just about every city in the US that has a municipal traffic code.
In my city, speeding IS a crime, albeit a minor one. You get caught, you get issued. You have the option of paying by mail. Fail to pay by mail within the time perior (fifteen days in my city) and it becomes a summons to appear in the municipal court. Fail to appear on the summons, and a warrant is issued for your arrest.
Tell the cop that you won't take care of the ticket one way or the other, and he'll arrest you right then, assuming that the offense is arrestable and the officer is willing to deal with the paper. I usually just tell the driver "You've been served. If you want to leave this hanging, it's your problem."
Just about every home-rule city in Colorado has the same thing, with only the specific details varying. Most other states are similar, in that they have such practices at the state level or allow cities or counties to enact them into law.
Under the STATE CODE[1], speeding isn't necessarily a crime. It may just be a civil traffic infraction. (The cutoff is at 20MPH over the limit). Even so, fail to pay or appear and the court will simply enter a default judgement against you. Then DMV cancels your license. Then you will almost certainly be arrested if you're caught driving on a cancelled[1] license.
[1] State Patrol, State Parks and Wildlife, etc., only write under the state traffic code. However, city officers have the discretion to charge under either state law or muni code.
[2] The legal term is "denied." If your license is suspended, revoked, or cancelled in any state in the Traffic Offender's Compact, then it's automatically denied in Colorado. That means sitting behind the wheel on any public roadway in the state is good for jail time.
Ed Abbey had a saying: "Bake your own bread, brew your own beer, and pee off the front porch any time you bloody well please."
I've adopted it into my life. Independent people make MaxiMegaloCorp nervous, and those bastards have been comfortable too long.
They sell you Wonder Bread. Try beaking the real kind. The smell of a loaf of seven-grain about to come out of the oven is better than sex or cocaine.
Change your oil yourself. In many states, the chain shops are required to accept the used oil for recycling without charge. Besides, do you want to spend $30 and twenty minutes waiting, or do you want to spend about $8, about twenty minutes of work, and be damn sure it was done right?
Brew your own beer. Most beer sucks, including almost all of the beer legal for supermarket sales in my state. Not to mention, Coors' is brewed about fifty miles from me, and is one of the more offensive corporations on the planet.
If you smoke, grow your own tobacco. RJR the likes may have gotten a raw deal in the courts, but they're scum just the same. How badly do they need your money?
If your grocery store is a chain of more than a couple-three stores, you probably end up giving a lot of money to some real scum like Archer-Daniels-Midland, "Supermarket to the World." Find a decent coop. Better yet, put in a garden. IMHO, a baked chicken tastes better when you raised it yourself, and you didn't need to give any money to Tyson to get it.
Cut your own damn firewood and clean your own chimney. The way your utility company probably tries to fuck you, burning a cord or two of pine this winter will keep you especially warm.
I think you can see where this is going: Declare independence. Look at your life, and look at all of the places where you're paying someone else or depending on someone else to do something that you could easily do for yourself. People comfortable in such dependent conditions are easily blackmailed and tend to bend over and take it. People used to doing for themselves tend to be more resistant to being screwed. A gardening handloading blacksmithing gourmet fly-tying brewer makes the Powers-That-Be nervous, because he's in a position to tell them where to go if he doesn't like their latest stunt.
And I'm going to cut this off, because I've got Martina McBride's "Independence Day" stuck in my head now, and it's a really annoying song.
Why do large companies like Borders announce implementations of things like this, suspend them upon complaints and then review things like customer's rights to privacy? Are these only an issue when people complain?
That's why we need to smack them down for even considering this crap.
I went to a local Borders today, and picked up about four ORA titles that I've been needing, plus a few other things. Maybe about $200 worth of cover price. I then went to the service desk and asked for the manager. He showed up and I told him that I had some serious concerns about the company's plans to use face-recognition software. He said the plan had been abandoned. I said that I was concerned that they had even considered such behavior, and that I didn't feel safe shopping at a bookstore that would consider such invasions.
Then I asked if he'd mind helping me re-shelf the books I ended up not buying.
The keys to even being heard are to be polite and to explain the problem to them in a language that they can understand. In Borders' case, the language is mainly money. I probably blow a thousand or so on books each year, not counting the work-related ones that Borders/B&N don't stock and wouldn't be able to order. That's about a grand that Borders has lost, assuming that they stay on good behavior and I lift my boycott after a year instead of going indefinitely.
We're talking about corporations, not individuals. I'm not fond of the notion of punishing people because of their ideas. However, if a corporation could spring this and shut it down after public outcry, I think it's entirely reasonable to question what other plans they might have, and whether these plans came from the same mindset. And they damned well don't need to be thinking such thoughts with my money.
Yes, their acts are legal, although in some states they'd be required to post the signs. And I think such things should be legal, on private property. However, they can do it without my money. In the book market, we're fortunate enough to have other options. Tattered Cover in Denver, in particular, is a good one if you have privacy concerns. They got into, and won, a legal pissing match with a regional drug task force over turning over their customer records.
I haven't heard any complaints about Powell's in Oregon either. And I don't doubt that similar stores exist elsewhere in the US and the world.
When you bring up amazon.com, the smart card looks though the inventory. It then selects the entire goddamn Oprah Winfrey Reading List, O'Reilly's "MSCE in a Nutshell," and about thirty-seven out-of-print Danielle Steele titles that have been sitting in the warehouse taking up valuable space for six years, and orders them for you but gives a delivery address of some guy in the Republic of Chad who's very literate but not in English. You then receive the festive non-denominational holiday giftwrap which should have been wrapped around the books that I sent to my sister last year, along with a second shipping charge.
Seriously, though, it's a way to store more information on the card and to make it more easily-accessable. There are readers on the market that will read the card from several inches away. The privacy implications should be obvious: How long until the card can be read WHILE IT'S STILL IN YOUR BILLFOLD? At any rate, the "smart card" chip does not necessarily need to actually be inserted into a card reader the way the magnetic stripes do.
There's talk of using them on driver's licenses to store fingerprints[1] and blood type and so forth. The purpose of this should be obvious, but unfortunately, it isn't. At least not to me.
Re:How long can the US DoJ go on?
on
Sklyarov Update
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· Score: 3, Informative
"Strange things happen under law, but since Adobe has withdrawn it's complaint, how long can the US Department of [in]Justice continue to persue the case? It's going to be real hard to convict Dmitry if Adobe says on the stand "No, of course Rot13 is not encryption.
Just as a point of clarification:
In the United States, in criminal matters, the plaintiff is The People(TM). NOT the individual victim. When I wrote someone a summons for vandalism a week or so ago, the form said The People of the City of XXXXXXX, by and for The People of the State of Colorado, vs Defendant.
It's not unheard of for a victim to decide he doesn't want a case pushed. In point of fact, it happens in about 80% of a certain category of violent crime in my area[1]. However, prosecutors are VERY STRONGLY discouraged from dismissing a case because of an uncooperative victim, because such a practice lends itself to tampering with victims or witnesses.
Imagine it: You commit a felony crime against someone. He calls the police. A report is taken and referred to the District Cartooney, who files a C&I [2] with the court charging you with the crime. You subsequently influence the victim, somehow, to decide that he doesn't want the case pushed. That's a BIG part of why charging decisions are not left to victims. What kind of influence made him drop the case? What kind of influence did the Mafia use for decades? Hint: Modern street gangs use it too, which is why you can have killings in broad daylight in public where "nobody saw anything."
In cases without mandatory charging laws,[3] a complaint can be dismissed by a prosecutor. It's called "discretion." It's, unfortunately, most obvious in sexual assault cases, as it's damn near impossible to make a case without a cooperative victim on the witness stand. Once the case is bound over for trial, the DA has no obligation to drop it, but no prosecutor is going to push an unwinnable case. Refusing to testify can be contempt of court, but the usual practice is to consider that certain classes of victims have suffered enough.
Getting back to the point: It's not Adobe's decision. It's the US Attorney's decision, for the US Cartooney in the district in which the charges were brought (Northern California?). Ina case like this, in which the victim's victimhood is unclear and the defendant's criminal purpose is doubtful, a prosecutor would probably be very receptive to such a suggestion by Adobe. However, the US Cartooney is the ONLY person with the power to dismiss the charges. (Or the judge, but he can only do it if there's no probable cause to believe Skylarov did the prohibited act. Given where the case stands, that means the judge has no power to dismiss the charges.)
[1] Domestic violence offenses. But those aren't news for nerds, and I guess they don't constitute stuff that matters to anyone but the victim, her kids, and the cops who have to rescue her ass every other month.
[2] Complaint and Information, the name of the document that's filed with a court to begin a felony criminal case. In my state, they're filed with the county court and beging with "The District Attorney in and for the Sixth Judicial District informs the court that..." which explains the odd name.
[3] In my state, Domestic Violence and restraining order violations. A peace officer who develops probable cause to believe someone committed either is legally REQUIRED to arrest that person and book him into jail. A prosecutor is FORBIDDEN to drop the charges unless he can satisfy the court that guilt cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. THis is because we let DV's go for so long without taking them seriously, and the price for that is being paid in a lot of blood and tears.
FWIW, "Speedy Trial," at least in most states, means only that the trial itself begins within six months of the charging. Time spent at large, outside of the court's jurisdiction, etc., usually doesn't count.
I just looked at my notes again. I think it's more like 70 days from entry of plea now, in Federal cases.
Arent people usually arraigned within 48 hours? Why has this taken weeks to get to this point?
Not necessarily. Bond has to be set within 72 hours of arrest, weekends and holidays not included. A charge must be filed at that time also. Now, assuming I remember Federal criminal procedure, which I don't promise,'filed' means a grand jury must indict, in the case of felonies. I think a Fed misdemeanor requires only the filing of a complaint with the court.[1]
The other immediate proceeding is the bond hearing, as I said before. In districts without a pre-written bond schedule, the hearing is where the judge determines an appropriate bond in light of the level of risk posed by the defendant, etc. It can also be for a defendant to ask for a lower bond than established by a pre-set bond schedule.
Arraignment is a separate proceeding, AFTER the charging. The arraignment is where the defendant actually enters a plea.
FWIW, "Speedy Trial," at least in most states, means only that the trial itself begins within six months of the charging. Time spent at large, outside of the court's jurisdiction, etc., usually doesn't count.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it's POP3? I've got a pack of Camel Lights that say M$ either already has, or will in the near futute embrace and extend POP3 as we know it.
To be fair, I've never heard of Outhouse being used to send spam. Trying to sustain a connection that long would probably crash it.
Money doesn't just "get wiped out of existence."
What happens is eventually, the money either gets released or forfeited. Release basically requires the owner's petition for the release to be granted by a court, AIUI (I'm a little weak on Federal forfeiture law.) Forfeiture means that the government basically files a lawsuit with the money/assets as a defendant, and is required to show to a preponderance of the evidence that the money was either the proceeds of a criminal enterprise or the means to commit one.
If the money's traceable to ObL, well, he ain't getting it back. He'd have to appear in court to petition, and would be hooked in a heartbeat.
Or the money can stay frozen indefinitely. If he dies, that's not impossible.
Well, you let enough people take their bite, and you don't have any apple left for yourself. All the bill requires is contact information and some sort of remove link.
Just about every spam has some sort of contact, although that contact is the spam's payload. It's the toll-free phone number that you call to order the toner cartridges. It's the website that you visit to order the herbal viagra. It's the Post Office box that you use to piss money away on useless "credit repair" scams. Or it's the drop-box address on Yahoo/Hotmail/Netaddress/whatever to request more information on the laundry balls.
And the people who trust remove lists are either naive or not very bright. Spammers are well-known for using them merely to harvest more addresses to sell. Why would anybody trust them? You might want to look into Rodney Joffe's SafeEPS system. It was intended to be a remove list developed by a known and trusted anti-spammer, and the DMA pretended to be interested. Joffe offered to sell it to the US Direct Marketing Association for one dollar-and the DMA refused. They make their money by forcing their spew on people. Taking away their ability to market to people who don't want it takes away their reason-to-be. SafeEPS, of course, died after that. No spammer is going to use it.
If the gentleman from Texas wants a legitimate spam bill, he needs to think more in terms of opt-in. Opt-in means no marketing email unless you actually REQUEST marketing email. In other words, the whole thing goes only with the permission of ALL of the people involved. Considering that the recipient has to pay to receive the crap, it seems only fair that he should decide just what gets sent to him.
Or we could do something even more sensible and leave Congress out of it. MAPS had something going with their RBL. They're dying now, under the weight of frivolous but expensive lawsuits and a very questionable settlement with Exactis/Experian. However, SPEWS seems to be taking their place. Those two organizations, SPEWS in particular, are doing more to fight spam than even the best new law could hope for.
But the bills referenced in the article above? Somewhere between useless and worse-than-useless.
And their so-called "professional" cameras don't measure up.
Every so often, I need to re-evaluate my section's equipment at work to see what's better than what we have and what needs to be replaced. Since my section is traffic and we do accident investigations, we need good cameras. The problem is, Polaroid has NOTHING that compares to a decent 35mm setup with professional-grade color print film.Not in our budget, anyway.
Digitals won't do us any good either. First of all, the very best (and most expensive) has resolution that MAY (on a good day) compare to the ASA100 that I carry for daylight, and the picture quality goes all to hell after dark.
More importantly, there exists a thing called "Photoshop." The time will come, and soon, that any dumb-assed law school student summer intern at the ACLU can get a digital photo suppressed in court for that.
The legal test for admissibility of a photo in court is that it: A., be of probative value that exceeds whatever tendency it may have to inflame the passions of a jury; and B., it must be an accurate representation of the scene at the time that it was taken.[1] When digital photo manipulation is within the hands of anybody with access to a w4r3z site, the court is less likely to automatically assume B and less likely to believe us about it.
OTOH, with a camera using normal film, it's simple enough to produce a negative to show that the photos were unaltered. The judge can see the negative. The defense cartooney can see the negative. Procedures exist for the defense cartooney to have the negative examined by his own specialist. In other words, everybody involved can see that the photos were undoctored. With a digital, they'd all have to take my word for it.
And getting polaroid duplicates is a bitch.
[1] There are other factors, but they don't really affect this discussion. You can violate the Fourth Amendment with any camera.
Maybe there's another issue with your system. I run KDE on top of Mandrake 8.0/2.4.12 on a Dell Inspiron, 333MHz and 96M, and it's not slow or choppy at all. I tried FVWM and AfterStep both, and there's not much speed difference between the three that I've noticed.
People don't buy computers to run GUI's, they buy computers to run apps.
So true. What linux needs now is an easy way to work with Word/Office/Access.
ISTR that's true for all of the means of infection, not just pulmonary. A course of antibiotics (I want to say sixty days of Cipro, but I'm not a doctor) is generally effective, but only if it's started before symptoms manifest. Once the patient shows symptoms, though, his immune system has to fight the bug all on its own and antibiotics are irrelevant.
Treating the disease requires knowing that you've been exposed (or may have been exposed), then getting medicated ASAP. In a serious attack, there's no guarantee that these things could happen quickly enough to avoid a good number of deaths.
Very true. The Wall Street Journal has actually had a couple of good articles on the subject. One was about a city in Texas which conducted a drill to see if its fire/police/hospital services could handle an outbreak. The results were not good. In the end, they had to (simulated) quarrantine the town.
The other article that leaps to mind was about the company making the vaccine. They've been jumped on HARD by the FDA over the years for bad sanitary procedures, with no guarantees that the problems have been fixed. The article also noted that, while an estimated 40 million doses of the vaccine exist, they were mostly made in the 50's and 60's, and there is just no reliable information about how much of the stuff is still effective. And then there are the horror stories about side effects...
I doubt it. When's the last time you bought something from a fourth-class mailing? Particularly an unsolicited one?
Looking through the last week's mail for me....one credit card bill. One bank statement. Something from my wife's professional association. A letter from my mom and some pictures of the farm.
Oh, and twenty-three bulk-rate mailings. A mixture of two credit cards with "low, low 9.9% introductory rates" and $100 annual fees, junk mail from John Elway's car dealership, three solicitations to invest in real estate in Denver's overpriced market, a solicitation for an investment services firm in CA (which ISTR that the SEC is on the verge of shutting down), and a pound of other circulars addressed to "resident."
Would you buy a car based upon junk mail?
The only people who would be out of business would be the frauds and scam artists who make up the DMA.
Not that I necessarily support a ban on junk pmail. Junk email, OTOH....
Pr0n and MP3's. What else is there to do with 160GB?
What they really need is what's called "nation-building." I have a personal theory, that peace and prosperity in a society require, above all else, the rule of law, rather than of men. IOW, the law must be made supreme over the lawmakers. We've tried that here in the US, and it's worked more often than not. (Although I do mind one particular perjurer a couple-three years back...) Similarly, it seems to be working in the UK and the more stable nations on the European continent.
They actually do have a religious tradition that implies some respect for democracy. I seem to remember, from a half-forgotten college class on the region, that the Islamic tradition includes a saying by the Prophet Muhammad that "the majority will not agree to error." Even though I doubt he meant universal suffrage the way that the US/UK/Continental Europe know it, that seems to me to be a clear signal that democracy wouldn't be completely foreign if sold in those terms.
They'll need to come up with their own laws, obviously. Afghanistan is not Colorado, and so translating the Colorado Revised Statutes into Pashtu probably wouldn't be what they needed. But that's something that they need to do, so that people can actually have justifiable faith in a "system" beyond personal revenge. IMHO, that's a prerequisite for any lasting development. Despite the jokes we all make, settling disputes with lawyers is a lot more civilized than settling them with blood feuds.
Secondly, we must allow the people of Afghanistan to decide the future course of their own country. Funding one militant group against another and setting up puppet governments is what got us into this situation (we funded the Taliban against the russians in the 80's),
Minor nitpick: We funded EVERYONE in Afghanistan who wasn't wearing a Soviet uniform. That some of the training and money landed on the people who now call themselves "Taleban" is unfortunate, but at the time the alternative appeared far worse.
and is in general why everyone in the middle east hates our meddling butts, and I don't blame them.
Well, everyone except for the people we keep bailing out of things. I do believe the king of Kuwait was ready to blow President GHW Bush on the White House lawn back in 1991, and the Saudi royal family doesn't mind us that much. Or the current government of Egypt. Not many people there really love us, but I doubt that many of them genuinely hate us either. Remember P.J. O'Rourke's story about the militiaman in Beiruit who condemned the US as Satanic in one breath, and then said his life's dream was to take his children to Disneyland to ride on the spinning tea cups? I'd be willing to bet that this kind of duality is fairly common.
The United States and its allies should stop pretending to take sides in conflicts in the region and allow them to pursue their own course. Our continued support of Isreal has been and continues to be a major sticking point for the region. But helping the other side(s) is not the solution. It's none of our fucking business.
The problem there is, it's usually in the US' interests to promote democracy and support freely-elected governments. Israel is a pretty sad example, I'll grant you. The Shin Bet (Israeli secret police) are a bunch of thugs, almost as bad as the goddamn PRC's Armed People's Police, and an embarassment to what I see as a normally-honorable profession. They have some major problems with their government. But damn it, the entire region has so very few democracies (Egypt and Turkey being the only two I can name offhand) that the ones that do exist are worth supporting.
Granted, shutting off the military aid wouldn't be such a bad thing, IMHO. Or at least using as a lever. "Hey, guys. You need to stop allowing torture in your prisons or this year's $3e9 goes to someone else."
We must protect ourselves against terrorists. But NOT by manipulating and destroying the entire region of the world that hates us. If we're not extrememly careful in our actions, we will create far more enemies in the region than we have now.
I actually agree. Ill-conceived action could alienate the allies we do have.
We should take a hint from post-WWII actions with Germany and Japan, who are now two of our greatest allies and economic partners. We must commit resources to the region to ensure their economic future of the region.
It's that whole "nation-building" thing again. Afghanistan needs real courts with real laws that were passed by a government with real consent from the governed. They need schools that teach something besides how to memorize the Koran and shoot an AK-47 (badly). And they need a real economy offering real goods and services that will bring in real money. Unfortunately, all they have is opium, and Golden Crescent opium (the variety grown in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan) is of very low quality. It's not capable of being refined for medical uses, and it's so poor that the heroin made from it just won't sell anywhere outside the region. It's bad enough when the entire economy is based upon drugs, but it's terrible when the entire economy is based upon drugs that no junkie in the US or Europe would touch.
Frankly, I'm not sure what would work best for them. I'm not an economist, just a dumb-ass traffic cop somewhere in the western US. But maybe, in the distant future, after a generation of them have graduated from real schools with real educations, they can work that out for themselves.
They can change their TOS. They can forbid spam-support services from using their networks. They can refuse to renew their contracts with spammers.
Anti-Spam people often seem to be so wrapped up in their cause, they often don't realise they are doing more harm than good, i.e. blocking half of Australia's email.
Well, Optus got listed because they failed to respond to spam complaints. For this past month, I've been getting more spam volume than the volume from my Bugtraq subscription. About a quarter of that was connected to Optus in one way or another. In other words, Optus has been filling my mailbox with crap. I lose nothing by blocking them, and it makes my life easier.
The one response I've had from Optus that wasn't an autoack amounted to "Screw you. Hosting spammers is legal." If their customers consider that to be acceptable net behavior, then they don't need to email me. There is no legal right to send email, anywhere in any Constitution in any nation at all. Or any legal need for me to accept it.
Spews set itself up in a way that makes it hard to sue and harder to serve. It's not exactly incorporated, and most if not all the principals are unknown.
FWIW, spammers have tried suing blocklist operators before. MAPS has, thus far, beaten pretty much every legal challenge against them, although the latest one with Media3 came to a somewhat questionable settlement. At least in the US, the precedent is in favor of the blocklist operators.
As for suing the providers...I frankly don't know. If my own ISP managed to get itself listed, I'd consider suing them for failing to enforce its AUP and therefore interfering with my service.
IOW, the officers all said to each other: "A plane just hit the building. It's perfectly safe, so we'd better go in and evacuate it right the fuck now!"
Unlikely.
Yeah they risk their lives every day but they get paid pretty well to do it (after top pay over 60+/ per annum with great benefits)
Which benefits? The comp time that we never get to take? The wonderful schedule that precludes having to be paged out of bed to investigate a traffic accident in which a five-year-old died? The cost-of-living adjustments that my jurisdiction hasn't had for about five years?
Also, command staff makes that kind of money. The working officers/detectives don't without working an assload of overtime, and the sergeants may not either. And ISTR that $60K isn't a whole lot in New York's housing market. Hell, I've been in this for a long time. I've got a number of instructor certifications. I've got special-unit certification two separate ways (SWAT and Traffic Accident Investigation). And I sure don't make $60K/year.
and, in the case of firefighters, get all the tang they can drink (I'm on the firefighter list myself and should be going in in a few months - maybe sooner now).
And with the ignorance you show above, I hope like hell you're not going to be a firefighter in my area.
So for the same reason we shouldn't profile all arabs as terrorists, we shouldn't paint all cops with the martyr brush. Many are good men and women, but just as many as before still have lubed up broomsticks.
Just as many cops of lubed up broomsticks as have been good men and women? In other words, you're either saying that most cops sexually molest suspects, or that there are about five good cops in the US. Now I really hope you were lying about being a firefighter.
Even with opium they have nothing. "Golden Crescent" (Afghan/Pakistani) opium tends to be of very poor quality. Almost none leaves the region, because the Mexican, Colombian, and Golden Triangle (SE Asia) stuff is of far higher grade. Why would hopheads with money, like Americans or Europeans, shell out for crap when good stuff is grown more cheaply in places that still have shipping?
[1] The really high-grade stuff, China White, has been grown in Mexico for maybe five years now. Some of the Colombian growers are experimenting with it, as the market for cocaine is slowly shrinking.
I very strongly agree with the 'trial' part. Not so strongly about the "war crimes tribunal' part.
IMHO it's wrong to call them soldiers. Real soldiers follow a certain code of conduct ('The Laws of Land Warfare,' I think it's called). These people do not. They don't need the respect accorded to real soldiers.
They're criminals, pure and simple. IMHO, the correct thing to do with them is to treat them as no more than a particularly vile sort of common criminal. Gather the evidence and arrest them. March them into the appropriate courtrooms, to be tried under the appropriate law[1]. And when the jury brings in the guilty verdict, give them Timothy McVeigh's seat in Terre Haute.
I have no doubt, at this point, that they'd be found guilty. And I find it hard to imagine that they wouldn't be executed, whatever the rules in Geneva are at the moment.
Bear in mind that only one First-World nation operates a death penalty. If they're tried in an international tribunal under any law but US law, they just plain won't get the death penalty.
But your point about humiliation is nice. The thought of a bunch of al-Qaida members making little rocks out of big ones in Leavenworth for the rest of their lives brings a smile to my face, especially coupled with the embarassment of owing their lives to a bunch of soft-hearted Americans.
On the other hand, I recognize that such action might involve unnecessary risk to the soldiers who'd have to carry it out... in which case, screw it, just take him and his out.
I know a few cops who'd be willing to chance it, given the proper support. Me, for instance. I've got some SWAT gear. I'm sure I could bs my way into a few weeks off for it.
[1] Jurisdiction would be interesting. The hijackings fall under a Federal 'air piracy' statute, which I believe is capital when the piracy results in death. The deaths fall under various states' murder statutes, Pennsylvania and New York. I don't remember if the Pentagon is in Virginia or DC, but DC law is something I don't know particularly well-it's a bizarre hodgepodge of Federal law and DC municipal code.
I don't know if any involved states have a death penalty. I'd be a little surprised if NY did, and a little more surprised if VA didn't.
THat's what Congressmen do. When we're lucky, the overreaction dies in conference committee.
Point one -- our airport security has been greatly degraded by deregulation. Security guards get minimum wage and minimal training. Now that keeps airfares down sure enough, but it is not without a price, is it?
So what's the solution? The nearest real airport to me is Denver International. Denver Police does have a station at the airport. However, there's no way in hell they have enough officers to take over the security screening entirely. Better-trained staff? Maybe, but frankly I'm not sure that Pinkerton and Wackenhut can do it either.
There's been talk about target-hardening of the planes. I see the Federal Air Marshal program being revived, or maybe the airlines' in-house security people taking that role. It's certainly worked for El Al, and IIRC British Airways employs a number of former SAS troopers in smilar duties. When was the last time either airline has been hijacked?
Point two -- Customs stopped racial profiling recently and their "hit rate" in fact went up. In conjunction with probable cause racial background is just another piece of information. Without probable cause it is a red herring.
Exactly right. I teach Highway Drug Interdiction to police officers, and "racial profiling" is discussed. What I've been teaching, and what I stand by, is that it's already illegal (see the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution) and that it causes them to miss things. If they key in on a certain minority group, they're going to miss 75% of the drugs and fugitives.
Point three -- Jets at Andrews were not on ready status even though the Mossad and NSA both had strong indications of a major attack coming. Are Washington and NY not considered targets anymore? Let's rethink our air defense, even though the next attack will likely be different.
Did the indications give a timeframe? Did they indicate that the attack would take a form that would make it reasonable to roust the USAF? "Indications" are like anonymous tips. Sometimes they pan out. More often, they're a pain in the ass that serves no benefit and we can't act on them without violating someone's civil rights. Similarly, putting a flight of F16's on CAP over Washington might have kept the Pentagon from being hit. Or they might have resulted in uninvolved airliners being shot down. Or they might have had no effect either way.
When fighter pilots take off, they have Rules of Engagement assigned by their command authority. Whoever writes a RoE that involves shooting down civilian airliners is going to have a hard time of it-no matter what he does, someone's going to use 20/20 hindsight to say that it's wrong. And "wrong" in this case will generally involve a lot of dead people.
Point four -- banning strong encryption will not stop secure terrorist communications, but it will certainly and definitely weaken our personal, banking, and e-commerce security. This aids the terrorists, we shouldn't do it.
We shouldn't do it anyway. The terrorists wanted to make us change our way of life. Our way of life, as Americans, include the fact that "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." To sacrifice our liberty is to admit defeat and give these murderers a victory. THat sets a precedent that is best not set, as it encourages them. Worse, to surrender in that manner is COWARDICE.
Point five -- the adminstration isn't even telling Congress what is happening. Giving all of us real information might allow us to participate meaningfully instead of just randomly lashing out at any Arab-looking Americans. An Indian was shot to death today because someone thought him an Arab.
What meaningful participation do you mean? I had to stand in line for three hours to donate blood at a fully-staffed and efficient blood bank. That says to me that people are indeed participating meaningfully. As far as taking the fight to the people who killed about 5000 of our own...Slashdot isn't going to do that. That will be done either by police and the FBI or by our armed forces. The rescue is being done by FDNY and a number of search and rescue teams, and for very good reason they're turning away most volunteers.
There's a reason for that.
I assume you're familiar with the difference between "positive rights" and "negative rights." A "positive right" is a right that requires real effort by other people. The "right to housing" requires someone to build the house. The "right to health care" requires someone to spend ten or twelve years in medical school and then give away their labor.
OTOH, "negative" rights only require inaction by others. A prime example is "freedom of speech" as practiced in the US. For the right to be secure, all that has to happen is that nobody actively tries to interfere.
In other words, it's fully possible to enjoy a negative right without interfering with the negative rights of others.It's just plain impossible to have a positive right without interfering with others. Lets take this "right to health care" that's been a topic of discussion in the US for the last decade. For you to receive health care, someone else must provide it. That means a doctor must either care for you gratis, thus violating his property rights to his own labor, or someone must pay the doctor.
Where does the pay come from? Probably some sort of taxation. Taxation is enforceable LAW. And when you look at the word 'enforceable,' you damn well better see that the word FORCE is right at the middle of it. That's what law is: FORCE. Law is meaningless without a bunch of guys with blue poly-blend clothes, tin badges, guns, and stupid-looking mustaches to make it happen.
So, how many positive rights do you really want to have? Just bear in mind that for each one that you decide to enshrine into law, someone will likely die for not providing it. How much blood is "the right to education" worth to you?
No, that's just the way police PIO's talk.
"Criminal evidence" is items, documents, statements, etc., which would tend to prove or disprove a fact in a criminal matter.
What our dear agent was saying was basically, "We conducted our search and seized the items defined in our warrant. Now we intend to examine them to determine their probative value in court. We hope they will shed light on the matter before us."
And the agents needed the same standard of proof that cops in the US have needed for two centuries or so now: Probable cause to believe that items would be present which constitute evidence of a crime.
FWIW, you don't need to have a suspect in order to get a search warrant. All you need is the probable cause to believe the evidence exists and is in a particular place, in an affidavit, given to a judge for his signature.
And yes, they carried them out in boxes. Would you prefer that they carried the items out in a stolen handbag?
Give MIR's designers and builders some credit: Their creation gave fifteen years of service. The average American can't even keep a car running for fifteen years, and this in an environment where you don't need a space suit to change the oil.
There's a very long list of exceptions. Look at the municipal code of just about every city in the US that has a municipal traffic code.
In my city, speeding IS a crime, albeit a minor one. You get caught, you get issued. You have the option of paying by mail. Fail to pay by mail within the time perior (fifteen days in my city) and it becomes a summons to appear in the municipal court. Fail to appear on the summons, and a warrant is issued for your arrest.
Tell the cop that you won't take care of the ticket one way or the other, and he'll arrest you right then, assuming that the offense is arrestable and the officer is willing to deal with the paper. I usually just tell the driver "You've been served. If you want to leave this hanging, it's your problem."
Just about every home-rule city in Colorado has the same thing, with only the specific details varying. Most other states are similar, in that they have such practices at the state level or allow cities or counties to enact them into law.
Under the STATE CODE[1], speeding isn't necessarily a crime. It may just be a civil traffic infraction. (The cutoff is at 20MPH over the limit). Even so, fail to pay or appear and the court will simply enter a default judgement against you. Then DMV cancels your license. Then you will almost certainly be arrested if you're caught driving on a cancelled[1] license.
[1] State Patrol, State Parks and Wildlife, etc., only write under the state traffic code. However, city officers have the discretion to charge under either state law or muni code.
[2] The legal term is "denied." If your license is suspended, revoked, or cancelled in any state in the Traffic Offender's Compact, then it's automatically denied in Colorado. That means sitting behind the wheel on any public roadway in the state is good for jail time.
I've adopted it into my life. Independent people make MaxiMegaloCorp nervous, and those bastards have been comfortable too long.
They sell you Wonder Bread. Try beaking the real kind. The smell of a loaf of seven-grain about to come out of the oven is better than sex or cocaine.
Change your oil yourself. In many states, the chain shops are required to accept the used oil for recycling without charge. Besides, do you want to spend $30 and twenty minutes waiting, or do you want to spend about $8, about twenty minutes of work, and be damn sure it was done right?
Brew your own beer. Most beer sucks, including almost all of the beer legal for supermarket sales in my state. Not to mention, Coors' is brewed about fifty miles from me, and is one of the more offensive corporations on the planet.
If you smoke, grow your own tobacco. RJR the likes may have gotten a raw deal in the courts, but they're scum just the same. How badly do they need your money?
If your grocery store is a chain of more than a couple-three stores, you probably end up giving a lot of money to some real scum like Archer-Daniels-Midland, "Supermarket to the World." Find a decent coop. Better yet, put in a garden. IMHO, a baked chicken tastes better when you raised it yourself, and you didn't need to give any money to Tyson to get it.
Cut your own damn firewood and clean your own chimney. The way your utility company probably tries to fuck you, burning a cord or two of pine this winter will keep you especially warm.
I think you can see where this is going: Declare independence. Look at your life, and look at all of the places where you're paying someone else or depending on someone else to do something that you could easily do for yourself. People comfortable in such dependent conditions are easily blackmailed and tend to bend over and take it. People used to doing for themselves tend to be more resistant to being screwed. A gardening handloading blacksmithing gourmet fly-tying brewer makes the Powers-That-Be nervous, because he's in a position to tell them where to go if he doesn't like their latest stunt.
And I'm going to cut this off, because I've got Martina McBride's "Independence Day" stuck in my head now, and it's a really annoying song.
That's why we need to smack them down for even considering this crap.
I went to a local Borders today, and picked up about four ORA titles that I've been needing, plus a few other things. Maybe about $200 worth of cover price. I then went to the service desk and asked for the manager. He showed up and I told him that I had some serious concerns about the company's plans to use face-recognition software. He said the plan had been abandoned. I said that I was concerned that they had even considered such behavior, and that I didn't feel safe shopping at a bookstore that would consider such invasions.
Then I asked if he'd mind helping me re-shelf the books I ended up not buying.
The keys to even being heard are to be polite and to explain the problem to them in a language that they can understand. In Borders' case, the language is mainly money. I probably blow a thousand or so on books each year, not counting the work-related ones that Borders/B&N don't stock and wouldn't be able to order. That's about a grand that Borders has lost, assuming that they stay on good behavior and I lift my boycott after a year instead of going indefinitely.
We're talking about corporations, not individuals. I'm not fond of the notion of punishing people because of their ideas. However, if a corporation could spring this and shut it down after public outcry, I think it's entirely reasonable to question what other plans they might have, and whether these plans came from the same mindset. And they damned well don't need to be thinking such thoughts with my money.
Yes, their acts are legal, although in some states they'd be required to post the signs. And I think such things should be legal, on private property. However, they can do it without my money. In the book market, we're fortunate enough to have other options. Tattered Cover in Denver, in particular, is a good one if you have privacy concerns. They got into, and won, a legal pissing match with a regional drug task force over turning over their customer records.
I haven't heard any complaints about Powell's in Oregon either. And I don't doubt that similar stores exist elsewhere in the US and the world.
Seriously, though, it's a way to store more information on the card and to make it more easily-accessable. There are readers on the market that will read the card from several inches away. The privacy implications should be obvious: How long until the card can be read WHILE IT'S STILL IN YOUR BILLFOLD? At any rate, the "smart card" chip does not necessarily need to actually be inserted into a card reader the way the magnetic stripes do.
There's talk of using them on driver's licenses to store fingerprints[1] and blood type and so forth. The purpose of this should be obvious, but unfortunately, it isn't. At least not to me.
Just as a point of clarification:
In the United States, in criminal matters, the plaintiff is The People(TM). NOT the individual victim. When I wrote someone a summons for vandalism a week or so ago, the form said The People of the City of XXXXXXX, by and for The People of the State of Colorado, vs Defendant.
It's not unheard of for a victim to decide he doesn't want a case pushed. In point of fact, it happens in about 80% of a certain category of violent crime in my area[1]. However, prosecutors are VERY STRONGLY discouraged from dismissing a case because of an uncooperative victim, because such a practice lends itself to tampering with victims or witnesses.
Imagine it: You commit a felony crime against someone. He calls the police. A report is taken and referred to the District Cartooney, who files a C&I [2] with the court charging you with the crime. You subsequently influence the victim, somehow, to decide that he doesn't want the case pushed. That's a BIG part of why charging decisions are not left to victims. What kind of influence made him drop the case? What kind of influence did the Mafia use for decades? Hint: Modern street gangs use it too, which is why you can have killings in broad daylight in public where "nobody saw anything."
In cases without mandatory charging laws,[3] a complaint can be dismissed by a prosecutor. It's called "discretion." It's, unfortunately, most obvious in sexual assault cases, as it's damn near impossible to make a case without a cooperative victim on the witness stand. Once the case is bound over for trial, the DA has no obligation to drop it, but no prosecutor is going to push an unwinnable case. Refusing to testify can be contempt of court, but the usual practice is to consider that certain classes of victims have suffered enough.
Getting back to the point: It's not Adobe's decision. It's the US Attorney's decision, for the US Cartooney in the district in which the charges were brought (Northern California?). Ina case like this, in which the victim's victimhood is unclear and the defendant's criminal purpose is doubtful, a prosecutor would probably be very receptive to such a suggestion by Adobe. However, the US Cartooney is the ONLY person with the power to dismiss the charges. (Or the judge, but he can only do it if there's no probable cause to believe Skylarov did the prohibited act. Given where the case stands, that means the judge has no power to dismiss the charges.)
[1] Domestic violence offenses. But those aren't news for nerds, and I guess they don't constitute stuff that matters to anyone but the victim, her kids, and the cops who have to rescue her ass every other month.
[2] Complaint and Information, the name of the document that's filed with a court to begin a felony criminal case. In my state, they're filed with the county court and beging with "The District Attorney in and for the Sixth Judicial District informs the court that..." which explains the odd name.
[3] In my state, Domestic Violence and restraining order violations. A peace officer who develops probable cause to believe someone committed either is legally REQUIRED to arrest that person and book him into jail. A prosecutor is FORBIDDEN to drop the charges unless he can satisfy the court that guilt cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. THis is because we let DV's go for so long without taking them seriously, and the price for that is being paid in a lot of blood and tears.
I just looked at my notes again. I think it's more like 70 days from entry of plea now, in Federal cases.
Not necessarily. Bond has to be set within 72 hours of arrest, weekends and holidays not included. A charge must be filed at that time also. Now, assuming I remember Federal criminal procedure, which I don't promise,'filed' means a grand jury must indict, in the case of felonies. I think a Fed misdemeanor requires only the filing of a complaint with the court.[1]
The other immediate proceeding is the bond hearing, as I said before. In districts without a pre-written bond schedule, the hearing is where the judge determines an appropriate bond in light of the level of risk posed by the defendant, etc. It can also be for a defendant to ask for a lower bond than established by a pre-set bond schedule.
Arraignment is a separate proceeding, AFTER the charging. The arraignment is where the defendant actually enters a plea.
FWIW, "Speedy Trial," at least in most states, means only that the trial itself begins within six months of the charging. Time spent at large, outside of the court's jurisdiction, etc., usually doesn't count.