I don't think that the man should be running to Canada. If he is going to commit such inflammatory actions then I think he should take up the responsibility and face the injustice that he has provoked in order to showcase his cause, otherwise, he will just cause the erosion of more of our freedoms.
Erosion of whose freedoms?
If you're so eager to see someone serve a jail sentence to "set a moral example" or whatever, why don't you go inside for him?
Besides, him going to Canada may be an erosion of other people's freedoms. Him going to jail is one hell of a blow to his own.
The Killer Bee issue has allready shown what can happen when an artificially created species escapes into the enviroment.
The so-called "killer bees" (African honeybees, actually) were not artificially created. They're native to Africa, but were accidentally introduced into South America.
And they're not actually a danger to plants. They pollenate just the same as any other bee.
The only real impact they have on the economy is that they're eventually going to be the replacement for the honeybees we use now in the US, and for a very good reason. There's a mite called the Varroa Mite which infests honeybees and basically kills them. The African honeybees have a much higher resistance to the mites than the European honeybees which US apiculturists use now.
The only problem is that the African honeybees don't form very large hives and don't seem to build up large stores of honey. It's an obvious adaptation to a warmer climate and much shorter winters, but makes them less-than-optimal for honey production.
That little difficulty is solveable. I imagine 10000 years ago some caveman was whining about releasing genetically-modified chickens into the environment too.
I'm looking at a statute book on my desk right now. It says "Copyright 2000." It struck me as being just a little odd when I bought it. Odd enough for me to call a lawyer and ask him.
In this one case, the copyright is on this specific compilation with the specific annotations. IOW, it's not just the statutes but also the "value-added" material which makes this copyrightable.
A damn good thing too. Otherwise, when I stop someone for DUI I'll need to write on the summons "42-4-1301 C.R.S., copyright DataLegal Publishing, 2001."
But then, that particular book which is copyright and yet open is my state's criminal and traffic codes, all of which were written by a few hundred people in a shiny dome in Denver. Civil stuff doesn't have the same need to make any sense.
For starters, he's sending his mail into MY mailbox. I pay for the phone line and hard drive and access. Not him. And yes, I have had incoming WANTED mail bounce because of spam. More than once. One of those bounces had a very negative effect on my work, in that I got to spend three very tense hours explaining to my sergeant why I was watching the wrong motel: the mail with the correct address was bounced due to half a meg of spam.
The only concept of "private property" on the Internet is through implementing security measures.
IOW, "If it ain't nailed down, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it's mine." The classic words of the spoiled child and the common thief.
Nearly everyone here seems to have defaulted to the view that anti-spam laws are a great thing. Why is this? What if it were a law related to content filtering?
What if there were a company in suburban Seattle which made a zippy GUI? WHO CARES?
The point is, these laws are NOT about content-based filtering. Spam is simply about whether the sender had permission to send his shit or not. Would-be (would-have-been?) anti-spam laws are about the same thing: Did the sender have MY prior permission to use MY resources?
If this bill is at all related to the Chris Smith (R-NJ) bill of a few years ago, it hardly counts as government regulation. All that bill did was create a PRIVATE right of action. Basically, Smith's bill brought spam email under the junk fax law at 47 USC 227. I haven't noticed our government sending people off to the death camps and drafting their children over junk faxes yet.
Now, if you're a spammer or a junk faxer, I can appreciate that you have a different POV. I can also appreciate that people become spammers and junk faxers because they're too cowardly to take up home-invasion burglary at unguarded nursing homes.
Is it all right for you to enter someones house and take what you want cause he left the door unlocked ?
In my state, that's burglary. Burglary only requires a person to be unlawfully present in a building or dwelling with the intent to commit a crime therein. Whether the entry was forced or the intended crime was actually committed are both irrelevant.
Some time back, when I was junior enough to be stuck on swing shift, I got a call to an apartment complex. Some guy was wandering through and just trying doorknobs, and some of the residents were very concerned.
My partner and I contacted him and asked him what he was doing. He said he was making sure the doors were locked, so nobody would have their stuff stolen. I'm standing there thinking "Yeah, right, and I'm Jack Nicklaus and late for a tee time." Anyway, his story was working less and less with each passing minute.
My partner patted him down for weapons. Turns out the guy was carrying a big-assed bowie knife, about ten feet of parachute cord, and was a parolee with two prior convictions for sexual assault.
We ended up arresting him for CCW and for failing to register as a sex offender. You and I both can guess what he was doing, or hoping to be doing anyway. I never got subpoenaed, so I don't know what the DA did with him. I know his parole was revoked, but not whether he actually went to trial on the other stuff.
Moral of the story: Don't rattle strange doorknobs unless you actually have business on the other side of that door. You may have a legitimate explanation, and in the greater context of the parent article you probably do. However, that tends to make the residents nervous and the cops very distrusting. You may know you had no intent to take or use the owner's information or property, but the owner doesn't necessarily know it, and that means a bunch of guys in blue poly-blend suits need to investigate. It's generally less painful to not be investigated in the first place, than to be investigated and eventually cleared.
Hmm.. existing laws may already protect physical property from trespassing, but iI don't I know of any laws that prevent virtual trespassing, not in that sense.
In Colorado, the heading on the top of the indictment or information won't say "Criminal Trespass," but rather "Computer Crime." However, it is a crime here to gain access to a computer or network without the authorization of the owner or his agent.
Article 5.5 of Title 18. I don't have the exact section number handy.
We don't file it very often, mostly because we have very few DDA's who consider themselves competent to prosecute these statutes. Convincing them to handle it the same as Criminal Trespass/Burglary/Criminal Mischief is tricky. Computer Crime is basically just those three crimes committed by other means, and is prosecuted in the same manner, but our DDA's are just not comfortable filing on them yet.
Hmmm, maybe not Life assurance, but isn't 3rd party car insurance mandatory in all the western countries? Therefore, If you didn't deal with the insurance company you couldn't drive legally, and that is not an option for most people.
Many US states and probably a few other countries have a slightly different rule: A car owner must demonstrate the capability to pay for damage caused by his vehicle. In my state, that's all we require: proof of the ability to cough up $25K on demand. Most people do that by buying liability insurance policies. However, some people choose instead to file what are called "Certificates of Self-Insurance," which most certify a bond of $25K filed under rules set by the Dep't of Motor Vehicles.
We take it seriously here. Operating an uninsured motor vehicle on the public roads in my state is good for up to a year in jail, $1K fine, and suspension of the driving privilege until the vehicle in question is either sold or insured. The suspension is rarely done-I may have issued two FRA suspensions in several years as a cop, and both of those involved injury accidents.
Well, granted, I suppose once you're on the interstate, FM dies and you are presented with Country OR Western as your choices, I think I'd rather try the 12 digitally broadcast techno channels...
You want a radio wasteland? So-called "country radio" is probably even worse than (top-40) "rock" stations.
We have two country FM country stations in Denver that I can find. Both of them are the same warmed over Shania Twain/Faith Hill/people who sound like Shania Twain and Faith Hill. The titles and the singers' names are different, but they still sound even more repetitive than the 80's station that Nina Blackswill keeps hawking. "Ninety six songs, over and over again! The eighties, and not much else!"
I'd pay real money to subscribe to a country station that wasn't the same dozen songs every day.
I wonder if it were the US Minister of Culture (doubtful that anyone like that exists)
We don't have one. We don't need one. The people of the United States are perfectly capable of having culture without the government's help.
We do have the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, but those are mostly for the artists and such who can't get a job at the Starbucks to support their artistic endeavors.
Love and kisses,
COAngler,
traffic cop by day, bad blues guitarist by night.
What are the real odds for US Customs to catch a container hosting a nuclear bomb ?
I assume you mean one of the standard shipping containers that does triple duty as a rail car or trailer box? I give 50-50, depending upon how Canadian Customs is doing that month.
The US border with Mexico is relatively well-watched, compared to other national borders of the same length elsewhere in the world. The USBP there thinks mostly in terms of drugs and illegal immigrants, but they're about as thorough as they can be for their staffing and deployment.
Our border with Canada, OTOH, is, well...two countries have a long history of relatively friendly relations. How seriously would we take the Canadian border as a threat? There aren't that many illegal drugs produced in Canada, and the only crimes Canadians routinely commit in the US are Bonnie Raitt's songs.
The reason none of this actually matters: nuclear weapons/missiles are about prestige for whoever has them. Why else would India and Pakistan go public? Why else is Israel's nuclear weapons program an "everybody knows it" affair? A nation won't get that same prestige from anonymous shipping containers going boom in Milwaukee.
The people who visited Indymedia didn't commit a crime, there is no probable cause that they would commit a crime,,/i>
And that's not even relevant.
The FBI agents were not serving an arrest warrant. They were serving a SEARCHwarrant.
An arrest warrant is a document issued by a judge commanding that a person be taken into custody, and requires a sworn showing of probable cause to believe the named person has committed a crime.
A search warrant is a document, signed by a judge, commanding agents to search a certain premises for evidence or contraband, and to seize whatever evidence or contraband is found. A search warrant requires a sworn showing of probable cause to believe that the evidence is present and is, in fact, evidence that would tend to prove or disprove that a crime was committed or that a given person did or did not commit it.
With a search warrant, the only thing that matters is the probable cause to believe that evidence is present. The exact owners of the property and their involvement or non-involvement is irrelevant. I've served more than one search warrant on a home, where the homeowner was not a suspect. However, we did have PC to believe there was evidence in the home, the judge agreed, and we got the warrant and searched.
Which would strike a normal person as more reasonable? In one corner, we see a business using a novel marketing scheme
Theft is hardly novel. It's old enough to have been banned in the Old Testament.
to get the word out about its useful product, whilst growing the economy, providing jobs, and stress testing the infrastructure of the internet (and don't tell me that last one won't be useful when the next infowar rolls around;
I don't see what my dialup connection has to do with someone else's infowar. I bought it for the sake of my own convenience. If someone wants to practice information warfare, let him do it on his own goddamn dime.
Who's going to get hurt when you drive a small-businessesman out of business just because he had the nerve to assume you might be interested in his product?
Hopefully, the THIEF who had the nerve to assume I'd be willing to pay for his advertising will be hurt. If he gets hurt to the point of jumping off the San Francisco Bay Bridge, it's a net gain for society at large.
The internet was supposed to change things, wasn't it? It was supposed to be revolutionary; level the playing field.
No, it was supposed to be a way to communicate if the USSR nuked the USA.
And free speech really is the issue. You can't argue with that.
The speech isn't free. The recipient is the one who gets stuck with the bill, and the FUCKING THIEVING SHITBAG who sent the thing gets to stand around and spout inane platitudes about free speech.
Suffice it to say, the US Supreme Court does not recognize free speech as including a 'right' to pester people against their will.
BTW, who are you going after once you've 'eliminated' 'spammers'? The Jews, perhaps? Hasn't history taught us anything?
I just have a hard time any military leader would keep a piece so vital for mowing down his own deserters who are deserting in the first place because they lack guns at all...
Except for one tiny problem: That really did happen.
Every Soviet corps had several "penal batallions." Several companies of men, not necessarily armed, and one company of MP's (or whatever the USSR called them) with rifles or SMGs. The latter company would form up behind the formers and open fire. Anyone in the penal companies who stood still would be killed by the MP's.
A lot of breakthroughs were made with the blood of the penal batallions. A lot of minefields were cleared that way too. Blow your foot off with a German mine, or get gut-shot by an MP and left to die...
Penal batallions weren't necessarily for deserters. It was fairly common for the senior officers of a regiment to be demoted and sent to one if they lost the regimental flag. I'm not sure what they did with the deserters, but I doubt it was the relatively gentle time at Leavenworth or Portsmouth which the US gives ours.
What it basically is designed to do is create a middle-class. The people who will meekly sit by, be non-union, and file paperwork and tabulate data all day. Don't question, just do your job, and you'll be rewarded more than the blue collar guys on the factory floor.
One of the rare items of Zinn's leftist claptrap I agree with. My own high school was like that. Get the kids involved in "progressive" political causes which had nothing to do with their own lives, and certainly nothing to do with their freedom, and get them packed off to a liberal arts college ASAP. That means the average grad would be 22 or so by the time he might be forced to actually think about something. By then, they already "know" how to "think" and will come to the "correct" (preapproved) conclusion.
Or, to paraphrase Edward Abbey and give my own formula for living: Brew your own beer, bake your own break, handload your own ammo, and piss off the front porch whenever you damn well feel like it. That's why I had a nice little "conference" with my high school's big shots after doing an AP English presentation on _The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel_ (which I heartily recommend to all slashdotters and other human beings)
Now that's doubly odd. If I understand correctly, a private organisation does not have to abide by discrimination law?
Close, but not quite. A business has to do business with pretty much everyone. A social or fraternal organization can be considerably more restrictive.
Also, homosexuals are not a protected category under Federal and most states' civil rights laws. The laws forbid discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, et al., but not on sexual preference
So (and this is not a troll), there is no real freedom of speech, just the Government is not able to restrict it, (but a private individual, or company, etc can)?
Basically, a private entity is not bound by the First Amendment.
If you get shitcanned from a job for speech, you should get a lawyer and look at Fed/state labor laws. Also, if someone has threatened force in retaliation for your speech, I can think of several criminal penalties that might apply. But those are neither sanctioned nor required by the First Amendment. And in my profession, I can legally be fired for striking or publically criticizing local government under certain circumstances. If that were unacceptable to me, I'd have become a sysadmin or something.
Is that not freedom of speech? It seems to me, if someone doesn't like what you're saying and decides to boycott you, all they're doing is answering speech with more speech.
I think its a little more technical than that. Public schools dont have the authority to search a teachers desk or office without a warrant due to 4th amendment rights. They do have the right to search a students locker because theyre acting loco parentis(sp?) or in place of the parent.
Yes, In loco parentis. "In the place of the parent." Schools are considered to assume some degree of parental responsibility for the 30-40 hours a week the kids are in their care.
Just as a parent has the right to search their kids property regardless of location, the school has the right to search the students belongings when they are on school grounds for just about any reason.
Pretty close. School officials are not considered to be "state actors" wrt the Fourth. If they find a criminal violation, they can report it. However, they are not bound by the same rules of evidence as are police.
What's more, statements provided by a school official can be used to constitute probable cause and support a search warrant. The Fourth Amendment's protections don't restrict private parties, unless the private parties are actually acting under the direction of police.
The 'record' in question is most likely just a contact card and incident report. A contact card is just a 3x5 card with name, DOB, address, phone number, etc. The incident report is generally nothing more than a page or two worth of narrative.
It may be 'supposed' to be expunged at a certain time, but in reality, many police agencies retain records of this sort of thing far past when they are supposed to be expunged.
There's just one tiny problem with your statement:
There is no law requiring police agencies to purge their records. A juvenile's record of convictions (maintained by the COURT) MAY be ordered sealed.
However, contact cards and incident reports (at least in my state) are legally considered to be public records. A police department that doesn't maintain them could face liability.
You know that the UK is the ONLY country that explicitly prohibits stalking, don't you? In every other country the stalker is free to go on as long as he doesn't hurt the victim phisically.
You are so full of shit, your local health department should be warned.
Stalking is a felony in Colorado. All it takes is for the victim to be alarmed or annoyed, or caused to fear for his own life. No bodily injury required. Our stalking statute, IIRC, also falls under our mandatory violent crimes sentencing.
Violation of a restraining order is admittedly only a misdemeanor, but it carries a mandatory arrest. Responding officers are REQUIRED to take the offender into custody upon developing probable cause. No discretion. No summons-and-release at the scene. Someone caught breaking a restraining order, his ass is spending some quality time in the county jail.
There's no US-wide law on the matter for a very good reason: The Federal government doesn't get involved in ordinary intra-state criminal justice matters, and thank god: no situation is so bad the FBI couldn't make it worse.
The police (particularly the British police) are notoriously corrupt
Hah. I have my own complaints about UK cops, being a US cop who has worked with them. I've found them to be stiff, inflexible, and so on. However, corrupt?
That's the LASTcomplaint I would believe about a UK cop. Not very adaptable, IMHO, but amazingly honest.
You want to see really corrupt cops? Yeah, you have to leave home for that, but hell, you have to leave the entire goddamn English-speaking world!
Any countries where their rights are limited ? What are their powers in the US ?
They have the same powers as any other Federal law enforcement agent, with one important exception:
They are legally entitled to search any persons or objects entering the US, routinely. That's right, routinely. No probable cause or reasonable articulable suspicion required.
The legal theory behind this power is that a customs search is not a criminal justice matter, but an administrative search for limited purposes to which the searched person had consented.
They are still there. Half Life, Homeworld, Swat 3, Tribes and Tribes2. They also do "sports" games, well if you consider fishing, bullriding, and golf sports:).
That's what's kept me from just dumping Windows entirely. I couldn't give up Trophy Bass II. Losing CadZone and Word (required by work) I didn't shiv a git about, but I needed TBII.
If gun manufacturers are liable for shootings, tobacco companies are liable for cancer, and manufacturers of all stripes are liable for anything some guy might do with their products, software won't be treated any differently.
Except for one problem: Thus far, what you're suggesting has only been successfully applied to tobacco, and that was based upon the notion that the tobacco companies KNEW they were selling a harmful product and were not being honest in public about the hazards.
The suits against gun manufacturers are being dismissed right and left, and the settlement S&W has with HUD is all but dead.
As for Ford being held liable for drunk drivers, well...let's don't hold our breath.
Slashdot Mirror
Erosion of whose freedoms?
If you're so eager to see someone serve a jail sentence to "set a moral example" or whatever, why don't you go inside for him?
Besides, him going to Canada may be an erosion of other people's freedoms. Him going to jail is one hell of a blow to his own.
The so-called "killer bees" (African honeybees, actually) were not artificially created. They're native to Africa, but were accidentally introduced into South America.
And they're not actually a danger to plants. They pollenate just the same as any other bee.
The only real impact they have on the economy is that they're eventually going to be the replacement for the honeybees we use now in the US, and for a very good reason. There's a mite called the Varroa Mite which infests honeybees and basically kills them. The African honeybees have a much higher resistance to the mites than the European honeybees which US apiculturists use now.
The only problem is that the African honeybees don't form very large hives and don't seem to build up large stores of honey. It's an obvious adaptation to a warmer climate and much shorter winters, but makes them less-than-optimal for honey production.
That little difficulty is solveable. I imagine 10000 years ago some caveman was whining about releasing genetically-modified chickens into the environment too.
In this one case, the copyright is on this specific compilation with the specific annotations. IOW, it's not just the statutes but also the "value-added" material which makes this copyrightable.
A damn good thing too. Otherwise, when I stop someone for DUI I'll need to write on the summons "42-4-1301 C.R.S., copyright DataLegal Publishing, 2001."
But then, that particular book which is copyright and yet open is my state's criminal and traffic codes, all of which were written by a few hundred people in a shiny dome in Denver. Civil stuff doesn't have the same need to make any sense.
For starters, he's sending his mail into MY mailbox. I pay for the phone line and hard drive and access. Not him. And yes, I have had incoming WANTED mail bounce because of spam. More than once. One of those bounces had a very negative effect on my work, in that I got to spend three very tense hours explaining to my sergeant why I was watching the wrong motel: the mail with the correct address was bounced due to half a meg of spam.
The only concept of "private property" on the Internet is through implementing security measures.
IOW, "If it ain't nailed down, it's mine. If I can pry it loose, it's mine." The classic words of the spoiled child and the common thief.
What if there were a company in suburban Seattle which made a zippy GUI? WHO CARES?
The point is, these laws are NOT about content-based filtering. Spam is simply about whether the sender had permission to send his shit or not. Would-be (would-have-been?) anti-spam laws are about the same thing: Did the sender have MY prior permission to use MY resources?
If this bill is at all related to the Chris Smith (R-NJ) bill of a few years ago, it hardly counts as government regulation. All that bill did was create a PRIVATE right of action. Basically, Smith's bill brought spam email under the junk fax law at 47 USC 227. I haven't noticed our government sending people off to the death camps and drafting their children over junk faxes yet.
Now, if you're a spammer or a junk faxer, I can appreciate that you have a different POV. I can also appreciate that people become spammers and junk faxers because they're too cowardly to take up home-invasion burglary at unguarded nursing homes.
In my state, that's burglary. Burglary only requires a person to be unlawfully present in a building or dwelling with the intent to commit a crime therein. Whether the entry was forced or the intended crime was actually committed are both irrelevant.
Some time back, when I was junior enough to be stuck on swing shift, I got a call to an apartment complex. Some guy was wandering through and just trying doorknobs, and some of the residents were very concerned.
My partner and I contacted him and asked him what he was doing. He said he was making sure the doors were locked, so nobody would have their stuff stolen. I'm standing there thinking "Yeah, right, and I'm Jack Nicklaus and late for a tee time." Anyway, his story was working less and less with each passing minute. My partner patted him down for weapons. Turns out the guy was carrying a big-assed bowie knife, about ten feet of parachute cord, and was a parolee with two prior convictions for sexual assault.
We ended up arresting him for CCW and for failing to register as a sex offender. You and I both can guess what he was doing, or hoping to be doing anyway. I never got subpoenaed, so I don't know what the DA did with him. I know his parole was revoked, but not whether he actually went to trial on the other stuff.
Moral of the story: Don't rattle strange doorknobs unless you actually have business on the other side of that door. You may have a legitimate explanation, and in the greater context of the parent article you probably do. However, that tends to make the residents nervous and the cops very distrusting. You may know you had no intent to take or use the owner's information or property, but the owner doesn't necessarily know it, and that means a bunch of guys in blue poly-blend suits need to investigate. It's generally less painful to not be investigated in the first place, than to be investigated and eventually cleared.
In Colorado, the heading on the top of the indictment or information won't say "Criminal Trespass," but rather "Computer Crime." However, it is a crime here to gain access to a computer or network without the authorization of the owner or his agent.
Article 5.5 of Title 18. I don't have the exact section number handy.
We don't file it very often, mostly because we have very few DDA's who consider themselves competent to prosecute these statutes. Convincing them to handle it the same as Criminal Trespass/Burglary/Criminal Mischief is tricky. Computer Crime is basically just those three crimes committed by other means, and is prosecuted in the same manner, but our DDA's are just not comfortable filing on them yet.
Many US states and probably a few other countries have a slightly different rule: A car owner must demonstrate the capability to pay for damage caused by his vehicle. In my state, that's all we require: proof of the ability to cough up $25K on demand. Most people do that by buying liability insurance policies. However, some people choose instead to file what are called "Certificates of Self-Insurance," which most certify a bond of $25K filed under rules set by the Dep't of Motor Vehicles.
We take it seriously here. Operating an uninsured motor vehicle on the public roads in my state is good for up to a year in jail, $1K fine, and suspension of the driving privilege until the vehicle in question is either sold or insured. The suspension is rarely done-I may have issued two FRA suspensions in several years as a cop, and both of those involved injury accidents.
You want a radio wasteland? So-called "country radio" is probably even worse than (top-40) "rock" stations.
We have two country FM country stations in Denver that I can find. Both of them are the same warmed over Shania Twain/Faith Hill/people who sound like Shania Twain and Faith Hill. The titles and the singers' names are different, but they still sound even more repetitive than the 80's station that Nina Blackswill keeps hawking. "Ninety six songs, over and over again! The eighties, and not much else!"
I'd pay real money to subscribe to a country station that wasn't the same dozen songs every day.
We don't have one. We don't need one. The people of the United States are perfectly capable of having culture without the government's help.
We do have the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, but those are mostly for the artists and such who can't get a job at the Starbucks to support their artistic endeavors.
Love and kisses,
COAngler,
traffic cop by day, bad blues guitarist by night.
I assume you mean one of the standard shipping containers that does triple duty as a rail car or trailer box? I give 50-50, depending upon how Canadian Customs is doing that month.
The US border with Mexico is relatively well-watched, compared to other national borders of the same length elsewhere in the world. The USBP there thinks mostly in terms of drugs and illegal immigrants, but they're about as thorough as they can be for their staffing and deployment.
Our border with Canada, OTOH, is, well...two countries have a long history of relatively friendly relations. How seriously would we take the Canadian border as a threat? There aren't that many illegal drugs produced in Canada, and the only crimes Canadians routinely commit in the US are Bonnie Raitt's songs. The reason none of this actually matters: nuclear weapons/missiles are about prestige for whoever has them. Why else would India and Pakistan go public? Why else is Israel's nuclear weapons program an "everybody knows it" affair? A nation won't get that same prestige from anonymous shipping containers going boom in Milwaukee.
And that's not even relevant.
The FBI agents were not serving an arrest warrant. They were serving a SEARCHwarrant.
An arrest warrant is a document issued by a judge commanding that a person be taken into custody, and requires a sworn showing of probable cause to believe the named person has committed a crime.
A search warrant is a document, signed by a judge, commanding agents to search a certain premises for evidence or contraband, and to seize whatever evidence or contraband is found. A search warrant requires a sworn showing of probable cause to believe that the evidence is present and is, in fact, evidence that would tend to prove or disprove that a crime was committed or that a given person did or did not commit it.
With a search warrant, the only thing that matters is the probable cause to believe that evidence is present. The exact owners of the property and their involvement or non-involvement is irrelevant. I've served more than one search warrant on a home, where the homeowner was not a suspect. However, we did have PC to believe there was evidence in the home, the judge agreed, and we got the warrant and searched.
Theft is hardly novel. It's old enough to have been banned in the Old Testament.
to get the word out about its useful product, whilst growing the economy, providing jobs, and stress testing the infrastructure of the internet (and don't tell me that last one won't be useful when the next infowar rolls around;
I don't see what my dialup connection has to do with someone else's infowar. I bought it for the sake of my own convenience. If someone wants to practice information warfare, let him do it on his own goddamn dime.
Who's going to get hurt when you drive a small-businessesman out of business just because he had the nerve to assume you might be interested in his product?
Hopefully, the THIEF who had the nerve to assume I'd be willing to pay for his advertising will be hurt. If he gets hurt to the point of jumping off the San Francisco Bay Bridge, it's a net gain for society at large.
The internet was supposed to change things, wasn't it? It was supposed to be revolutionary; level the playing field.
No, it was supposed to be a way to communicate if the USSR nuked the USA.
And free speech really is the issue. You can't argue with that.
The speech isn't free. The recipient is the one who gets stuck with the bill, and the FUCKING THIEVING SHITBAG who sent the thing gets to stand around and spout inane platitudes about free speech.
Suffice it to say, the US Supreme Court does not recognize free speech as including a 'right' to pester people against their will.
BTW, who are you going after once you've 'eliminated' 'spammers'? The Jews, perhaps? Hasn't history taught us anything?
And now Mr. Godwin has been invoked. Thank you.
Except for one tiny problem: That really did happen.
Every Soviet corps had several "penal batallions." Several companies of men, not necessarily armed, and one company of MP's (or whatever the USSR called them) with rifles or SMGs. The latter company would form up behind the formers and open fire. Anyone in the penal companies who stood still would be killed by the MP's.
A lot of breakthroughs were made with the blood of the penal batallions. A lot of minefields were cleared that way too. Blow your foot off with a German mine, or get gut-shot by an MP and left to die...
Penal batallions weren't necessarily for deserters. It was fairly common for the senior officers of a regiment to be demoted and sent to one if they lost the regimental flag. I'm not sure what they did with the deserters, but I doubt it was the relatively gentle time at Leavenworth or Portsmouth which the US gives ours.
One of the rare items of Zinn's leftist claptrap I agree with. My own high school was like that. Get the kids involved in "progressive" political causes which had nothing to do with their own lives, and certainly nothing to do with their freedom, and get them packed off to a liberal arts college ASAP. That means the average grad would be 22 or so by the time he might be forced to actually think about something. By then, they already "know" how to "think" and will come to the "correct" (preapproved) conclusion.
Or, to paraphrase Edward Abbey and give my own formula for living: Brew your own beer, bake your own break, handload your own ammo, and piss off the front porch whenever you damn well feel like it. That's why I had a nice little "conference" with my high school's big shots after doing an AP English presentation on _The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel_ (which I heartily recommend to all slashdotters and other human beings)
Close, but not quite. A business has to do business with pretty much everyone. A social or fraternal organization can be considerably more restrictive.
Also, homosexuals are not a protected category under Federal and most states' civil rights laws. The laws forbid discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, et al., but not on sexual preference
Basically, a private entity is not bound by the First Amendment.
If you get shitcanned from a job for speech, you should get a lawyer and look at Fed/state labor laws. Also, if someone has threatened force in retaliation for your speech, I can think of several criminal penalties that might apply. But those are neither sanctioned nor required by the First Amendment. And in my profession, I can legally be fired for striking or publically criticizing local government under certain circumstances. If that were unacceptable to me, I'd have become a sysadmin or something.
Is that not freedom of speech? It seems to me, if someone doesn't like what you're saying and decides to boycott you, all they're doing is answering speech with more speech.
Yes, In loco parentis. "In the place of the parent." Schools are considered to assume some degree of parental responsibility for the 30-40 hours a week the kids are in their care.
Just as a parent has the right to search their kids property regardless of location, the school has the right to search the students belongings when they are on school grounds for just about any reason.
Pretty close. School officials are not considered to be "state actors" wrt the Fourth. If they find a criminal violation, they can report it. However, they are not bound by the same rules of evidence as are police.
What's more, statements provided by a school official can be used to constitute probable cause and support a search warrant. The Fourth Amendment's protections don't restrict private parties, unless the private parties are actually acting under the direction of police.
It may be 'supposed' to be expunged at a certain time, but in reality, many police agencies retain records of this sort of thing far past when they are supposed to be expunged.
There's just one tiny problem with your statement:
There is no law requiring police agencies to purge their records. A juvenile's record of convictions (maintained by the COURT) MAY be ordered sealed.
However, contact cards and incident reports (at least in my state) are legally considered to be public records. A police department that doesn't maintain them could face liability.
But there will never be a program which allows a computer to say "hello" to the world.
You are so full of shit, your local health department should be warned.
Stalking is a felony in Colorado. All it takes is for the victim to be alarmed or annoyed, or caused to fear for his own life. No bodily injury required. Our stalking statute, IIRC, also falls under our mandatory violent crimes sentencing.
Violation of a restraining order is admittedly only a misdemeanor, but it carries a mandatory arrest. Responding officers are REQUIRED to take the offender into custody upon developing probable cause. No discretion. No summons-and-release at the scene. Someone caught breaking a restraining order, his ass is spending some quality time in the county jail.
There's no US-wide law on the matter for a very good reason: The Federal government doesn't get involved in ordinary intra-state criminal justice matters, and thank god: no situation is so bad the FBI couldn't make it worse.
Hah. I have my own complaints about UK cops, being a US cop who has worked with them. I've found them to be stiff, inflexible, and so on. However, corrupt?
That's the LASTcomplaint I would believe about a UK cop. Not very adaptable, IMHO, but amazingly honest.
You want to see really corrupt cops? Yeah, you have to leave home for that, but hell, you have to leave the entire goddamn English-speaking world!
They have the same powers as any other Federal law enforcement agent, with one important exception:
They are legally entitled to search any persons or objects entering the US, routinely. That's right, routinely. No probable cause or reasonable articulable suspicion required.
The legal theory behind this power is that a customs search is not a criminal justice matter, but an administrative search for limited purposes to which the searched person had consented.
That's what's kept me from just dumping Windows entirely. I couldn't give up Trophy Bass II. Losing CadZone and Word (required by work) I didn't shiv a git about, but I needed TBII.
Except for one problem: Thus far, what you're suggesting has only been successfully applied to tobacco, and that was based upon the notion that the tobacco companies KNEW they were selling a harmful product and were not being honest in public about the hazards.
The suits against gun manufacturers are being dismissed right and left, and the settlement S&W has with HUD is all but dead.
As for Ford being held liable for drunk drivers, well...let's don't hold our breath.