I think the very wealthy send personal shoppers to stores and accept/reject the new clothing in their own homes.
And that's for ready-to-wear. For tailored stuff (and who isn't rich and wearing custom tailored suits?), the tailor or his sizing rep comes to your house and measures you, shows fabric samples, and then comes back with finished clothes for final fitting.
Actually going to a store and having to disrobe in a changing room, interact with other people and have strangers around you isn't what people with real money do. There may be some stores that are far from home or impractical for personal shoppers, so in that case, you pack up your entourage, rent a few suites at the Plaza and have stuff brought to your room.
..this idea, coupled with the "time warp" of another post would be a great idea, especially if you could manage to display HD video.
Start out with what video on the internet looked like back using dialup in 1995 -- postage-stamp sized 8 bit windows running at 8-10 fps with out-of-sync 8Khz mono audio. Move slowly up the resolution and link speed until you get to "today's streaming video", but still displaying only one window of video. During this time, keep the display at something smaller, like 800x600 on a larger display; partly to magnify the pixelization of older/slower video, partly for greater wow factor later on.
At this point, you start talking about your link and you switch the video feed to HD full screen. "And that's not all...." -- switch the display to max resolution (2048 x 1536?), and start adding HD feeds until you've tiled the screen with HD feeds. Keep adding them until you have so many on the screen that they're hard to see or you really have maxed out the pipe.
This is something that ordinary people can grasp; the challenge will be a computer with video display capable of displaying dozens of simultaneous HD feeds, but it will look really cool, especially if you keep the sound going on each station and gradually increase the volume as you add channels for dramatic impact.
Re:Razor-blade model? (Free Wifi pay for power?)
on
WiFi Free-For-All
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· Score: 1
I used to carry a sweet little 3-outlet switched power strip. It came in handy for hotels where there wasn't enough outlets for the laptop, the cell charger, etc. It'd be great for this situations. Unfortunately it got left in a Chicago data center when we needed more power than we had outlets for and I've never replaced it.
My dog will eat stuff she doesn't get fed very often (raw meat, wet dog food) until she gets sick, and some breeds can kill themselves doing that.
Razor-blade model? (Free Wifi pay for power?)
on
WiFi Free-For-All
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'll admit to paying for wifi at MSP, but I also get to expense it, so the cost doesn't matter to me. What drives me batshit is the scarcity of *outlets* at airports! Maybe this is how they plan to pay for it, by putting in paid electricity!
What's the deal with outlets at airports, anyway? I know it'd be far more expensive to add outlets in the middle of the floor or in places where there was no easy access to power, but it's hard to find ANY outlets, and when you do find them they're often far from your specific gate, in the middle of a hallway, or just nonexistent. Part of the reason I find this so surprising is that most electical codes require an outlet every 6 feet or something, yet in an 2000 sq ft area I found three, with only two in a usable place -- and when I dug around in my bag looking for something, I had two people approach me asking if I was leaving, eyeing the outlet.
Battery power is fine if you don't turn on the laptop during the flight or carry a couple of extra batteries. I don't (weight, etc), and I like to save my batteries for watching DVDs during the flight. But with outlets so scarce, I think I might be forced to get a couple of extra batteries just to deal with the lack of power.
Besides the tongue-in-cheek reference to paying for power, the other idea that occured to me is the dreaded advertising model for wifi -- give away access, but transparent proxy all web requests and add popup and banner hijacking advertising. Sure, it won't affect those of us that use VPN or ssh tunnels to our own proxies, but they can solve that with NAT and/or locked-down access.
They came out with some umbrella holding company form regarding "employee responsibility". It was pretty noxious, especially from a political correctness perspective. I refused to sign mine and tossed it behind my furniture ("I lost it" plausable deniability), and nobody has said anything yet.
My guess is that in companies above a certain size, HR departments are all about doing more with less, and they're generally staffed by a bunch of clerical types for whom less work is the goal in life. One more or one less code of conduct or agreement doesn't matter and unless you sit at a desk in the presence of an HR overlord until all paper is signed, you can just not sign it or make up a story or two until they've moved on to the next distraction.
In terms of the story submitters problem, what happens if he just signs it and ignores the provisions. Either his side business is penny-ante and they won't notice or care, at which point he's not lost anything -- just be careful at work not to talk about it and make/take calls over lunch or on days off.
Or his business DOES become significant, in which case you quietly quit and leave an out of state PO box ("I always wanted to live in New Mexico") as your forwarding address. By the time they figure out what's happening, they'll have to either get ballsy and sue you for real (at which point careful corporate structuring can make their life very hard) or they'll just assume you're yet another ex-employee.
Either way, what they don't know can't harm you. Chances are an Ask Slashdot poster isn't a superstar who draws gossip, but some Ham-and-Egger that doesn't matter in the scheme of things.
Part of the Rosemount site was used as a storage facility by the U, at least until 1990 when I last visited. I worked for a U department and one very cold winter day, another student worker and myself took the department van loaded with shit (an old folding machine, a mimeograph machine, etc) down there to "store" in what looked like an old wooden Army barracks.
I seem to recall reading in the local paper that the site has some problems with contamination (PCBs, maybe?) from old junk dumped there.
What was kind of funny was that our equipment, while old, was still working, and the building we could get into was filled with tons of usable if outdated office equipment, but none of it could be resold.
After dropping off our stuff, we kind of snooped around a little and then split (it was like -20F and even the van wasn't very warm).
Parent is dead on, and I'd take it one step further: don't attend meetings that have no agenda if you can at all avoid it. There are some "crisis" meetings that cannot be avoided, but if you get called to a meeting ALWAYS email the meeting organizer and ask for an agenda -- "Reply to all" can be you friend here, because it puts the "public eye" on the meeting caller.
If they reply with something vague or don't reply at all, you're off the hook. If someone asks why you weren't at the meeting, you can just say that that you were busy with X and that the agenda had nothing to do with your projects.
There's no escaping some meetings (called by bosses, crises, etc), and sometimes a meeting without an agenda gets called specifically to submarine people who won't attend an agendaless meeting ("We met yesterday and discussed your project..."), but not participating unless an agenda is prepared can definitely help prevent yak sessions where nothing gets done.
In the US in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a perception that street crime was on the increase and I think muggings became somewhat common, even in predominantly middle class areas in large cities. The late 80s and very early 90s saw a rise in "carjacking", causing even those who were merely transiting through high-density urban areas to become potential victims.
Since then these phenomnena or at least the reporting seems to have gone down. Personal experience working and visiting New York City and Boston and extensive walking trips at night seems to have backed this up; we never even saw people we'd consider threatening, let alone getting mugged.
Is street crime (muggings, robbery, etc) a more common occurance in middle class areas of Britain?
Have those things improved at all? Is there any viable new video goggle/glasses technology on the horizon? The problem with so many small devices capable of doing video or even more traditional computer-based work is the tiny screens, or the companion problem, the requirement for a larger screen making the overall device too big for easy portability.
Even on an airplane where lugging my laptop is an option, it's a problem. If I'm in a non-emergency row coach seat, I have to hold my laptop with the bottom tipped up towards me so I can hold the screen at a decent viewing angle. It gets worse if the person in front of me decides to lean their seat all the way back; I end up with my laptop essentially rotated 90 degrees away from me.
It will be a huge leap forward for portable video and computing when we can get large displays without needing even the relatively small space of an airline seat. I know that the previous (current?) iterations of video goggles kind of sucked; too big, too power intensive, too hard on the eyes, whatever. Anything getting better?
I can see "sleeping on the couch" if my wife caught me sleeping around or something of that nature.
For disagreeing with her when she's just wrong? That's dysfunctional.
It's not the phobics, but the willfully ignorant
on
The Impact of Technophobes
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Really. I'm fine with someone who's *intimidated* by a computer, afraid they'll break something, or just real cautious. But I lose all patience with people who are willfully ignorant and refuse to learn anything (and then conveniently blame a system or component for being "too hard").
I find that there's almost a kind of class attitude about this -- people who practice willful ignorance also think this somehow makes them more upper class or something because they're not having to sully their hands learning some technical skill. Sadly I also see a gender bias, with a lot of women taking that tact.
I actually had a huge fight with my wife about this one time. She is a marketing exec who was going on a long business trip to California. Prior to leaving, she asked their office's IT guy (small office, only one full-time admin/helpdesk guy) to configure her laptop for remote access. The night before she left, she pulled out her laptop and was *furious* that it didn't work and that it was jeopardizing other business she needed to keep up with while away. I asked her if she made any attempt to work with the IT guy, and she said no, she was too busy. I told her that it must not have been important to use remote access then, if she wasn't willing to spend 5 minutes running through it with the IT guy.
It's either important or its not, and bitching at the IT guy because you weren't willing to put ANY effort into it is total bullshit. The tools are valuable, but like it or not they are somewhat complicated and unless you work with them all the time, you need to put a small amount of effort into them to make them work for you.
And at that point her frustration with her deadlines and travel and my frustration from working with self-important marketing people dovetailed really nicely and we had a huge fight.
ARP traffic from California on an INDIANA segment?
That makes no sense at all. IANACableInternetEngineer, but I would have supposed that the ethernet broadcast domain for a cable segment would have been a street or neighborhood at the smallest, to perhaps a larger multi-neighborhood segment at the biggest.
Bridging entire states together into a giant broadcast domain sounds just kind of dumb, and also sounds like it would waste hundreds of megabits of expensive long-haul service as well.
What DOES make sense is that you're seeing multicast traffic or just misconfigured customer equipment ARPing for addresses that don't exist, and you're not really seeing layer 2 traffic that originated in California in Indiana. I'm pretty sure that even Cumcast is smarter than that.
OK, you've named one, extremely infamous, case from one of the most violent eras of modern American social history, for which there is an equally infamous European counterpart -- the Bloody Sunday shooting in Northern Ireland. And that doesn't even count the British detentions without charge, targeted assassinations, and so on.
I wouldn't say that the US doesn't have some infamous moments in crowd control, but I also don't think it represents a pattern of repression of public protest. While America had race riots in the 1940s, a lot of Europeans were committing genocide on massive scale. Who looks worse?
To what degree? I.e., can the judge just say, "I don't think he's innocent. So despite the jury, _I_ find him guilty and sentence him to 30 years in a pound-you-in-the-ass prison"? Or can they only nullify verdicts so as to favor of the defendent?
IANAL but I believe that the judge can set aside any jury verdict if he believes (and can demonstrate clearly) that the jury's decision blatantly ignores the facts and the laws in question. It probably engages an automatic appelite review of the case, as well, as a built-in safeguard.
Furthermore, where is the power of the jury to ignore laws and evidence defined? As I've googled this subject a little, I can't find a single hard reference to an actual law, statute, judicial order or any other reference that empowers jurors to vote their conscience. I fully recognize they have the *practical* power to do this -- vote whatever way they want, and I'm sure jurors, who are often selected for their LACK of education, often DO vote based on something other than a cold logical analysis of the facts.
Anyway, from what I have read, "jury nullification" is more of a phenomenon that periodically raises its head (people moving slaves from slave to free states, prohibition, and from what I've read, inner city jurors letting black defendents in drug cases go) than a real, validated principal backed by the legal system. There are a lot of people who *advocate* it, but IMNSHO it appears to go hand-in-hand with other antiestablishment advocacy, so its hard to know if its real.
You may be right about the mistrial, but the judge *can* set aside the jury's decision.
My guess is that we'd be hearing as much about jury nullification as we would about massive mistrials, if either was a significant factor. In any case, there would be massive appeals in anything but the most trivial cases. Nobody's walking from a murder rap due to jury nullification.
Jury nullification is highly controversial, regardless of whether you could actually pull it off. Many consider it an arbitrary disregarding of the law, and more dangerous than possibly ill-conceived laws.
By the way, in Germany songs with words such as "fuck" are played as they are, yet in the US these words are beeped. Seems that your freedom of speech isn't so absolute after all...
They may be able to do that, but having JUST finished serving as a juror in a Federal criminal trial, I can tell you it wouldn't go over very well in most cases where there is strong evidence.
In all liklihood the judge would declare a mistrial. I'm not familiar (we weren't told) with the judge's powers over a jury and what laws apply to jury conduct. It might be possible for the judge to declare the jury in contempt for disregarding the judge's instructions on how the law(s) are to be applied.
It's not like you go to court and do whatever you want and interpret the law any way you want. The judge has total control of the rules of interpretation used by the jury. The court and the trial are kind of the judge's own little kingdom, and you mess with a federal judge at your own peril.
If I recall correctly, protesters in the US are corralled into tightly-secured pens, with ranks of riot police on all sides, helicopters\snipers lurking overhead, and undercover agents in the crowd around you. So technically, everyone is allowed to voice their dissent. But the rules are designed to discourage as many people as possible. Do you want to be penned, covertly photographed, and possibly get 'swept up' by being near the wrong people?
This only happens at extremely high profile events or events with high security concerns. Ordinary run of the mill protests happen all the time without any barricades or other limitations on freedom of expression. And I might add that this would be even less common if the WTO protesters hadn't decided instead to become *rioters* and smash downtown Seattle. Now there's a lot of concern (some legitimate) from locals when one of these high profile gigs comes to down that a bunch of out of towners are going to come in and wreck shit that the locals have to pay for (stores, signs, businesses, cars).
Furthermore, I hardly think the Europeans have a lock on free and open dissent. World Economic Forum in Switzerland? They practically walled it off. When the WTO met in Italy a couple of years ago, they LITERALLY walled it off with shipping containers, and a lot people were hurt and I believe a couple KILLED in protests and action by the police. I've never seen a water cannon used against US protestors (nor am I aware of any ownership of them by any police department) since limited use of firehoses against protesters in the 1960s (the symbolism of which probably limits their use to this day).
Another example of people assuming that EVERYBODY lives in the USA or is under US law...
The solicitation was made on a server located in the US. I don't doubt that Ashcroft would consider that US jurisdiction, regardless of the physical location of the poster.
There's a lot of guys in dog cages at Guantanomo Bay who've NEVER been to the US. I'm not so sure these days that when the US governemnt is pissed off at you, where you are and where you did something matter a whole lot.
You do realize you've just comitted a pretty serious Federal crime, don't you? I know you're kidding or just emoting the same frustration many others, myself included, feel about the willful disregard spammers seem to have for many things.
Since Germans don't have unlimited freedom of political expression, I wonder how many Americans would give up theirs and accept the yoke of censorship for privacy?
As much as I want privacy, I have a hard time feeling like I'm a victim of lack of privacy. I'm more annoyed on a practical every day basis with the nosy neighbors than I am with US Bank's selling my credit card purchase information or Tivo's aggregation of my viewing habits.
I'm actually much more concerned about the government's ability and willingness to repress political speech than I am whether some database knows I bought a couple of cans of jock itch spray with my credit card.
If you participate in the modern economy at all (ie, job, credit, house, etc) you are so tracked, ordered, slotted, demographically aligned, etc, it doesn't really matter. Whether Tivo knows I've got a Rocco Siffridi wishlist or whether I hit pause for 20 minutes while watching HBO softcore, I could care less.
The ONLY way you can remain "anonymous" in this world is to work for cash and squat in an old farmhouse someplace in North Dakota. Otherwise, it's impossible to be anonymous.
Slashdot Mirror
That occured to me, but then it wouldn't be a demonstration but an illustration, which, in reality, might be all that's necessary.
I think the very wealthy send personal shoppers to stores and accept/reject the new clothing in their own homes.
And that's for ready-to-wear. For tailored stuff (and who isn't rich and wearing custom tailored suits?), the tailor or his sizing rep comes to your house and measures you, shows fabric samples, and then comes back with finished clothes for final fitting.
Actually going to a store and having to disrobe in a changing room, interact with other people and have strangers around you isn't what people with real money do. There may be some stores that are far from home or impractical for personal shoppers, so in that case, you pack up your entourage, rent a few suites at the Plaza and have stuff brought to your room.
..this idea, coupled with the "time warp" of another post would be a great idea, especially if you could manage to display HD video.
Start out with what video on the internet looked like back using dialup in 1995 -- postage-stamp sized 8 bit windows running at 8-10 fps with out-of-sync 8Khz mono audio. Move slowly up the resolution and link speed until you get to "today's streaming video", but still displaying only one window of video. During this time, keep the display at something smaller, like 800x600 on a larger display; partly to magnify the pixelization of older/slower video, partly for greater wow factor later on.
At this point, you start talking about your link and you switch the video feed to HD full screen. "And that's not all...." -- switch the display to max resolution (2048 x 1536?), and start adding HD feeds until you've tiled the screen with HD feeds. Keep adding them until you have so many on the screen that they're hard to see or you really have maxed out the pipe.
This is something that ordinary people can grasp; the challenge will be a computer with video display capable of displaying dozens of simultaneous HD feeds, but it will look really cool, especially if you keep the sound going on each station and gradually increase the volume as you add channels for dramatic impact.
I used to carry a sweet little 3-outlet switched power strip. It came in handy for hotels where there wasn't enough outlets for the laptop, the cell charger, etc. It'd be great for this situations. Unfortunately it got left in a Chicago data center when we needed more power than we had outlets for and I've never replaced it.
20%? I can see your typical "nothing but the best for me" yuppie mom tossing the whole package if it doesn't read nearly 100%.
My dog will eat stuff she doesn't get fed very often (raw meat, wet dog food) until she gets sick, and some breeds can kill themselves doing that.
I'll admit to paying for wifi at MSP, but I also get to expense it, so the cost doesn't matter to me. What drives me batshit is the scarcity of *outlets* at airports! Maybe this is how they plan to pay for it, by putting in paid electricity!
What's the deal with outlets at airports, anyway? I know it'd be far more expensive to add outlets in the middle of the floor or in places where there was no easy access to power, but it's hard to find ANY outlets, and when you do find them they're often far from your specific gate, in the middle of a hallway, or just nonexistent. Part of the reason I find this so surprising is that most electical codes require an outlet every 6 feet or something, yet in an 2000 sq ft area I found three, with only two in a usable place -- and when I dug around in my bag looking for something, I had two people approach me asking if I was leaving, eyeing the outlet.
Battery power is fine if you don't turn on the laptop during the flight or carry a couple of extra batteries. I don't (weight, etc), and I like to save my batteries for watching DVDs during the flight. But with outlets so scarce, I think I might be forced to get a couple of extra batteries just to deal with the lack of power.
Besides the tongue-in-cheek reference to paying for power, the other idea that occured to me is the dreaded advertising model for wifi -- give away access, but transparent proxy all web requests and add popup and banner hijacking advertising. Sure, it won't affect those of us that use VPN or ssh tunnels to our own proxies, but they can solve that with NAT and/or locked-down access.
They came out with some umbrella holding company form regarding "employee responsibility". It was pretty noxious, especially from a political correctness perspective. I refused to sign mine and tossed it behind my furniture ("I lost it" plausable deniability), and nobody has said anything yet.
My guess is that in companies above a certain size, HR departments are all about doing more with less, and they're generally staffed by a bunch of clerical types for whom less work is the goal in life. One more or one less code of conduct or agreement doesn't matter and unless you sit at a desk in the presence of an HR overlord until all paper is signed, you can just not sign it or make up a story or two until they've moved on to the next distraction.
In terms of the story submitters problem, what happens if he just signs it and ignores the provisions. Either his side business is penny-ante and they won't notice or care, at which point he's not lost anything -- just be careful at work not to talk about it and make/take calls over lunch or on days off.
Or his business DOES become significant, in which case you quietly quit and leave an out of state PO box ("I always wanted to live in New Mexico") as your forwarding address. By the time they figure out what's happening, they'll have to either get ballsy and sue you for real (at which point careful corporate structuring can make their life very hard) or they'll just assume you're yet another ex-employee.
Either way, what they don't know can't harm you. Chances are an Ask Slashdot poster isn't a superstar who draws gossip, but some Ham-and-Egger that doesn't matter in the scheme of things.
Part of the Rosemount site was used as a storage facility by the U, at least until 1990 when I last visited. I worked for a U department and one very cold winter day, another student worker and myself took the department van loaded with shit (an old folding machine, a mimeograph machine, etc) down there to "store" in what looked like an old wooden Army barracks.
I seem to recall reading in the local paper that the site has some problems with contamination (PCBs, maybe?) from old junk dumped there.
What was kind of funny was that our equipment, while old, was still working, and the building we could get into was filled with tons of usable if outdated office equipment, but none of it could be resold.
After dropping off our stuff, we kind of snooped around a little and then split (it was like -20F and even the van wasn't very warm).
Parent is dead on, and I'd take it one step further: don't attend meetings that have no agenda if you can at all avoid it. There are some "crisis" meetings that cannot be avoided, but if you get called to a meeting ALWAYS email the meeting organizer and ask for an agenda -- "Reply to all" can be you friend here, because it puts the "public eye" on the meeting caller.
If they reply with something vague or don't reply at all, you're off the hook. If someone asks why you weren't at the meeting, you can just say that that you were busy with X and that the agenda had nothing to do with your projects.
There's no escaping some meetings (called by bosses, crises, etc), and sometimes a meeting without an agenda gets called specifically to submarine people who won't attend an agendaless meeting ("We met yesterday and discussed your project..."), but not participating unless an agenda is prepared can definitely help prevent yak sessions where nothing gets done.
In the US in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a perception that street crime was on the increase and I think muggings became somewhat common, even in predominantly middle class areas in large cities. The late 80s and very early 90s saw a rise in "carjacking", causing even those who were merely transiting through high-density urban areas to become potential victims.
Since then these phenomnena or at least the reporting seems to have gone down. Personal experience working and visiting New York City and Boston and extensive walking trips at night seems to have backed this up; we never even saw people we'd consider threatening, let alone getting mugged.
Is street crime (muggings, robbery, etc) a more common occurance in middle class areas of Britain?
Have those things improved at all? Is there any viable new video goggle/glasses technology on the horizon? The problem with so many small devices capable of doing video or even more traditional computer-based work is the tiny screens, or the companion problem, the requirement for a larger screen making the overall device too big for easy portability.
Even on an airplane where lugging my laptop is an option, it's a problem. If I'm in a non-emergency row coach seat, I have to hold my laptop with the bottom tipped up towards me so I can hold the screen at a decent viewing angle. It gets worse if the person in front of me decides to lean their seat all the way back; I end up with my laptop essentially rotated 90 degrees away from me.
It will be a huge leap forward for portable video and computing when we can get large displays without needing even the relatively small space of an airline seat. I know that the previous (current?) iterations of video goggles kind of sucked; too big, too power intensive, too hard on the eyes, whatever. Anything getting better?
I can see "sleeping on the couch" if my wife caught me sleeping around or something of that nature.
For disagreeing with her when she's just wrong? That's dysfunctional.
Really. I'm fine with someone who's *intimidated* by a computer, afraid they'll break something, or just real cautious. But I lose all patience with people who are willfully ignorant and refuse to learn anything (and then conveniently blame a system or component for being "too hard").
I find that there's almost a kind of class attitude about this -- people who practice willful ignorance also think this somehow makes them more upper class or something because they're not having to sully their hands learning some technical skill. Sadly I also see a gender bias, with a lot of women taking that tact.
I actually had a huge fight with my wife about this one time. She is a marketing exec who was going on a long business trip to California. Prior to leaving, she asked their office's IT guy (small office, only one full-time admin/helpdesk guy) to configure her laptop for remote access. The night before she left, she pulled out her laptop and was *furious* that it didn't work and that it was jeopardizing other business she needed to keep up with while away. I asked her if she made any attempt to work with the IT guy, and she said no, she was too busy. I told her that it must not have been important to use remote access then, if she wasn't willing to spend 5 minutes running through it with the IT guy.
It's either important or its not, and bitching at the IT guy because you weren't willing to put ANY effort into it is total bullshit. The tools are valuable, but like it or not they are somewhat complicated and unless you work with them all the time, you need to put a small amount of effort into them to make them work for you.
And at that point her frustration with her deadlines and travel and my frustration from working with self-important marketing people dovetailed really nicely and we had a huge fight.
ARP traffic from California on an INDIANA segment?
That makes no sense at all. IANACableInternetEngineer, but I would have supposed that the ethernet broadcast domain for a cable segment would have been a street or neighborhood at the smallest, to perhaps a larger multi-neighborhood segment at the biggest.
Bridging entire states together into a giant broadcast domain sounds just kind of dumb, and also sounds like it would waste hundreds of megabits of expensive long-haul service as well.
What DOES make sense is that you're seeing multicast traffic or just misconfigured customer equipment ARPing for addresses that don't exist, and you're not really seeing layer 2 traffic that originated in California in Indiana. I'm pretty sure that even Cumcast is smarter than that.
OK, you've named one, extremely infamous, case from one of the most violent eras of modern American social history, for which there is an equally infamous European counterpart -- the Bloody Sunday shooting in Northern Ireland. And that doesn't even count the British detentions without charge, targeted assassinations, and so on.
I wouldn't say that the US doesn't have some infamous moments in crowd control, but I also don't think it represents a pattern of repression of public protest. While America had race riots in the 1940s, a lot of Europeans were committing genocide on massive scale. Who looks worse?
To what degree? I.e., can the judge just say, "I don't think he's innocent. So despite the jury, _I_ find him guilty and sentence him to 30 years in a pound-you-in-the-ass prison"? Or can they only nullify verdicts so as to favor of the defendent?
IANAL but I believe that the judge can set aside any jury verdict if he believes (and can demonstrate clearly) that the jury's decision blatantly ignores the facts and the laws in question. It probably engages an automatic appelite review of the case, as well, as a built-in safeguard.
Furthermore, where is the power of the jury to ignore laws and evidence defined? As I've googled this subject a little, I can't find a single hard reference to an actual law, statute, judicial order or any other reference that empowers jurors to vote their conscience. I fully recognize they have the *practical* power to do this -- vote whatever way they want, and I'm sure jurors, who are often selected for their LACK of education, often DO vote based on something other than a cold logical analysis of the facts.
Anyway, from what I have read, "jury nullification" is more of a phenomenon that periodically raises its head (people moving slaves from slave to free states, prohibition, and from what I've read, inner city jurors letting black defendents in drug cases go) than a real, validated principal backed by the legal system. There are a lot of people who *advocate* it, but IMNSHO it appears to go hand-in-hand with other antiestablishment advocacy, so its hard to know if its real.
You may be right about the mistrial, but the judge *can* set aside the jury's decision.
My guess is that we'd be hearing as much about jury nullification as we would about massive mistrials, if either was a significant factor. In any case, there would be massive appeals in anything but the most trivial cases. Nobody's walking from a murder rap due to jury nullification.
Jury nullification is highly controversial, regardless of whether you could actually pull it off. Many consider it an arbitrary disregarding of the law, and more dangerous than possibly ill-conceived laws.
By the way, in Germany songs with words such as "fuck" are played as they are, yet in the US these words are beeped. Seems that your freedom of speech isn't so absolute after all...
Don't confuse freedom of speech with poor taste..
They may be able to do that, but having JUST finished serving as a juror in a Federal criminal trial, I can tell you it wouldn't go over very well in most cases where there is strong evidence.
In all liklihood the judge would declare a mistrial. I'm not familiar (we weren't told) with the judge's powers over a jury and what laws apply to jury conduct. It might be possible for the judge to declare the jury in contempt for disregarding the judge's instructions on how the law(s) are to be applied.
It's not like you go to court and do whatever you want and interpret the law any way you want. The judge has total control of the rules of interpretation used by the jury. The court and the trial are kind of the judge's own little kingdom, and you mess with a federal judge at your own peril.
If I recall correctly, protesters in the US are corralled into tightly-secured pens, with ranks of riot police on all sides, helicopters\snipers lurking overhead, and undercover agents in the crowd around you. So technically, everyone is allowed to voice their dissent. But the rules are designed to discourage as many people as possible. Do you want to be penned, covertly photographed, and possibly get 'swept up' by being near the wrong people?
This only happens at extremely high profile events or events with high security concerns. Ordinary run of the mill protests happen all the time without any barricades or other limitations on freedom of expression. And I might add that this would be even less common if the WTO protesters hadn't decided instead to become *rioters* and smash downtown Seattle. Now there's a lot of concern (some legitimate) from locals when one of these high profile gigs comes to down that a bunch of out of towners are going to come in and wreck shit that the locals have to pay for (stores, signs, businesses, cars).
Furthermore, I hardly think the Europeans have a lock on free and open dissent. World Economic Forum in Switzerland? They practically walled it off. When the WTO met in Italy a couple of years ago, they LITERALLY walled it off with shipping containers, and a lot people were hurt and I believe a couple KILLED in protests and action by the police. I've never seen a water cannon used against US protestors (nor am I aware of any ownership of them by any police department) since limited use of firehoses against protesters in the 1960s (the symbolism of which probably limits their use to this day).
Another example of people assuming that EVERYBODY lives in the USA or is under US law...
The solicitation was made on a server located in the US. I don't doubt that Ashcroft would consider that US jurisdiction, regardless of the physical location of the poster.
There's a lot of guys in dog cages at Guantanomo Bay who've NEVER been to the US. I'm not so sure these days that when the US governemnt is pissed off at you, where you are and where you did something matter a whole lot.
You do realize you've just comitted a pretty serious Federal crime, don't you? I know you're kidding or just emoting the same frustration many others, myself included, feel about the willful disregard spammers seem to have for many things.
But you might've wanted to add a smiley...
Since Germans don't have unlimited freedom of political expression, I wonder how many Americans would give up theirs and accept the yoke of censorship for privacy?
As much as I want privacy, I have a hard time feeling like I'm a victim of lack of privacy. I'm more annoyed on a practical every day basis with the nosy neighbors than I am with US Bank's selling my credit card purchase information or Tivo's aggregation of my viewing habits.
I'm actually much more concerned about the government's ability and willingness to repress political speech than I am whether some database knows I bought a couple of cans of jock itch spray with my credit card.
If you participate in the modern economy at all (ie, job, credit, house, etc) you are so tracked, ordered, slotted, demographically aligned, etc, it doesn't really matter. Whether Tivo knows I've got a Rocco Siffridi wishlist or whether I hit pause for 20 minutes while watching HBO softcore, I could care less.
The ONLY way you can remain "anonymous" in this world is to work for cash and squat in an old farmhouse someplace in North Dakota. Otherwise, it's impossible to be anonymous.