The way "program trading" works, if the authorities dig into this, as they should, they are likely to find that the same traders placed bets both ways, knowing the time of the announcement, and cancelled the losing bet and kept the winning one. It's market manipulation and plain old theft, but since millions of dollars were made it is unlikely that the perpetrators will actually be called to account in civil much less criminal court as they should if the government were honest. The honest traders can't compete in such a rigged market, and we need to take a hard look at whether to allow such bets in markets everyone knows are going up, too, while we're at it.
The respective merits of the ACLU and the NRA is not the point. The point is that they have come together across a wide ideological gulf to challenge the NSA's outrageous grab of our private communications. Now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau claims some unidentified right, duty and power to grab all of our credit and debit card transactions, too.
We had and thought we had won this fight in the nineties but the NSA and other government agencies, backed by administrations of both political parties, neither of which, or their candidates, give a Continental hoot for the rights of individuals or the Fourth Amendment or the "blessings of liberty," have demonstrated that, instead of "tak[ing] care that the Constitution and laws be faithfully executed," have proceeded to destroy the foundations of what made this country. Thought Police, 1984, Brave New World, the Beast of Revelation, here we come. If we're not there yet, "you can sure see it [the destruction of our liberties' from here.
The author should go back and re-read the text of the Fifth Amendment as wisely adopted by the Framers and those who voted to ratify it, and which has never been amended. It protects a person from being "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." The Sixth Amendment guarantees a party, whether state or defendant, " . . . compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor" in a criminal case.
The broad guarantees of due process in the Fourth and Fourteenth, concerning also see the guarantee of jury trials in most civil cases in the Seventh, Amendments, with the have long been held to guarantee civil as well as criminal litigants the right to compulsory process to secure the testimony of witnesses with knowledge of relevant facts or of facts that might reasonably be expected to lead to discovery thereof.
The state legislatures, in state cases, and Congress in federal cases, have enacted, and some courts have created, some reporter and other shields, but they were never intended to deny litigants their Constitutionally guaranteed rights to compulsory process for obtaining discovery of evidence, and the fact that Congress has been and is currently debating a broader reporter shield law (which the Wall Street Journal and others have demonstrated is a difficult if not impossible drafting job) demonstrates that the right the author claims simply does not exist.
The author betrays historical and Constitutional ignorance by admitting that he does not understand why a guilty party should not be compelled to confess. That leads to indefinite coercive confinement not to mention other brutal coercive measures. See Arthur Miller's The Crucible for some examples of that in pre-Constitutional America, or see more recent examples in China, the Soviet Union, Iran, etc.
The first problem involved is that we have begun to treat United Nations actions as though they were binding upon the United States and its citizens, under color of the provision of our Constitution that includes treaties, ratified by the Senate, as the supreme law of the land. The clause was never intended to permit bypassing the House of Representativesâ(TM) vital role in the law-making process, nor to permit the President and the Senate to diminish any of the fundamental rights of Americans guaranteed by the Constitution. Indeed, our fundamental rights are guaranteed, but not granted, either by the Constitution or the government. The prevailing view of the Framers of the Constitution, as laid out in the Federalist papers which were the case for its ratification, was that our federal government had no powers not expressly granted in the Constitution, and they originally argued against the Bill of Rights because the prevailing view as noted there was that these fundamental rights, including those guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, were derived from what the Declaration of Independence called âoethe laws of nature and of Natureâ(TM)s God, . . our Creator.â
Letâ(TM)s be completely candid about this. The impetus behind the current push to limit the free speech and press rights of Americans originates out of the fear of terrorism or war by militant Islamists, and our governmentâ(TM)s craven fear and cowardice because the Muslim world controls much of the oil and gas we depend upon for our productivity and standard of living.. If we actually got into a real, all-out war, unlike World War II which we won in part because we had the oil, we would be hard put to supply our forces with oil or manufactured goods. A minute segment of ill-informed professing Christians have abused such free speech and free exercise rights, but the brutal fact is that it is not Christians or Jews, etc, but only the resurgent militant Islamists, who ultimately seek our conquest and subjugation anyway, the powerful âoegayâ lobby, and certain militant atheists, who, and whose violent reactions, are behind this whole idea of restricting religious or other expression.
The whole idea that the law should protect people from religious or political speech that they disagree with and donâ(TM)t want to hear, or want others to hear, because of some emotional reaction they choose to have to it is not only contrary to the American Constitutional scheme, but violates fundamental, God-given, human rights. Some Western countries, facing increased Islamic , âoegay,â and atheist influence, have decided to classify and prohibit as so-called âoehate speechâ the tenets of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, which believers have traditionally believed are inspired, but practically never extend the same restrictive treatment to the Quran, which Muslims believe was literally written by Allah (God) in heaven, although it contains many passages which legitimize and command, or which the militant Muslims insist legitimize and command, murder and other crimes and violations of our fundamental human rights.
This is quite different from regulating incitement to commit crimes, psychological abuse of children, etc.
I'm a retired Texas lawyer with more personal and professional knowledge about suicide than anyone should have, and a strong believer in personal privacy. I'm not up on the details of British Columbia and Canadian law but they do not have some of the restrictions on search and seizure, or liberal protections for speech and press, that we do in the U.S., and have outlawed some forms of actual or alleged hate speech that, for better or worse, we cannot.
Here in Texas, it has long been a crime either to aid or to abet or encourage in individual to commit suicide, which law provides only a fine unless death or serious bodily injury results, in which event the crime in a felony carrying up to a ten year prison term. Our family and penal law also cover serious psychological child abuswe resulting in harm. Missouri enacted a law dealing with encouraging suicide after the infamous Lori Drew case.
Trust me on this one, a vulnerable child or teen, etc., can be pushed to commit suicide by psychological child abuse. I have known and represented several children who had survived serious suicide attempts. One child client begged me to kill her. The best evidence available to me indicates that the completed suicide of one Texas child at nine was essentially the product of psychological abuse by peers. Indeed, any such attempt or completed suicide should be investigated for underlying child abuse. I was very close to one case where a six year old child was terrorized and thus prevented from reporting and identifying the perpetrator of sexual abuse and it turned out that the abuser making the threat was too young to qualify as a juvenile delinquent. Unfortunately, in my view, I cannot find a reported case where anyone has been prosecuted for or convicted of psychological child abuse.
This is a much more serious problem than most people understand and realize.
Glad you have. I have a Logitech keyboard and optical mouse and the letters etc. have quickly worn off, which is a minor pain in the posterior, and Caps Lock comes and sticks on if I type a lot of the keys near that. I'm looking for a good keyboard, mostly for use in Word, Outlook, Firefox and sometimes IE Internet browsing, Contacts, etc., etc. and getting discouraged.
I've had and gone through Dell, Microsoft, Logitech, and some no-name keyboards or ones the brand name of which I can't recall, and even the more expensive ones from Microsoft I have used either had problems when I got them or stopped working properly before long. First one letter or function key quits, then more, or striking one key gets me something I did not type, the touch on some keys gets to be too light or much too hard to push, or the markings rub off, etc.
I need a good tactile feel to alert me if I type something wrong, etc., and reliability when my typing gets up around 80 wpm. Ideally, a keyboard should be designed to keep coffee, peanut shells, staples or paper clips, dog fur, dirt, etc. out and to let me clean it simply and easily, preferably without having to wait eight hours before using it.
I'm unable to find and get into the TOA. whatever that is, referred to here, on the Net, and don't have a current dictionary of acronyms, so I may be missing something. This problem appears to be with a local transit authority police agency and Delta Air, not federal TSA, though the shirt, whatever it said which I don't know, did question. challenge, or attack TSA.
I don't hold with racial, ethnic, religious, etc. discrimination, official or by public accommodations like airlines and restaurants, and they cannot justify that by claiming that customers might be biased against the person, either, but of course there is no law against excluding Ph.D. candidates because everybody knows, especially since "9/11" and the Aurora CO theater shooting, that some of those might be studying something dangerous like those. (For the record, I have only one earned doctorate myself, a J.D., the basic law degree). I've read about two successive directives by TSA's parent Homeland Security Department listing practicing Christians, believers in upholding and defending the Constitution, and the Second Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights thereto, veterans and special forces trainees, etc. as suspiciously likely to commit assassination, terrorism, etc.
I have a congenital nystagmus condition, which, under Texas and many other jurisdictions; law, is probable cause for a warrantless arrest, breath or blood test, and search because the same symptoms, uncontrollable eye movements, etc., can be produced by alcohol or cocaine. I also have poor vision and eye-hand coordination, no depth perception, etc. as a result of this and other congenital neurological anomalies. I have been detained, and got pulled out and screened, not when boarding but after landing at my home city one night because I was visibly upset after a federal functionary had me fly to New Orleans and then they asked me why I came and said the problem could have been solved on the phone, so my involuntary eye movements wee more pronounced than usual--and that was before TSA. It took 24 years before the CIA finally quit lying to my U. S. Senator and me and admitted to me that they had put and kept me on a list of suspected Soviet spies and sympathizers, not only false but easily proven false, over a piece of academic research. I still can't get TSA to tell me if my nystagmus condition etc. and my mostly conservative political views, openly published, has me on a "no fly" or "suspicious" list. Nobody will tell me how to vote or board a plane shortly after my wallet with my state non-driver ID card (which it took me 14 years to get Texas to issue and then to integrate into the main drivers' license system) was lost or stolen, either.
I know of no airline or TSA rule that might provide any even remotely legally arguable legal basis for denying a passenger carriage on a plane because of any political message, unless it was grossly obscene, indecent, etc.,not revealed here, in which case turn the shirt inside out for the flight. "Delta commits Unfair Labor Practices" would be protected, especially during a strike or lead-up job action.
If the pilot had bumped these people to avoid delaying takeoff, pilots do have broad discretion, but it they had been allowed to board and had boarded before being kicked off, that doesn't make sense on the information given to date.
Obviously something ticked the state Authority that runs the airport and its police.off. State and federal civil rights authorities should investigate what, if any,Constitutional and other legal rights may have been violated. Winning a civil suit might be very hard regardless of many possible facts.
If you are fool enough to use your employer's computer for banking, healthcare, credit, etc., and especially if you don't think this stuff is routinely intercepted and looked at by employers, prospective employers, etc., notwithstanding HIPAA, FCRA, you should be fired for sheer ignorance or stupidity, but the real reason you will get fired is more likely going to violate federal or state law with relative impunity because an employer can always make up a permissible reason, especially if you get caught doing personal business on the company system.
"Anything you say, on or off line, can or will be used against you, if not in a court of law, then at work and in other relationships and transactions."
I used to practice with an insurance-defense law firm, and have also represented plaintiffs whose depositions were taken by other insurance-defense firms. Trust me on this, your or your wife or teenage daughter's OB/GYN records or abortion, or having taken antidepressants, are known and likely to be used against you in deposition if not in court. We used to get not only the plaintiffs' but their lawyers' financial data including specifically due dates of major loans. My wife's and my records were quoted in court, complete with details about my best man at our wedding, when I was appointed to represent some children whose father accused their mother of abuse. I was fired from one job at the behest of the health insurer, and called in while a dorm counselor in college, because of a typo that indicated I had a heart attack, which nobody living could correct, and I had never met the woman listed on one hospital's credit and medical records as my wife, nor our alleged child.
Having our health insurance through our employers is one of the single worst arrangements ever invented, because it is impossible to segregate such information, especially but not only with self-insured employers where even the weak anti-discrimination provisions don't apply. John McCain got this right.
Cuban is right, as is this poster. Algorithmic progrm trading is simply the insiders gaming the system at the expense of the ordinary players, and they will leave the market when they realize this. How long do you think any other gambling casino would last if it let some players do this?
In my personal experience having been a child, something I realize many primary grade students have never experienced, my older sister could and did teach me a lot about and awaken an interest in chemistry, physics, etc., while a high school student and college frosh and I was in grade school. I watched her do the same with her youngest child, a daughter, then seven. Of course she ended up Teacher of the Year in her state a half-century later. Public high school chemistry with valences, etc., but no lab, except a few experiments I did myself at home, was interesting and easy, and I had planned a career in that direction. In college, the department head, who taught the freshman lecture, used something he called MAC equations instead of the usual valences etc. and I was and remained utterly lost, and, with a significant uncorrectable set of vision and coordination deficits, lab was tough, too.
Nobody ever could explain why, in our first chem lab, everybody got issued a flask, a cork, and alcohol and chlorobenzene from the same supply, to be distilled apart, and my flask, but nobody else's, blew apart before getting heated, and with no fire.
In four years of higher math in public high school, nobody told me I was doing all he graph problems, for example, a$$ backwards until the grader made that comment in college. With 70th percentile math and 99 3/4th percentile verbal scores, I switched direction and went to law school. We didn't learn until an MRI forty years later that the reason I couldn't hack college math, despite loving in in principle, knocking a chunk off my GPA, and nearly killing myself trying, was that I had been born without most of the corpus collossum, which connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain and is critical to higher math.
We were not blessed with children by birth or adoption, but my friends who home-schooled, about all of whom were college educated, collaborated, and engaged in some "Jack Spratt" trading where someone good at higher math taught the group's kids that while someone else taught other things they knew better. I went to high school and college with children of illiterate immigrant coal miners who were taught critical things at home that students I knew as clients and employees never learned, and became experts in chemistry and other sciences.
My late mother was a certified teacher and did manage to teach me one critical skill in pre-first grade. She tried to teach me other things, and briefly tried to home-school us, using nationally recognized materials, in 7th grade, and I remember most of those experiences as nightmares.
“The Password Protection Act of 2012 (PPA) would also prevent employers from accessing information on any computer that isn't owned or controlled by an employee, including private e-mail accounts, photo sharing sites, and smartphones." [Emphasis added]
This doesn’t make any sense. Are you sure the word “employee” should not have been “employer?”
Any computer, phone, or heart pacemaker your employer or prospective employer graciously decides to permit you to bring to work, or to any other premises over which they may have control, is “controlled by an employer.” The only reason your car is not, even though parking on company property is clearly subject to its control, is that this might expose the employer or prospective employer, and thus their wealthy and powerful insurance company, to liability for an accident.
My law school dean was fond of Will Rogers’ comment “When Congress tells a joke, it’s a law, and when Congress passes a law, it’s a joke.”
Employment law is a sick joke. You can fire practically anyone, except a few people with a lot of money and political “suck,” for “good cause, no cause at all, or an evil and malicious cause,” regardless of any promises you may have made to get them to take the job. You can’t refuse to hire, or fire, someone for being black or over 40 or Jewish or disabled but qualified, but the odds of an employer, much less a large and influential employer, getting called to account legally if that is your real reason are slim to none in the real world if you’re smart enough to document the very common fact that they are also “over-qualified,” or have never done some rare procedure in the field that they may have to do on this job, and that anyone could do, and don’t hire them, or that they refused to participate in criminal conduct, or that they left their post to save the life of a child within sight. Whistle-blower laws are being construed so narrowly that they offer little of the protection intended, or which the voters thought was intended, by Congress or state legislators. The courts have gone so far toward gutting the Americans with Disabilities Act that Congress amended it largely to restore the clear original intent of the law. They’re already starting to gut the law as amended again.
It doesn’t make any difference, because, like long-promised privacy protection legislation, it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of being passed in any form that would actually address and solve the problems. Oh, sure, something with a high-sounding name will get passed, but, by the time the lobbyists get through rewriting it, it will have about as much effect as barking at the moon.
As a retired Texas lawyer with criminal law experience, including a lot of court-appointed defense experience, who has also been a crime victim, I suspect that the author of this comment does not live in Texas.
You say you are indigent, thus can't afford to pay for legal representation yourself. Any lawyer the state pays for is going to be in exactly the same position, but any who are any good is not going to sell you out. Where I practiced, in any given case, court-appointed counsel made more money the more work he did defending you, and, of course, he has the same motives to build a string of wins, but, if you, the client, lose, you may have to pay it back in any event (so win). In better economic times, I have known lawyers who were less than welcoming of court appointments, which pay less than direct private retainers, but the current Second Great Depression has made a lot of lawyers who used to try to avoid appointments now sing jup for all they can get.
I'm an old ham and SWL, learned the law about being allowed to listen but not republish point to point radio communications as a young teen, and live in a small town where the only news is via scanner, so I wish this were not necessary, but the police have been going to frequencies not covered on most scanners and other methods of secure communications for years. The FCC forbids us private citizens from encrypting most radio traffic, but the organized narcotics rings and others do it all the time. I was on a police ride-along many years ago in Dallas and the dispatcher had the officers go to a pay phone (remember those?) for a message about a bomb threat to avoid panic. At one point there was a city ordinance in Dallas against having a scanner or police radio in a private car that was aimed at ambulance-chasing lawyers and the media.
Having known of cell calls by politicians, and radio messages to and from Air Force One, being intercepted and illegally published, I'm sujrprised this has taken so long.
I practiced privacy and criminal law for years before being forced to retire. I've known the dispatch tapes to prove useful if you can catch those before they are routinely recorded over about every 24 hours, and I love dash-cam video which sometimes is hte only true account from either side of what really happened in a chase, stop, shooting, etc., but you don't really hear anything unguarded and relevant on police radio because they're smart enough not to say "Let's beat the out of him and say he resisted" on the air.
I've known some police abuses and outright state and federal crimes, and some lies about them.
I arrived at court one morning to learn from the bailiff, who had a police radio, and the judge, who also heard this, that the police had broadcast a report that I had been found murdered. This was the second such occasion and they knew this was false, and I never could find out who originated this, but, for reasons attorney-client confidentiality prevents me from explaining here, I took this as a threat.
I'm not sure we really want to put all police and other emergency radio traffic on the Internet even with a delay. That's permanent and too easy for people to misuse. This traffic also often includes privileged and confidential medical and mental health data.
I suspect the posters who are doing so well in IT and Computer Science are out of touch with a lot of graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) majors including those who are not.
I worked my way through much of college and law school, where my original job, set up by a clueless rich fellow, fell through and I ended up working practically full time and walking back and forth to work another 1.5 hours per day. I got the Tsetse Fly Award in the April Fool issue of the paper for logging the most sleep in 8:00 A.M. class and every once in awhile crashed out and slept through a day of classes. I think that was a major reason I missed Law Review and only graduated in the top third of my selective class at a top school, which cut off a lot of opportunities and better paying jobs. You can’t do it today without some special connections and skills.
I live across from a second-tier state university and know people with B.S., M/S. and everything but the defense of their dissertations for Ph.D. in computers and other STEM fields, more than one of whom have ended up teaching English in China, and others unemployed in or near their fields and literally flipping burgers.
Some were making six-figure incomes until their jobs got off-shored at what would be below minimum wage here and have had to travel across the country to low-pay part-time jobs. I put a lot of them through bankruptcy after they lost their jobs and homes, etc.
How do we propose to collect enough taxes to dig out of the national debt pit while driving down the earning capacity, and tax payments, of what used to be much of our middle class? How do you expect these people to make enough to pay off their non-dischargeable student loans and other massive debt? They can’t. Student loans are just one of the next bubbles to burst.
Another small problem: Only a very, very small percentage of even the conscientious American students with high intelligence have the specific native intelligence and talent to succeed in STEM and computer fields even when they pay well. Fewer male than female high school grads are going to college because the return just isn’t there.
I’m older than most of you and remember when this country went on its big move to push everybody into engineering. I tried, and only MIT was smart enough to turn me down. It sort of worked for awhile. Then we started seeing pages and pages of ads for engineers that said “no aerospace experience need apply.” Age. Etc. discrimination laws are impossible to enforce most of the time and we’re scrapping huge chunks of intelligent younger, much less older, college grads regardless of major. Why do you think almost half of American adults are on some kind of welfare payments, a situation we cannot possibly sustain financially and which destroys everything this country used to stand for.
"Not having broken any laws is very unlikely." How universally true. I'm a retired lawyer and if you ever figure out how to go through a typical week, do anything, and not break one or more state and federl criminal laws in the process, it would be a rare occurrence.
You can also get, as I did, into terroristic death threats from the authorities, all kinds of legal trouble, by reporting or otherwise trying to get protection and help for a sexually abused child, while the laws requiring reporting such things are filled with rat-holes only a child molester would have written. The State Bar told me I must not report something the statute said I was required to report in one instance, while nobody would investigate the solid evidence in others.
If our politicians, of either party, gave a Continental hoot about us, our privacy would be protected by strong, and enforced, federal and state laws, and you would be required to go public with what you know and somebody would be required to notify the victims and deal with this mess.
Do you really believe that all these lost, strayed, or stolen computers loaded with the personal, academic, and medical records of 70,000 university students or card holders were not actually instead bought and paid for by the data miners and aggregators who sell such personal information? Mine, loaded with privileged and confidential data about molested children I represented and their molesters, and my file cabinets, were searched twice, and my law office destroyed at what was at least the third burglary by what the Fire Marshal told and showed me was clearly arson but wouldn't list that way for the record, and hte police never even opened a file.
I couldn't advise anyone else what to do but, in the situation described, I'd turn the whole mess over to not one but several investigative jo9urnalists anonymously with enough evidence to authenticate it, send a copy to the SEC, FTC, etc.--of course you might have to flee the country, change your name, etc.
Hey, we've solved that problem. We no longer teach half of them to read and write even simple business letters. The pen is only mightier if you know how to use it.
Viva!
IAAL. The loophole is that a rule banning pencils does not cover BIC pens, the uses of which both as surgical instruments and as weapons in student revolutions were covered in a revolutionary tract, reproduced and widely published by the DOD, I read in high school long, long ago. They started banning things when I started school in 1945, and I think balls were the only thing not banned by the time I somehow lived to graduate. Geography books are definitely "deadly weapons" under Texas law, where the definition aptly starts with the word "anything." I missed some school after being bashed over the head with one by an older known bully and getting a concussion. There is something about school rules that exempts them from any check on absurdity. Surely this one will be rescinded.
As a retired lawyer, you bet this was a h--y s--t moment! You have no earthly idea how sensitive some of the data we deal with can be. Leaking some of it can get you disbarred. Some it can get you or your client, or a witness, etc., seriously injured or killed. Never mind who’s trying to buy what property through a straw man, my practice very unexpectedly came to involve representation of a number of child and adult survivors of incestuous rape, and some of the perpetrators were officials palmed off on us by both political parties.
We traced one nasty piece of malware that got onto our two un-networked computers, a number of program disks, and a large case of data floppies, to our computer repairman whose business had got infected, and neither of our well-known commercial antivirus programs had caught it though ours did afterward, maybe from an update.
My favorite security leak was when the city sold the hard drive from the police department’s computer to me for $5.00 at a public sale where I also bought some furniture. What genius replaced and sold that to a defense lawyer, or anyone else, without formatting it first, or at all?
We had checked carefully one day to be sure we were locked up tight, only to return the next morning to discover our front door wide open, a new printer cartridge, much of a copier cartridge, and most of a box of paper used up, our computers out of action, and a lot of files on many of the same disks converted to what, long afterward, we learned were WordStar 4, Navy DIF, and other formats we couldn't read or write. Our printer had been disabled by switching DIP switches, etc. The police insisted we had left the door open and that all this was done by heat lightning, and refused, up front when we called, to take a report, but sent their computer man over who did get the computers but not the printer or files running. Heat lightning. Right! Another lawyer’s office called me the next business day and reported a similar burglary with nothing but maybe files taken. Five years later, after the statute of limitations had run, we got the evidence including stolen files and the highly-recommended fired employee perpetrator having taken a locksmith course, etc.
Later, the office, on the first floor of an occupied office and apartment building across from City Hall, which all the people with newly changed keys swore we had all made sure was locked, was found unlocked and destroyed by what the Fire Marshal showed and told us was clearly arson set in three different rooms, etc. Our fireproof safe file was damaged and opened. Again, no sign of force.
Hiring is one of the worst points of vulnerability. I read on FindLaw where the best known name partner at a certain Silicon Valley firm with clients like HP spent $68,000.00 hiring a secretary and she robbed them blind before getting caught. One of the judges here had hired a thief earlier. One of the lawyers who the worst crook I hired had given as a reference and had recommended told me after the fire, and after we discovered he had known she was a forger and thief, that they knew but that it would have been unethical for them to tell me she was a thief so they hadn’t. Wrong. The Fire Marshal told me she had engaged the “torch” who had burglarized and destroyed my office, and she and I had the only keys to the safe file, but, after showing and telling us it had clearly been arson, as if anyone couldn’t see that, he refused to put that in his report and listed it only as “of suspicious origin.” The police never talked to me and, as far as I know, never made a report on this, either. The DA insisted that it couldn’t be burglary if the door was unlocked, but, even with my office destroyed, it took me only minutes to pull the controlling Texas case that it was. Stealing a case of beer out of the open bed of the sheriff’s pickup truck is felony burglary, too, as a foolish client of mine learned. I know who did what and the obscene reason why, and
My wife and I have relatively new Sprint HTC EVO Android-based smart phones. My wife has downloaded a lot of apps, nothing that looks suspicious, reads a lot of Email newsletters, and uses hers to send and exchange GMail Email, etc. With limited vision, I do all my newsletters, Email, etc. on this desktop except I have read some news etc., and received some mail from her etc., on my cell phone. We're both suddenly getting both messages and mail from unknown sources that is spam, some highly objectionable, some signed with unrecognizable handles, some simply undecipherable gibberish not all of which is in English characters or recognizable and may be Chinese or whatever, . Our phones have both also started switching, changing home page apps, placing calls without being touched and to people in our directories but not last person called, etc. Our primary concern is that we both use our phones for privileged and confidential medical, legal, etc. matters, and our people lists contain doctors and friends with whom we have privileged and confidential relationships and some very sensitive confidential information.
Both phones are on the federal Do Not Call list, though that is usually not necessarily for cell phones. Sprint is not happy hearing from us again. Please keep us posted on this including, but not limited to, effective defenses as they are developed.
By the way, most sites I know don't cover Android apps for legal and other things and this is the only site on which I have found two wanrings now about Android malware. Where can I find best malware, security, legal and other research, adn other apps for Android?
Also, several of the available free and cheap Android apps I don't really want on my cell phone, which has limited battery life, but would really like ot have on my MS Windows desktop, and there are some my wife would like on her laptop. I'm sure there must be a way to do that but can't figure out how. Any suggestions.
Prof. Martin got this right. I'll put this more bluntly. I have experience as a criminal defense lawyer, a crime victim including armed robberies, burglaries, and illegal searches of privileged and confidential paper and computer client files, and civil rights crimes under color of law, represented an awful lot of child and adult survivors of mostly incestuous child sexual abuse, some of it, and other sex offenses, committed by politicians and officials palmed off on us by both political parties, and trying to get various authorities to shut down wide open drug dealerships the police admitted knowing about, which led to such searches and state and federal civil rights crimes. I cannot imagine how the California Court of Appeals got this so wrong and hope the decision is overturned on appeal. Your cell phone, your computer, your USB flash drive, and your ISP, off-site backup service, etc.'s records from these, are the modern equivalent of the Founders' roll-top desks and their journals in their saddlebags. If they really had enough to make a search of the subject's cell phone "reasonable" under the 4th Amendment's guarantee--not grant--of fundamental natural human rights, they could apply for a search warrant, only rarely denied, but apparently didn't.
The so-called "war on drugs," or whatever the Obama Administration is calling that this week, is a sham and a scam. You don't have to look beyond the DEA Web site to see that everyone knows we have been and still are losing, and the money, like a lot of the rest of the federal budget, is going into the politicians' and officials’ pockets. With several of us neighbors, and uniformed police, having witnessed the buying and selling of crack cocaine on this block across the street from a state university and in plain sight of a police station, I went all the way up the chain from local to county to state to federal DEA to the White House Drug Czar’s office, under both parties, and every one of them refused to act. After nearly two years, I finally got Building Inspection to close it down. The argument that eroding First and Fourth Amendment and other fundamental rights to privacy implicated by such searches is either reasonable or right on the theory that it might tend to help fight this fake "war" is specious circular reasoning and an outright lie.
We started to go off course when the Supreme Court was persuaded to hold that your bank’s copy of your checking account records, which reveal your religious, political, medical, and other relationships, were not yours to control and you had no standing to object to their rummaging through them without a warrant. We went farther down that wrong road with holdings that upheld laws that allowed police officers complete and unreviewable discretion to take your wife or daughter to jail, where the could be strip-searched, and maybe body-cavity searched, if that was standard practice, but issue a summons to somebody else, for a traffic violation, conviction of which carried no jail time as a penalty, or, for that matter, for a million-dollar embezzlement or insider trading scam. And we went completely off into the swamp with a Supreme Court holding that the officers’ motive and intent in anything they did that could arguably be brought within the outer range of their authority, tested solely against their version of what they saw or heard, was irrelevant and could not be questioned in criminal or civil court. It’s almost impossible to win a federal civil rights case if the officer says he didn’t know or think what he did was unreasonable, such as if smart phones were new technology. There are other cases where they have erred the other way.
Don’t kid yourself that the honest person has nothing to fear from this erosion of privacy. The now-familiar warning that “Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a court of law,” is all too true in practice, whether you are innocent or guilty. There is something practically everybody would do almost anyth
One problem I have not seen mentioned here is that the number and percentage of male high school graduates even applying much less graudating from college is dropping like a rock. But it takes an average of 14 years to break even on a college degree and you have to pay off your student loans much earlier and before you start making any money from your degree. I live across the street from a state university and this is serious both for the universities and for the future of families.
Does anybody wonder why so many of our doctors are coming from third-world countries like Pakistan. 23% of juniors at the state university here recently failed the easy Junior Level Essay Exam, among much other evidence that the public schools are still turning out bright students who are functionally illiterate and can't balance a checkbook. When the U. S. is 23rd in English proficiency at that point in education, what do you expect?
Students whose parents could pay full price and make nice donations to the college have always had an easier time getting in than those of us who had to win scholarships. But this seems to be getting worse, especially as the non-dischargable debt burden to get through college and professional school has spiraled into numbers that even many lawyers, etc., will never be able to pay off much less pay on schedule. Most college grads' salaries, in real, constant-dollar terms, have been stagnant or falling since about 1973.
Public junior colleges start from vacant fields, 30-40 miles from public universities. with a plant investment that exceeds what my highly rated private alma mater founded in 1787 lists as its total endowment and assets. The rate of more and more luxurious building replacement here, and new building at another similar state university where I used to live in Pennsylvania, are staggering. Administrative costs are way higher than in my day. Salaries are up but not that high except for the political positions, including CEO, fund-raisers, and athletics.
Some truth in this but if you do it right you can provide financial aid, both grants and loans, to needy students without driving up the cost of higher education. My private undergraduate alma matter, highly rated, had an endowment, after nearly 200 years when I was there, equal to the plant investment of one of the newer public junior colleges here, and provided most of the cost to me in grants and some loans. One of my economics professors got to talking about their lower pay than their collegues with similar education in the business world. I weighed in with a question concerning different tangible and intangible benefits and drawbacks and his free choice to teach there, as a straight problem in economic choices and the economic and non-economic considerations thereof, which, in economic terms, rather delicately called him on this. Thinking back on it, and some advice to pursue an academic career, which I would have considered more if I had the hindsight of a career in private law practice I do now, it does offer a pretty attractive work-life balance in many respects. A lot of it has to do with values and temperaments. He realized and conceded I had a point and certainly never retaliated. Incidentally, I would rate him as one of the more conservative members of the economics faculty.
The bubble in academic pricing didn't really begin to inflate until after that, my best guess being about 1974 when, after the Arab Oil Embargo shock, and the incomes of most college graduates and the purely economic value of a college education stagnated and started to drop.
I know a number of professors, instructors, etc., and have taught one small college course and been a guest lecturer in some other classes. Posters here seem to have had, or thought they had, professors more conservative than those I had in a private undergraduate college, a highly-rated private law school, and an extra summer session at a highly-rated state law school, and certainly more conservative than my one sister ever had any of at Penn State. All the propagandizing I remember was from the liberal side. My four siblings graduated from top-tier state universities. My younger wife attended some junior college and other courses, took most of her work and graduated from the second-tier state university here, and took some graduate courses at two other state universities. None of them reported any brainwashing or indoctrination from the conservative side, but, from first and second grade on up, we've had teachers who insisted thatour other tachers were ignorant idiots. Some, with and without doctorates, were. I have also lived most of my life in college and state university towns, for diverse reasons, and conservative professors are scarce in most fields including the social sciences.
As for rambling off into personal viewpoints, etc., most of what I remember of value from public schools in east Texas and Pennsylvania, in the lab school at Penn State and public school in another state university town, came up when the teachers set aside the often dumbed down and insipid written lesson plans and talked ot us out of their professional and life experience. We got more of this beneficial impartation of experience and wisdom out of class in college and law school.
My experience talking about political and economic, and many other, subjects with many high school and college students. One recent conversation with a seemingly bright and interested junior level journalism major transferring from a major junior college was far from unique in revealing that she had never actually read and studied the First Amendment, much less essential writings about its drafting and interpretation, and could not name four of the five rights guaranteed thereby, but thought certain language was in the text that isn't. Way too many bright students, born here to English-speaking parents, have been allowed to go through public school and graduate without becoming functionally literate in English. I learned to write essays and research papers in sixth grad
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Agreed. The same thing happens with online registration for doctors' offices, etc.
The way "program trading" works, if the authorities dig into this, as they should, they are likely to find that the same traders placed bets both ways, knowing the time of the announcement, and cancelled the losing bet and kept the winning one. It's market manipulation and plain old theft, but since millions of dollars were made it is unlikely that the perpetrators will actually be called to account in civil much less criminal court as they should if the government were honest. The honest traders can't compete in such a rigged market, and we need to take a hard look at whether to allow such bets in markets everyone knows are going up, too, while we're at it.
The respective merits of the ACLU and the NRA is not the point. The point is that they have come together across a wide ideological gulf to challenge the NSA's outrageous grab of our private communications. Now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau claims some unidentified right, duty and power to grab all of our credit and debit card transactions, too. We had and thought we had won this fight in the nineties but the NSA and other government agencies, backed by administrations of both political parties, neither of which, or their candidates, give a Continental hoot for the rights of individuals or the Fourth Amendment or the "blessings of liberty," have demonstrated that, instead of "tak[ing] care that the Constitution and laws be faithfully executed," have proceeded to destroy the foundations of what made this country. Thought Police, 1984, Brave New World, the Beast of Revelation, here we come. If we're not there yet, "you can sure see it [the destruction of our liberties' from here.
The author should go back and re-read the text of the Fifth Amendment as wisely adopted by the Framers and those who voted to ratify it, and which has never been amended. It protects a person from being "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." The Sixth Amendment guarantees a party, whether state or defendant, " . . . compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor" in a criminal case. The broad guarantees of due process in the Fourth and Fourteenth, concerning also see the guarantee of jury trials in most civil cases in the Seventh, Amendments, with the have long been held to guarantee civil as well as criminal litigants the right to compulsory process to secure the testimony of witnesses with knowledge of relevant facts or of facts that might reasonably be expected to lead to discovery thereof. The state legislatures, in state cases, and Congress in federal cases, have enacted, and some courts have created, some reporter and other shields, but they were never intended to deny litigants their Constitutionally guaranteed rights to compulsory process for obtaining discovery of evidence, and the fact that Congress has been and is currently debating a broader reporter shield law (which the Wall Street Journal and others have demonstrated is a difficult if not impossible drafting job) demonstrates that the right the author claims simply does not exist. The author betrays historical and Constitutional ignorance by admitting that he does not understand why a guilty party should not be compelled to confess. That leads to indefinite coercive confinement not to mention other brutal coercive measures. See Arthur Miller's The Crucible for some examples of that in pre-Constitutional America, or see more recent examples in China, the Soviet Union, Iran, etc.
The first problem involved is that we have begun to treat United Nations actions as though they were binding upon the United States and its citizens, under color of the provision of our Constitution that includes treaties, ratified by the Senate, as the supreme law of the land. The clause was never intended to permit bypassing the House of Representativesâ(TM) vital role in the law-making process, nor to permit the President and the Senate to diminish any of the fundamental rights of Americans guaranteed by the Constitution. Indeed, our fundamental rights are guaranteed, but not granted, either by the Constitution or the government. The prevailing view of the Framers of the Constitution, as laid out in the Federalist papers which were the case for its ratification, was that our federal government had no powers not expressly granted in the Constitution, and they originally argued against the Bill of Rights because the prevailing view as noted there was that these fundamental rights, including those guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, were derived from what the Declaration of Independence called âoethe laws of nature and of Natureâ(TM)s God, . . our Creator.â Letâ(TM)s be completely candid about this. The impetus behind the current push to limit the free speech and press rights of Americans originates out of the fear of terrorism or war by militant Islamists, and our governmentâ(TM)s craven fear and cowardice because the Muslim world controls much of the oil and gas we depend upon for our productivity and standard of living.. If we actually got into a real, all-out war, unlike World War II which we won in part because we had the oil, we would be hard put to supply our forces with oil or manufactured goods. A minute segment of ill-informed professing Christians have abused such free speech and free exercise rights, but the brutal fact is that it is not Christians or Jews, etc, but only the resurgent militant Islamists, who ultimately seek our conquest and subjugation anyway, the powerful âoegayâ lobby, and certain militant atheists, who, and whose violent reactions, are behind this whole idea of restricting religious or other expression. The whole idea that the law should protect people from religious or political speech that they disagree with and donâ(TM)t want to hear, or want others to hear, because of some emotional reaction they choose to have to it is not only contrary to the American Constitutional scheme, but violates fundamental, God-given, human rights. Some Western countries, facing increased Islamic , âoegay,â and atheist influence, have decided to classify and prohibit as so-called âoehate speechâ the tenets of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, which believers have traditionally believed are inspired, but practically never extend the same restrictive treatment to the Quran, which Muslims believe was literally written by Allah (God) in heaven, although it contains many passages which legitimize and command, or which the militant Muslims insist legitimize and command, murder and other crimes and violations of our fundamental human rights. This is quite different from regulating incitement to commit crimes, psychological abuse of children, etc.
I'm a retired Texas lawyer with more personal and professional knowledge about suicide than anyone should have, and a strong believer in personal privacy. I'm not up on the details of British Columbia and Canadian law but they do not have some of the restrictions on search and seizure, or liberal protections for speech and press, that we do in the U.S., and have outlawed some forms of actual or alleged hate speech that, for better or worse, we cannot. Here in Texas, it has long been a crime either to aid or to abet or encourage in individual to commit suicide, which law provides only a fine unless death or serious bodily injury results, in which event the crime in a felony carrying up to a ten year prison term. Our family and penal law also cover serious psychological child abuswe resulting in harm. Missouri enacted a law dealing with encouraging suicide after the infamous Lori Drew case. Trust me on this one, a vulnerable child or teen, etc., can be pushed to commit suicide by psychological child abuse. I have known and represented several children who had survived serious suicide attempts. One child client begged me to kill her. The best evidence available to me indicates that the completed suicide of one Texas child at nine was essentially the product of psychological abuse by peers. Indeed, any such attempt or completed suicide should be investigated for underlying child abuse. I was very close to one case where a six year old child was terrorized and thus prevented from reporting and identifying the perpetrator of sexual abuse and it turned out that the abuser making the threat was too young to qualify as a juvenile delinquent. Unfortunately, in my view, I cannot find a reported case where anyone has been prosecuted for or convicted of psychological child abuse. This is a much more serious problem than most people understand and realize.
Glad you have. I have a Logitech keyboard and optical mouse and the letters etc. have quickly worn off, which is a minor pain in the posterior, and Caps Lock comes and sticks on if I type a lot of the keys near that. I'm looking for a good keyboard, mostly for use in Word, Outlook, Firefox and sometimes IE Internet browsing, Contacts, etc., etc. and getting discouraged. I've had and gone through Dell, Microsoft, Logitech, and some no-name keyboards or ones the brand name of which I can't recall, and even the more expensive ones from Microsoft I have used either had problems when I got them or stopped working properly before long. First one letter or function key quits, then more, or striking one key gets me something I did not type, the touch on some keys gets to be too light or much too hard to push, or the markings rub off, etc. I need a good tactile feel to alert me if I type something wrong, etc., and reliability when my typing gets up around 80 wpm. Ideally, a keyboard should be designed to keep coffee, peanut shells, staples or paper clips, dog fur, dirt, etc. out and to let me clean it simply and easily, preferably without having to wait eight hours before using it.
I'm unable to find and get into the TOA. whatever that is, referred to here, on the Net, and don't have a current dictionary of acronyms, so I may be missing something. This problem appears to be with a local transit authority police agency and Delta Air, not federal TSA, though the shirt, whatever it said which I don't know, did question. challenge, or attack TSA. I don't hold with racial, ethnic, religious, etc. discrimination, official or by public accommodations like airlines and restaurants, and they cannot justify that by claiming that customers might be biased against the person, either, but of course there is no law against excluding Ph.D. candidates because everybody knows, especially since "9/11" and the Aurora CO theater shooting, that some of those might be studying something dangerous like those. (For the record, I have only one earned doctorate myself, a J.D., the basic law degree). I've read about two successive directives by TSA's parent Homeland Security Department listing practicing Christians, believers in upholding and defending the Constitution, and the Second Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights thereto, veterans and special forces trainees, etc. as suspiciously likely to commit assassination, terrorism, etc. I have a congenital nystagmus condition, which, under Texas and many other jurisdictions; law, is probable cause for a warrantless arrest, breath or blood test, and search because the same symptoms, uncontrollable eye movements, etc., can be produced by alcohol or cocaine. I also have poor vision and eye-hand coordination, no depth perception, etc. as a result of this and other congenital neurological anomalies. I have been detained, and got pulled out and screened, not when boarding but after landing at my home city one night because I was visibly upset after a federal functionary had me fly to New Orleans and then they asked me why I came and said the problem could have been solved on the phone, so my involuntary eye movements wee more pronounced than usual--and that was before TSA. It took 24 years before the CIA finally quit lying to my U. S. Senator and me and admitted to me that they had put and kept me on a list of suspected Soviet spies and sympathizers, not only false but easily proven false, over a piece of academic research. I still can't get TSA to tell me if my nystagmus condition etc. and my mostly conservative political views, openly published, has me on a "no fly" or "suspicious" list. Nobody will tell me how to vote or board a plane shortly after my wallet with my state non-driver ID card (which it took me 14 years to get Texas to issue and then to integrate into the main drivers' license system) was lost or stolen, either. I know of no airline or TSA rule that might provide any even remotely legally arguable legal basis for denying a passenger carriage on a plane because of any political message, unless it was grossly obscene, indecent, etc.,not revealed here, in which case turn the shirt inside out for the flight. "Delta commits Unfair Labor Practices" would be protected, especially during a strike or lead-up job action. If the pilot had bumped these people to avoid delaying takeoff, pilots do have broad discretion, but it they had been allowed to board and had boarded before being kicked off, that doesn't make sense on the information given to date. Obviously something ticked the state Authority that runs the airport and its police.off. State and federal civil rights authorities should investigate what, if any,Constitutional and other legal rights may have been violated. Winning a civil suit might be very hard regardless of many possible facts.
If you are fool enough to use your employer's computer for banking, healthcare, credit, etc., and especially if you don't think this stuff is routinely intercepted and looked at by employers, prospective employers, etc., notwithstanding HIPAA, FCRA, you should be fired for sheer ignorance or stupidity, but the real reason you will get fired is more likely going to violate federal or state law with relative impunity because an employer can always make up a permissible reason, especially if you get caught doing personal business on the company system. "Anything you say, on or off line, can or will be used against you, if not in a court of law, then at work and in other relationships and transactions." I used to practice with an insurance-defense law firm, and have also represented plaintiffs whose depositions were taken by other insurance-defense firms. Trust me on this, your or your wife or teenage daughter's OB/GYN records or abortion, or having taken antidepressants, are known and likely to be used against you in deposition if not in court. We used to get not only the plaintiffs' but their lawyers' financial data including specifically due dates of major loans. My wife's and my records were quoted in court, complete with details about my best man at our wedding, when I was appointed to represent some children whose father accused their mother of abuse. I was fired from one job at the behest of the health insurer, and called in while a dorm counselor in college, because of a typo that indicated I had a heart attack, which nobody living could correct, and I had never met the woman listed on one hospital's credit and medical records as my wife, nor our alleged child. Having our health insurance through our employers is one of the single worst arrangements ever invented, because it is impossible to segregate such information, especially but not only with self-insured employers where even the weak anti-discrimination provisions don't apply. John McCain got this right.
Cuban is right, as is this poster. Algorithmic progrm trading is simply the insiders gaming the system at the expense of the ordinary players, and they will leave the market when they realize this. How long do you think any other gambling casino would last if it let some players do this?
In my personal experience having been a child, something I realize many primary grade students have never experienced, my older sister could and did teach me a lot about and awaken an interest in chemistry, physics, etc., while a high school student and college frosh and I was in grade school. I watched her do the same with her youngest child, a daughter, then seven. Of course she ended up Teacher of the Year in her state a half-century later. Public high school chemistry with valences, etc., but no lab, except a few experiments I did myself at home, was interesting and easy, and I had planned a career in that direction. In college, the department head, who taught the freshman lecture, used something he called MAC equations instead of the usual valences etc. and I was and remained utterly lost, and, with a significant uncorrectable set of vision and coordination deficits, lab was tough, too. Nobody ever could explain why, in our first chem lab, everybody got issued a flask, a cork, and alcohol and chlorobenzene from the same supply, to be distilled apart, and my flask, but nobody else's, blew apart before getting heated, and with no fire. In four years of higher math in public high school, nobody told me I was doing all he graph problems, for example, a$$ backwards until the grader made that comment in college. With 70th percentile math and 99 3/4th percentile verbal scores, I switched direction and went to law school. We didn't learn until an MRI forty years later that the reason I couldn't hack college math, despite loving in in principle, knocking a chunk off my GPA, and nearly killing myself trying, was that I had been born without most of the corpus collossum, which connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain and is critical to higher math. We were not blessed with children by birth or adoption, but my friends who home-schooled, about all of whom were college educated, collaborated, and engaged in some "Jack Spratt" trading where someone good at higher math taught the group's kids that while someone else taught other things they knew better. I went to high school and college with children of illiterate immigrant coal miners who were taught critical things at home that students I knew as clients and employees never learned, and became experts in chemistry and other sciences. My late mother was a certified teacher and did manage to teach me one critical skill in pre-first grade. She tried to teach me other things, and briefly tried to home-school us, using nationally recognized materials, in 7th grade, and I remember most of those experiences as nightmares.
“The Password Protection Act of 2012 (PPA) would also prevent employers from accessing information on any computer that isn't owned or controlled by an employee, including private e-mail accounts, photo sharing sites, and smartphones." [Emphasis added] This doesn’t make any sense. Are you sure the word “employee” should not have been “employer?” Any computer, phone, or heart pacemaker your employer or prospective employer graciously decides to permit you to bring to work, or to any other premises over which they may have control, is “controlled by an employer.” The only reason your car is not, even though parking on company property is clearly subject to its control, is that this might expose the employer or prospective employer, and thus their wealthy and powerful insurance company, to liability for an accident. My law school dean was fond of Will Rogers’ comment “When Congress tells a joke, it’s a law, and when Congress passes a law, it’s a joke.” Employment law is a sick joke. You can fire practically anyone, except a few people with a lot of money and political “suck,” for “good cause, no cause at all, or an evil and malicious cause,” regardless of any promises you may have made to get them to take the job. You can’t refuse to hire, or fire, someone for being black or over 40 or Jewish or disabled but qualified, but the odds of an employer, much less a large and influential employer, getting called to account legally if that is your real reason are slim to none in the real world if you’re smart enough to document the very common fact that they are also “over-qualified,” or have never done some rare procedure in the field that they may have to do on this job, and that anyone could do, and don’t hire them, or that they refused to participate in criminal conduct, or that they left their post to save the life of a child within sight. Whistle-blower laws are being construed so narrowly that they offer little of the protection intended, or which the voters thought was intended, by Congress or state legislators. The courts have gone so far toward gutting the Americans with Disabilities Act that Congress amended it largely to restore the clear original intent of the law. They’re already starting to gut the law as amended again. It doesn’t make any difference, because, like long-promised privacy protection legislation, it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of being passed in any form that would actually address and solve the problems. Oh, sure, something with a high-sounding name will get passed, but, by the time the lobbyists get through rewriting it, it will have about as much effect as barking at the moon.
As a retired Texas lawyer with criminal law experience, including a lot of court-appointed defense experience, who has also been a crime victim, I suspect that the author of this comment does not live in Texas. You say you are indigent, thus can't afford to pay for legal representation yourself. Any lawyer the state pays for is going to be in exactly the same position, but any who are any good is not going to sell you out. Where I practiced, in any given case, court-appointed counsel made more money the more work he did defending you, and, of course, he has the same motives to build a string of wins, but, if you, the client, lose, you may have to pay it back in any event (so win). In better economic times, I have known lawyers who were less than welcoming of court appointments, which pay less than direct private retainers, but the current Second Great Depression has made a lot of lawyers who used to try to avoid appointments now sing jup for all they can get.
I'm an old ham and SWL, learned the law about being allowed to listen but not republish point to point radio communications as a young teen, and live in a small town where the only news is via scanner, so I wish this were not necessary, but the police have been going to frequencies not covered on most scanners and other methods of secure communications for years. The FCC forbids us private citizens from encrypting most radio traffic, but the organized narcotics rings and others do it all the time. I was on a police ride-along many years ago in Dallas and the dispatcher had the officers go to a pay phone (remember those?) for a message about a bomb threat to avoid panic. At one point there was a city ordinance in Dallas against having a scanner or police radio in a private car that was aimed at ambulance-chasing lawyers and the media. Having known of cell calls by politicians, and radio messages to and from Air Force One, being intercepted and illegally published, I'm sujrprised this has taken so long. I practiced privacy and criminal law for years before being forced to retire. I've known the dispatch tapes to prove useful if you can catch those before they are routinely recorded over about every 24 hours, and I love dash-cam video which sometimes is hte only true account from either side of what really happened in a chase, stop, shooting, etc., but you don't really hear anything unguarded and relevant on police radio because they're smart enough not to say "Let's beat the out of him and say he resisted" on the air. I've known some police abuses and outright state and federal crimes, and some lies about them. I arrived at court one morning to learn from the bailiff, who had a police radio, and the judge, who also heard this, that the police had broadcast a report that I had been found murdered. This was the second such occasion and they knew this was false, and I never could find out who originated this, but, for reasons attorney-client confidentiality prevents me from explaining here, I took this as a threat. I'm not sure we really want to put all police and other emergency radio traffic on the Internet even with a delay. That's permanent and too easy for people to misuse. This traffic also often includes privileged and confidential medical and mental health data.
I suspect the posters who are doing so well in IT and Computer Science are out of touch with a lot of graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) majors including those who are not. I worked my way through much of college and law school, where my original job, set up by a clueless rich fellow, fell through and I ended up working practically full time and walking back and forth to work another 1.5 hours per day. I got the Tsetse Fly Award in the April Fool issue of the paper for logging the most sleep in 8:00 A.M. class and every once in awhile crashed out and slept through a day of classes. I think that was a major reason I missed Law Review and only graduated in the top third of my selective class at a top school, which cut off a lot of opportunities and better paying jobs. You can’t do it today without some special connections and skills. I live across from a second-tier state university and know people with B.S., M/S. and everything but the defense of their dissertations for Ph.D. in computers and other STEM fields, more than one of whom have ended up teaching English in China, and others unemployed in or near their fields and literally flipping burgers. Some were making six-figure incomes until their jobs got off-shored at what would be below minimum wage here and have had to travel across the country to low-pay part-time jobs. I put a lot of them through bankruptcy after they lost their jobs and homes, etc. How do we propose to collect enough taxes to dig out of the national debt pit while driving down the earning capacity, and tax payments, of what used to be much of our middle class? How do you expect these people to make enough to pay off their non-dischargeable student loans and other massive debt? They can’t. Student loans are just one of the next bubbles to burst. Another small problem: Only a very, very small percentage of even the conscientious American students with high intelligence have the specific native intelligence and talent to succeed in STEM and computer fields even when they pay well. Fewer male than female high school grads are going to college because the return just isn’t there. I’m older than most of you and remember when this country went on its big move to push everybody into engineering. I tried, and only MIT was smart enough to turn me down. It sort of worked for awhile. Then we started seeing pages and pages of ads for engineers that said “no aerospace experience need apply.” Age. Etc. discrimination laws are impossible to enforce most of the time and we’re scrapping huge chunks of intelligent younger, much less older, college grads regardless of major. Why do you think almost half of American adults are on some kind of welfare payments, a situation we cannot possibly sustain financially and which destroys everything this country used to stand for.
It's not really a war, just an exercise in looting.
You make sense from what I know of the theories, plural, of language as very partially posted above.
"Not having broken any laws is very unlikely." How universally true. I'm a retired lawyer and if you ever figure out how to go through a typical week, do anything, and not break one or more state and federl criminal laws in the process, it would be a rare occurrence. You can also get, as I did, into terroristic death threats from the authorities, all kinds of legal trouble, by reporting or otherwise trying to get protection and help for a sexually abused child, while the laws requiring reporting such things are filled with rat-holes only a child molester would have written. The State Bar told me I must not report something the statute said I was required to report in one instance, while nobody would investigate the solid evidence in others. If our politicians, of either party, gave a Continental hoot about us, our privacy would be protected by strong, and enforced, federal and state laws, and you would be required to go public with what you know and somebody would be required to notify the victims and deal with this mess. Do you really believe that all these lost, strayed, or stolen computers loaded with the personal, academic, and medical records of 70,000 university students or card holders were not actually instead bought and paid for by the data miners and aggregators who sell such personal information? Mine, loaded with privileged and confidential data about molested children I represented and their molesters, and my file cabinets, were searched twice, and my law office destroyed at what was at least the third burglary by what the Fire Marshal told and showed me was clearly arson but wouldn't list that way for the record, and hte police never even opened a file. I couldn't advise anyone else what to do but, in the situation described, I'd turn the whole mess over to not one but several investigative jo9urnalists anonymously with enough evidence to authenticate it, send a copy to the SEC, FTC, etc.--of course you might have to flee the country, change your name, etc.
Hey, we've solved that problem. We no longer teach half of them to read and write even simple business letters. The pen is only mightier if you know how to use it.
Viva! IAAL. The loophole is that a rule banning pencils does not cover BIC pens, the uses of which both as surgical instruments and as weapons in student revolutions were covered in a revolutionary tract, reproduced and widely published by the DOD, I read in high school long, long ago. They started banning things when I started school in 1945, and I think balls were the only thing not banned by the time I somehow lived to graduate. Geography books are definitely "deadly weapons" under Texas law, where the definition aptly starts with the word "anything." I missed some school after being bashed over the head with one by an older known bully and getting a concussion. There is something about school rules that exempts them from any check on absurdity. Surely this one will be rescinded.
As a retired lawyer, you bet this was a h--y s--t moment! You have no earthly idea how sensitive some of the data we deal with can be. Leaking some of it can get you disbarred. Some it can get you or your client, or a witness, etc., seriously injured or killed. Never mind who’s trying to buy what property through a straw man, my practice very unexpectedly came to involve representation of a number of child and adult survivors of incestuous rape, and some of the perpetrators were officials palmed off on us by both political parties. We traced one nasty piece of malware that got onto our two un-networked computers, a number of program disks, and a large case of data floppies, to our computer repairman whose business had got infected, and neither of our well-known commercial antivirus programs had caught it though ours did afterward, maybe from an update. My favorite security leak was when the city sold the hard drive from the police department’s computer to me for $5.00 at a public sale where I also bought some furniture. What genius replaced and sold that to a defense lawyer, or anyone else, without formatting it first, or at all? We had checked carefully one day to be sure we were locked up tight, only to return the next morning to discover our front door wide open, a new printer cartridge, much of a copier cartridge, and most of a box of paper used up, our computers out of action, and a lot of files on many of the same disks converted to what, long afterward, we learned were WordStar 4, Navy DIF, and other formats we couldn't read or write. Our printer had been disabled by switching DIP switches, etc. The police insisted we had left the door open and that all this was done by heat lightning, and refused, up front when we called, to take a report, but sent their computer man over who did get the computers but not the printer or files running. Heat lightning. Right! Another lawyer’s office called me the next business day and reported a similar burglary with nothing but maybe files taken. Five years later, after the statute of limitations had run, we got the evidence including stolen files and the highly-recommended fired employee perpetrator having taken a locksmith course, etc. Later, the office, on the first floor of an occupied office and apartment building across from City Hall, which all the people with newly changed keys swore we had all made sure was locked, was found unlocked and destroyed by what the Fire Marshal showed and told us was clearly arson set in three different rooms, etc. Our fireproof safe file was damaged and opened. Again, no sign of force. Hiring is one of the worst points of vulnerability. I read on FindLaw where the best known name partner at a certain Silicon Valley firm with clients like HP spent $68,000.00 hiring a secretary and she robbed them blind before getting caught. One of the judges here had hired a thief earlier. One of the lawyers who the worst crook I hired had given as a reference and had recommended told me after the fire, and after we discovered he had known she was a forger and thief, that they knew but that it would have been unethical for them to tell me she was a thief so they hadn’t. Wrong. The Fire Marshal told me she had engaged the “torch” who had burglarized and destroyed my office, and she and I had the only keys to the safe file, but, after showing and telling us it had clearly been arson, as if anyone couldn’t see that, he refused to put that in his report and listed it only as “of suspicious origin.” The police never talked to me and, as far as I know, never made a report on this, either. The DA insisted that it couldn’t be burglary if the door was unlocked, but, even with my office destroyed, it took me only minutes to pull the controlling Texas case that it was. Stealing a case of beer out of the open bed of the sheriff’s pickup truck is felony burglary, too, as a foolish client of mine learned. I know who did what and the obscene reason why, and
My wife and I have relatively new Sprint HTC EVO Android-based smart phones. My wife has downloaded a lot of apps, nothing that looks suspicious, reads a lot of Email newsletters, and uses hers to send and exchange GMail Email, etc. With limited vision, I do all my newsletters, Email, etc. on this desktop except I have read some news etc., and received some mail from her etc., on my cell phone. We're both suddenly getting both messages and mail from unknown sources that is spam, some highly objectionable, some signed with unrecognizable handles, some simply undecipherable gibberish not all of which is in English characters or recognizable and may be Chinese or whatever, . Our phones have both also started switching, changing home page apps, placing calls without being touched and to people in our directories but not last person called, etc. Our primary concern is that we both use our phones for privileged and confidential medical, legal, etc. matters, and our people lists contain doctors and friends with whom we have privileged and confidential relationships and some very sensitive confidential information. Both phones are on the federal Do Not Call list, though that is usually not necessarily for cell phones. Sprint is not happy hearing from us again. Please keep us posted on this including, but not limited to, effective defenses as they are developed. By the way, most sites I know don't cover Android apps for legal and other things and this is the only site on which I have found two wanrings now about Android malware. Where can I find best malware, security, legal and other research, adn other apps for Android? Also, several of the available free and cheap Android apps I don't really want on my cell phone, which has limited battery life, but would really like ot have on my MS Windows desktop, and there are some my wife would like on her laptop. I'm sure there must be a way to do that but can't figure out how. Any suggestions.
Prof. Martin got this right. I'll put this more bluntly. I have experience as a criminal defense lawyer, a crime victim including armed robberies, burglaries, and illegal searches of privileged and confidential paper and computer client files, and civil rights crimes under color of law, represented an awful lot of child and adult survivors of mostly incestuous child sexual abuse, some of it, and other sex offenses, committed by politicians and officials palmed off on us by both political parties, and trying to get various authorities to shut down wide open drug dealerships the police admitted knowing about, which led to such searches and state and federal civil rights crimes. I cannot imagine how the California Court of Appeals got this so wrong and hope the decision is overturned on appeal. Your cell phone, your computer, your USB flash drive, and your ISP, off-site backup service, etc.'s records from these, are the modern equivalent of the Founders' roll-top desks and their journals in their saddlebags. If they really had enough to make a search of the subject's cell phone "reasonable" under the 4th Amendment's guarantee--not grant--of fundamental natural human rights, they could apply for a search warrant, only rarely denied, but apparently didn't. The so-called "war on drugs," or whatever the Obama Administration is calling that this week, is a sham and a scam. You don't have to look beyond the DEA Web site to see that everyone knows we have been and still are losing, and the money, like a lot of the rest of the federal budget, is going into the politicians' and officials’ pockets. With several of us neighbors, and uniformed police, having witnessed the buying and selling of crack cocaine on this block across the street from a state university and in plain sight of a police station, I went all the way up the chain from local to county to state to federal DEA to the White House Drug Czar’s office, under both parties, and every one of them refused to act. After nearly two years, I finally got Building Inspection to close it down. The argument that eroding First and Fourth Amendment and other fundamental rights to privacy implicated by such searches is either reasonable or right on the theory that it might tend to help fight this fake "war" is specious circular reasoning and an outright lie. We started to go off course when the Supreme Court was persuaded to hold that your bank’s copy of your checking account records, which reveal your religious, political, medical, and other relationships, were not yours to control and you had no standing to object to their rummaging through them without a warrant. We went farther down that wrong road with holdings that upheld laws that allowed police officers complete and unreviewable discretion to take your wife or daughter to jail, where the could be strip-searched, and maybe body-cavity searched, if that was standard practice, but issue a summons to somebody else, for a traffic violation, conviction of which carried no jail time as a penalty, or, for that matter, for a million-dollar embezzlement or insider trading scam. And we went completely off into the swamp with a Supreme Court holding that the officers’ motive and intent in anything they did that could arguably be brought within the outer range of their authority, tested solely against their version of what they saw or heard, was irrelevant and could not be questioned in criminal or civil court. It’s almost impossible to win a federal civil rights case if the officer says he didn’t know or think what he did was unreasonable, such as if smart phones were new technology. There are other cases where they have erred the other way. Don’t kid yourself that the honest person has nothing to fear from this erosion of privacy. The now-familiar warning that “Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a court of law,” is all too true in practice, whether you are innocent or guilty. There is something practically everybody would do almost anyth
One problem I have not seen mentioned here is that the number and percentage of male high school graduates even applying much less graudating from college is dropping like a rock. But it takes an average of 14 years to break even on a college degree and you have to pay off your student loans much earlier and before you start making any money from your degree. I live across the street from a state university and this is serious both for the universities and for the future of families. Does anybody wonder why so many of our doctors are coming from third-world countries like Pakistan. 23% of juniors at the state university here recently failed the easy Junior Level Essay Exam, among much other evidence that the public schools are still turning out bright students who are functionally illiterate and can't balance a checkbook. When the U. S. is 23rd in English proficiency at that point in education, what do you expect? Students whose parents could pay full price and make nice donations to the college have always had an easier time getting in than those of us who had to win scholarships. But this seems to be getting worse, especially as the non-dischargable debt burden to get through college and professional school has spiraled into numbers that even many lawyers, etc., will never be able to pay off much less pay on schedule. Most college grads' salaries, in real, constant-dollar terms, have been stagnant or falling since about 1973. Public junior colleges start from vacant fields, 30-40 miles from public universities. with a plant investment that exceeds what my highly rated private alma mater founded in 1787 lists as its total endowment and assets. The rate of more and more luxurious building replacement here, and new building at another similar state university where I used to live in Pennsylvania, are staggering. Administrative costs are way higher than in my day. Salaries are up but not that high except for the political positions, including CEO, fund-raisers, and athletics.
Some truth in this but if you do it right you can provide financial aid, both grants and loans, to needy students without driving up the cost of higher education. My private undergraduate alma matter, highly rated, had an endowment, after nearly 200 years when I was there, equal to the plant investment of one of the newer public junior colleges here, and provided most of the cost to me in grants and some loans. One of my economics professors got to talking about their lower pay than their collegues with similar education in the business world. I weighed in with a question concerning different tangible and intangible benefits and drawbacks and his free choice to teach there, as a straight problem in economic choices and the economic and non-economic considerations thereof, which, in economic terms, rather delicately called him on this. Thinking back on it, and some advice to pursue an academic career, which I would have considered more if I had the hindsight of a career in private law practice I do now, it does offer a pretty attractive work-life balance in many respects. A lot of it has to do with values and temperaments. He realized and conceded I had a point and certainly never retaliated. Incidentally, I would rate him as one of the more conservative members of the economics faculty. The bubble in academic pricing didn't really begin to inflate until after that, my best guess being about 1974 when, after the Arab Oil Embargo shock, and the incomes of most college graduates and the purely economic value of a college education stagnated and started to drop. I know a number of professors, instructors, etc., and have taught one small college course and been a guest lecturer in some other classes. Posters here seem to have had, or thought they had, professors more conservative than those I had in a private undergraduate college, a highly-rated private law school, and an extra summer session at a highly-rated state law school, and certainly more conservative than my one sister ever had any of at Penn State. All the propagandizing I remember was from the liberal side. My four siblings graduated from top-tier state universities. My younger wife attended some junior college and other courses, took most of her work and graduated from the second-tier state university here, and took some graduate courses at two other state universities. None of them reported any brainwashing or indoctrination from the conservative side, but, from first and second grade on up, we've had teachers who insisted thatour other tachers were ignorant idiots. Some, with and without doctorates, were. I have also lived most of my life in college and state university towns, for diverse reasons, and conservative professors are scarce in most fields including the social sciences. As for rambling off into personal viewpoints, etc., most of what I remember of value from public schools in east Texas and Pennsylvania, in the lab school at Penn State and public school in another state university town, came up when the teachers set aside the often dumbed down and insipid written lesson plans and talked ot us out of their professional and life experience. We got more of this beneficial impartation of experience and wisdom out of class in college and law school. My experience talking about political and economic, and many other, subjects with many high school and college students. One recent conversation with a seemingly bright and interested junior level journalism major transferring from a major junior college was far from unique in revealing that she had never actually read and studied the First Amendment, much less essential writings about its drafting and interpretation, and could not name four of the five rights guaranteed thereby, but thought certain language was in the text that isn't. Way too many bright students, born here to English-speaking parents, have been allowed to go through public school and graduate without becoming functionally literate in English. I learned to write essays and research papers in sixth grad