From my understanding, and the contention of the officer, the GPS logs average speed. Which means that during a short period of time, the defendant could have greatly exceeded the speed limit (and was clocked by the officer at that time), while the average speed was far lower than that. In which case, both the cop and the defendant are correct, and the cop is till valid in giving the ticket... and
The debate is likely to come down to how often the GPS device calculated and reported ground speed. Petaluma police lieutenant John Edwards told the AP that since GPS is satellite-based, there's a delay involved, and that Malone may have sped up and slowed down in the window between measurements, which could be as long as 60 seconds. Yes, it comes down to accuracy. But Lieutenant Edwards is wrong about the technology. The GPS satellites do not record the cars movements, so the lag time between the satellite and the car wouldn't matter. The only thing that matters is how often the car's device is recording speed, which could be up to once every second or maybe even more frequently based on the GPS technology alone. Really, what matters here are the technical specifications of the recording device and what data it recorded.
If it recorded waypoints every 30 seconds and calculated average speed, then it doesn't preclude the possibility that the radar was right, but there is nothing inherent in the technical capabilities of the GPS system that would limit it to 30 second intervals. If data was plotted every couple seconds or shorter, to come up with the speed, then I would say that puts the policeman's aim or radar gun calibration into question enough to find not guilty.
Right it is just that simple, and how much did each get in honorarium (speaking fees) which are a great way to funnel money to prospective candidates. How many of those Romney business deals over the years were because Romney's dad was politically connected and they assumed Mitt would be running for political office someday? How much money got funneled to Hilary because her husband was governor, president, or because people were saying she would someday run for office and even president 20 years ago? What did Giuliani know about security besides putting his political name to use in another one of politics revolving doors?
You describe just a couple of the ways these people got their money, at least more recently, but your list doesn't explain why people gave them money. "Favor" is a big part of business, but when it crosses over into politics it is corruption.
Do you think corporations ought to have the same First Amendment rights as citizens?
Corporations are legal instruments for... people. Who shouldn't have to give up their freedom because they are associated with a corporation, which is simply how they make a living. You want to level the playing field between the elite and the rest of the citizenry, then you don't make laws that threaten jail time if you say the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way. Then only the lawyers will have a public voice.
Campaign finance reform has done nothing but ensure that the political elite and their lawyers retain control over the government.
Yeah, I'm sure striking down laws allowing rich people to automatically win the election is for the good of the nation, and exactly what the Founders intended. Nothing in the current laws prevent rich people from using their own money... just look at Romney's campaign contributions to himself. So, really the laws in place ensure that only rich people (or those that got their campaign contributions before they started their campaign, in the form of salary or "speaking fees") can afford to run successfully.
Campaign finance reform is a barrier to entry to keep the parties in control of government.
4. Profit!!!! (See? No '????' needed with politics; there's always profit to be had when you control everything!) Profit implies an initial investment or cost, government politics is all about take.
The question is only where you want the evil directed, as that's where there are slight differences. You think so? Maybe if you modified that with "evil rhetoric", then I could agree.
The governments case was that he was being told by people inside Qwest management that they weren't going to meet stated expectations for the year and then he sold the stock based on that insider information. But if there were potential contracts to build classified networks worth billions of dollars being negotiated and he had a reasonable expectation that Qwest would get those contracts so the company would then meet or exceed expectations, then it wasn't insider trading. Because his expectation was in line with what had been projected publicly. Not being able to talk about those contracts was a major impediment to his defense.
Allegedly he turned down the NSA request in February before he sold the stock in the Spring, but the government contracts didn't get awarded to other companies until about 3 months after he sold the stock. So, unless the NSA directly threatened in that February meeting to pull the other contracts if he didn't play ball with the illegal wiretapping, then he could have just as easily thought that his refusal would not have any effect on those completely unrelated contracts to build classified networks for the us government.
So, this does really change things if it is true and if the government really did prevent this information from being presented at trial.
So, say your legitimate bare bones expenses are $50 less than what you make per month (not accounting for contingencies). So the person quits making payments on debt and starts saving up for the lawyers fees, filing fees and course expenses, finally gets enough to pay for bankruptcy, then what is to prevent a creditor from getting their cash then? And say you make it through bankruptcy court, then the first thing you get to do in your new life is to pay someone for exit counseling...
I'll say it again. There is nothing worth hearing in a paid for credit counseling that is worth the money, especially when all it does is potentially set you up with more debt and delay you from rebuilding your credit.
I'd be okay with this new bankruptcy law if in return it was made a felony to charge someone more than 10% above the prime interest rate for a loan. Now we have a situation where people might have paid back their principal many times over by the time they get to bankruptcy, to delay the disposal of their debt any longer is just adding to the injustice. They might have been fools to let themselves be talked into debt, but those who do the talking are pure evil.
like, perhaps we took our eye off the ball? If by "eye" you mean telescope and by "ball" you mean big chunk of rock and ice in space that could smack into the earth someday and kill everyone, then yes, like that.
Right, assuming you have any credit left to borrow with... which was my point. If you are at the point of declaring bankruptcy, then you are probably going to have to lean on your family and friends for a few hundred bucks in fees and costs to file for bankruptcy and get this new counseling before and after, because you don't have any bank credit left. And you have already likely leaned on any family or friends to get to that point.
And just the $75 bucks up front doesn't take into consideration legal representation and another $75 after the bankruptcy goes through in additional counseling.
There is nothing that can't be said to a person that couldn't just be printed on a piece of paper and handed to them with their filing. The fees are purely there to make it harder for people to file which to me sounds like kicking someone when they are down and then kicking them when they try to get back up.
The point was in response to the assertion that it wasn't harder now to declare bankruptcy. $75 (lowest price I found) for "counseling" before, plus another $75 for "counseling" afterwards, plus whatever a bankrupcy lawyer costs.
Perhaps someone like this woman with a steady paycheck can just divert money from debt payments to pay for the fees and costs of filing for bankruptcy, but for most people they might turn to bankruptcy precisely because they don't have enough money for even a couple hundred bucks in fees.
There's more paperwork and you have to try credit counseling first. That's it. Oh and you have to pay for counseling first, which I hear runs about $700. So basically you have to borrow some money from someone in order to be allowed to file bankruptcy. Might as well bring back the debtors prisons.
If we craft our laws carefully, there is no reason not to want to see those laws enforced perfectly, and there isn't any reason to worry about how breaks in the law are detected. Problem is when laws are designed around the reality of their enforceability. Usually this means that the punishments are increased so as to have a deterrent effect. Substantially increasing enforceability should precipitate a proportional decrease in severity of individual punishments, especially for misdemeanors.
I got caught in one of those red light traps in DC. Got a nice picture of my car going through a red light 0.7 seconds after it turned red. Given it was a month or so after the fact, I have a vague memory that I was confused about the signage, as I had never been on that road before, and I was trying to get out of the city. This caused a 0.7 second error on my part. I also recall a guy leading another guy by a leash wearing a black leather outfit but I don't think I saw that until after going through the intersection so I don't think it distracted me.
Nobody was endangered, nobody was even inconvenienced, and there was no intention to run the red light on my part. I chose to have a hearing through the mail, which was pretty much a waste of my time because the letter response simply cited the law and said I had to pay. Or to choose to go before an actual human to explain would have effectively doubled the fine if I lost, by charging be a fee which I would forfeit.
The point is that there are no laws that should be defined so rigidly that a computer can dole out punishments. Unless a computer can determine intent, then it must be up to other people what laws should be applied to human actions. Otherwise if we decide that crimes can be involuntary and based purely on actions regardless of intent, then we have lost another bit of our humanity.
In some ways I'd rather see these things organized "under one roof". As long as the product feedback center is responsive I don't think this is going to be a big deal for most. As long as when the product feedback center becomes unresponsive you can go take the code, give the software a new name and organize the software project under a new roof, then it is open source. If not then it is just "open source" marketing.
"Adobe® Flex 3 is a cross platform, open source framework for creating rich Internet applications that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems." The flex part is just the interactive messaging between the proprietary flash client application and whatever you are running on the server to feed it with data. It is analogous to what you might do with AJAX, except the major browsers still don't support the open source equivalent of flash animations which is SVG animation. There is nothing open source about the actual applications that are running under the proprietary flash player browser plugin. Flash is still as closed and proprietary a format as ever.
A lot of people like to bitch any time effort is duplicated and any fork (or competition) is a waste of time, but those people only need to look at XFree86 (remember those guys?) vs Xorg. Competition in software both commercial and open source is good and of benefit to everyone as long as the communication protocols (including file formats) do not become locked up in proprietary IP or DRM. Proprietary formats are what lead to stagnation in software by companies that just milk their locked-in installed based for all they are worth.
Even while at ARPAnet, he says he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination. His fears crystallized in the late 1990s when he saw companies begin to use the Internet to make phone calls and consumers begin to dabble in online video. Hmm... I really hope this was taken out of context, otherwise he doesn't know what he is talking about. The whole point of using UDP versus TCP (which actually does tells the sender to resend lost packets) is that low latency is more important than data integrity for some content. Phone calls, in particular, require that you have as low a latency as possible. And you don't want to suddenly have your audio transmission shifted back a couple seconds to buffer the audio otherwise people will start talking over one another.
Ensuring that packets arrive at their destination is not best handled at the TCP/IP level or at any protocol level, the way to ensure that packets arrive at their destination is to have a clear physical transmission without interference. Networking protocols are for telling the sender to resend lost packets on a lossy line, or not, depending on how much you need the packet.
Considering SPAM quantity as 10x to 100x regular e-mail, I'd like to see the equivalent road:) Well, if you are talking about a bottleneck then just visit any major American City at about 5:15PM. But if you are talking about quality of content, then the strip in Las Vegas is the apt comparison.
Don't be mad at Verizon because your government is completely fraudulent and corrupt -- if you vote, kick everyone out on the next election, and keep doing it until someone removes the monopoly provisions. Thanks, but I think I am right to be mad at both Verizon and my government. After all it was Verizon that has been screaming that it can't(won't) offer its customers the services they want unless they are give legal monopoly to do it. And because my elected representatives sacrificed long term consumer interests for a short term political benefit, I am mad at them too.
Few of the class of 2006 are going on to grad study in engineering or jobs in the field. 2006? Good to keep tabs on graduates, but I think it will take more than a year to gauge the effectiveness of the program in serving its graduates. Maybe wait till 2009 or 2010 to evaluate the prospects of the Olin University Engineers.
I know the best and brightest are often encouraged to do stuff like Peace Corps after graduating. I wonder how many Olin Engineers are building bridges in developing countries and getting some hands on experience that way?
And graduating debt free means they aren't automatically enslaved 6 months after graduation... they can wait for marriage and a mortgage for that.
Anyone else notice that editing article content is becoming just a mad jumble of wiki's own syntax which is becoming even harder to read than raw html would be? It used to be that wiki formatting was just pretty simple and it left article content pretty readable in edit mode, but now with all the templates and such you often get a mad jumble of "{" and "|" which makes it very difficult to read and edit without screwing up the page. Mediawiki is in dire need of a good web based wysiwyg editing tool.
Historically in the US, refusal to show ID, and refusal to perform specific acts that there is no legal requirement for you to perform (such as showing your receipt), have been explicitly ruled by the courts as not being sufficient reason for arrest - in fact, it's not even sufficient reason for search. Refusal to do either of these things cannot be interpreted as reason for anything. Agreed. But think of it the other way around, if you are trying to show false arrest then you are going to have to show that the police or shopkeeper acted unreasonably. You might also have to show that there was some intent to make a false arrest. The law, courts and juries are going to be more forgiving if the people involved acted in good faith of the law even if they make a mistake. I agree 100% that the cop made a false arrest once he determined that the person had purchased the items. And I agree that his original suspicion was based on incorrect assumptions, but if I were a judge/jury looking at this I would not see anything malicious until the part where the guy was taken into custody just for not complying with the police officers request to see an ID card. Everything up until that point was based on an incorrect assumption that he was a thief and had stolen something. I don't blame the officer for wanting to see a receipt, it was the quickest way to resolve the dispute and I also would be pissed that the guy didn't show it to me. But upon seeing the receipt and confirming that no theft had occurred the cop should have told the shopkeepers not to detain anyone in the future just for not showing a receipt. Instead he just got pissed that the guy wouldn't cooperate and trumped up some charges. That is an abuse of authority.
Given the complexity of the legal field, I'm pessimistic as to the average person's capability to defend themselves in a case like this. Securing legal counsel sounds like a prudent (if expensive) way to mitigate the potential losses. I think it is very important for people to feel competent when dealing with their own government in a simple matter like this. And given that this person was apparently aware of his own rights and didn't merely stumble into this situation I think it is reasonable to expect him to be able to defend himself in this legal exercise. The law is little more than an exercise in reading comprehension with a little latin or french thrown in to make it sound a little more fancy. People shouldn't be afraid of it any more than they are afraid of their own government. Fear drives people to waste resources, but the fault is not in what caused the fear, but the fear itself.
Government and the legal profession is to be respected certainly, but if you speak in clear concise sentences even a lawyer can sometimes understand you.
Slashdot Mirror
If it recorded waypoints every 30 seconds and calculated average speed, then it doesn't preclude the possibility that the radar was right, but there is nothing inherent in the technical capabilities of the GPS system that would limit it to 30 second intervals. If data was plotted every couple seconds or shorter, to come up with the speed, then I would say that puts the policeman's aim or radar gun calibration into question enough to find not guilty.
Right it is just that simple, and how much did each get in honorarium (speaking fees) which are a great way to funnel money to prospective candidates. How many of those Romney business deals over the years were because Romney's dad was politically connected and they assumed Mitt would be running for political office someday? How much money got funneled to Hilary because her husband was governor, president, or because people were saying she would someday run for office and even president 20 years ago? What did Giuliani know about security besides putting his political name to use in another one of politics revolving doors?
You describe just a couple of the ways these people got their money, at least more recently, but your list doesn't explain why people gave them money. "Favor" is a big part of business, but when it crosses over into politics it is corruption.
Campaign finance reform has done nothing but ensure that the political elite and their lawyers retain control over the government.
Campaign finance reform is a barrier to entry to keep the parties in control of government.
The governments case was that he was being told by people inside Qwest management that they weren't going to meet stated expectations for the year and then he sold the stock based on that insider information. But if there were potential contracts to build classified networks worth billions of dollars being negotiated and he had a reasonable expectation that Qwest would get those contracts so the company would then meet or exceed expectations, then it wasn't insider trading. Because his expectation was in line with what had been projected publicly. Not being able to talk about those contracts was a major impediment to his defense.
Allegedly he turned down the NSA request in February before he sold the stock in the Spring, but the government contracts didn't get awarded to other companies until about 3 months after he sold the stock. So, unless the NSA directly threatened in that February meeting to pull the other contracts if he didn't play ball with the illegal wiretapping, then he could have just as easily thought that his refusal would not have any effect on those completely unrelated contracts to build classified networks for the us government.
So, this does really change things if it is true and if the government really did prevent this information from being presented at trial.
So, say your legitimate bare bones expenses are $50 less than what you make per month (not accounting for contingencies). So the person quits making payments on debt and starts saving up for the lawyers fees, filing fees and course expenses, finally gets enough to pay for bankruptcy, then what is to prevent a creditor from getting their cash then? And say you make it through bankruptcy court, then the first thing you get to do in your new life is to pay someone for exit counseling...
I'll say it again. There is nothing worth hearing in a paid for credit counseling that is worth the money, especially when all it does is potentially set you up with more debt and delay you from rebuilding your credit.
I'd be okay with this new bankruptcy law if in return it was made a felony to charge someone more than 10% above the prime interest rate for a loan. Now we have a situation where people might have paid back their principal many times over by the time they get to bankruptcy, to delay the disposal of their debt any longer is just adding to the injustice. They might have been fools to let themselves be talked into debt, but those who do the talking are pure evil.
people need to eat too.
Right, assuming you have any credit left to borrow with... which was my point. If you are at the point of declaring bankruptcy, then you are probably going to have to lean on your family and friends for a few hundred bucks in fees and costs to file for bankruptcy and get this new counseling before and after, because you don't have any bank credit left. And you have already likely leaned on any family or friends to get to that point.
And just the $75 bucks up front doesn't take into consideration legal representation and another $75 after the bankruptcy goes through in additional counseling.
There is nothing that can't be said to a person that couldn't just be printed on a piece of paper and handed to them with their filing. The fees are purely there to make it harder for people to file which to me sounds like kicking someone when they are down and then kicking them when they try to get back up.
The point was in response to the assertion that it wasn't harder now to declare bankruptcy. $75 (lowest price I found) for "counseling" before, plus another $75 for "counseling" afterwards, plus whatever a bankrupcy lawyer costs.
Perhaps someone like this woman with a steady paycheck can just divert money from debt payments to pay for the fees and costs of filing for bankruptcy, but for most people they might turn to bankruptcy precisely because they don't have enough money for even a couple hundred bucks in fees.
I got caught in one of those red light traps in DC. Got a nice picture of my car going through a red light 0.7 seconds after it turned red. Given it was a month or so after the fact, I have a vague memory that I was confused about the signage, as I had never been on that road before, and I was trying to get out of the city. This caused a 0.7 second error on my part. I also recall a guy leading another guy by a leash wearing a black leather outfit but I don't think I saw that until after going through the intersection so I don't think it distracted me.
Nobody was endangered, nobody was even inconvenienced, and there was no intention to run the red light on my part. I chose to have a hearing through the mail, which was pretty much a waste of my time because the letter response simply cited the law and said I had to pay. Or to choose to go before an actual human to explain would have effectively doubled the fine if I lost, by charging be a fee which I would forfeit.
The point is that there are no laws that should be defined so rigidly that a computer can dole out punishments. Unless a computer can determine intent, then it must be up to other people what laws should be applied to human actions. Otherwise if we decide that crimes can be involuntary and based purely on actions regardless of intent, then we have lost another bit of our humanity.
Ensuring that packets arrive at their destination is not best handled at the TCP/IP level or at any protocol level, the way to ensure that packets arrive at their destination is to have a clear physical transmission without interference. Networking protocols are for telling the sender to resend lost packets on a lossy line, or not, depending on how much you need the packet.
I know the best and brightest are often encouraged to do stuff like Peace Corps after graduating. I wonder how many Olin Engineers are building bridges in developing countries and getting some hands on experience that way?
And graduating debt free means they aren't automatically enslaved 6 months after graduation... they can wait for marriage and a mortgage for that.
Anyone else notice that editing article content is becoming just a mad jumble of wiki's own syntax which is becoming even harder to read than raw html would be? It used to be that wiki formatting was just pretty simple and it left article content pretty readable in edit mode, but now with all the templates and such you often get a mad jumble of "{" and "|" which makes it very difficult to read and edit without screwing up the page. Mediawiki is in dire need of a good web based wysiwyg editing tool.
Might be easier to launch in international waters: http://www.boeing.com/special/sea-launch/
Government and the legal profession is to be respected certainly, but if you speak in clear concise sentences even a lawyer can sometimes understand you.