It has a feature which captures and sends a screen shot back to the govt every time someone opens an application. Someone has to review these screen shots to be sure that there is no "Dictator Kim is a goof'' message showing.
How many minutes until someone takes a picture of their butt and sends that in to the government recepticle? And how much longer until there is an app for that, perhaps pre-loaded with the infamous goat sex guy [no link]? And would it not be nice of that government repository were publicly posted in the west?
I have a more realistic user id. Really, you guys cannot manage to sprint for more than 4 digits. Sad.
I do, however, still use a text-based mail user agent. It's called "elm", and it has the interesting feature that it simply does not run those zip files, java files, and other mailware that gets past the filters. Also it seems to be a lot faster than the graphical mail user agents.
I am not sure they are really relevant any more. Their headline business, search, gets about 15 hits per day, and a third of them are typos for people thinking they want Yandex.
I may be making up these statistics, or I may have gotten them thanks to an efficient yahoo search.
What are they going to do when the terrorists realize that the long queues waiting to get through the security checkpoints are a ripe target?
Not sure. I always assumed that the terrorists had a part in designing the unconveniences at airports, shows, and the like. Either foreign terrorists or job-preserving bureaucrats; it is sometimes hard to distinguish them. For either group, the idea is to give a large collection of easy targets.
A later committee chooses which targets get hit this month. Sometimes the job-preservation group chooses: no one gets blown up, but everyone has to pay extra taxes for the safety.
the government is also incapable of stopping every murder and ensuring that no one at this very minute
Right you are. But at the same time, the govt is not specifically barring you from committing murder. Instead, murder is a crime with well understood elements. It's forbidden to me, to you, and to the fellow with the pictures stored on his devices.
The bar in this case is against one person, applies to an ill-defined set of images, and penalizes what would otherwise be legitimate, to wit, possession of his electronic devices and the content of their storage.
It is worse because of the fuzzy lines: what images should she control, and what may be ``sufficiently innocent'' that she should not. And what if he was running MS Windows, so the images have already leaked out beyond his control? Can the court compel the impossible, the re-taking of data which are ``in the wild'' already?
This is limited to intent. When some worm finds the supplosedly removed files in some sort of ``recycle'' storage, how shall we deal with it? Is it contempt because he foolishly believed the forbidden data were gone?
secret court that rubber stamps everything it sees
Not quite. In the 30+ years that it has existed, it did partially sort of turn down a government request. Specifically, it required that the government have its spooks watch its spooks to be sure that they did nothing untoward.
This burdensome restriction led to the activation of the FISA appeals court, which of course said that the FISA court was wrong to deny the govt what it wanted. In re: Seaked Case 02-001, 310 F.3d 717.
I'm sure that the outcome in the UK will not govern, and it might not even be considered particularly persuasive.
Remember that UK lacks any sort of useful constitution. The closest thing they have to such authority dates from the 1200s, and I don't think there was much concern for public observation or photography at that time.
The various states seem to generally follow a rule that, if you are in a place where you have a right to be, you are allowed to look and photograph. There are some exceptions: if your flash is disruptive, or if you have managed some sort of creative peeping-tom-ism, you may not be able to proceed.
I'll bet you do not have the right to photograph an arrest.
Sure you do. If you are standing in a place where you have a right to be, you may look or photograph as you will, so long as you do not cause a disturbance.
Once you have taken the picture, you are free to publish it. There can be some problems for the person photographed; some female celebrities with poor judgment have been photographed exiting cars, in short skirts, and having forgotten to wear underwear. Other people have been photographed at inopportune times, such as while they were robbing stores or while they were being arrested.
Sometimes these pictures make it harder to obtain a jury which is not already somewhat familiar with the case. I recall a football player who was photographed fleeing the police who were trying to arrest him, for instance, and it was very difficult to find jurors who were unfamiliar with the matter.
Photographs can also be useful to defendants. Imagine, for instance, a situation where a friend of the defendant had taken video of the entire event and it showed conclusively that no crime had occurred.
gather up every single thing he can think of to throw at the defendant and do it, on the hope that something'll stick
It does not have to stick, either. If the prosecutor can convict of anything, the judge can sentence for not only the convictions but also the acquittals. See U.S. v. Watts, 519 U.S. 148 (1997).
You most certainly do [legally have to pay sales tax on goods bought in another state]
Not so. No sale in your state, no sales tax.
The trick is that the ``use tax'', which is the exact same amount and for all intents and purposes feels like a sales tax -- but legally is not -- must be paid. How to distinguish them? Well, a sales tax only applies to sales. A use tax applies to anything brought into the state for use within the state.
Just to be sure that you are confused by this, you get to deduct the amount of any sales tax from the use tax. So if your state charges 6% and you bought it where the sales tax is 5%, then you deduct the 5% from the 6% use tax and you only owe 1%.
Now, in case you still think you understand, let me add an extra wrinkle. I can do this, I have a license to confuse. Consider the guy from, say, NC who buys something in SC on his way down here to Florida. He uses and consumes the product here. Then he heads home, leaving only the empty container in a Florida trash can. Florida does not have a state income tax form for him, see Article 7, Section 5, Constitution. So how can he report and pay that use tax?
And no, if you bought something in a higher-tax state for use in Florida, you won't be getting any money back.
Nothing I've read about Hiibel would suggest to me that it was part of that case.
Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, 542 U.S. 177 (12-Jun-2004), pg 181:
The officer asked him if he had "any identification on [him]," which we understand as a request to produce a driver's license or some other form of written identification. The man refused...
The court then discusses the case as though the defendant had only been asked to give his name, but the offense for which he was arrested was understood by the Court to be refusal to produce written identification.
The classic language of this request is ``Your papers, please.''
No where in that SCOTUS ruling did it say that you have to produce identification if asked.
In looking at Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, 542 U.S. 177 (21-Jun-2004), we see that the Court confined its discussion to whether a person could be required to divulge his identity. It said that a person could, and provided a bit of banana oil about cases where providing the name might be incriminating. The Court also stated that the statute could not be read as requiring production of identification papers.
However, based on its discussion of how asking someone to speak their name in the context of a Terry stop was not a Fourth Amendment violation, the Court actually upheld a conviction for failure to produce papers rather than failure to speak a name.
I am sorry, but neither I nor the dictionary see any real difference. In short, our disagreement is over whether we can distinguish theft from stealing, and that I do not much credit your distinctive definition of stealing as ``unauthorized acquisition''.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines stealing as ``1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.'' I believe this is a fairly good statement of the common understanding of stealing. As an intransitive verb, steal is defined as ``1. To commit theft.''
The difference between infringment of copyright and stealing is simply this: when I infringe the copyright, I do not actually take anything. Your characterization, that ``what is taken is the guaranteed right'' is erroneous. I no more take the right, though I trample upon it, than I take your land when I trespass over it in my big boots.
You still have the rights of copyright after I have infringed. If you did not, your suit against me for infringement would fail. One of the elements, indeed the key, is that you have the copyright.
Furthermore, you still have the ability to exercise your rights. My infringement will not prevent you from distributing or exhibiting legitimate copies. I displaced sales, but that does not prevent you from making and selling legitimate copies after you shut me down. Your remedy for the displaced sales is money damages, not replevy of wrongly detained property.
I have acquired nothing of yours, stolen nothing from you. Yet I have still injured you, in that you expected to have revenue from the sale of a copy and now you do not. Thus, you will sue me, not for stealing but for infringing your right.
Yes, it does. It violates the exclusivity of the copyright. The right of property is the right to exclude
I agree that making unauthorized copies violates the exclusivity of the copyright. I also agree that one of the sticks in the bundle of rights is the right to exclude.
It does not follow that violation of copyright is stealing. In order for that conclusion to hold, we would need another assertion, namely that violating any property right is stealing. Alternatively we would need the assertion that the right to exclude is the only stick in the bundle of rights.
That such is not the case is easily demonstrated with real property. When I trespass, I am violating the right to exclude. None would argue otherwise. Yet truly, I am not stealing the realty. I am not interfering with the right to possess, another stick in that bundle. When the police get here, they are going to have me up for trespass, not stealing or burglary.
The same is true of personalty; we thus have trespass to chattels, where I damage your property, I do not steal it. When I hack into your computer and program it to injure itself, I have not stolen your computer. You still possess it; I may never even be in the same state as the property upon which I trespassed. If it is a virtual server, there may not even be any property outside of our imaginations, but you still possess whatever you possessed before.
Historically, there were things I could do with your wife that would violate your rights in her. There it is impossible to argue that I have taken anything other than improper liberties.
A copyright is a property right, though the nature of the property is a little more elusive than realty or ordinary chattels. If I violate your right to exclude, perhaps by making an unauthorized copy, you still have your copyright. You still have all your physical chattels, too, being the legitimate copies you made and keep for sale. I have taken nothing from you except a potential sale, and your remedy ought to be in damages for the lost sale rather than replevin for misappropriated chattels.
Copyright is even more extravagant than that. It is possible to infringe a copyright by allowing the public to view part of a copy in the background on television for a few seconds. Ringgold v. B.E.T., 126 F.3d 70 (US 2d Cir., 1997). This is true even if I legitimately purchased the copy from you. Few other than the RIAA would say that I took anything from you when that copy was in the background on television. If you did not keep a television, and simply inventoried your things, you would never detect the infringement. Had I stolen something, your inventory would surely reveal it right away.
Not every violation of a right is stealing. If one does not take something with intent to deprive the owner, one does not steal. Copyright infringement violates a right, but does not steal. That's why the remedies differ.
copyright infringement is and always has been stealing
I would beg to differ.
Stealing (theft) is the taking of the property of another with the intent to deprive him of the value thereof.
Copyright infringement does not take the property of another. The essential element in copyright infringement is the creation of new copies, which is to say, new property, without the right to do so. In making these copies, you may cause the rights-holder to lose sales, and thereby injure him, but you are not taking his property.
For that reason, we have separate laws barring copyright infringement and stealing.
For a contrast, if you were to go to a dairy and take the milk crates, intending to keep them, you would be stealing. The milk crates are the property of the dairy, and you are taking them.
As well, if you could arrange it so that when you downloaded a song the computer from which you downloaded it lost the bits, perhaps having the file turn to zeroes. If you then downloaded from a RIAA machine, causing them to lose the material, you would be stealing
because you would be taking their bits (as opposed to merely copying them).
I would certainly object to any provision whereby you could send me ``collect'' messages without having my approval. That, however, does not reflect an objection to the price. It is an objection to the idea that you can spend my money without my permission.
The injury is the same, in principle, whether or not the price to send a text message is reasonable. Whether you cost me one or a hundred dollars, the objection is the same.
I am having a hard time seeing who the class is or what their injury might be. You need a few more facts for price-fixing, and otherwise there is no cognizible injury in charging what the market will bear.
They pay to send it to me, and they pay to get it all back from me.
A few years ago, I had the office supply make me a rubber stamp that said ``delete from mailing list'' in fairly large letters. When I get something business-replyable, I make sure to use the stamp before I send it back to them.
There are a lot of clueless advertisers out there. Credit card companies ought to be able to afford a clue, too, considering the interest rates that they propose to charge.
The only people that ever make money on an Olympics are the ad agencies.
Here in the States, contractors who are sufficiently corrupt to get in on the Olympic construction gravy train may do quite well. The taxpayers of the host city are of course obliged to fund the excess.
When I write of a host city, I use the term ``host'' in the same sense that you might be the host to a tapeworm.
shopping carts have a deposit system (50 cents for a cart that costs far far more)
It isn't about the price of the cart. People will return the darn things to get their half a dollar back.
In truth, however, the money is the wrong issue. The shopper cannot get $60 for the cart, even if the store paid such a price, and even if the cart is still in factory-new condition.
If the shopper were perverse, in fact, he might see the payment of the deposit as obtaining express permission to retain the cart until such time as he felt like returning it. That could be months and miles later. Same principle as a deposit bottle: leave money, take away item; bring back later, get money back. That bottle probably cost the Coke company more than the amount of the deposit to make, but the deposit brought it back.
None of this should be taken to suggest that I would shop at a grocery that attempted to extract a deposit from me for the use of the cart. Such a thing seems unlikely unless I were indeed intending to leave the deposit and take the cart.
Let me offer some uninformed speculation here. Don't worry, I do not have any actual facts.
It costs more time for them to process your credit card inside. If you do it outside, they probably wind up not spending any human time on you. That means the human inside can deal with the case customers, or sweep, or whatever.
They also have reasonable certainty of payment. The credit card company promised that the card was good before the machine turned the pump on. Certainty is worth something. (In my line of work, it is worth quite a lot.) If you were to pump, then bring the credit card in, they lose that certainty because the card could be bad. Alternatively, you could drive away without paying, though that may be forbidden in some states.
We see two benefits to pay-at-the-pump: reduced cost, and increased certainty of payment. There are, however, some costs. Mainly, they lose a marketing opportunity. I cannot say that it is a great opportunity -- the credit card guy may be a less likely buyer of stuff than the cash guy -- but it is certainly a lost opportunity.
I would expect that the convenience store association has studied the trade-offs, probably in great detail, and has determined that the trade-off is worth it.
I am not sure that pay-before as opposed to pay-after makes much difference, but again it has surely been studied. Pay-first was surely instituted at least in part to deter the taking of product without payment.
Slashdot Mirror
It has a feature which captures and sends a screen shot back to the govt every time someone opens an application. Someone has to review these screen shots to be sure that there is no "Dictator Kim is a goof'' message showing.
How many minutes until someone takes a picture of their butt and sends that in to the government recepticle? And how much longer until there is an app for that, perhaps pre-loaded with the infamous goat sex guy [no link]? And would it not be nice of that government repository were publicly posted in the west?
I have a more realistic user id. Really, you guys cannot manage to sprint for more than 4 digits. Sad.
I do, however, still use a text-based mail user agent. It's called "elm", and it has the interesting feature that it simply does not run those zip files, java files, and other mailware that gets past the filters. Also it seems to be a lot faster than the graphical mail user agents.
And yes, you will please get off my lawn.
I am not sure they are really relevant any more. Their headline business, search, gets about 15 hits per day, and a third of them are typos for people thinking they want Yandex.
I may be making up these statistics, or I may have gotten them thanks to an efficient yahoo search.
Not sure. I always assumed that the terrorists had a part in designing the unconveniences at airports, shows, and the like. Either foreign terrorists or job-preserving bureaucrats; it is sometimes hard to distinguish them. For either group, the idea is to give a large collection of easy targets.
A later committee chooses which targets get hit this month. Sometimes the job-preservation group chooses: no one gets blown up, but everyone has to pay extra taxes for the safety.
Right you are. But at the same time, the govt is not specifically barring you from committing murder. Instead, murder is a crime with well understood elements. It's forbidden to me, to you, and to the fellow with the pictures stored on his devices.
The bar in this case is against one person, applies to an ill-defined set of images, and penalizes what would otherwise be legitimate, to wit, possession of his electronic devices and the content of their storage.
It is worse because of the fuzzy lines: what images should she control, and what may be ``sufficiently innocent'' that she should not. And what if he was running MS Windows, so the images have already leaked out beyond his control? Can the court compel the impossible, the re-taking of data which are ``in the wild'' already?
This is limited to intent. When some worm finds the supplosedly removed files in some sort of ``recycle'' storage, how shall we deal with it? Is it contempt because he foolishly believed the forbidden data were gone?
Not quite. In the 30+ years that it has existed, it did partially sort of turn down a government request. Specifically, it required that the government have its spooks watch its spooks to be sure that they did nothing untoward.
This burdensome restriction led to the activation of the FISA appeals court, which of course said that the FISA court was wrong to deny the govt what it wanted. In re: Seaked Case 02-001, 310 F.3d 717.
At least not when we do not have any mod points with which to moderate you back down into the mud.
I'd have a hard time making a compelling case that the Soil and Water district did not top the U.N. in actual power.
I'm sure that the outcome in the UK will not govern, and it might not even be considered particularly persuasive.
Remember that UK lacks any sort of useful constitution. The closest thing they have to such authority dates from the 1200s, and I don't think there was much concern for public observation or photography at that time.
The various states seem to generally follow a rule that, if you are in a place where you have a right to be, you are allowed to look and photograph. There are some exceptions: if your flash is disruptive, or if you have managed some sort of creative peeping-tom-ism, you may not be able to proceed.
Sure you do. If you are standing in a place where you have a right to be, you may look or photograph as you will, so long as you do not cause a disturbance.
Once you have taken the picture, you are free to publish it. There can be some problems for the person photographed; some female celebrities with poor judgment have been photographed exiting cars, in short skirts, and having forgotten to wear underwear. Other people have been photographed at inopportune times, such as while they were robbing stores or while they were being arrested.
Sometimes these pictures make it harder to obtain a jury which is not already somewhat familiar with the case. I recall a football player who was photographed fleeing the police who were trying to arrest him, for instance, and it was very difficult to find jurors who were unfamiliar with the matter.
Photographs can also be useful to defendants. Imagine, for instance, a situation where a friend of the defendant had taken video of the entire event and it showed conclusively that no crime had occurred.
Here in the U.S., we still sing songs praising the British fleetness of foot in battle.
It does not have to stick, either. If the prosecutor can convict of anything, the judge can sentence for not only the convictions but also the acquittals. See U.S. v. Watts, 519 U.S. 148 (1997).
Not so. No sale in your state, no sales tax.
The trick is that the ``use tax'', which is the exact same amount and for all intents and purposes feels like a sales tax -- but legally is not -- must be paid. How to distinguish them? Well, a sales tax only applies to sales. A use tax applies to anything brought into the state for use within the state.
Just to be sure that you are confused by this, you get to deduct the amount of any sales tax from the use tax. So if your state charges 6% and you bought it where the sales tax is 5%, then you deduct the 5% from the 6% use tax and you only owe 1%.
Now, in case you still think you understand, let me add an extra wrinkle. I can do this, I have a license to confuse. Consider the guy from, say, NC who buys something in SC on his way down here to Florida. He uses and consumes the product here. Then he heads home, leaving only the empty container in a Florida trash can. Florida does not have a state income tax form for him, see Article 7, Section 5, Constitution. So how can he report and pay that use tax?
And no, if you bought something in a higher-tax state for use in Florida, you won't be getting any money back.
Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, 542 U.S. 177 (12-Jun-2004), pg 181: The officer asked him if he had "any identification on [him]," which we understand as a request to produce a driver's license or some other form of written identification. The man refused ...
The court then discusses the case as though the defendant had only been asked to give his name, but the offense for which he was arrested was understood by the Court to be refusal to produce written identification.
The classic language of this request is ``Your papers, please.''
In looking at Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, 542 U.S. 177 (21-Jun-2004), we see that the Court confined its discussion to whether a person could be required to divulge his identity. It said that a person could, and provided a bit of banana oil about cases where providing the name might be incriminating. The Court also stated that the statute could not be read as requiring production of identification papers.
However, based on its discussion of how asking someone to speak their name in the context of a Terry stop was not a Fourth Amendment violation, the Court actually upheld a conviction for failure to produce papers rather than failure to speak a name.
I am sorry, but neither I nor the dictionary see any real difference. In short, our disagreement is over whether we can distinguish theft from stealing, and that I do not much credit your distinctive definition of stealing as ``unauthorized acquisition''.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines stealing as ``1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.'' I believe this is a fairly good statement of the common understanding of stealing. As an intransitive verb, steal is defined as ``1. To commit theft.''
The difference between infringment of copyright and stealing is simply this: when I infringe the copyright, I do not actually take anything. Your characterization, that ``what is taken is the guaranteed right'' is erroneous. I no more take the right, though I trample upon it, than I take your land when I trespass over it in my big boots.
You still have the rights of copyright after I have infringed. If you did not, your suit against me for infringement would fail. One of the elements, indeed the key, is that you have the copyright.
Furthermore, you still have the ability to exercise your rights. My infringement will not prevent you from distributing or exhibiting legitimate copies. I displaced sales, but that does not prevent you from making and selling legitimate copies after you shut me down. Your remedy for the displaced sales is money damages, not replevy of wrongly detained property.
I have acquired nothing of yours, stolen nothing from you. Yet I have still injured you, in that you expected to have revenue from the sale of a copy and now you do not. Thus, you will sue me, not for stealing but for infringing your right.
I agree that making unauthorized copies violates the exclusivity of the copyright. I also agree that one of the sticks in the bundle of rights is the right to exclude.
It does not follow that violation of copyright is stealing. In order for that conclusion to hold, we would need another assertion, namely that violating any property right is stealing. Alternatively we would need the assertion that the right to exclude is the only stick in the bundle of rights.
That such is not the case is easily demonstrated with real property. When I trespass, I am violating the right to exclude. None would argue otherwise. Yet truly, I am not stealing the realty. I am not interfering with the right to possess, another stick in that bundle. When the police get here, they are going to have me up for trespass, not stealing or burglary.
The same is true of personalty; we thus have trespass to chattels, where I damage your property, I do not steal it. When I hack into your computer and program it to injure itself, I have not stolen your computer. You still possess it; I may never even be in the same state as the property upon which I trespassed. If it is a virtual server, there may not even be any property outside of our imaginations, but you still possess whatever you possessed before.
Historically, there were things I could do with your wife that would violate your rights in her. There it is impossible to argue that I have taken anything other than improper liberties.
A copyright is a property right, though the nature of the property is a little more elusive than realty or ordinary chattels. If I violate your right to exclude, perhaps by making an unauthorized copy, you still have your copyright. You still have all your physical chattels, too, being the legitimate copies you made and keep for sale. I have taken nothing from you except a potential sale, and your remedy ought to be in damages for the lost sale rather than replevin for misappropriated chattels.
Copyright is even more extravagant than that. It is possible to infringe a copyright by allowing the public to view part of a copy in the background on television for a few seconds. Ringgold v. B.E.T., 126 F.3d 70 (US 2d Cir., 1997). This is true even if I legitimately purchased the copy from you. Few other than the RIAA would say that I took anything from you when that copy was in the background on television. If you did not keep a television, and simply inventoried your things, you would never detect the infringement. Had I stolen something, your inventory would surely reveal it right away.
Not every violation of a right is stealing. If one does not take something with intent to deprive the owner, one does not steal. Copyright infringement violates a right, but does not steal. That's why the remedies differ.
I would beg to differ. Stealing (theft) is the taking of the property of another with the intent to deprive him of the value thereof.
Copyright infringement does not take the property of another. The essential element in copyright infringement is the creation of new copies, which is to say, new property, without the right to do so. In making these copies, you may cause the rights-holder to lose sales, and thereby injure him, but you are not taking his property.
For that reason, we have separate laws barring copyright infringement and stealing.
For a contrast, if you were to go to a dairy and take the milk crates, intending to keep them, you would be stealing. The milk crates are the property of the dairy, and you are taking them.
As well, if you could arrange it so that when you downloaded a song the computer from which you downloaded it lost the bits, perhaps having the file turn to zeroes. If you then downloaded from a RIAA machine, causing them to lose the material, you would be stealing because you would be taking their bits (as opposed to merely copying them).
I would certainly object to any provision whereby you could send me ``collect'' messages without having my approval. That, however, does not reflect an objection to the price. It is an objection to the idea that you can spend my money without my permission.
The injury is the same, in principle, whether or not the price to send a text message is reasonable. Whether you cost me one or a hundred dollars, the objection is the same.
I am having a hard time seeing who the class is or what their injury might be. You need a few more facts for price-fixing, and otherwise there is no cognizible injury in charging what the market will bear.
A few years ago, I had the office supply make me a rubber stamp that said ``delete from mailing list'' in fairly large letters. When I get something business-replyable, I make sure to use the stamp before I send it back to them.
There are a lot of clueless advertisers out there. Credit card companies ought to be able to afford a clue, too, considering the interest rates that they propose to charge.
Here in the States, contractors who are sufficiently corrupt to get in on the Olympic construction gravy train may do quite well. The taxpayers of the host city are of course obliged to fund the excess.
When I write of a host city, I use the term ``host'' in the same sense that you might be the host to a tapeworm.
Publix does not. I'm not sure if they are the biggest grocery chain in the state, but they are surely up there.
I have also seen POS advertising in there bragging that you don't need to fuss with cards.
It isn't about the price of the cart. People will return the darn things to get their half a dollar back.
In truth, however, the money is the wrong issue. The shopper cannot get $60 for the cart, even if the store paid such a price, and even if the cart is still in factory-new condition.
If the shopper were perverse, in fact, he might see the payment of the deposit as obtaining express permission to retain the cart until such time as he felt like returning it. That could be months and miles later. Same principle as a deposit bottle: leave money, take away item; bring back later, get money back. That bottle probably cost the Coke company more than the amount of the deposit to make, but the deposit brought it back.
None of this should be taken to suggest that I would shop at a grocery that attempted to extract a deposit from me for the use of the cart. Such a thing seems unlikely unless I were indeed intending to leave the deposit and take the cart.
Let me offer some uninformed speculation here. Don't worry, I do not have any actual facts.
It costs more time for them to process your credit card inside. If you do it outside, they probably wind up not spending any human time on you. That means the human inside can deal with the case customers, or sweep, or whatever.
They also have reasonable certainty of payment. The credit card company promised that the card was good before the machine turned the pump on. Certainty is worth something. (In my line of work, it is worth quite a lot.) If you were to pump, then bring the credit card in, they lose that certainty because the card could be bad. Alternatively, you could drive away without paying, though that may be forbidden in some states.
We see two benefits to pay-at-the-pump: reduced cost, and increased certainty of payment. There are, however, some costs. Mainly, they lose a marketing opportunity. I cannot say that it is a great opportunity -- the credit card guy may be a less likely buyer of stuff than the cash guy -- but it is certainly a lost opportunity.
I would expect that the convenience store association has studied the trade-offs, probably in great detail, and has determined that the trade-off is worth it.
I am not sure that pay-before as opposed to pay-after makes much difference, but again it has surely been studied. Pay-first was surely instituted at least in part to deter the taking of product without payment.