In court, do you think you have a legal right to refuse to answer the question "what is your name?"
Please note the following discusses what the law *is*, not what I think it *should* be. I didn't write the law, I read it.
> It is not illegal to park your car at home at 7 AM in the morning either, but if the court asks you if you did that you have the right not to answer.
In general, no you don't, not under the law. See "subpoena". You have a right to not answer IF the answer is testimony (evidence given by a witness) which incriminates you.
So, under the law, there are two pertinent questions: a) Is it testimony (spoken *evidence* relevant to the charge) b) Might the answer incriminate the person being asked.
You can refuse to answer "did you park at home at 7AM?" if you are charged with parking there - maybe it's a no-parking zone. To be protected, the statement must be evidence (not merely a non-evidentiary fact which might assist in discovering evidence), and it must be evidence against the speaker.
A question which fails each test is "what is your name?". In general, a person's name isn't evidence of a crime (or against). Testimony is defined as spoken evidence, so stating your name is not testimony (unless you are accused of falsifying your identity). Stating your name MIGHT well assist an investigator in proceeding with an investigation. Just because it is helpful to investigators doesn't make it spoken evidence (testimony). A password might well assist an investigator in proceeding with an investigation...
Assuming a statement IS evidence, the second prong of the test is whether it is self-incriminating. I can be forced to testify against you, and you can be forced to testify against me. You just can't be forced to testify against yourself. So the question is only out of bounds if the answer implicates the person answering. Note as above, what is your name?" assists with the investigation, but it's not self-incrimination, because the answer doesn't itself implicate the person in a crime. Similarly "What is your password?" assists with the investigation, but doesn't itself implicate them in a crime.
I might agree that your conclusion SHOULD be the law if you can explain how you'd distinguish between questions including "what is your name?" and "what is your password?" Why is one self-incrimination and the other not? Both help investigators. Neither is an admission of a crime.
Assume here we're talking about a criminal court case, with a court order; not random cop wanting to look in your phone for no reason. Obviously random cop can't demand your password of their own accord without a court order.
In the context of a court order, this isn't a new thing, people have long stored documents in safes, hidden documents, etc. You can be compelled to disclose such evidence - after they prove that you have it. If it can be proven that you possess any relevant evidence, a body or anything else, you can be compelled to produce that evidence in most (all?) Western countries.
A US court recently ruled on an interesting case with a self-incrimination aspect. There was a hard drive which, evidence indicated, contained child porn. Prosecutors supoened the evidence on the hard drive, via demanding the password. In the opinion, the court ruled that IF it was NOT proven that the defendant owned and used the drive, providing the password would be testimony that it was his, and therefore self-incrimination. Because it had already been otherwise proven (or stipulated) that it was his drive, providing the password was producing evidence in his possession, not testimony.
In other words, how is a password testifying against yourself? Is it illegal to set your password to "correct horse battery staple"? The password isn't illegal, so saying that you have a certain password doesn't mean you committed a crime. Rather, it's the *evidence* already on the device that reveals the facts. There is no legal right to hide *evidence*.
> Views only help on the output side, not the input side.
Not normally true if your base tables are in normal form. If your base tables are *not* normalized, updates (through views or otherwise) are a crapshoot. If the base tables are normalized, you can update them through a de-normalizing view.
Aggregate views (reports) are of course not updateable. Updating an aggregate would cause your totals to no longer match your detail records. That's a good thing.
> when I try to write neat code, I'm always aware that ever single call is a call, so there's the efficiency hit in context switches.
On the topic of efficiency, given the choice, would you rather use up a resource that's worth a penny or a resource that's worth $1,000?
Suppose the function call takes 50ns of CPU time. Suppose we hit that function call a million times. The total cost of a million function calls is about 50 milliseconds. Let's convert that to dollars. Suppose a CPU core costs $350 and lasts 157680000000 milliseconds. So a million function calls cost $0.0000000002.
Your time costs approximately twice your salary (the company pays for your office, your computer, your health insurance...). Suppose you are cheap, you make $50K / year. That means you cost $100 / hour, or $1.66 / minute.
One minute of your time costs 830,000,000 times as much as a million function calls! If you spend one minute of your time ($1.66) to save that function call ($0.0000000002)
Suppose the function were called a TRILLION times. It still costs 830 times less than spending a minute of your time on it.
The most efficient thing is to save yourself the time. Unless the function is called a QUADRILLION times, it is wasteful to be worrying about it.
Indeed, if code is nested 8 levels deep, four or more of those levels should probably be separate functions. The first function might be: while (line = readline) {
if (notcomment) {
sql.= build_sql(line)
} } return sql
The levels of indentation related to building the sql are off in another function, called build_sql().
Human working memory can hold about 8 items at a time, in this case 8 lines of code. Which means you can look at an 8-line function and understand it all at once; you know what those 8 lines are doing. When looking at a 300 line function, you have to scroll up and down parsing parts of it at a time. That greatly increases bugs. Functions no more than 8 lines can normally be seen to be correct - you can fully understand it, without need to scroll up and try to remember how foo affected bar 250 lines ago.
Views allow you to operate on the database as if it were denormalized, without losing the consistency guarantees and other benefits of a properly normalized database.
It's the same concept as STORING datetimes as a number internally, a consistent, monotically increasing number, while DISPLAYING them as strings like "November 6, 2016 1:30 AM". Storing "November 6, 2016 1:30 AM" is crap for any kind of calculation, especially because that string represents two different times an hour apart - there's no way to know whether that comes before or after "November 6, 2016 1:20 AM".
Similarly, views are virtual tables which provide whatever you'd like the user to see, without breaking the underlying data structure.
The Russian word "pravda" means "truth". Pravda is the government-controlled newspaper.
It would indeed be a waste of time to ARGUE with one person talking about pravda and the other talking about Pravda. They are two different things.
On the other hand, I believe it's worth remembering, and sometimes pointing out, that they are two different things. Where a conversation is seeking pravda (truth), I will mention it when someone seeks to answer the inquiry by citing Pravda (the government newspaper).
One reall can fall into the trap of thinking that the only truth is what the govt acknowledges as truth, and that the only rights are whatever the govt acknowledges as rights.
> quite hard for anybody to justify charging $100 for forwarding notices
The DMCA doesn't require service providers to forward notices. It requires them to follow a specific process, but mailing things isn't part of that process.
The first step, which very much applies to the problem "notices", is determining whether or not the communication is in fact a qualifying DMCA notice at all. (Many of Rightscorp's alleged notices did not meet DMCA requirements.) You can easily spend a couple of man-hours on a handling a case, sometimes a few hours. For a rough estimate of the cost, twice the employee's salaries - you have to pay for their office, computer, health insurance etc as well as their salaries.
> isn't officially supported yet; it is in RC status. For now... use a custom build, or build it yourself
Yes, you can either download an unofficial build or compile it yourself, like people have been doing for years now. Gmail and Google Maps were officially beta for years, not officially supported as millions of people used them. You seem to confuse "officially supported" vs "works".
If it's hundreds of *different* images, that's a tradeoff to consider. If it's many copies of the same image, most memory can be shared. Every approach has advantages and disadvantages.
Until you thousands of instances, the most expensive resource is probably people. RAM, CPU, and storage are cheaper than people, and you don't have to buy health insurance and other benefits for your RAM.
Sometimes shared libraries get only one copy in memory. In other cases, you can end up using more memory. Sometimes it's worth a few extra MBs of RAM.
Personally, I've developed some expertise with kvm/qemu, so I tend to use full virtualization more often. Yes, it uses even more RAM. 512 MB of RAM costs me what, $3? I bill at $100/hour, so given the choice between using $3 of RAM or 30 minutes of my time, I'll spend the $3.
Docker is basically the fastest, lightest type of virtualization. Mainly it gets you a reasonably secure jail. The container contains the entire userland, the whole OS other than the kernel. Some people use this to run both Debian Linux and Android at the same time. Yeah dependencies are handled too, but that's not normally the point.
> When Joe Sixpack uses this [gui] to write a medical billing program with a data warehouse and credit card gateways, let me know.
Oh they WILL point and click their way to a Sharepoint site that stores personal medical information, accepts credit cards, and emails it all as an Excel spreadsheet. And it'll look like it pretty much works, most of the time. (It doesn't bother anyone with alerts when it fails on numbers with more than four digits, so nobody sees any problem.) They just saved $6,000 over having a developer with a clue involved!
Then some script kiddie will find it, the manure with strike the ventilation, and the company will spend $250,000 cleaning up the mess, much of that going to the security company I work for.
> The way the DMCA process is written, the party making the claim doesn't really face much penalty for effectively lying to the court
Absolutely agreed. That's a major problem with DMCA. In mynexperience handling DMCA issues and advising people on both sides, it's THE major problem. Other issues flow from this.
> it seems reasonable to require the party sending them out cover the costs--they can tack it onto what they ask for when they win, if nothing else.
In the Rightscorp vs Cox example, it seems perfectly reasonable. Consider a tube site set up solely for the purpose of people unlawfully uploading other people's content. It would be crazy to allow the tube site operator to triple their revenue by charging their victims $100 per video to remove them. If that were the law, we'd immediately have a flood of sites and services whose primary purpose is to demand payment for removing content they shouldn't have ripped off in the first place, demanding payment from the very people they took the content from in the first place. So while we'd all like to charge Rightscorp any fees we can think of, it would be a horrible law.
In this case, existing law already covers both your point about "extortion" and safe harbor from liability. What it doesn't cover adequately is RightsCorp's high volume of negligent complaints.
First, extortion. Suppose I scratch your car, a big scratch. You want $2,000 to have it repainted. I offer $100 to have just the scratch covered with touch up paint. You're not happy with that because even with the touch up paint, the damage will be visible. You say "if you don't pay to have my car painted, I'll take the issue to court. I'll sue you for the $2,000." Is that extortion? No, it's not extortion to state that you'll pursue a claim that you believe to be legitimate. It would only be extortion if you said "if you don't pay for my car, I'll lie and sue you for sexual harassment". Does Rightscorp believe they have a legitimate complaint? The court ruled that they do! And by the letter of the law, they *should* have won. Cox didn't do what the law says they must do in order to avoid liability. Since Rightscorp is pursuing an arguably legitimate claim, it's clearly not extortion. (Not that I LIKE Rightscorp, but the court ruled that their claim was correct.)
Cox could theoretically counter-sue for the cost of handling negilgent notices, but that's a side issue.
The DMCA is mostly about providing safe harbor to carriers such that they can't be sued by either the copyright holder or the person accused of violating copyrights, provided that they follow the prescribed process. The carrier can't be sued by anyone for what they the carrier does, if the carrier does the process outlined in the DMCA. Cox chose not to follow the DMCA process with Rightscorp notices. (Because Rightscorp sent a lot of questionable notices and apparently Cox didn't realize they could just tell the customers to fill out a counter-notice form, if they weren't actually violating.)
Rightscorp *already* won in court. They sued Cox, the fifth largest ISP in the country. To fix the situation, a few words need to be added to the relevant law, the DMCA.
While we're at it, also adding a significant penalty for filing negligent DMCA notices would go aa LONG way to fixing the other problems related to the issues the act was intended to address.
That line of thinking requires you to believe that there are actually no such thing as rights, only privileges granted and revoked by other people at their whim.
Governments infringe on people's rights. That would not be possible if government was the source of rights and could take them away.
The right of free speech would be completly meaningless if it meant nothing more than "as long as nobody dislikes what you say, nobody will stop you from saying it". The right of religuon would be meaningless if it meant "you can believe what you want, only if the government approves of it." That's true of ANYTHING - if nobody dislikes what I put into the water supply, nobody will stop me. Is that a "right to poison the water"? No. The difference, what is meant by the word "right", is exactly that I can believe what I will REGARDLESS of whether the government or the majority approves. That's why we can speak of a "right to free speech" but not a "right to poison water" - because the government may control the water, and may not control my words.
Suppose for a moment that rights did come from government. Which law, which act of government granted you the right of free speech? There is none. No law says "you make speak freely". So you do not have the right of free speech if you're waiting for the government to grant it. Rather, the Constitution FORBIDS the federal government from INFRINGING on your pre-existing rights.
> you should certainly recognize that you are not describing a real-world concept, and it could be argued that you are ipso facto wrong
I'm describing the fact that rights are violated repeatedly. That's very real-world.
A slave has their rights violated every day. If we don't take action, their rights will be violated again tomorrow. That's real world.
If you think that that a slaves rights were *taken away*, then their rights are no longer being violated. You would say "they were enslaved, and that's sad, but now that they are enslaves they have no rights, and I have no resposibility to protect the rights they don't have anyway." That's also real world, people actually think that way and make real-world decisions on that basis.
An example in America is parts of the Patriot Act. Some people see that as past event - rights WERE taken away. It's a done deal, they think, because rights were removed. I see that rights are currently being violated under the Act, today. The rights are being violated today only because they still exist today.
Apparently I was unclear, I didn't communicate well. I'm distinguishing between violating rights (infringing on them) versus "taking them away".
> the government regularly infringes on the right of free speech. Chelsea Manning, search warrants with gag orders, etc.
Suppose the government improperly searches your papers on Monday, then again on Tuesday, then again on Wednesday. The SECOND time that the government does an illegal search of your papers, on Tuesday, is it infringing on your rights again? How about the third, on Wednesday? Yes, of course each search infringes (violates) your rights.
THEREFORE we know the right *existed* on Tuesday. The government *infringed* your rights on Monday, it did not remove them.
If the government had *taken away* your rights on Monday, it couldn't possibly infringe them on Tuesday. The government *violated* your rights on Monday, it did not take them away.
Every single day that someone was in a concentration camp, their rights were being violated. That would not be true if the government removed their rights on day 1. The government didn't create their human rights, so the government can not remove them - the government, or anyone else, can only *violate* your rights.
The Constitution doesn't say "the government must *grant*" new rights, it says the government "shall not infringe" THE right of.... "The right of free speech, not "a" right of free speech - they are saying the right existed before the Constitution was written; that human rights are part of being human. Nobody grants them, therefore nobody can un-grant them.
I fully understand the feelings behind your comment. I've been homeless, I've seen a lot of things. It's annoying to see people waste money while you're struggling.
The correct logic is the same in either case. If you create an strong economic incentive for poor people to come to a country, they'll try to do so; if you create a strong economic incentive for rich people to come to a country (or send their money there), they'll try to do so.
A guy with $100 to his name probably has it in his wallet, or in his checking account. A billionaire doesn't have a millions of $20 bills in his a wallet, a billionaire owns Tesla, Amazon, or some other company. The "billion dollars" isn't actual dollars, it's a company or two. Sending his billion dollars to some other company means sending the company there. It is indeed bad for the economy when a company moves their operations away - see Detroit for an example.
YOU didn't come here for Basic Income. You work in the US, you own a small part of the US (a house), and have an American family, and I notice you write (very) American English. You've decided to basically become an American now, it seems. A "new American" I've heard such immigrants called.) You just haven't made it official.
The proposal is: $500/month 21+ years old $250/month for 21 and younger
So a family of four gets $1,500 / month from tax payers like you and I. The average family in Mexico is four people earning $850/month. They'd get more money by coming to the US and NOT working than by staying in Mexico and working. Do you think that might be attractive to some people? Considering not just Mexico, but all of Central and South America, maybe a few million people?
Do you have a spare $1,500/month to pay for someone who wants to come here and not work?
That's why, despite the "unfairness" to "new Americans" like you who have chosen not to make it official, we can't offer a free "five percenter" income to anybody who feels like showing up without even working. Probably tens of millions of people would love to double their income and not even have to work anymore. That incentive is too strong.
The study showed something much more specific than the summary mentions, and sometimes the opposite of what the headlines indicates.
Quoting the article, good outcomes were likely when : -- giving one-time cash quantities to people on the brink of homelessness who can demonstrate that they will be able to pay rent by themselves in the future, but who have been afflicted by some nonrecurring crisis, such as a medical bill. Recipients need to be able to demonstrate consistent future income --
Not so effective, the study found, was giving cash to people carelessly. If someone was broke last year, and the year before, and they were broke last month, they'll probably be broke again next month.
Personal experience helping ex-cons, alcoholics, and drug addicts is that *most* people will continue doing what they've been doing, and continue getting the same results. The trick is to find the ~5% who are doing something different, so they'll get different results, and help them.
I was going to say exactly that. I have one key fob for me Charger, but I lose things, so I expect I'll lose it at some point, or break it. I'd love to crack it first. I hate to spend several hundred dollars on a spare.
I understand that slightly older Dodge vehicles can be hacked wirelessly through the infotainment system, but I don't think that hack applies to my car.
Slashdot Mirror
In court, do you think you have a legal right to refuse to answer the question "what is your name?"
Please note the following discusses what the law *is*, not what I think it *should* be. I didn't write the law, I read it.
> It is not illegal to park your car at home at 7 AM in the morning either, but if the court asks you if you did that you have the right not to answer.
In general, no you don't, not under the law. See "subpoena". You have a right to not answer IF the answer is testimony (evidence given by a witness) which incriminates you.
So, under the law, there are two pertinent questions:
a) Is it testimony (spoken *evidence* relevant to the charge)
b) Might the answer incriminate the person being asked.
You can refuse to answer "did you park at home at 7AM?" if you are charged with parking there - maybe it's a no-parking zone. To be protected, the statement must be evidence (not merely a non-evidentiary fact which might assist in discovering evidence), and it must be evidence against the speaker.
A question which fails each test is "what is your name?". In general, a person's name isn't evidence of a crime (or against). Testimony is defined as spoken evidence, so stating your name is not testimony (unless you are accused of falsifying your identity). Stating your name MIGHT well assist an investigator in proceeding with an investigation. Just because it is helpful to investigators doesn't make it spoken evidence (testimony). A password might well assist an investigator in proceeding with an investigation ...
Assuming a statement IS evidence, the second prong of the test is whether it is self-incriminating. I can be forced to testify against you, and you can be forced to testify against me. You just can't be forced to testify against yourself. So the question is only out of bounds if the answer implicates the person answering. Note as above, what is your name?" assists with the investigation, but it's not self-incrimination, because the answer doesn't itself implicate the person in a crime. Similarly "What is your password?" assists with the investigation, but doesn't itself implicate them in a crime.
I might agree that your conclusion SHOULD be the law if you can explain how you'd distinguish between questions including "what is your name?" and "what is your password?" Why is one self-incrimination and the other not? Both help investigators. Neither is an admission of a crime.
Assume here we're talking about a criminal court case, with a court order; not random cop wanting to look in your phone for no reason. Obviously random cop can't demand your password of their own accord without a court order.
In the context of a court order, this isn't a new thing, people have long stored documents in safes, hidden documents, etc. You can be compelled to disclose such evidence - after they prove that you have it. If it can be proven that you possess any relevant evidence, a body or anything else, you can be compelled to produce that evidence in most (all?) Western countries.
A US court recently ruled on an interesting case with a self-incrimination aspect. There was a hard drive which, evidence indicated, contained child porn. Prosecutors supoened the evidence on the hard drive, via demanding the password. In the opinion, the court ruled that IF it was NOT proven that the defendant owned and used the drive, providing the password would be testimony that it was his, and therefore self-incrimination. Because it had already been otherwise proven (or stipulated) that it was his drive, providing the password was producing evidence in his possession, not testimony.
In other words, how is a password testifying against yourself? Is it illegal to set your password to "correct horse battery staple"? The password isn't illegal, so saying that you have a certain password doesn't mean you committed a crime. Rather, it's the *evidence* already on the device that reveals the facts. There is no legal right to hide *evidence*.
> Views only help on the output side, not the input side.
Not normally true if your base tables are in normal form.
If your base tables are *not* normalized, updates (through views or otherwise) are a crapshoot. If the base tables are normalized, you can update them through a de-normalizing view.
Aggregate views (reports) are of course not updateable. Updating an aggregate would cause your totals to no longer match your detail records. That's a good thing.
> when I try to write neat code, I'm always aware that ever single call is a call, so there's the efficiency hit in context switches.
On the topic of efficiency, given the choice, would you rather use up a resource that's worth a penny or a resource that's worth $1,000?
Suppose the function call takes 50ns of CPU time. Suppose we hit that function call a million times. The total cost of a million function calls is about 50 milliseconds. Let's convert that to dollars. Suppose a CPU core costs $350 and lasts 157680000000 milliseconds. So a million function calls cost $0.0000000002.
Your time costs approximately twice your salary (the company pays for your office, your computer, your health insurance ...). Suppose you are cheap, you make $50K / year. That means you cost $100 / hour, or $1.66 / minute.
One minute of your time costs 830,000,000 times as much as a million function calls! If you spend one minute of your time ($1.66) to save that function call ($0.0000000002)
Suppose the function were called a TRILLION times. It still costs 830 times less than spending a minute of your time on it.
The most efficient thing is to save yourself the time. Unless the function is called a QUADRILLION times, it is wasteful to be worrying about it.
Indeed, if code is nested 8 levels deep, four or more of those levels should probably be separate functions. The first function might be: .= build_sql(line)
while (line = readline) {
if (notcomment) {
sql
}
}
return sql
The levels of indentation related to building the sql are off in another function, called build_sql().
Human working memory can hold about 8 items at a time, in this case 8 lines of code. Which means you can look at an 8-line function and understand it all at once; you know what those 8 lines are doing. When looking at a 300 line function, you have to scroll up and down parsing parts of it at a time. That greatly increases bugs. Functions no more than 8 lines can normally be seen to be correct - you can fully understand it, without need to scroll up and try to remember how foo affected bar 250 lines ago.
Views allow you to operate on the database as if it were denormalized, without losing the consistency guarantees and other benefits of a properly normalized database.
It's the same concept as STORING datetimes as a number internally, a consistent, monotically increasing number, while DISPLAYING them as strings like "November 6, 2016 1:30 AM". Storing "November 6, 2016 1:30 AM" is crap for any kind of calculation, especially because that string represents two different times an hour apart - there's no way to know whether that comes before or after "November 6, 2016 1:20 AM".
Similarly, views are virtual tables which provide whatever you'd like the user to see, without breaking the underlying data structure.
The Russian word "pravda" means "truth". Pravda is the government-controlled newspaper.
It would indeed be a waste of time to ARGUE with one person talking about pravda and the other talking about Pravda. They are two different things.
On the other hand, I believe it's worth remembering, and sometimes pointing out, that they are two different things. Where a conversation is seeking pravda (truth), I will mention it when someone seeks to answer the inquiry by citing Pravda (the government newspaper).
One reall can fall into the trap of thinking that the only truth is what the govt acknowledges as truth, and that the only rights are whatever the govt acknowledges as rights.
> quite hard for anybody to justify charging $100 for forwarding notices
The DMCA doesn't require service providers to forward notices. It requires them to follow a specific process, but mailing things isn't part of that process.
The first step, which very much applies to the problem "notices", is determining whether or not the communication is in fact a qualifying DMCA notice at all. (Many of Rightscorp's alleged notices did not meet DMCA requirements.) You can easily spend a couple of man-hours on a handling a case, sometimes a few hours. For a rough estimate of the cost, twice the employee's salaries - you have to pay for their office, computer, health insurance etc as well as their salaries.
> isn't officially supported yet; it is in RC status. For now ... use a custom build, or build it yourself
Yes, you can either download an unofficial build or compile it yourself, like people have been doing for years now. Gmail and Google Maps were officially beta for years, not officially supported as millions of people used them. You seem to confuse "officially supported" vs "works".
If it's hundreds of *different* images, that's a tradeoff to consider. If it's many copies of the same image, most memory can be shared. Every approach has advantages and disadvantages.
Until you thousands of instances, the most expensive resource is probably people. RAM, CPU, and storage are cheaper than people, and you don't have to buy health insurance and other benefits for your RAM.
Sometimes shared libraries get only one copy in memory. In other cases, you can end up using more memory. Sometimes it's worth a few extra MBs of RAM.
Personally, I've developed some expertise with kvm/qemu, so I tend to use full virtualization more often. Yes, it uses even more RAM. 512 MB of RAM costs me what, $3? I bill at $100/hour, so given the choice between using $3 of RAM or 30 minutes of my time, I'll spend the $3.
Docker is basically the fastest, lightest type of virtualization. Mainly it gets you a reasonably secure jail. The container contains the entire userland, the whole OS other than the kernel. Some people use this to run both Debian Linux and Android at the same time. Yeah dependencies are handled too, but that's not normally the point.
By 2011, Docker had ARM support.
https://github.com/docker/dock...
> When Joe Sixpack uses this [gui] to write a medical billing program with a data warehouse and credit card gateways, let me know.
Oh they WILL point and click their way to a Sharepoint site that stores personal medical information, accepts credit cards, and emails it all as an Excel spreadsheet. And it'll look like it pretty much works, most of the time. (It doesn't bother anyone with alerts when it fails on numbers with more than four digits, so nobody sees any problem.) They just saved $6,000 over having a developer with a clue involved!
Then some script kiddie will find it, the manure with strike the ventilation, and the company will spend $250,000 cleaning up the mess, much of that going to the security company I work for.
> The way the DMCA process is written, the party making the claim doesn't really face much penalty for effectively lying to the court
Absolutely agreed. That's a major problem with DMCA. In mynexperience handling DMCA issues and advising people on both sides, it's THE major problem. Other issues flow from this.
> it seems reasonable to require the party sending them out cover the costs--they can tack it onto what they ask for when they win, if nothing else.
In the Rightscorp vs Cox example, it seems perfectly reasonable. Consider a tube site set up solely for the purpose of people unlawfully uploading other people's content. It would be crazy to allow the tube site operator to triple their revenue by charging their victims $100 per video to remove them. If that were the law, we'd immediately have a flood of sites and services whose primary purpose is to demand payment for removing content they shouldn't have ripped off in the first place, demanding payment from the very people they took the content from in the first place. So while we'd all like to charge Rightscorp any fees we can think of, it would be a horrible law.
In this case, existing law already covers both your point about "extortion" and safe harbor from liability. What it doesn't cover adequately is RightsCorp's high volume of negligent complaints.
First, extortion. Suppose I scratch your car, a big scratch. You want $2,000 to have it repainted. I offer $100 to have just the scratch covered with touch up paint. You're not happy with that because even with the touch up paint, the damage will be visible. You say "if you don't pay to have my car painted, I'll take the issue to court. I'll sue you for the $2,000." Is that extortion? No, it's not extortion to state that you'll pursue a claim that you believe to be legitimate. It would only be extortion if you said "if you don't pay for my car, I'll lie and sue you for sexual harassment". Does Rightscorp believe they have a legitimate complaint? The court ruled that they do! And by the letter of the law, they *should* have won. Cox didn't do what the law says they must do in order to avoid liability. Since Rightscorp is pursuing an arguably legitimate claim, it's clearly not extortion. (Not that I LIKE Rightscorp, but the court ruled that their claim was correct.)
Cox could theoretically counter-sue for the cost of handling negilgent notices, but that's a side issue.
The DMCA is mostly about providing safe harbor to carriers such that they can't be sued by either the copyright holder or the person accused of violating copyrights, provided that they follow the prescribed process. The carrier can't be sued by anyone for what they the carrier does, if the carrier does the process outlined in the DMCA. Cox chose not to follow the DMCA process with Rightscorp notices. (Because Rightscorp sent a lot of questionable notices and apparently Cox didn't realize they could just tell the customers to fill out a counter-notice form, if they weren't actually violating.)
Rightscorp *already* won in court. They sued Cox, the fifth largest ISP in the country. To fix the situation, a few words need to be added to the relevant law, the DMCA.
While we're at it, also adding a significant penalty for filing negligent DMCA notices would go aa LONG way to fixing the other problems related to the issues the act was intended to address.
That line of thinking requires you to believe that there are actually no such thing as rights, only privileges granted and revoked by other people at their whim.
Governments infringe on people's rights.
That would not be possible if government was the source of rights and could take them away.
The right of free speech would be completly meaningless if it meant nothing more than "as long as nobody dislikes what you say, nobody will stop you from saying it". The right of religuon would be meaningless if it meant "you can believe what you want, only if the government approves of it." That's true of ANYTHING - if nobody dislikes what I put into the water supply, nobody will stop me. Is that a "right to poison the water"? No. The difference, what is meant by the word "right", is exactly that I can believe what I will REGARDLESS of whether the government or the majority approves. That's why we can speak of a "right to free speech" but not a "right to poison water" - because the government may control the water, and may not control my words.
Suppose for a moment that rights did come from government. Which law, which act of government granted you the right of free speech? There is none. No law says "you make speak freely". So you do not have the right of free speech if you're waiting for the government to grant it. Rather, the Constitution FORBIDS the federal government from INFRINGING on your pre-existing rights.
> you should certainly recognize that you are not describing a real-world concept, and it could be argued that you are ipso facto wrong
I'm describing the fact that rights are violated repeatedly. That's very real-world.
A slave has their rights violated every day. If we don't take action, their rights will be violated again tomorrow. That's real world.
If you think that that a slaves rights were *taken away*, then their rights are no longer being violated. You would say "they were enslaved, and that's sad, but now that they are enslaves they have no rights, and I have no resposibility to protect the rights they don't have anyway." That's also real world, people actually think that way and make real-world decisions on that basis.
An example in America is parts of the Patriot Act. Some people see that as past event - rights WERE taken away. It's a done deal, they think, because rights were removed. I see that rights are currently being violated under the Act, today. The rights are being violated today only because they still exist today.
Apparently I was unclear, I didn't communicate well. I'm distinguishing between violating rights (infringing on them) versus "taking them away".
> the government regularly infringes on the right of free speech. Chelsea Manning, search warrants with gag orders, etc.
Suppose the government improperly searches your papers on Monday, then again on Tuesday, then again on Wednesday. The SECOND time that the government does an illegal search of your papers, on Tuesday, is it infringing on your rights again? How about the third, on Wednesday? Yes, of course each search infringes (violates) your rights.
THEREFORE we know the right *existed* on Tuesday.
The government *infringed* your rights on Monday, it did not remove them.
If the government had *taken away* your rights on Monday, it couldn't possibly infringe them on Tuesday. The government *violated* your rights on Monday, it did not take them away.
Therefore:
> Rights are taken away from people all the time.
Rights are *violated* all the time. FTFY
Every single day that someone was in a concentration camp, their rights were being violated. That would not be true if the government removed their rights on day 1. The government didn't create their human rights, so the government can not remove them - the government, or anyone else, can only *violate* your rights.
The Constitution doesn't say "the government must *grant*" new rights, it says the government "shall not infringe" THE right of .... "The right of free speech, not "a" right of free speech - they are saying the right existed before the Constitution was written; that human rights are part of being human. Nobody grants them, therefore nobody can un-grant them.
I fully understand the feelings behind your comment. I've been homeless, I've seen a lot of things. It's annoying to see people waste money while you're struggling.
The correct logic is the same in either case. If you create an strong economic incentive for poor people to come to a country, they'll try to do so; if you create a strong economic incentive for rich people to come to a country (or send their money there), they'll try to do so.
A guy with $100 to his name probably has it in his wallet, or in his checking account. A billionaire doesn't have a millions of $20 bills in his a wallet, a billionaire owns Tesla, Amazon, or some other company. The "billion dollars" isn't actual dollars, it's a company or two. Sending his billion dollars to some other company means sending the company there. It is indeed bad for the economy when a company moves their operations away - see Detroit for an example.
YOU didn't come here for Basic Income. You work in the US, you own a small part of the US (a house), and have an American family, and I notice you write (very) American English. You've decided to basically become an American now, it seems. A "new American" I've heard such immigrants called.) You just haven't made it official.
The proposal is:
$500/month 21+ years old
$250/month for 21 and younger
So a family of four gets $1,500 / month from tax payers like you and I.
The average family in Mexico is four people earning $850/month.
They'd get more money by coming to the US and NOT working than by staying in Mexico and working. Do you think that might be attractive to some people? Considering not just Mexico, but all of Central and South America, maybe a few million people?
Do you have a spare $1,500/month to pay for someone who wants to come here and not work?
That's why, despite the "unfairness" to "new Americans" like you who have chosen not to make it official, we can't offer a free "five percenter" income to anybody who feels like showing up without even working. Probably tens of millions of people would love to double their income and not even have to work anymore. That incentive is too strong.
The study showed something much more specific than the summary mentions, and sometimes the opposite of what the headlines indicates.
Quoting the article, good outcomes were likely when :
--
giving one-time cash quantities to people on the brink of homelessness who can demonstrate that they will be able to pay rent by themselves in the future, but who have been afflicted by some nonrecurring crisis, such as a medical bill. Recipients need to be able to demonstrate consistent future income
--
Not so effective, the study found, was giving cash to people carelessly. If someone was broke last year, and the year before, and they were broke last month, they'll probably be broke again next month.
Personal experience helping ex-cons, alcoholics, and drug addicts is that *most* people will continue doing what they've been doing, and continue getting the same results. The trick is to find the ~5% who are doing something different, so they'll get different results, and help them.
I was going to say exactly that. I have one key fob for me Charger, but I lose things, so I expect I'll lose it at some point, or break it. I'd love to crack it first. I hate to spend several hundred dollars on a spare.
I understand that slightly older Dodge vehicles can be hacked wirelessly through the infotainment system, but I don't think that hack applies to my car.