The inability of MS's teams to work together might have something to do with the atrocious stack ranking method they used for employee evaluation:
“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
That's from Vanity Faire from last year. I still find it hard to believe. I used to think Balmer hate was just sort of nerd posturing, but after reading that I realized, no, Balmer really is a clueless jack off doing nothing more than reciting the latest MBA buzzwords he learned from the latest business bestseller.
...it may not be a good one, but there's always a choice. You can move the company to Iceland and tell the NSA to suck it. It's not a good, practical, or wise choice, but it's a choice.
Dude, you're missing the point. We want to keep the invasion of Canada limited to conventional weapons. Because it's not the uranium we need -- it's their healthcare system.
This is what intelligence agencies do. And this is what they should be doing. I would expect American intelligence agencies to be spying on every foreign government. Of course I'd hope they're spending more resources spying on China and Russia and Saudi Arabia than France and the U.K., but at the end of the day, nations don't have friends, only interests.
Remember when the French played coy about if they'd put their military under NATO command if the Russians invaded West Germany? Knowing whether that was just the French being the French or if they seriously planned to sit out WWIII would have been really helpful if you were responsible for U.S. deployments in the Fulda gap. That's why you spy on your allies. Gentlemen don't read each other's mail. Which is why we should avoid hiring gentlemen to work at CIA.
Everyone should (and no doubt did) expect this kind of thing. But in revealing methods and practices and details of operations Snowden has actually done something wrong. Revealing the details of NSA's pervasive spying on American citizens was a public service. Dude should get a medal for that. But revealing the details of how the U.S. is spying on foreign governments today is kinda the textbook definition of a traitor.
On balance I'd say Snowden has still been a net positive -- the NSA operation is evil, immoral, and unconstitutional. It's worth losing some diplomatic intelligence in order to expose it. But it's not like that was the inevitable price -- he chose to reveal this new stuff in addition to the earlier revelations.
Unions represent, what, about 6% of American private sector workers? The American labor movement is if not dead than on life support. On their best day unions exert a tiny fraction of the political influence big business does. They have some impact on some Democratic primary campaigns, but they're a bit player in general elections in most of the country, and they've been so marginalized they don't have much impact on capital hill.
People will almost always say that those things can never happen here in the US. It happens in other places in the world but never here.
It already has happened here. How many tens of thousands of innocent Americans did we imprison during WWII because they happened to be of Japanese descent?
Don't forget to also take out the battery from your cell when you've turned it off, otherwise your phone can still be pinged by the network and in some cases will continue to automatically phone home. IIRC, smartphones will often also have some internal micro-power source (kinda like a cmos battery in your desktop). You'd have to disable that to make sure there's no power to the phone when it's off. I believe that most older dumbphones do not have this kind of thing, so you should probably stick to one of those for your burner (and of course if you've got a burner and a legit phone, never have them powered up in the same location at the same time).
Someone needs to FOIA all records of communication between Senator Chuck Schumer's office and the U.S. State Department for the last month. $5 says he requested this.
To accuse one someone of using a "just following orders" defense has some very specific connotations, and it's total bullshit for you to employ those in this context -- and it's chickenshit to use the connotation without being willing to own up to the full Goodwin your comment implies.
The actual comment was "that's not my decision," which suggests something between total ignorance (unlikely) to fervent support (does anyone have that for Af-Pak at this point?) to anything up to and including 'This was the worst military decision since Agincourt, but I don't find it morally repugnant enough to betray my duty.' What it probably meant was that it's irrelevant for this discussion.
Damn, man, I'm a lefty pinko hippie and even I think you're being a jerk.
Yes of course it's ridiculous to expect you can eliminate the ability of people to turn fertilizer into bombs. No matter what security types want, the chemistry here is real simple -- you don't get nitrogen fertilizer without nitrate and ammonia, and without nitrogen fertilizer lots more people are going to starve. This is especially true in places like south Asia.
But making it just a little more difficult to make a bomb with will go a long way in places like AF-PAK. Not only are people there less capable of performing whatever filtration/synthesis/whatever is needed to get back to boom, they've got to perform that procedure on literally tons of material.
If someone is looking to do Boston Marathon levels of carnage, they'll get the explosives. You can start by collecting your own piss and evaporating it to get the nitrates you need. It'll take awhile but you'll get there. You won't run a regional insurgency by filtering dried pee to make IEDs.
Why would I buy this stuff?
Right now you can buy Amonium Nitrate that gives you a ton of readily available nitrogen for your crops at a relatively small cost.
And, in case I need it, I can build a bomb with the stuff, too.
I don't often need to build an IED, but whether it's a stump in your field or a neighbor messing with you or the damn federals raiding your moonshine still, sometimes you need to blow something up. With amonium nitrate, I don't have to buy and store expensive and potentially dangerous explosives just on the off chance I need to blow something sky high.
But this new no-go-boom-fertilizer just takes away the features I'm used to getting for free with my fertilizer. It's like DRM for ag chemicals.
A song can be written and recorded in a day.
When someone comes at me with 'it's only a couple hours of work' my standard reply is "it's 15 years and a couple hours of work, that's how long it took me to build the skills to do this couple hours of work and that's why you're paying me $LARGESUM." The same would seem true for a musician.
The state hands free law was only passed in 2007, went into effect in 2008. The law banning texting while driving was passed a year later. It's not that the law is out of date...this is another example of the incredible incompetence of the California legislature. I mean, these guys make congress look good.
There was, around the same time, a bill passed specifically permitting window mount gps units, because otherwise anything mounted on the windshield was against the CVC.
Worth mentioning, the hands free law had been proposed for at least five years before it was passed. It was passed only when the wireless industry stopped opposing it. A capitol staffer told me that a lobbyist told her that the industry opposed a hands free law as long as it was likely to cost them customers, but eventually figured they'd reached market saturation for handsets, and would now make a few bucks on selling headsets once the law passed. Take it FWIW, but said staffer is reliable enough that I've cited her as 'capitol sources' several times and haven't had it bite me yet....
...that it almost becomes a work of art. I want to just sit and admire it and try and tease out the nuances of idiocy and subtle details or inanity that lurk within the depths of its stupidity, in hopes that I'll reach some new plateau of understanding as I gain insight into the essential nature of the moron of the species.
alas, time is short, so I'll have to return another time to bask in the aura of this commentator's ignorance.
The adults need the work in Elk Grove, California. They used to build iMacs there. Now they do it in China. Apple, like most other multinationals, is scum.
Well, that doesn't jibe with what I learned in college, or what I helped teach when I was a TA in a communications law class, or my experience in the ~10 years I've been working in the news business.
In general, the law takes a very hard line against 'prior restraint' -- preventing something from being published -- and says if something is illegally published than the government can file charges after publication (which means go after the reporter to try and get the leak). The SCOTUS's exact phrase IIRC is that there's a 'presumption of unconstitutionality' against any kind of prior restraint.
The only black letter exceptions are troop movements during wartime and obscenity. The courts have also allowed gag orders against participants in court cases ostensibly to protect defendants' 6th amendment rights.
The Pentagon Papers provides a very good precedent for the Wikileaks case. IDK about plans for a bomber, but I do know that the courts refused to block technical details about how to build an H-bomb (I think it's U.S. vs Progressive Inc., refers to the magazine, not the insurance company).
I've got a lot more details if you need 'em, but I'm lazy. So, did you have any actual evidence to back up your certainty, or was that just you talking out of your ass?
You are absolutely wrong on every part of both the relevant law and the usual practice. Google New York Times vs. United States (1971) for a start. It bugs me that your comment got modded up, because it's so deeply ignorant.
There is nothing that I'm going to download onto my system that I don't have complete access to. I'll cheat and install binaries occasionally, cuz I'm lazy, but it just feels wrong to have anything on my box that isn't under my control. Isn't that the definition of malware?
I actually think this is if not the thing physicians are concerned about WRT records it's definitely a huge part of it. And they're perhaps right to groan about it... I'm sure they get real tired of being the second opinion for WebMD. But you know what? I don't care.
It's a good thing if an obnoxious patient is asking 'why do you think that about my condition?'
If the patient/family member has a point, listen to them. That way, you won't be the one asshole who told me my wife was terminal and there wasn't anything to be done, then when I asked about a treatment I read about in The Lancet tell me smugly that "there's no support for that treatment in the literature." I had a copy of the journal with me. It shut him up. I also had the phone number for an academic medical center a couple of towns over. When she got there, the first thing they did was the treatment that this doctor said was bogus. She's fine now. I think that doctor may have actually had more than 10 years of medical training. Too bad he didn't spend a few minutes learning to Google.
If the patient is a total idiot, learn how to slip him or her a print out from Up-to-Date on your way out the door. And if you're bothered by patients asking questions -- then go into research, 'cuz you shouldn't treat patients. If you're bothered because those questions are stupid, you should have become a veterinarian, because people are stupid and that'll never change.
California has capped med mal awards for 'non-economic' damages at $250,000, without inflation adjustments, for something like 15 years. I'm yet to see health care here get cheaper. My understanding is that the largest single factor causing fluctuations in med mal premiums is the state of the bond market, since that's where insurance companies make all their money.
The thing is, you made it more likely that you would go to prison by cooperating with the cop's inquiry. By giving an alibi, you provided the chance for an investigator to find something to contradict it. It wouldn't have to be truthful evidence. It could have been a mistaken witness, or a misprinted receipt, or a glitch in a GPS, or your girlfriend using your cell phone or any of a million things. (I think it was Lucky Luciano who said it was tougher to defend a frame job than a legit case, 'cuz you got no way to anticipate how the frame will go down.)
If something apparently credible had popped up to contradict your alibi, you could have found yourself the prime suspect to whatever, and it wouldn't take much to find yourself charged and bound over for trial.
It wouldn't necessarily mean the cop was deliberately trying to frame you. I covered cops and courts for my hometown newspaper, and covered lots of crime stories in bigger cities later, and my observation is that cops routinely make inferences and assumptions that push them to a conclusion, and then find evidence to back that conclusion up. I think we all do that. But the rest of us don't send people to prison. You can push back against those tendencies if you try, but I don't see cops getting incentives to do that -- it's just not part of the job, it would leave them working half as many cases per cop, and they'd solve fewer of 'em because most (solvable) cases aren't big who-done-its but do go cold fast.
Then think about all the research about eyewitness IDs that have come out in the last decade or so (they're influenced by investigators; people really suck at 'em -- especially across racial, gender, and age gaps; and witnesses will quickly work the image of the person they ID'd into their memory of the scene, so a "maybe" ID gets massaged into a 'yeah' near the scene and becomes a "that's the guy, I'm positive" in court).
So considering that, how hard do you think it would have been if your alibi had been credibly (if falsely) challenged, for detectives, prosecutors, and maybe the jury, to see how any other evidence gathered in the case all fit with you being the guy?
And any evidence that may not quite fit perfect? Good chance you'll never learn about it, even if it does exist. Brady violations as they're called are rampant in prosecutors offices, the standards are weak and prosecutors have every incentive to hide evidence, and even in the most appalling cases they won't be punished.
This is how wrongful convictions happen. It's not likely to happen to you just because you gave a cop some information. But it could have. And this could happen without anyone in the system being truly trying to frame you. But that won't be much comfort when some forensic evidence comes back a match -- placing you at the scene with scientific precision. It could just be a totally bogus practice -- like the 'bullet lot' matching that the FBI used to trumpet before quietly admitting it was totally worthless, or the use of forensic dentistry which was critical in two wrongful murder convictions we know of (and who knows how many others that didn't have DNA evidence to test). Or it could be that the analyst has her finger on the scales, knows who the cops arrested and gives up a result to match. Maybe because the guy's guilty, and she's kind of busy fueling her coke habit from the evidence lockup (happened in San Francisco a couple of years ago).
Moral of the story -- don't talk to cops, never offer an alibi, and if you do have evidence or an explanation save it for your lawyer to work with to make sure it helps instead of hurts. You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.
If you believe the "only correct answer" is "I want my lawyer" in the above scenarios[...].
You're absolutely correct. That's not even the correct answer. It's usually best to not say anything at all. But in general, the only thing you should say to a cop before invoking your rights to counsel is "am I under arrest."
There are a couple exceptions to this rule:
there's an automobile involved -- traffic stop
a cop tries to enter private property -- or anywhere one has a reasonable expectation of privacy -- without a search warrant
a cop wants to pat you down
In all three of these situations you need to get the cop on record with the legal justification he or she believes permits the action -- preferably in a way that's being recorded and stored off-site -- because if you don't than the officer can just tailor an answer to fit later events. You also may have to assert your rights directly: "no you're not allowed on the property/in the house/past the gate" (and never open the door! Go out the back and come through the yard if you want to address police. Better still is "slide the warrant under the door or get off the property.") And of course, all this is only for people who aren't doing dirt. If you've got a body in the trunk or the cops are at the door of your 3bed/2bath meth lab, you need to balance the legal aspects against getting the cop any more curious.
The reason for these precautions is not that I'm anti-cop. It's that police have lost any legitimacy they may have once had.
Some believe that all the institutions of American government have lost that legitimacy, cops among them. A lot of people have viscerally felt what it's like to be oppressed by police because of their race or class -- it only takes getting jacked up a couple of times for being Black on a Friday Night or for being too poor to pay a traffic ticket before you start viewing police as occupying forces.
Of course poor people and brown people getting oppressed and resenting it isn't new. But it seems after decades of incompetence and brutality, of wrongful convictions and constant perjury, of casual violence against citizens -- sometimes mistaken, always overkill -- without consequence, even many people who identify as stakeholders in American society no longer assume law enforcement is either competent or benevolent.
You can view the behavior of police as some sort of virulent, violent mental issue, likely combined with deep seated sexual phobias. You can view them as simply acting out their attitudes of scumbag entitlement, their reflexive bigotry and their authoritarian tendencies. You can view them as the armed enforcers of a corrupt oligarchy. You can view them as simple minded guys acting how people act in institutions with bad incentives, an absolutist institutional culture and a lack of intellectual curiosity all papered over by a ton of cognitive dissonance. I think all of them come into play.
But once you consider the police illegitimate, it becomes clear that the best way to deal with them is to not. So yeah, I don't talk to cops. Ever. And neither should you. It's dangerous to engage with them, and it's wrong to treat them like their decent members of our society.
(Of course I don't mean to impune the integrity of every cop in the country: there could be dozens or even hundreds of decent, honorable people among the more than 1.25 million sworn officers in American law enforcement.)
Prosecutors can only compel testimony after a grant of immunity, which means you're basically off the hook -- and at least at a state level it's not just transactional immunity covering your testimony, but immunity involving the underlying offense being investigated.
Also worth noting that grand juries are a relative rarity -- especially as an investigative tool (maybe not real uncommon in absolute numbers, but in percentage terms they're far from an everyday thing).
And while no one gets counsel inside the grand jury hearing (wonder why prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich? It's 'cuz they're the only shyster the jury hears from), the issues themselves aren't exactly surprises. If you're determined to protect someone, you'll have plenty of time to practice and game plan your testimony to ensure the prosecution gets nothing.
If all else fails, I've always been impressed by Ollie North, who during just one day of the Iran-Contra hearings answered "I don't recall" at least 30 times. I think I'd go less 'snearing Marine/you can't handle the truth' and instead try and play it off like I was Cheech or something..."I'm sorry, man, I'm trying to help you but it's all sorta hazy. My memory is really lousy, but my glaucoma is way better, you know. Hey, judge, you think we could stop for a quick munchie recess?"
The telcos are also eager to kill off the POTS network entirely, in hopes it will get them out from under (what's left of) common carrier and universal service regulations. I'm generally skeptical of government, but I'm not sure that what we want is less constraints for AT&T and Verizon. I've personally known drug cartels that are better corporate citizens than those companies.
Slashdot Mirror
....and that's saying something.
The inability of MS's teams to work together might have something to do with the atrocious stack ranking method they used for employee evaluation:
“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
That's from Vanity Faire from last year. I still find it hard to believe. I used to think Balmer hate was just sort of nerd posturing, but after reading that I realized, no, Balmer really is a clueless jack off doing nothing more than reciting the latest MBA buzzwords he learned from the latest business bestseller.
...it may not be a good one, but there's always a choice. You can move the company to Iceland and tell the NSA to suck it. It's not a good, practical, or wise choice, but it's a choice.
Dude, you're missing the point. We want to keep the invasion of Canada limited to conventional weapons. Because it's not the uranium we need -- it's their healthcare system.
This is what intelligence agencies do. And this is what they should be doing. I would expect American intelligence agencies to be spying on every foreign government. Of course I'd hope they're spending more resources spying on China and Russia and Saudi Arabia than France and the U.K., but at the end of the day, nations don't have friends, only interests.
Remember when the French played coy about if they'd put their military under NATO command if the Russians invaded West Germany? Knowing whether that was just the French being the French or if they seriously planned to sit out WWIII would have been really helpful if you were responsible for U.S. deployments in the Fulda gap. That's why you spy on your allies. Gentlemen don't read each other's mail. Which is why we should avoid hiring gentlemen to work at CIA.
Everyone should (and no doubt did) expect this kind of thing. But in revealing methods and practices and details of operations Snowden has actually done something wrong. Revealing the details of NSA's pervasive spying on American citizens was a public service. Dude should get a medal for that. But revealing the details of how the U.S. is spying on foreign governments today is kinda the textbook definition of a traitor.
On balance I'd say Snowden has still been a net positive -- the NSA operation is evil, immoral, and unconstitutional. It's worth losing some diplomatic intelligence in order to expose it. But it's not like that was the inevitable price -- he chose to reveal this new stuff in addition to the earlier revelations.
Unions represent, what, about 6% of American private sector workers? The American labor movement is if not dead than on life support. On their best day unions exert a tiny fraction of the political influence big business does. They have some impact on some Democratic primary campaigns, but they're a bit player in general elections in most of the country, and they've been so marginalized they don't have much impact on capital hill.
People will almost always say that those things can never happen here in the US. It happens in other places in the world but never here.
It already has happened here. How many tens of thousands of innocent Americans did we imprison during WWII because they happened to be of Japanese descent?
Don't forget to also take out the battery from your cell when you've turned it off, otherwise your phone can still be pinged by the network and in some cases will continue to automatically phone home. IIRC, smartphones will often also have some internal micro-power source (kinda like a cmos battery in your desktop). You'd have to disable that to make sure there's no power to the phone when it's off. I believe that most older dumbphones do not have this kind of thing, so you should probably stick to one of those for your burner (and of course if you've got a burner and a legit phone, never have them powered up in the same location at the same time).
Someone needs to FOIA all records of communication between Senator Chuck Schumer's office and the U.S. State Department for the last month. $5 says he requested this.
To accuse one someone of using a "just following orders" defense has some very specific connotations, and it's total bullshit for you to employ those in this context -- and it's chickenshit to use the connotation without being willing to own up to the full Goodwin your comment implies.
The actual comment was "that's not my decision," which suggests something between total ignorance (unlikely) to fervent support (does anyone have that for Af-Pak at this point?) to anything up to and including 'This was the worst military decision since Agincourt, but I don't find it morally repugnant enough to betray my duty.' What it probably meant was that it's irrelevant for this discussion. Damn, man, I'm a lefty pinko hippie and even I think you're being a jerk.
Yes of course it's ridiculous to expect you can eliminate the ability of people to turn fertilizer into bombs. No matter what security types want, the chemistry here is real simple -- you don't get nitrogen fertilizer without nitrate and ammonia, and without nitrogen fertilizer lots more people are going to starve. This is especially true in places like south Asia.
But making it just a little more difficult to make a bomb with will go a long way in places like AF-PAK. Not only are people there less capable of performing whatever filtration/synthesis/whatever is needed to get back to boom, they've got to perform that procedure on literally tons of material.
If someone is looking to do Boston Marathon levels of carnage, they'll get the explosives. You can start by collecting your own piss and evaporating it to get the nitrates you need. It'll take awhile but you'll get there. You won't run a regional insurgency by filtering dried pee to make IEDs.
Why would I buy this stuff?
Right now you can buy Amonium Nitrate that gives you a ton of readily available nitrogen for your crops at a relatively small cost.
And, in case I need it, I can build a bomb with the stuff, too.
I don't often need to build an IED, but whether it's a stump in your field or a neighbor messing with you or the damn federals raiding your moonshine still, sometimes you need to blow something up. With amonium nitrate, I don't have to buy and store expensive and potentially dangerous explosives just on the off chance I need to blow something sky high.
But this new no-go-boom-fertilizer just takes away the features I'm used to getting for free with my fertilizer. It's like DRM for ag chemicals.
A song can be written and recorded in a day. When someone comes at me with 'it's only a couple hours of work' my standard reply is "it's 15 years and a couple hours of work, that's how long it took me to build the skills to do this couple hours of work and that's why you're paying me $LARGESUM." The same would seem true for a musician.
The state hands free law was only passed in 2007, went into effect in 2008. The law banning texting while driving was passed a year later. It's not that the law is out of date...this is another example of the incredible incompetence of the California legislature. I mean, these guys make congress look good. There was, around the same time, a bill passed specifically permitting window mount gps units, because otherwise anything mounted on the windshield was against the CVC. Worth mentioning, the hands free law had been proposed for at least five years before it was passed. It was passed only when the wireless industry stopped opposing it. A capitol staffer told me that a lobbyist told her that the industry opposed a hands free law as long as it was likely to cost them customers, but eventually figured they'd reached market saturation for handsets, and would now make a few bucks on selling headsets once the law passed. Take it FWIW, but said staffer is reliable enough that I've cited her as 'capitol sources' several times and haven't had it bite me yet....
...that it almost becomes a work of art. I want to just sit and admire it and try and tease out the nuances of idiocy and subtle details or inanity that lurk within the depths of its stupidity, in hopes that I'll reach some new plateau of understanding as I gain insight into the essential nature of the moron of the species.
alas, time is short, so I'll have to return another time to bask in the aura of this commentator's ignorance.
The adults need the work in Elk Grove, California. They used to build iMacs there. Now they do it in China. Apple, like most other multinationals, is scum.
Well, that doesn't jibe with what I learned in college, or what I helped teach when I was a TA in a communications law class, or my experience in the ~10 years I've been working in the news business.
In general, the law takes a very hard line against 'prior restraint' -- preventing something from being published -- and says if something is illegally published than the government can file charges after publication (which means go after the reporter to try and get the leak). The SCOTUS's exact phrase IIRC is that there's a 'presumption of unconstitutionality' against any kind of prior restraint.
The only black letter exceptions are troop movements during wartime and obscenity. The courts have also allowed gag orders against participants in court cases ostensibly to protect defendants' 6th amendment rights.
The Pentagon Papers provides a very good precedent for the Wikileaks case. IDK about plans for a bomber, but I do know that the courts refused to block technical details about how to build an H-bomb (I think it's U.S. vs Progressive Inc., refers to the magazine, not the insurance company).
I've got a lot more details if you need 'em, but I'm lazy. So, did you have any actual evidence to back up your certainty, or was that just you talking out of your ass?
You are absolutely wrong on every part of both the relevant law and the usual practice. Google New York Times vs. United States (1971) for a start. It bugs me that your comment got modded up, because it's so deeply ignorant.
There is nothing that I'm going to download onto my system that I don't have complete access to. I'll cheat and install binaries occasionally, cuz I'm lazy, but it just feels wrong to have anything on my box that isn't under my control. Isn't that the definition of malware?
I actually think this is if not the thing physicians are concerned about WRT records it's definitely a huge part of it. And they're perhaps right to groan about it ... I'm sure they get real tired of being the second opinion for WebMD. But you know what? I don't care.
It's a good thing if an obnoxious patient is asking 'why do you think that about my condition?'
If the patient/family member has a point, listen to them. That way, you won't be the one asshole who told me my wife was terminal and there wasn't anything to be done, then when I asked about a treatment I read about in The Lancet tell me smugly that "there's no support for that treatment in the literature." I had a copy of the journal with me. It shut him up. I also had the phone number for an academic medical center a couple of towns over. When she got there, the first thing they did was the treatment that this doctor said was bogus. She's fine now. I think that doctor may have actually had more than 10 years of medical training. Too bad he didn't spend a few minutes learning to Google.
If the patient is a total idiot, learn how to slip him or her a print out from Up-to-Date on your way out the door. And if you're bothered by patients asking questions -- then go into research, 'cuz you shouldn't treat patients. If you're bothered because those questions are stupid, you should have become a veterinarian, because people are stupid and that'll never change.
California has capped med mal awards for 'non-economic' damages at $250,000, without inflation adjustments, for something like 15 years. I'm yet to see health care here get cheaper. My understanding is that the largest single factor causing fluctuations in med mal premiums is the state of the bond market, since that's where insurance companies make all their money.
The thing is, you made it more likely that you would go to prison by cooperating with the cop's inquiry. By giving an alibi, you provided the chance for an investigator to find something to contradict it. It wouldn't have to be truthful evidence. It could have been a mistaken witness, or a misprinted receipt, or a glitch in a GPS, or your girlfriend using your cell phone or any of a million things. (I think it was Lucky Luciano who said it was tougher to defend a frame job than a legit case, 'cuz you got no way to anticipate how the frame will go down.)
If something apparently credible had popped up to contradict your alibi, you could have found yourself the prime suspect to whatever, and it wouldn't take much to find yourself charged and bound over for trial.
It wouldn't necessarily mean the cop was deliberately trying to frame you. I covered cops and courts for my hometown newspaper, and covered lots of crime stories in bigger cities later, and my observation is that cops routinely make inferences and assumptions that push them to a conclusion, and then find evidence to back that conclusion up. I think we all do that. But the rest of us don't send people to prison. You can push back against those tendencies if you try, but I don't see cops getting incentives to do that -- it's just not part of the job, it would leave them working half as many cases per cop, and they'd solve fewer of 'em because most (solvable) cases aren't big who-done-its but do go cold fast.
Then think about all the research about eyewitness IDs that have come out in the last decade or so (they're influenced by investigators; people really suck at 'em -- especially across racial, gender, and age gaps; and witnesses will quickly work the image of the person they ID'd into their memory of the scene, so a "maybe" ID gets massaged into a 'yeah' near the scene and becomes a "that's the guy, I'm positive" in court).
So considering that, how hard do you think it would have been if your alibi had been credibly (if falsely) challenged, for detectives, prosecutors, and maybe the jury, to see how any other evidence gathered in the case all fit with you being the guy?
And any evidence that may not quite fit perfect? Good chance you'll never learn about it, even if it does exist. Brady violations as they're called are rampant in prosecutors offices, the standards are weak and prosecutors have every incentive to hide evidence, and even in the most appalling cases they won't be punished.
This is how wrongful convictions happen. It's not likely to happen to you just because you gave a cop some information. But it could have. And this could happen without anyone in the system being truly trying to frame you. But that won't be much comfort when some forensic evidence comes back a match -- placing you at the scene with scientific precision. It could just be a totally bogus practice -- like the 'bullet lot' matching that the FBI used to trumpet before quietly admitting it was totally worthless, or the use of forensic dentistry which was critical in two wrongful murder convictions we know of (and who knows how many others that didn't have DNA evidence to test). Or it could be that the analyst has her finger on the scales, knows who the cops arrested and gives up a result to match. Maybe because the guy's guilty, and she's kind of busy fueling her coke habit from the evidence lockup (happened in San Francisco a couple of years ago).
Moral of the story -- don't talk to cops, never offer an alibi, and if you do have evidence or an explanation save it for your lawyer to work with to make sure it helps instead of hurts. You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.
If you believe the "only correct answer" is "I want my lawyer" in the above scenarios[...].
You're absolutely correct. That's not even the correct answer. It's usually best to not say anything at all. But in general, the only thing you should say to a cop before invoking your rights to counsel is "am I under arrest."
There are a couple exceptions to this rule:
In all three of these situations you need to get the cop on record with the legal justification he or she believes permits the action -- preferably in a way that's being recorded and stored off-site -- because if you don't than the officer can just tailor an answer to fit later events. You also may have to assert your rights directly: "no you're not allowed on the property/in the house/past the gate" (and never open the door! Go out the back and come through the yard if you want to address police. Better still is "slide the warrant under the door or get off the property.") And of course, all this is only for people who aren't doing dirt. If you've got a body in the trunk or the cops are at the door of your 3bed/2bath meth lab, you need to balance the legal aspects against getting the cop any more curious.
The reason for these precautions is not that I'm anti-cop. It's that police have lost any legitimacy they may have once had.
Some believe that all the institutions of American government have lost that legitimacy, cops among them. A lot of people have viscerally felt what it's like to be oppressed by police because of their race or class -- it only takes getting jacked up a couple of times for being Black on a Friday Night or for being too poor to pay a traffic ticket before you start viewing police as occupying forces.
Of course poor people and brown people getting oppressed and resenting it isn't new. But it seems after decades of incompetence and brutality, of wrongful convictions and constant perjury, of casual violence against citizens -- sometimes mistaken, always overkill -- without consequence, even many people who identify as stakeholders in American society no longer assume law enforcement is either competent or benevolent.
You can view the behavior of police as some sort of virulent, violent mental issue, likely combined with deep seated sexual phobias. You can view them as simply acting out their attitudes of scumbag entitlement, their reflexive bigotry and their authoritarian tendencies. You can view them as the armed enforcers of a corrupt oligarchy. You can view them as simple minded guys acting how people act in institutions with bad incentives, an absolutist institutional culture and a lack of intellectual curiosity all papered over by a ton of cognitive dissonance. I think all of them come into play.
But once you consider the police illegitimate, it becomes clear that the best way to deal with them is to not. So yeah, I don't talk to cops. Ever. And neither should you. It's dangerous to engage with them, and it's wrong to treat them like their decent members of our society.
(Of course I don't mean to impune the integrity of every cop in the country: there could be dozens or even hundreds of decent, honorable people among the more than 1.25 million sworn officers in American law enforcement.)
Prosecutors can only compel testimony after a grant of immunity, which means you're basically off the hook -- and at least at a state level it's not just transactional immunity covering your testimony, but immunity involving the underlying offense being investigated.
Also worth noting that grand juries are a relative rarity -- especially as an investigative tool (maybe not real uncommon in absolute numbers, but in percentage terms they're far from an everyday thing).
And while no one gets counsel inside the grand jury hearing (wonder why prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich? It's 'cuz they're the only shyster the jury hears from), the issues themselves aren't exactly surprises. If you're determined to protect someone, you'll have plenty of time to practice and game plan your testimony to ensure the prosecution gets nothing.
If all else fails, I've always been impressed by Ollie North, who during just one day of the Iran-Contra hearings answered "I don't recall" at least 30 times. I think I'd go less 'snearing Marine/you can't handle the truth' and instead try and play it off like I was Cheech or something..."I'm sorry, man, I'm trying to help you but it's all sorta hazy. My memory is really lousy, but my glaucoma is way better, you know. Hey, judge, you think we could stop for a quick munchie recess?"
The telcos are also eager to kill off the POTS network entirely, in hopes it will get them out from under (what's left of) common carrier and universal service regulations. I'm generally skeptical of government, but I'm not sure that what we want is less constraints for AT&T and Verizon. I've personally known drug cartels that are better corporate citizens than those companies.
Is it bad that I was hoping it was Goatse.cx?