Please don't play lawyer. Discovery and search warrants are completely disjoint things. The former is executed by private parties, the latter is executed by the state. For example:
(1) I have a safe in my bedroom, my ex-wife demands that I account for the contents in our civil divorce case (civil not criminal, not civil as in polite). She files a motion to compel me to provide her an itemized list of the contents. If I object, I can take it to the judge who will decide if I must turn it over. If I ignore it or lie, I'm subject to civil contempt.
(2) I have a safe in my bedroom, officer friendly has probable cause to believe it contains evidence of a crime or fruit of that crime. He goes to a magistrate who affirms that he has probable cause and issues the warrant. The SWAT kicks the door in and takes the safe. There is no question about whether I comply, the search warrant entitles him to search and seize the safe and hence no penalties involved (although resisting an officer in the lawful discharge of his duty is a separate criminal offense).
I'm sure the judge would be OK if they changed their password to some random string, so long as it worked. The order wasn't "give him the string that corresponds to your current password on Facebook", it was "give him access to Facebook".
Note that he also placed limits on what they could do with it, to wit, not posting anything. So really it was just read-only.
I was responding to the GP's breathless assertion that what the judge did would be like giving litigants access to each other's homes and personal/medical information. Which they have.
He tried for an absurd comparison and landed right on the truth!
Why not also require them to make copies of their house keys for each other so they and their lawyers can go into each other's houses any time they want and rummage through each other's files, look for evidence of affairs in their bedrooms, look for property not reported in the divorce proceedings, look for signs of alcohol or drugs or depression or other personal factors that might have some bearing on the case?
They can. It's called discovery, and it's one of the most useful tools for civil litigants because it forces the adversary to disclose (or assert under legal penalty that it doesn't exist) any documents relevant to a particular trial. So if you sue some corporation for selling you a defective widget, you can force them to turn over all emails and notes about quality-testing or safety testing for that widget. Without it, you'd have absolutely no way to prove (e.g.) that Sally in engineering sent an email to her boss explaining that the flux capacitor supplier they chose was cutting corners and that it could cause device failure and you could basically never make a case for knowing indifference. Or if you are suing that corporation for violating the GPL and you have reason (binary similarity) to believe that product X contains GPL code, you can demand they turn over that source code for inspection. Again, without it, you would never be able to prove a GPL violation because that source code would be locked inside some secure internal server and you would be forced to make some equivocal claim about the binaries instead of looking at the plain evidence.
A divorce case is (in the eyes of the law, which has this odd thing about procedure being uniform) no different -- each party is entitled to any document or file, electronic or paper, that's relevant to the divorce. That includes anything inside your house, anything in your bedroom, unreported property*, hospitalization records. If it has a bearing on the case, the parties are absolutely entitled to it (under restrictions mind you, public disclosure of any information derived from discovery subjects you to criminal and civil sanctions plus is a great way to get the judge ticked off at you).
* I used to work the tech side of things for an investigation firm involved in the child-support end of divorces (long after the litigation ended) looking for evidence that parties exaggerated or even fabricated their claims of poverty when accused of nonpayment or underpayment. Some of these guys would come in to court pleading that they had no disposable income only to find our pictures of them at strip joints getting lap dances. Concealing assets and income from the court can land you in jail for contempt. Don't do it.
The problem is that the fake wireless tower appears to be outside the scope of the warrant. Keep in mind that judges do not issue blank checks when they write out a warrant. Doing something that's not in the scope of the warrant is just as illegal as if the warrant didn't exist at all.
No disagreement to the last sentence but I think "you can get location information from Verizon's network" and "you can spoof Verizon's network to get location information" are indistinguishable both as to the "thing being searched" (the suspect's location) and "method of searching" (by using the suspect's cell phone signal).
So if Wired's point is that maybe the Feds did something that pushes the scope of the warrant, OK -- my impression from TFA was that they were against the use of spoofed cellphone towers in general.
a court order and warrant that investigators used to get similar location data from Verizonâ(TM)s own towers.
I'm really surprised again by Wired. The government got a warrant -- the same level of scrutiny they need to search your house or haul your ass to a concrete room. What more can they do to conduct a lawful investigation? The purpose of the warrant requirement is to make sure that probable cause is evaluated by a neutral and detached magistrate, not to bar all searches and make it impossible to catch identity thieves.
I'm firmly for electronic privacy but I think it's patently absurd to say there should be a higher standard for getting cell-phone data than physically entering a person's home or arresting him.
. The government has no metric for success, they do stuff just because. It doesn't matter if people actually benefit from what the government does, they get paid anyway.
Their metric for success is getting reelected, if we vote them out, they are out of a job. The fact that we aren't that great at picking leaders (much like the shareholders of HP or Yahoo) is hardly their fault and entirely ours.
And besides that, we're talking about a system where one group of people are making decisions about "appropriateness" for a huge mass of people. The notion of what is "adult" or "inappropriate" content varies from individual to individual, as does the notion of "mental preparedness".
No disagreement there but the key is that if you don't like the notion of "adult" or "appropriate" that's used in that particular filtering system, you can opt not to turn it on (or, if you've previously opted to turn it on, opt to turn it off). This proposal is 100% individual-empowering to decide whether or not they want to accept it and gives them the freedom to change their mind later.
That is, if we really believe in individual freedom and individual choices then we ought to respect the choice to have this filtering turned on for your internet connection. Otherwise, it becomes this sort of weak "well, you have the individual freedom to view or not to view pornography but I don't think you ought to be able to install a filter on your internet or ask your ISP to do it" which strikes me as intellectually inconsistent and frankly insulting.
TFS and TFA make it clear that this is a service being offered to customers as an opt-in system. What the heck is wrong with offering customers that choice, especially given that they can presumably change their mind at some point in the future (when their kids are old enough to view porn).
Customers will be asked to make a choice over whether they want filtering on their connection or not. Adult content blocks will not be implemented by default.
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but honestly I think that these huge screens are totally idiotic if you really want to go mainstream with a phone. See, half of your potential customers are women (which tend to have smaller hands) and not too few will be teenagers.
Is the Nexus line really branded as a 'mainstream' product? I figured it's targeted at the gadget-crazy that would find the extra real estate useful. That seems to be Android's niche anyway -- more male, more techie, more left-brained.
When homebuyers decide to get a house within their budget instead of stretching for extra rooms by going cheap on construction, they'll get better quality. Building a 2000 sq ft house on a 1500 sq ft budget means, necessarily, cutting some corners. If you don't realize that, you either aren't paying attention or you are deluding yourself.
The quality on some of these new houses is really atrocious. I've seen cabinets fall apart after 10-12 years, decks rotting after 15, drywall that won't even hold a painting. I saw a dishwasher held to a cabinet by a pair of wood screws.
Wee bit of a fifth amendment problem there... You can't compel anyone to report a goddamned thing if it might incriminate them.
No, but you can forgive them the crime of possession of child pornography if they do report it. The legislature could (and did, in the past) make any possession of child pornography a crime period -- instead they made it a crime but included an exception in the case. The greater power to ban it in all circumstances whatsoever ought to logically include the lesser power to ban it except when duly reported.
So yeah, the State cannot compel you to report a goddamned thing. On the other hand, they can brand you a felon and put you on the sex offender registry for possession of child pornography (if you did possess it, naturally) and they can offer you a deal not to use that power.
They ARE in a position to delete the relevant data in order to fulfill the termination clause without incurring the ten million dollar penalty.
No, they aren't. Destroying assets claimed by a secured creditor is actually criminal. Once you know that you are going to declare bankruptcy, you have to do everything in your power to ensure that the creditors get as much back as possible.
That data has value to buyers and those creditors have claim on the proceeds of that sale.
Besides, clearly someone didn't bother to read the comments box where I clearly indicated that by retaining my data they agreed to my personal information license and that it would supersede any privacy policy they might publish.
And every such contract (forget that you don't even have one for a second) is null and void upon bankruptcy. That's the point of bankruptcy! You can't fulfill all your obligations so you are going to have to let some of them go. And since you are unsecured, you are last in line.
It doesn't have to actually fly. It sends the courts a message: "Protect privacy or be buried in a blizzard of paperwork, all perfectly legal".
No, filing frivolous claims is not legal and is actually punishable by sanctions under FRCP11. I know a number of judges that wouldn't even bother waiting for the other party to order you to show cause why you are filing numerous redundant and patently absurd claims with his court and should not penalized.
In a pre-web world, I wonder how much obligation is placed on say, a bank teller, who fails to notice a crossed-out term in a bank account obligation, and how that would translate to an online world. Best, Kevin
None. Acceptance of a contract has to be done knowingly. When you make any modification to an offered contract (e.g. by strikeout), that means you've rejected the offer and made a counteroffer. See, Hyde v. Wrench (1840) 3 Beav 334. The bank teller would then have to actually have to affirmatively know about and accept the counteroffer in order to create a binding contract.
And let me underscore that not only did he break Italian law, but he also attempted to use his political position to deny an Italian prosecutors the right to pursue the charges against him. So, seeing as he violated laws regarding age of sexual consent AND abused his power to try to evade the legal consequences of that, please spell out for me clearly how he still could be a good Prime Minister.
He could be a good Prime Minister if he proposed and passed quality legislation, efficiently ran the government, made sensible plans for the future, appointed competent individuals to various posts, embarked on good foreign policy. You know, things that governments actually do in the course of GOVERNING. Boring stuff that only us silly policy wonks think about.
But yeah, if the voters would rather have an honest idiot than a dishonest genius, so be it. Just don't complain when your legislation is stupid because you elevated character over competence.
[ Of course, purely by accident you get someone that's both competent and of high moral character. I'd rather hedge my bets and let all competent takers come rather than waiting for that particular unicorn though. ]
But surely not trying to abuse his position as the head of government to get around potential prosecution over sexual relations with an underage prostitute is an abuse of power and abuse of process, which, so far as I can tell, would mean he would be unfit to be Prime Minister.
This supposes that the job of the PM is to be a figurehead or a symbolic leader. I'd prefer placing the PM's priorities on actual leadership: passing good laws, running the government smoothly, making smart decisions. The idea of "unfit leader" is nonsensical elevation of character over actual performance and is the reason why we have so many crappy leaders in general -- because we are concerned with matters unrelated to the actual function required by the job. "Character voters" are the problem here, not the solution.
You have this odd sort of angle where he can wantonly violate Italian law, but that's okay if he's a good Prime Minister. By definition, a head of government who violates legislation that said government is bound to uphold is not a good head of government.
No, that's not OK -- his violation of the law might make him a bad person. Being a good PM doesn't "cancel out" being a bad person or vice versa. Many people are good people but bad at their jobs. Many people are good at their jobs but bad people. Many are good at both (and sadly many are bad at both).
What's more, I don't think his job is to "uphold legislation" any more than an programmers's job to "uphold code". Indeed, the job of a PM is to produce quality legislation (and other Executive functions) that are in the country's best interest just as much as it's the coder's job to do his job well. Whether or not he's "upholding" anything is meaningless if he's delivering quality governance.
I don't see what's "by definition" anywhere your argument. Government is there to govern, not for me to care whether he breaks the law in his spare time unless doing so actually harms the country in some material fashion.
Italians, like most other people in the industrialized world, are not allowed to have sex with minors. Yes, the precise age at which one ceases to be a minor varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but Italian law has set the age at 18, and he was paying and having sex with someone below the age at which Italian law recognizes the two parties can have consent.
Which is why I wouldn't invite him to dinner but no reason not to vote for him for PM.
No, I'm saying that whether or not he's breaking the law has fuckall to do with whether his actions as Prime Minister were any good. Banging hookers doesn't hurt Italy. It's doesn't help either -- it's entirely orthogonal to Italy in general.
Qua a Prime Minister, we should judge his actions as Prime Minister. Qua a person, we should judge his personal actions. The two have nothing to do with each other.
[ PS. He's enough of a terrible PM that this attack is not only stupid, it's gratuitous. ]
You mean showing disapproval of the Italian PM hiring underage hookers is "injecting my sexual politics"?
Yeah, it is. You know why? Because it has absolutely nothing to do with his ability (or lack thereof) to be a functional Prime Minister of the government of Italy. It has nothing to do with his office whatsoever. Let me answer a question with a question then, would you rather elect a competent PM that slept around with underage hookers while pursuing sensible policies or a morally upright one that was incompetent and whose policies you opposed?
Not that SB is competent or his policies sensible or that these are the only two choices, naturally. But my point is that his sex life is orthogonal to his role as Prime Minister. You can { bang hookers, not bang hookers } and be a { good, bad } PM. All 4 possibilities are there.
Well, more directly of Berlusconi's corporate profits. Why the Italians haven't drowned this guy in the Tiber is quite beyond me. A crook, a disgusting old letch, and on top of it a complete ass, who for all his vaunted business skills, is still overseeing the drive to keep Italy one of the "I"s in "PIIGS".
He's an ass but what the hell is with this preening moralism getting modded up on/.? Who the fuck cares whether he's a prude or a pervert and, moreover, what's wrong with setting the example that the elderly can have just as active a sex life as anyone else (aside from the fact that we'd rather not visualize it)? He's a single man and I'm just as happy for him getting his jollies as anyone else on this planet.
You gain little by injecting your sexual politics into it, as though we should be less likely to support him (and I don't support him because, as I said above, he is an ass) because he sleeps around.
This kind of decision would turn every (former) Border's customer into a potential creditor in the bankruptcy proceeding, since it becomes a cost and damage to that customer if the privacy terms already agreed to are changed. Imagine if even 1 [percent] person of Border's (former) customer were to file a petition with the bankruptcy court to enter as a creditor.
Even if this, shall we say novel, concept of counting you as a creditor based on some implied contract in the privacy terms actually flew with the court (I doubt it, but I'm humoring you) the whole point of bankruptcy is that the debtor cannot honor all its creditors going forward. That's what it means to be asset-insolvent -- you owe creditors more than you are worth and so many of them, by necessity, don't get the obligations honored.
Since, even in your theory, you took an un-secured (no-collateral was offered to back up the implied privacy contract) credit interest in Border's, meaning that everyone with a secured (bonded) debt gets in line in front of you and you never get paid. That's how bankruptcy works, after all, the creditors line up in order and they take until there's nothing left.
IOW, not only do you have to convince a court of the unprecedented concept of a debt in the form of a privacy obligation, you have to convince the court that you should be paid in front of other, secured, creditors. The former is already far-fetched, the combination is patently absurd.
TLDR version: Even if B&N "owed" you something they are in no position to pay what they owe anyways so you are going to get the shaft will all the other unsecured creditors that lent them money and are not going to see any of it back.
The last paragraph of the linked article mentions that they had no choice but to do this:
Do you think a poor family that is getting $10/month broadband (1.5/384) cares that it was part of a merger deal? The upshot is that millions of lower income families are going to get internet -- that's a Good Thing(TM).
The other competitors (Verizon and Sprint) use CDMA technology that uses different frequencies and different modulation schemes. GSM is a more popular format worldwide because it is not patent-encumbered. CDMA phones typically lag in technology by several years.
Which is why I have a CDMA Samsung Galaxy S2 from Sprint a month or so after the international launch and before AT&T and TMobile offer it. .
Also, Verizon and Sprint run on the same CDMA frequencies and have a bilateral roaming agreement. And CDMA is a more efficient modulation, allowing more users per MHz of bandwidth than any other technology.
There was also an idea to use multiple cores to extend the superscalar concept, so when you encountered a branch one core took each potential path and you discarded the wrong one.
Given how accurate branch predictors are, what's the point in computing the non-predicted paths?
The service Google is talking about here tracks the physical location of Wifi hubs by SSID, and because of regulatory pressure they're letting the Wifi hub users opt out.
If only IEEE 802.XX devices like wifi access points had some sort of address that was guaranteed to be unique to that particular physical device. You could then even print that address on some sort of physical sticker and affix it to the device so that the owner could discover that address and communicate to third parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't play lawyer. Discovery and search warrants are completely disjoint things. The former is executed by private parties, the latter is executed by the state. For example:
(1) I have a safe in my bedroom, my ex-wife demands that I account for the contents in our civil divorce case (civil not criminal, not civil as in polite). She files a motion to compel me to provide her an itemized list of the contents. If I object, I can take it to the judge who will decide if I must turn it over. If I ignore it or lie, I'm subject to civil contempt.
(2) I have a safe in my bedroom, officer friendly has probable cause to believe it contains evidence of a crime or fruit of that crime. He goes to a magistrate who affirms that he has probable cause and issues the warrant. The SWAT kicks the door in and takes the safe. There is no question about whether I comply, the search warrant entitles him to search and seize the safe and hence no penalties involved (although resisting an officer in the lawful discharge of his duty is a separate criminal offense).
I'm sure the judge would be OK if they changed their password to some random string, so long as it worked. The order wasn't "give him the string that corresponds to your current password on Facebook", it was "give him access to Facebook".
Note that he also placed limits on what they could do with it, to wit, not posting anything. So really it was just read-only.
I was responding to the GP's breathless assertion that what the judge did would be like giving litigants access to each other's homes and personal/medical information. Which they have.
He tried for an absurd comparison and landed right on the truth!
Why not also require them to make copies of their house keys for each other so they and their lawyers can go into each other's houses any time they want and rummage through each other's files, look for evidence of affairs in their bedrooms, look for property not reported in the divorce proceedings, look for signs of alcohol or drugs or depression or other personal factors that might have some bearing on the case?
They can. It's called discovery, and it's one of the most useful tools for civil litigants because it forces the adversary to disclose (or assert under legal penalty that it doesn't exist) any documents relevant to a particular trial. So if you sue some corporation for selling you a defective widget, you can force them to turn over all emails and notes about quality-testing or safety testing for that widget. Without it, you'd have absolutely no way to prove (e.g.) that Sally in engineering sent an email to her boss explaining that the flux capacitor supplier they chose was cutting corners and that it could cause device failure and you could basically never make a case for knowing indifference. Or if you are suing that corporation for violating the GPL and you have reason (binary similarity) to believe that product X contains GPL code, you can demand they turn over that source code for inspection. Again, without it, you would never be able to prove a GPL violation because that source code would be locked inside some secure internal server and you would be forced to make some equivocal claim about the binaries instead of looking at the plain evidence.
A divorce case is (in the eyes of the law, which has this odd thing about procedure being uniform) no different -- each party is entitled to any document or file, electronic or paper, that's relevant to the divorce. That includes anything inside your house, anything in your bedroom, unreported property*, hospitalization records. If it has a bearing on the case, the parties are absolutely entitled to it (under restrictions mind you, public disclosure of any information derived from discovery subjects you to criminal and civil sanctions plus is a great way to get the judge ticked off at you).
* I used to work the tech side of things for an investigation firm involved in the child-support end of divorces (long after the litigation ended) looking for evidence that parties exaggerated or even fabricated their claims of poverty when accused of nonpayment or underpayment. Some of these guys would come in to court pleading that they had no disposable income only to find our pictures of them at strip joints getting lap dances. Concealing assets and income from the court can land you in jail for contempt. Don't do it.
The problem is that the fake wireless tower appears to be outside the scope of the warrant. Keep in mind that judges do not issue blank checks when they write out a warrant. Doing something that's not in the scope of the warrant is just as illegal as if the warrant didn't exist at all.
No disagreement to the last sentence but I think "you can get location information from Verizon's network" and "you can spoof Verizon's network to get location information" are indistinguishable both as to the "thing being searched" (the suspect's location) and "method of searching" (by using the suspect's cell phone signal).
So if Wired's point is that maybe the Feds did something that pushes the scope of the warrant, OK -- my impression from TFA was that they were against the use of spoofed cellphone towers in general.
a court order and warrant that investigators used to get similar location data from Verizonâ(TM)s own towers.
I'm really surprised again by Wired. The government got a warrant -- the same level of scrutiny they need to search your house or haul your ass to a concrete room. What more can they do to conduct a lawful investigation? The purpose of the warrant requirement is to make sure that probable cause is evaluated by a neutral and detached magistrate, not to bar all searches and make it impossible to catch identity thieves.
I'm firmly for electronic privacy but I think it's patently absurd to say there should be a higher standard for getting cell-phone data than physically entering a person's home or arresting him.
. The government has no metric for success, they do stuff just because. It doesn't matter if people actually benefit from what the government does, they get paid anyway.
Their metric for success is getting reelected, if we vote them out, they are out of a job. The fact that we aren't that great at picking leaders (much like the shareholders of HP or Yahoo) is hardly their fault and entirely ours.
And besides that, we're talking about a system where one group of people are making decisions about "appropriateness" for a huge mass of people. The notion of what is "adult" or "inappropriate" content varies from individual to individual, as does the notion of "mental preparedness".
No disagreement there but the key is that if you don't like the notion of "adult" or "appropriate" that's used in that particular filtering system, you can opt not to turn it on (or, if you've previously opted to turn it on, opt to turn it off). This proposal is 100% individual-empowering to decide whether or not they want to accept it and gives them the freedom to change their mind later.
That is, if we really believe in individual freedom and individual choices then we ought to respect the choice to have this filtering turned on for your internet connection. Otherwise, it becomes this sort of weak "well, you have the individual freedom to view or not to view pornography but I don't think you ought to be able to install a filter on your internet or ask your ISP to do it" which strikes me as intellectually inconsistent and frankly insulting.
TFS and TFA make it clear that this is a service being offered to customers as an opt-in system. What the heck is wrong with offering customers that choice, especially given that they can presumably change their mind at some point in the future (when their kids are old enough to view porn).
Customers will be asked to make a choice over whether they want filtering on their connection or not. Adult content blocks will not be implemented by default.
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but honestly I think that these huge screens are totally idiotic if you really want to go mainstream with a phone. See, half of your potential customers are women (which tend to have smaller hands) and not too few will be teenagers.
Is the Nexus line really branded as a 'mainstream' product? I figured it's targeted at the gadget-crazy that would find the extra real estate useful. That seems to be Android's niche anyway -- more male, more techie, more left-brained.
I'm sure the demographic data isn't perfect, but the skew seems pretty reasonable to me: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20092784-71/study-android-users-sad-hicks-iphone-users-rich-girls/
...get what you pay for.
When homebuyers decide to get a house within their budget instead of stretching for extra rooms by going cheap on construction, they'll get better quality. Building a 2000 sq ft house on a 1500 sq ft budget means, necessarily, cutting some corners. If you don't realize that, you either aren't paying attention or you are deluding yourself.
The quality on some of these new houses is really atrocious. I've seen cabinets fall apart after 10-12 years, decks rotting after 15, drywall that won't even hold a painting. I saw a dishwasher held to a cabinet by a pair of wood screws.
Wee bit of a fifth amendment problem there... You can't compel anyone to report a goddamned thing if it might incriminate them.
No, but you can forgive them the crime of possession of child pornography if they do report it. The legislature could (and did, in the past) make any possession of child pornography a crime period -- instead they made it a crime but included an exception in the case. The greater power to ban it in all circumstances whatsoever ought to logically include the lesser power to ban it except when duly reported.
So yeah, the State cannot compel you to report a goddamned thing. On the other hand, they can brand you a felon and put you on the sex offender registry for possession of child pornography (if you did possess it, naturally) and they can offer you a deal not to use that power.
They ARE in a position to delete the relevant data in order to fulfill the termination clause without incurring the ten million dollar penalty.
No, they aren't. Destroying assets claimed by a secured creditor is actually criminal. Once you know that you are going to declare bankruptcy, you have to do everything in your power to ensure that the creditors get as much back as possible.
That data has value to buyers and those creditors have claim on the proceeds of that sale.
Besides, clearly someone didn't bother to read the comments box where I clearly indicated that by retaining my data they agreed to my personal information license and that it would supersede any privacy policy they might publish.
And every such contract (forget that you don't even have one for a second) is null and void upon bankruptcy. That's the point of bankruptcy! You can't fulfill all your obligations so you are going to have to let some of them go. And since you are unsecured, you are last in line.
It doesn't have to actually fly. It sends the courts a message: "Protect privacy or be buried in a blizzard of paperwork, all perfectly legal".
No, filing frivolous claims is not legal and is actually punishable by sanctions under FRCP11. I know a number of judges that wouldn't even bother waiting for the other party to order you to show cause why you are filing numerous redundant and patently absurd claims with his court and should not penalized.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/Rule11.htm
[ Also, seriously, stop trying to play lawyer. ]
In a pre-web world, I wonder how much obligation is placed on say, a bank teller, who fails to notice a crossed-out term in a bank account obligation, and how that would translate to an online world. Best, Kevin
None. Acceptance of a contract has to be done knowingly. When you make any modification to an offered contract (e.g. by strikeout), that means you've rejected the offer and made a counteroffer. See, Hyde v. Wrench (1840) 3 Beav 334. The bank teller would then have to actually have to affirmatively know about and accept the counteroffer in order to create a binding contract.
And let me underscore that not only did he break Italian law, but he also attempted to use his political position to deny an Italian prosecutors the right to pursue the charges against him. So, seeing as he violated laws regarding age of sexual consent AND abused his power to try to evade the legal consequences of that, please spell out for me clearly how he still could be a good Prime Minister.
He could be a good Prime Minister if he proposed and passed quality legislation, efficiently ran the government, made sensible plans for the future, appointed competent individuals to various posts, embarked on good foreign policy. You know, things that governments actually do in the course of GOVERNING . Boring stuff that only us silly policy wonks think about.
But yeah, if the voters would rather have an honest idiot than a dishonest genius, so be it. Just don't complain when your legislation is stupid because you elevated character over competence.
[ Of course, purely by accident you get someone that's both competent and of high moral character. I'd rather hedge my bets and let all competent takers come rather than waiting for that particular unicorn though. ]
But surely not trying to abuse his position as the head of government to get around potential prosecution over sexual relations with an underage prostitute is an abuse of power and abuse of process, which, so far as I can tell, would mean he would be unfit to be Prime Minister.
This supposes that the job of the PM is to be a figurehead or a symbolic leader. I'd prefer placing the PM's priorities on actual leadership: passing good laws, running the government smoothly, making smart decisions. The idea of "unfit leader" is nonsensical elevation of character over actual performance and is the reason why we have so many crappy leaders in general -- because we are concerned with matters unrelated to the actual function required by the job. "Character voters" are the problem here, not the solution.
You have this odd sort of angle where he can wantonly violate Italian law, but that's okay if he's a good Prime Minister. By definition, a head of government who violates legislation that said government is bound to uphold is not a good head of government.
No, that's not OK -- his violation of the law might make him a bad person. Being a good PM doesn't "cancel out" being a bad person or vice versa. Many people are good people but bad at their jobs. Many people are good at their jobs but bad people. Many are good at both (and sadly many are bad at both).
What's more, I don't think his job is to "uphold legislation" any more than an programmers's job to "uphold code". Indeed, the job of a PM is to produce quality legislation (and other Executive functions) that are in the country's best interest just as much as it's the coder's job to do his job well. Whether or not he's "upholding" anything is meaningless if he's delivering quality governance.
I don't see what's "by definition" anywhere your argument. Government is there to govern, not for me to care whether he breaks the law in his spare time unless doing so actually harms the country in some material fashion.
Italians, like most other people in the industrialized world, are not allowed to have sex with minors. Yes, the precise age at which one ceases to be a minor varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but Italian law has set the age at 18, and he was paying and having sex with someone below the age at which Italian law recognizes the two parties can have consent.
Which is why I wouldn't invite him to dinner but no reason not to vote for him for PM.
No, I'm saying that whether or not he's breaking the law has fuckall to do with whether his actions as Prime Minister were any good. Banging hookers doesn't hurt Italy. It's doesn't help either -- it's entirely orthogonal to Italy in general.
Qua a Prime Minister, we should judge his actions as Prime Minister. Qua a person, we should judge his personal actions. The two have nothing to do with each other.
[ PS. He's enough of a terrible PM that this attack is not only stupid, it's gratuitous. ]
You mean showing disapproval of the Italian PM hiring underage hookers is "injecting my sexual politics"?
Yeah, it is. You know why? Because it has absolutely nothing to do with his ability (or lack thereof) to be a functional Prime Minister of the government of Italy. It has nothing to do with his office whatsoever. Let me answer a question with a question then, would you rather elect a competent PM that slept around with underage hookers while pursuing sensible policies or a morally upright one that was incompetent and whose policies you opposed?
Not that SB is competent or his policies sensible or that these are the only two choices, naturally. But my point is that his sex life is orthogonal to his role as Prime Minister. You can { bang hookers, not bang hookers } and be a { good, bad } PM. All 4 possibilities are there.
Well, more directly of Berlusconi's corporate profits. Why the Italians haven't drowned this guy in the Tiber is quite beyond me. A crook, a disgusting old letch, and on top of it a complete ass, who for all his vaunted business skills, is still overseeing the drive to keep Italy one of the "I"s in "PIIGS".
He's an ass but what the hell is with this preening moralism getting modded up on /.? Who the fuck cares whether he's a prude or a pervert and, moreover, what's wrong with setting the example that the elderly can have just as active a sex life as anyone else (aside from the fact that we'd rather not visualize it)? He's a single man and I'm just as happy for him getting his jollies as anyone else on this planet.
You gain little by injecting your sexual politics into it, as though we should be less likely to support him (and I don't support him because, as I said above, he is an ass) because he sleeps around.
This kind of decision would turn every (former) Border's customer into a potential creditor in the bankruptcy proceeding, since it becomes a cost and damage to that customer if the privacy terms already agreed to are changed. Imagine if even 1 [percent] person of Border's (former) customer were to file a petition with the bankruptcy court to enter as a creditor.
Even if this, shall we say novel, concept of counting you as a creditor based on some implied contract in the privacy terms actually flew with the court (I doubt it, but I'm humoring you) the whole point of bankruptcy is that the debtor cannot honor all its creditors going forward. That's what it means to be asset-insolvent -- you owe creditors more than you are worth and so many of them, by necessity, don't get the obligations honored.
Since, even in your theory, you took an un-secured (no-collateral was offered to back up the implied privacy contract) credit interest in Border's, meaning that everyone with a secured (bonded) debt gets in line in front of you and you never get paid. That's how bankruptcy works, after all, the creditors line up in order and they take until there's nothing left.
IOW, not only do you have to convince a court of the unprecedented concept of a debt in the form of a privacy obligation, you have to convince the court that you should be paid in front of other, secured, creditors. The former is already far-fetched, the combination is patently absurd.
TLDR version: Even if B&N "owed" you something they are in no position to pay what they owe anyways so you are going to get the shaft will all the other unsecured creditors that lent them money and are not going to see any of it back.
The last paragraph of the linked article mentions that they had no choice but to do this:
Do you think a poor family that is getting $10/month broadband (1.5/384) cares that it was part of a merger deal? The upshot is that millions of lower income families are going to get internet -- that's a Good Thing(TM).
True with 2G but GSM 3G uses Wide Band CDMA so the special efficiency is essentially the same.
Good point, although I think you meant 'spectral' efficiency. :-)
The other competitors (Verizon and Sprint) use CDMA technology that uses different frequencies and different modulation schemes. GSM is a more popular format worldwide because it is not patent-encumbered. CDMA phones typically lag in technology by several years.
Which is why I have a CDMA Samsung Galaxy S2 from Sprint a month or so after the international launch and before AT&T and TMobile offer it. .
Also, Verizon and Sprint run on the same CDMA frequencies and have a bilateral roaming agreement. And CDMA is a more efficient modulation, allowing more users per MHz of bandwidth than any other technology.
There was also an idea to use multiple cores to extend the superscalar concept, so when you encountered a branch one core took each potential path and you discarded the wrong one.
Given how accurate branch predictors are, what's the point in computing the non-predicted paths?
The service Google is talking about here tracks the physical location of Wifi hubs by SSID, and because of regulatory pressure they're letting the Wifi hub users opt out.
If only IEEE 802.XX devices like wifi access points had some sort of address that was guaranteed to be unique to that particular physical device. You could then even print that address on some sort of physical sticker and affix it to the device so that the owner could discover that address and communicate to third parties.
Oh, the things you could do!