I don't like Scientology either but I value my freedom to associate.
Should all associations be given tax-free status? If not, then what conditions deserve tax-free status, and should that status be irrevocable once obtained?
Where do you draw the line?
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Less Than Free
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Ahh, another demand-created "monopoly". I find that concept just fascinating. Apparently in this day and age you can have a monopoly in something even when there are 50 alternatives just because the consumers overwhelmingly choose your product.
Then how do you, as a matter of law, divide between "good" monopolies that just provide the best service for customers and "bad" monopolies that use armtwisting to get ahead?
What about companies that do both to get ahead in a single market?
What happens when a company gets its lead position in one market the "good" way and then uses its power in that market to leverage its way into another market that it normally wouldn't be able to compete well in?
Because that's what our laws against tying are about. I'm not sure that Google counts as a monopoly, but what they're doing is clearly tying. They are using their ad services to squeeze competitors out of the mapping market in the same way that MS used its OS dominance to kill the original Netscape. Mind you, I'm not saying that Google is violating antitrust law (since I know enough about antitrust law to know how little I know), but we're not talking about Google winning the mapping market through just being awesome. We're talking about an unfair pricing advantage.
As I have been told many times by my conservative friends, liberals attack the person, conservatives attack the issue.
Partisans always claim that about the other side. The fact is that every side makes personal attacks and then pretends that they're "above" the fray. Just read the hand-held signs at any rally sufficiently large enough or angry enough of people supporting the same issues you do, and you'll find someone out there to embarrass you. Sometimes I miss living in a conservative state because it's so much easier to be impressed with your own political beliefs when you rarely encounter people who think the same way for all the wrong reasons.:-)
People are just people, and any sufficiently large group, no matter what their political stripe, is going to be chock full of nuts who think everyone that's not part of their group are all stupid/evil.
And again I'm labeled a troll. Don't you people get it? Once the *precedent* of making Amazon collect taxes outside California (their home), then the law can be expanded to include private users selling items on Ebay.
Of course the precedent exists already, but why would a government go through that trouble? It's much easier to shake down buyers in your own state than to try to haul sellers from other states into court.
Plus, as a matter of public policy, it's easier to say that the people of your own state as supposed to know their local taxes than to say that the people of every state needs to know the taxes of every single county & city in the country. It inefficient, unreasonable, and impractical to expect amateur sellers to comply.
But if they go that route, then so what? Suddenly Ebay will have a very compelling reason to automate the process for sellers or else lose their entire customer base. (Would you or anyone you know use Ebay if they didn't handle it for you?)
So the name of the organization fighting the war determines whether it is a war.
Yes, it can. National and international law treats police and military forces differently. However, police action in an occupied territory is still governed by the Geneva Conventions, but I'm getting off-topic here.
I do find it ironic, though, that you're pillorying me for considering the name of an organization important but you're totally 100% behind the notion that the War on Drugs is an actual war whose conduct requires treating any action by the US government (specifically its courts) that could affect more than one person as a war crime, just because it's called a "war" by politicians wanting to sound tough on crime.
I mean, can you not at least admit that it would be an absurd result of your interpretation of the War on Drugs and the Geneva Convention to treat the MPAA sending a letter to an ISP to deactivate on IP address where filesharing occurred as something on par with concentration camps and orders to ship the families of soldiers that surrender to the other side to a Gulag?
I mean, have you really considered that howling "war crimes!" at little civil tiffs like this only diminishes the importance of the suffering of people who suffer from actual war crimes? That equating losing a single free WiFi AP to having your entire neighborhood razed because some jerk launched a rocket from it is likely to make people simply ignore those of us trying to shed light on real human suffering?
Oh, and did you count the numerous times the US Army was deployed in the declared and officially funded War on Drugs?
Those would not be part of a declared war under the Conventions. They would however be armed conflicts, most likely, and the US government must follow the Conventions in their conduct of such conflicts. However, since the military is always (with rare exception) cooperating with the countries that host drug activities, no Party to the Convention is involved, and the restrictions are pretty light.
Regardless, I doubt anyone sane would consider the Convention to apply to matters that have absolutely nothing to do with that conflict. Filesharing has nothing to do with the "War on Drugs," and if the world isn't going to do anything about the way the Israelis treat the Palestinians in overt violation of the Conventions, then you can expect the tiniest fiddle in the world to be played for this.
For that to be the same with photo tickets, it would be have to be an offense 'to own a car that was speeding', for example. If they try to use camera tickets without having writing the law that way, they get thrown out.
Well, unless they advance the technology like they have where I live (as of 2-3 months ago) to snap a zoomed-in picture of the driver, looking confused and disgusted as they realize what just happened to the car that they're following right across a sudden, illogical drop to a 30 MPH speed limit on a 5-line highway NOT THAT I'D KNOW OR ANYTHING.
(Seriously, it's pretty slick, though I think flash photography of driver's faces is a safety hazard, even in full daylight.)
But that's not, for example, how speeding tickets work in my state, where there's all sorts of affirmative defenses in the law you can use to justify or reduce speeding tickets (Broken speedometer, sloped hill, medical emergency.), and you do, indeed, get a trial.
Interesting. What state is this? Medical emergency is going to be a great necessity defense in nearly any state, but I'm curious about the other two. Now I want to look up some cases for fun.
Mailing a notice to the correct address on file should be the only act that constitutes a fulfillment of their responsibility to notify the offender (and, really, they should need to use a delivery method with proof of delivery, but that's a whole 'nother story...).
Well, one of the problems here is that the burdens of proof may not be as strongly in favor of the defendant as, say, proving that someone shot someone else.
In many jurisdictions, traffic and license offenses are "violations." Violations are not crimes but carry civil penalties (i.e. fines) and only require a civil burden of proof (i.e. "preponderance of the evidence" rather than "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt"). However, driving on a suspended license often carries a maximum penalty that includes jail time, so that's not likely to be relevant here.
What is more directly relevant to the case is that all the prosecution needs to do to convict someone of a crime is to prove all the elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. (i.e. Were you driving? Was your license suspended? End of case.) Any believable defense that casts doubt on one of those elements lets you go free. (This is sometimes known as a "negativing defense.")
But if you want to mount a defense that doesn't attack those elements (e.g. necessity, extenuating circumstances, etc.), then the burden of proof for those defenses is often (but not always) on the defendant, and that burden may be anywhere from "preponderance of the evidence" to "clear and convincing evidence." (This is sometimes known as a "collateral defense.")
So, if you want to claim, "I never had any way of knowing that my license was suspended!" then the burden of proof is on you, and you're probably going to need something more than just the assertion that you never got the mail. After all, the jury (or judge in a typical traffic court bench trial) is free to consider your testimony alone as self-serving and/or unreliable.
If Ford sold the only cars with steering wheels and automatic transmissions, then I might agree that your analogy is apt.
I have read and reread this line three times. Then I went away for a couple of minutes and tried again. I still have absolutely NO idea what point you're trying to make here. (I guess that makes it the perfect car analogy, though.)
MY point, in case you missed it, is that there are many vendors of the class of goods that Mac OS X belongs to (operating systems), that Mac OS X is by no means the dominant one, and that being the only seller of your own brand of product does not make you a monopolist.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt because that was the only logic (albeit flawed) that I could understand for calling Apple a monopolist, but if you've got something even crazier to back that notion up with, I'd like to hear it -- at least just out of idle curiosity at this point.
They're chipping away at a monopoly, something I'm surprised is even considered the slightest bit controversial on this site.
You have a very bizarre definition of monopoly if Apple is one. Apple is no more a monopoly because they're the only vendor of Mac hardware than Ford is a monopoly for being the only vendor of Ford cars.
Psystar's argument in court were as much nonsense as your sentiment above. It's no surprise that they lost.
But 99% of the laws require you to know what you are doing is, in fact, what you doing, and do it on purpose. It's illegal if, and only if, you know you're doing a specific action, whether or not you know if that action's illegal.
Actually, while most criminal laws that carry jail offenses do require you to have purposeful or knowing intent (in MPC jurisdictions, anyway), most vehicle-related offenses are strict liability offenses since they carry minimal stigma.
Ignorance of fact is irrelevant to strict liability offenses. "I didn't know I was going that fast, officer!" or "My speedometer is broken!" are both no excuse in a speeding ticket. All that matters is that you committed the act and met all the attendant circumstances. Traffic courts don't generally have to worry much about litigating a person's intent.
Up-front note: IANAL, I have no intention of becoming a traffic lawyer, and the thrust of this post is that you need to talk to one if you're in this kind of situation.
Actually, ignorance of fact is only a defense if a violation or crime has some mental state (mens rea) requirement and your ignorance negates that requirement. (e.g. "Knowingly," "with intent to," etc.) Most traffic violations are strict liability offenses, and your ignorance of the facts would be irrelevant.
Improper notice is a possible argument, but that's going to depend largely on your jurisdiction, and you will need an attorney to navigate these issues. (It's probably way too late for the original poster here, but FYI for everyone else.)
Generally speaking, if the DMV sent it to the address that's on file and didn't get it returned in the mail, the court is going to side with the prosecution. You have a responsibility under law in most states to notify the DMV if you move precisely to prevent this sort of thing from happening. If the DMV doesn't have a current address on file, and a court notice or ticket goes missing in the mail, then that is your fault.
So keep those records up to date, and always call the state bar to do a cheap phone consultation with an attorney to make sure you know the law, even if you can't afford to have the attorney represent you in court. If you're up against a statute that may result in a jail sentence (as is the case with driving with a suspended license in many jurisdictions), you want to know ahead of time, and you don't want to show up in a court room with a head full of misconceptions about the law and wind up in jail.
It's not a war or armed conflict as any international body would define it, and one of the main reasons your argument would never prevail in a court is that it expands the scope of the law of war to cover actions completely unrelated to war. If you think it does, then I'd love to see you cite something authoritative instead of just blathering on with spurious logic that ignores the consequences of holding what you do.
It's funded as a war, it bypasses constitutional protections as a war and it's declared as a war.
It's not funded through the military apparatus of the nation but instead is handled by the police. It's only as "funded as a war" as our agriculture policy is (i.e. via tax dollars).
I've already explained why were wrong on the Constitutional issue (not that you apparently read anything I said).
It's not declared as a war by Congress, and Presidents have as much authority to declare war as Bugs Bunny does. (Not that this has significant bearing on the Geneva Conventions because they include any other "armed conflict." So once again, you're raising a red herring.)
Are you just trying to stack up ways to be wrong here?
"Armed conflict" is undefined in the Geneva Convention, but you're going to have a hard time getting the international community to accept your broad definition. If you want to read the Geneva Conventions as broadly as you do, then RenFest jousters, paintball games, and street gangs would all be governed by the Convention, and people involved could be subject to war crimes.
Hell, as I alluded in my first response on this, my fourth grade teacher liked to give homework to the whole class when someone acted up. Are you going to argue that she's a war criminal just because there's a so-called war on drugs? Because that's what you're arguing if you're arguing that the MPAA or the government are violating the Geneva Convention because of a penal action against one entity that just happened to affect people that were getting free stuff from that entity over a matter completely unrelated to (a) any armed conflict and (b) drugs in specific.
Your argument is madness. It ignores any common sense interpretation of the intent and purpose of the Conventions and relies on shaky wordplay. It expands the power of the law of armed conflicts to cover police actions that have nothing at all do with war, and it expands the laws to cover completely unrelated matters like disputes over copyright. And it relies on a shaky definition of "collective punishment" that embraces any potential impact of punishing one person on other persons.
Basically, you've made an argument that international law prevents enforcement of any laws unless the penalties cannot affect more than one person even indirectly. Well good luck getting the international community to embrace your interpretation! Because international law is only as good as the international will to enforce it. Have fun living in your own little legal bubble world that has no connection to reality.
Basically. I mean, there's a point at which standing up for your principles is just whizzing in the wind, and the wind's just blowing all over you. It's not like boycotting AT&T would make them stop being a bunch of fascism enablers, so what's the point in inflicting injury upon yourself when it's not going to do anything helpful except let you pat yourself on the back?
Certainly you have the right to be upset, but why would you give hundreds of dollars a year to a company you're upset with?
For example, I'm an AT&T customer despite the fact that AT&T bent over backwards for the NSA's illegal wiretapping program. I'd love to boycott them, but none of the other providers were reluctant to play along, and I need a cellphone plan with unlimited data transfers. Who am I going to change to if I want to boycott? Nobody. I'm stuck either (a) forgoing a useful service, (b) paying more than I can afford for data from one of the small prepaid carriers, or (c) bending over and taking it.
For Vietnam, I expect that an international court would consider it a war, even though it wasn't declared. And the War on Drugs is a declared war (even if not strictly by the Constitutional standard, as there has been no congressional vote on it).
Clearly it was an armed conflict, and Article 2 states that the convention applies both in declared war and any other armed conflict. Furthermore, the US and both the governments of North & South Vietnam were parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Drugs on the other hand are not a Party to the convention, and police actions against one's own citizens are not generally considered "armed conflicts" regardless of the fact that guns may be employed in them. The world of international law (and law in general) is ruled far more by common sense than wordplay than a lot of laymen think. Honestly, you make yourself look totally divorced from reality if you think that kind of argument would impress any court or other international body.
The Geneva Conventions govern real wars not poorly-named domestic policy initiatives.
And that fact has been used to violate the Constitution. Many people have had posessions taken with no court action and no possibility of return when they were never charged with a crime. That's depriving someone of property without due process, but because it's spoils of drugs, it's ok. You can break the Constitution if it's war.
Maybe you should look up how forfeiture works sometimes. Criminal forfeiture only happens after someone has been convicted of a crime. Civil forfeiture happens when the government establishes probable cause that someone's property is either the fruit of criminal activity or a tool used in criminal activity. After that point, the person whose property is seized has the ability to seek judicial review of the seizure. The burden of proof is on the person who wants to claim their property is not subject to forfeiture, and I'm not happy with that nor with how rarely a person prevails, but the Supreme Court has ruled that due process is still satisfied.
Hey, nice catch. I didn't even think of that. Presumably the communications between the POS terminal and the credit card company are encrypted, but a little extra doesn't hurt considering how much easier it is to "wiretap" wireless connections than wired connections.
You sign a contract with Verizon. Verizon is providing the services. You are contracting with them and saying you will use their services for X years. It's a contract. [...]
Honestly, I don't see what the deal is.
So what if it's a contract? Does that magically make it unquestionably super-awesome or some sort of natural law like gravity which is pointless to complain about?
The point is that it's an asinine contract and that people are upset with its terms. It would be one thing if Verizon was giving its customers something in exchange for the new terms, but no such benefit is being offered for the higher cost. There are no upsides. People have a right to be upset.
So the MPAA is clearly then allowed to treat civilians worse than people being occupied in wartime by any country that has signed the Geneva Convention?
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention only applies to "protected persons."
Art. 4. Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.
Nationals of a State which is not bound by the Convention are not protected by it. Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.
In short, a state can punish its own citizens collectively, at least as long as there's no actual war -- and all you smarty-pants who think the "War on Drugs" is an actual war are impressing no one, least of all an international criminal court. (It's worth nothing that the US doesn't recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC either.) This is why, no matter how much I still resent her, my 4th grade teacher isn't a war criminal.
It's also worth noting that turning off a service one party provides for free to multiple third parties is not generally recognized as a punitive act towards the third parties in the US. "Punishment" is reserved for actions taken directly against an individual or group. So closing a soup kitchen for health code violations is not "collective punishment" of the homeless nor is imprisoning a father collective punishment of his family.
Lastly, I think you've got a really sad sense of entitlement and pathetic, comfortable ignorance if you think that cutting off free Wi-fi at the park is equivalent to the kind of collective punishments that happen during war. Read up on Stalin's Order 270 or Sherman's March to the Sea.
And then stop your whining about Wi-fi. The MPAA is being a bunch of jerks, but they're not engaging in war crimes. People need to get some goddamned perspective.
No no, you're right. Bitching and moaning on slashdot is SO much more effective. Obviously.
Actually, considering that the problem is that CNN is getting their "news" from stupid internet forum faffery, then it might actually be more effective for once.
That aside, stopping watching AND complaining to encourage others to stop watching is more effective than just stopping watching. Neither one is really all that effective at all without a critical mass of people doing the same given the size of their customer base, and telling people to just shut up and stop watching pretty much ensures that their isolated decision to stop watching won't have any noticeable effect.
Advocacy matters when your actions would otherwise be lost in a crowd.
Gee, I guess that when you personally are no longer watching CNN, then its shoddy reporting and "advocacy journalism" like Lou Dobbs has no remaining effect on the voting public, and thus you should no longer have any right to complain about it!
I bet you think that you strike a huge blow against a company when you boycott their products without any coordination with other potential buyers.
You can't go two minutes in this game without being thrown into a long cut-scene. I like to play my RPGs, not watch them.
It's called "plot," and not all RPG fans are as convinced as you are that it should be given cursory treatment. Anyway, Bioware's RPG have had long scenes of linear dialog for as long as I can remember. (Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, etc.)
Baguettes are longish, round loafes of bread. Breadsticks are short, brittle sticks of bread.
It's not that hard. Really.
In the US, a breadstick usually refers to something like this and are soft on the inside instead of brittle. If you aren't aware of the difference in scale, it would be easy to confuse, and bizarrely enough, the Wikipedia entry I linked even has a note not to confuse the two.
(I swear I didn't put that there. It seems to date back to at least early 2008. The article seems to be victim to a surprising amount of vandalism and edits by nutjobs.)
The judge PREDICTABLY and logically ruled against him. I'd have laughed him out of court.
I wouldn't. I'd impose Rule 11 sanctions against their attorneys for making an argument that no one with any knowledge of copyright law could have made in good faith. There wouldn't be much laughter at all.
Literally, it's not wrong. However, it gives the impression that EMI is going after the Beatles instead of going after someone ripping-off the Beatles, and it may also give the initial impression that the Beatles were on the web legitimately before a lawsuit took them off.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like Scientology either but I value my freedom to associate.
Should all associations be given tax-free status? If not, then what conditions deserve tax-free status, and should that status be irrevocable once obtained?
Ahh, another demand-created "monopoly". I find that concept just fascinating. Apparently in this day and age you can have a monopoly in something even when there are 50 alternatives just because the consumers overwhelmingly choose your product.
Then how do you, as a matter of law, divide between "good" monopolies that just provide the best service for customers and "bad" monopolies that use armtwisting to get ahead?
What about companies that do both to get ahead in a single market?
What happens when a company gets its lead position in one market the "good" way and then uses its power in that market to leverage its way into another market that it normally wouldn't be able to compete well in?
Because that's what our laws against tying are about. I'm not sure that Google counts as a monopoly, but what they're doing is clearly tying. They are using their ad services to squeeze competitors out of the mapping market in the same way that MS used its OS dominance to kill the original Netscape. Mind you, I'm not saying that Google is violating antitrust law (since I know enough about antitrust law to know how little I know), but we're not talking about Google winning the mapping market through just being awesome. We're talking about an unfair pricing advantage.
As I have been told many times by my conservative friends, liberals attack the person, conservatives attack the issue.
Partisans always claim that about the other side. The fact is that every side makes personal attacks and then pretends that they're "above" the fray. Just read the hand-held signs at any rally sufficiently large enough or angry enough of people supporting the same issues you do, and you'll find someone out there to embarrass you. Sometimes I miss living in a conservative state because it's so much easier to be impressed with your own political beliefs when you rarely encounter people who think the same way for all the wrong reasons. :-)
People are just people, and any sufficiently large group, no matter what their political stripe, is going to be chock full of nuts who think everyone that's not part of their group are all stupid/evil.
And again I'm labeled a troll. Don't you people get it? Once the *precedent* of making Amazon collect taxes outside California (their home), then the law can be expanded to include private users selling items on Ebay.
Of course the precedent exists already, but why would a government go through that trouble? It's much easier to shake down buyers in your own state than to try to haul sellers from other states into court.
Plus, as a matter of public policy, it's easier to say that the people of your own state as supposed to know their local taxes than to say that the people of every state needs to know the taxes of every single county & city in the country. It inefficient, unreasonable, and impractical to expect amateur sellers to comply.
But if they go that route, then so what? Suddenly Ebay will have a very compelling reason to automate the process for sellers or else lose their entire customer base. (Would you or anyone you know use Ebay if they didn't handle it for you?)
So the name of the organization fighting the war determines whether it is a war.
Yes, it can. National and international law treats police and military forces differently. However, police action in an occupied territory is still governed by the Geneva Conventions, but I'm getting off-topic here.
I do find it ironic, though, that you're pillorying me for considering the name of an organization important but you're totally 100% behind the notion that the War on Drugs is an actual war whose conduct requires treating any action by the US government (specifically its courts) that could affect more than one person as a war crime, just because it's called a "war" by politicians wanting to sound tough on crime.
I mean, can you not at least admit that it would be an absurd result of your interpretation of the War on Drugs and the Geneva Convention to treat the MPAA sending a letter to an ISP to deactivate on IP address where filesharing occurred as something on par with concentration camps and orders to ship the families of soldiers that surrender to the other side to a Gulag?
I mean, have you really considered that howling "war crimes!" at little civil tiffs like this only diminishes the importance of the suffering of people who suffer from actual war crimes? That equating losing a single free WiFi AP to having your entire neighborhood razed because some jerk launched a rocket from it is likely to make people simply ignore those of us trying to shed light on real human suffering?
Oh, and did you count the numerous times the US Army was deployed in the declared and officially funded War on Drugs?
Those would not be part of a declared war under the Conventions. They would however be armed conflicts, most likely, and the US government must follow the Conventions in their conduct of such conflicts. However, since the military is always (with rare exception) cooperating with the countries that host drug activities, no Party to the Convention is involved, and the restrictions are pretty light.
Regardless, I doubt anyone sane would consider the Convention to apply to matters that have absolutely nothing to do with that conflict. Filesharing has nothing to do with the "War on Drugs," and if the world isn't going to do anything about the way the Israelis treat the Palestinians in overt violation of the Conventions, then you can expect the tiniest fiddle in the world to be played for this.
For that to be the same with photo tickets, it would be have to be an offense 'to own a car that was speeding', for example. If they try to use camera tickets without having writing the law that way, they get thrown out.
Well, unless they advance the technology like they have where I live (as of 2-3 months ago) to snap a zoomed-in picture of the driver, looking confused and disgusted as they realize what just happened to the car that they're following right across a sudden, illogical drop to a 30 MPH speed limit on a 5-line highway NOT THAT I'D KNOW OR ANYTHING.
(Seriously, it's pretty slick, though I think flash photography of driver's faces is a safety hazard, even in full daylight.)
But that's not, for example, how speeding tickets work in my state, where there's all sorts of affirmative defenses in the law you can use to justify or reduce speeding tickets (Broken speedometer, sloped hill, medical emergency.), and you do, indeed, get a trial.
Interesting. What state is this? Medical emergency is going to be a great necessity defense in nearly any state, but I'm curious about the other two. Now I want to look up some cases for fun.
Mailing a notice to the correct address on file should be the only act that constitutes a fulfillment of their responsibility to notify the offender (and, really, they should need to use a delivery method with proof of delivery, but that's a whole 'nother story...).
Well, one of the problems here is that the burdens of proof may not be as strongly in favor of the defendant as, say, proving that someone shot someone else.
In many jurisdictions, traffic and license offenses are "violations." Violations are not crimes but carry civil penalties (i.e. fines) and only require a civil burden of proof (i.e. "preponderance of the evidence" rather than "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt"). However, driving on a suspended license often carries a maximum penalty that includes jail time, so that's not likely to be relevant here.
What is more directly relevant to the case is that all the prosecution needs to do to convict someone of a crime is to prove all the elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. (i.e. Were you driving? Was your license suspended? End of case.) Any believable defense that casts doubt on one of those elements lets you go free. (This is sometimes known as a "negativing defense.")
But if you want to mount a defense that doesn't attack those elements (e.g. necessity, extenuating circumstances, etc.), then the burden of proof for those defenses is often (but not always) on the defendant, and that burden may be anywhere from "preponderance of the evidence" to "clear and convincing evidence." (This is sometimes known as a "collateral defense.")
So, if you want to claim, "I never had any way of knowing that my license was suspended!" then the burden of proof is on you, and you're probably going to need something more than just the assertion that you never got the mail. After all, the jury (or judge in a typical traffic court bench trial) is free to consider your testimony alone as self-serving and/or unreliable.
If Ford sold the only cars with steering wheels and automatic transmissions, then I might agree that your analogy is apt.
I have read and reread this line three times. Then I went away for a couple of minutes and tried again. I still have absolutely NO idea what point you're trying to make here. (I guess that makes it the perfect car analogy, though.)
MY point, in case you missed it, is that there are many vendors of the class of goods that Mac OS X belongs to (operating systems), that Mac OS X is by no means the dominant one, and that being the only seller of your own brand of product does not make you a monopolist.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt because that was the only logic (albeit flawed) that I could understand for calling Apple a monopolist, but if you've got something even crazier to back that notion up with, I'd like to hear it -- at least just out of idle curiosity at this point.
They're chipping away at a monopoly, something I'm surprised is even considered the slightest bit controversial on this site.
You have a very bizarre definition of monopoly if Apple is one. Apple is no more a monopoly because they're the only vendor of Mac hardware than Ford is a monopoly for being the only vendor of Ford cars.
Psystar's argument in court were as much nonsense as your sentiment above. It's no surprise that they lost.
But 99% of the laws require you to know what you are doing is, in fact, what you doing, and do it on purpose. It's illegal if, and only if, you know you're doing a specific action, whether or not you know if that action's illegal.
Actually, while most criminal laws that carry jail offenses do require you to have purposeful or knowing intent (in MPC jurisdictions, anyway), most vehicle-related offenses are strict liability offenses since they carry minimal stigma.
Ignorance of fact is irrelevant to strict liability offenses. "I didn't know I was going that fast, officer!" or "My speedometer is broken!" are both no excuse in a speeding ticket. All that matters is that you committed the act and met all the attendant circumstances. Traffic courts don't generally have to worry much about litigating a person's intent.
Up-front note: IANAL, I have no intention of becoming a traffic lawyer, and the thrust of this post is that you need to talk to one if you're in this kind of situation.
Actually, ignorance of fact is only a defense if a violation or crime has some mental state (mens rea) requirement and your ignorance negates that requirement. (e.g. "Knowingly," "with intent to," etc.) Most traffic violations are strict liability offenses, and your ignorance of the facts would be irrelevant.
Improper notice is a possible argument, but that's going to depend largely on your jurisdiction, and you will need an attorney to navigate these issues. (It's probably way too late for the original poster here, but FYI for everyone else.)
Generally speaking, if the DMV sent it to the address that's on file and didn't get it returned in the mail, the court is going to side with the prosecution. You have a responsibility under law in most states to notify the DMV if you move precisely to prevent this sort of thing from happening. If the DMV doesn't have a current address on file, and a court notice or ticket goes missing in the mail, then that is your fault.
So keep those records up to date, and always call the state bar to do a cheap phone consultation with an attorney to make sure you know the law, even if you can't afford to have the attorney represent you in court. If you're up against a statute that may result in a jail sentence (as is the case with driving with a suspended license in many jurisdictions), you want to know ahead of time, and you don't want to show up in a court room with a head full of misconceptions about the law and wind up in jail.
It's not a war or armed conflict as any international body would define it, and one of the main reasons your argument would never prevail in a court is that it expands the scope of the law of war to cover actions completely unrelated to war. If you think it does, then I'd love to see you cite something authoritative instead of just blathering on with spurious logic that ignores the consequences of holding what you do.
It's funded as a war, it bypasses constitutional protections as a war and it's declared as a war.
It's not funded through the military apparatus of the nation but instead is handled by the police. It's only as "funded as a war" as our agriculture policy is (i.e. via tax dollars).
I've already explained why were wrong on the Constitutional issue (not that you apparently read anything I said).
It's not declared as a war by Congress, and Presidents have as much authority to declare war as Bugs Bunny does. (Not that this has significant bearing on the Geneva Conventions because they include any other "armed conflict." So once again, you're raising a red herring.)
Are you just trying to stack up ways to be wrong here?
"Armed conflict" is undefined in the Geneva Convention, but you're going to have a hard time getting the international community to accept your broad definition. If you want to read the Geneva Conventions as broadly as you do, then RenFest jousters, paintball games, and street gangs would all be governed by the Convention, and people involved could be subject to war crimes.
Hell, as I alluded in my first response on this, my fourth grade teacher liked to give homework to the whole class when someone acted up. Are you going to argue that she's a war criminal just because there's a so-called war on drugs? Because that's what you're arguing if you're arguing that the MPAA or the government are violating the Geneva Convention because of a penal action against one entity that just happened to affect people that were getting free stuff from that entity over a matter completely unrelated to (a) any armed conflict and (b) drugs in specific.
Your argument is madness. It ignores any common sense interpretation of the intent and purpose of the Conventions and relies on shaky wordplay. It expands the power of the law of armed conflicts to cover police actions that have nothing at all do with war, and it expands the laws to cover completely unrelated matters like disputes over copyright. And it relies on a shaky definition of "collective punishment" that embraces any potential impact of punishing one person on other persons.
Basically, you've made an argument that international law prevents enforcement of any laws unless the penalties cannot affect more than one person even indirectly. Well good luck getting the international community to embrace your interpretation! Because international law is only as good as the international will to enforce it. Have fun living in your own little legal bubble world that has no connection to reality.
Basically. I mean, there's a point at which standing up for your principles is just whizzing in the wind, and the wind's just blowing all over you. It's not like boycotting AT&T would make them stop being a bunch of fascism enablers, so what's the point in inflicting injury upon yourself when it's not going to do anything helpful except let you pat yourself on the back?
Certainly you have the right to be upset, but why would you give hundreds of dollars a year to a company you're upset with?
For example, I'm an AT&T customer despite the fact that AT&T bent over backwards for the NSA's illegal wiretapping program. I'd love to boycott them, but none of the other providers were reluctant to play along, and I need a cellphone plan with unlimited data transfers. Who am I going to change to if I want to boycott? Nobody. I'm stuck either (a) forgoing a useful service, (b) paying more than I can afford for data from one of the small prepaid carriers, or (c) bending over and taking it.
Guess which one I'm doing.
For Vietnam, I expect that an international court would consider it a war, even though it wasn't declared. And the War on Drugs is a declared war (even if not strictly by the Constitutional standard, as there has been no congressional vote on it).
Clearly it was an armed conflict, and Article 2 states that the convention applies both in declared war and any other armed conflict. Furthermore, the US and both the governments of North & South Vietnam were parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Drugs on the other hand are not a Party to the convention, and police actions against one's own citizens are not generally considered "armed conflicts" regardless of the fact that guns may be employed in them. The world of international law (and law in general) is ruled far more by common sense than wordplay than a lot of laymen think. Honestly, you make yourself look totally divorced from reality if you think that kind of argument would impress any court or other international body.
The Geneva Conventions govern real wars not poorly-named domestic policy initiatives.
And that fact has been used to violate the Constitution. Many people have had posessions taken with no court action and no possibility of return when they were never charged with a crime. That's depriving someone of property without due process, but because it's spoils of drugs, it's ok. You can break the Constitution if it's war.
Maybe you should look up how forfeiture works sometimes. Criminal forfeiture only happens after someone has been convicted of a crime. Civil forfeiture happens when the government establishes probable cause that someone's property is either the fruit of criminal activity or a tool used in criminal activity. After that point, the person whose property is seized has the ability to seek judicial review of the seizure. The burden of proof is on the person who wants to claim their property is not subject to forfeiture, and I'm not happy with that nor with how rarely a person prevails, but the Supreme Court has ruled that due process is still satisfied.
Hey, nice catch. I didn't even think of that. Presumably the communications between the POS terminal and the credit card company are encrypted, but a little extra doesn't hurt considering how much easier it is to "wiretap" wireless connections than wired connections.
You sign a contract with Verizon. Verizon is providing the services. You are contracting with them and saying you will use their services for X years. It's a contract. [...]
Honestly, I don't see what the deal is.
So what if it's a contract? Does that magically make it unquestionably super-awesome or some sort of natural law like gravity which is pointless to complain about?
The point is that it's an asinine contract and that people are upset with its terms. It would be one thing if Verizon was giving its customers something in exchange for the new terms, but no such benefit is being offered for the higher cost. There are no upsides. People have a right to be upset.
So the MPAA is clearly then allowed to treat civilians worse than people being occupied in wartime by any country that has signed the Geneva Convention?
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention only applies to "protected persons."
Art. 4. Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.
Nationals of a State which is not bound by the Convention are not protected by it. Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.
In short, a state can punish its own citizens collectively, at least as long as there's no actual war -- and all you smarty-pants who think the "War on Drugs" is an actual war are impressing no one, least of all an international criminal court. (It's worth nothing that the US doesn't recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC either.) This is why, no matter how much I still resent her, my 4th grade teacher isn't a war criminal.
It's also worth noting that turning off a service one party provides for free to multiple third parties is not generally recognized as a punitive act towards the third parties in the US. "Punishment" is reserved for actions taken directly against an individual or group. So closing a soup kitchen for health code violations is not "collective punishment" of the homeless nor is imprisoning a father collective punishment of his family.
Lastly, I think you've got a really sad sense of entitlement and pathetic, comfortable ignorance if you think that cutting off free Wi-fi at the park is equivalent to the kind of collective punishments that happen during war. Read up on Stalin's Order 270 or Sherman's March to the Sea.
And then stop your whining about Wi-fi. The MPAA is being a bunch of jerks, but they're not engaging in war crimes. People need to get some goddamned perspective.
No no, you're right. Bitching and moaning on slashdot is SO much more effective. Obviously.
Actually, considering that the problem is that CNN is getting their "news" from stupid internet forum faffery, then it might actually be more effective for once.
That aside, stopping watching AND complaining to encourage others to stop watching is more effective than just stopping watching. Neither one is really all that effective at all without a critical mass of people doing the same given the size of their customer base, and telling people to just shut up and stop watching pretty much ensures that their isolated decision to stop watching won't have any noticeable effect.
Advocacy matters when your actions would otherwise be lost in a crowd.
Minus reaching maturity, of course.
Gee, I guess that when you personally are no longer watching CNN, then its shoddy reporting and "advocacy journalism" like Lou Dobbs has no remaining effect on the voting public, and thus you should no longer have any right to complain about it!
I bet you think that you strike a huge blow against a company when you boycott their products without any coordination with other potential buyers.
You can't go two minutes in this game without being thrown into a long cut-scene. I like to play my RPGs, not watch them.
It's called "plot," and not all RPG fans are as convinced as you are that it should be given cursory treatment. Anyway, Bioware's RPG have had long scenes of linear dialog for as long as I can remember. (Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, etc.)
Baguettes are longish, round loafes of bread. Breadsticks are short, brittle sticks of bread.
It's not that hard. Really.
In the US, a breadstick usually refers to something like this and are soft on the inside instead of brittle. If you aren't aware of the difference in scale, it would be easy to confuse, and bizarrely enough, the Wikipedia entry I linked even has a note not to confuse the two.
(I swear I didn't put that there. It seems to date back to at least early 2008. The article seems to be victim to a surprising amount of vandalism and edits by nutjobs.)
The judge PREDICTABLY and logically ruled against him. I'd have laughed him out of court.
I wouldn't. I'd impose Rule 11 sanctions against their attorneys for making an argument that no one with any knowledge of copyright law could have made in good faith. There wouldn't be much laughter at all.
Literally, it's not wrong. However, it gives the impression that EMI is going after the Beatles instead of going after someone ripping-off the Beatles, and it may also give the initial impression that the Beatles were on the web legitimately before a lawsuit took them off.