"No matter what interpretation you use, you're clearly always 'right'"
Well, no. No matter what interpretation you use, you're clearly always right from the point of view of that interpretation (and maybe also from some other interpretations). But there are also many interpretations by which you're clearly wrong.
Which is why we don't have one supreme court justice, but a multiplicity of supreme court justices. The idea being that if a majority of justices have the same interpretation, it's more likely to be the correct one than if only a single justice has a particular interpretation. (Where "correct" means "in line with the way that most people interpret the law.")
As I said, interpretations don't happen in a vacuum. They happen in the context of a culture, a language, a people, a political spectrum, a set of rules, etc. While sometimes it is clear that most people use words the same way, sometimes it is that people are using words in different ways and sometimes it is not clear if the words are being used the same way.
But back to the idea that "they could just decide that..." That does happen from time to time. Bush v. Gore is a clear case of that. Virtually every sitting justice of the court set aside their usual methodology for interpretting the constitution and voted along party lines. And no one stopped them. Moreover, no one had the right to stop them. The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the law means and if they say it means one thing, there is no legal mechanism by which one can say that they are incorrect.
Some interpretations are wrong, and obviously so, according to some other interpretations.
Take the claim that the meaning of "freedom of speech" having a clear and univocal meaning with no room for interpretation. Does that mean that we are free to slander someone, to shout 'fire' in a crowded movie theater when there is no evidence of such, to use words judged as obscene by one's local community, to use "fighting words" when speaking to others? Those uses of language are sometimes counted as falling under "freedom of speech" and sometimes not.
As for definitions of words not changing, consider the use of the 'gay' 100 years ago compared to today. For that matter, consider the way a libertarian uses the word 'freedom' compared to a neoplatonist. Or consider the use of the word 'happiness' in the Declaration of Independence. The "pursuit of happiness" did not mean to the intelligentsia of the 18th century what it means to most people today. Language is not static. Consider what it means to be a conservative in formerly Soviet regions of the world compared to what it means to be a conservative in the US.
In other words, definitions follow usage. And usage is determined by a whole host of factors that include culture, history, tradition, rule following, and more. These factors change over time. Sometimes they change slowly. Sometimes they change quickly.
With the Supreme Court being the highest law of the land, their judgment as to whether a law is constitutional or not is effectively the last word on whether or not it is constitutional.
Moreover, I think you are unclear on the limits of language. The issues of inherent meaning and interpretation are so intertwined that it is next to impossible to separate them in a useful and meaningful fashion.
Should a supreme court justice be tried for impeachment, they are tried in the Senate. As there is no mechanism for appeal, this means that it is the US Congress that decides what constitutes an impeachable offense for a sitting supreme court justice.
While it's unlikely that the US Senate would vote to impeach a justice on ideological grounds, it's not outside the realm of possibility.
IIRC, supreme court justices are open to charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors" which has whatever meaning the US Congress assigns to it should it decide to have a trial.
... while it means that they don't have the goal of maximizing shareholder's equity, doesn't meant that they don't exhibit profit-seeking behavior. It just means that the profit isn't paid out in the form of dividends. It could, as one example, be paid out in the form of executive compensation.
Moreover, many credit unions are for-profit concerns. But the dividends go to account holders rather than third-party investors that don't deposit money into the credit union. And the money that is deposited is used by members rather than non-members. Rather than your deposits going towards providing the backing for third-parties to get loans, etc., they go towards loans, etc., for members of the credit union. This distinction starts to break down, however, when the credit union decides to invest the money in instruments to increase dividends to the members.
Either phone them and tell them that you want to close the account or next time they try to change the terms, send them a letter that you don't accept. In either case, the account will be closed with regards to new transactions but you'll be able to continue to pay off the balance at the current rate.
The rest of us hate having a dozen different remote controls on the coffee table and would prefer that the DVD Player/Blue Ray Player/Cable Box/etc. all fit into one neat package instead of having a nightmare of cables, boxes, wall warts and remote controls.
Most people rarely "interact" with their TV the same way that they rarely interact with their cell phones and mustic players. Note the shift from the prevailing view not all that long ago of "I don't want all these features, I just want to make a damned phone call" to wanting the latest iPhone or Android. Ditto with music players.
These days, when people watch TV, they want to schedule recordings, pause, play, rewind, watch two shows at once with picture in a picture, have a stock ticker running while they watch a comedy, stream video sources, stream audio over the internet while they play a video game, make phone calls, etc. Turning what essentially a dumb disply into a smart device capable of doing that is the next logical step.
So the market that would be targetted is not the existing market of people buying an Apple set top box. Rather, it's people looking for new TVs and, if the rumors are true, the strategy is to get a sizeable portion of that market to buy one that has Apple's iOS built into it. I think that's a reasonable strategy. The biggest obstacle seems to me to not be the market itself but barriers to entry for varioius services. Cable companies hate cable-ready TVs. They absolutely loved the advent of digital TV where they could start encrypting the signal and requiring a set top box in every room. Apple is going to have to pull a rabbit out of the hat to convince cable companies to allow Apple branded TVs to use the Apple interface rather than the set top box of the cable company. As long as consumers pretty much have to use the cable company interface, or as long as cable card is inconvenient to install, it's going to be difficult to break into the market.
That is, until such time as streaming over the Internet is capable of replacing cable service.
But if they price them the same way they price their monitors, I'll stick to underpriced Sony kit and the like.
I understand better specs and all that, but at $900+ bucks for a 27" monitor, Apple screens are almost four times as much as perfectly suitable (for my purposes) alternatives with the same screen size.
That said, there is almost certainly a market for top of the line, high quality smart HDTVs. Despite cheapskates like me, Apple might very well make a killing.
(1) Most people saying that it's "almost worth it" aren't really serious. If they were, this sort of case would be unexceptional. But it is exceptional. These sorts of events are relatively rare. So if you think the point of criminal punishment is deterence, any penalty at all will still deter most people.
(2) The deterence theory of punishment is largely discredited, at least in western style liberal democracies. Take the death penalty in the US as one example. There is quite a bit of good data that suggests that capital punishment does not act as a deterent. Yet, many (if not most) US citizens want to keep the death penalty legal and cheer when murders are put to death. Better theories are the retributive and restorative theories of punishment. The first seems crass to me, but there is good evidence to support it. The second is pretty interesting but one has to take a few metaphysical leaps to make sense out of it. For a good treatment see the section dealing with justice and punishment in John Finnis, ``Natural Law, Natural Right''
They'll have most of the books. But if you have JSTOR access, I suggest first looking up his article "The Problematics of Legal and Moral Theory". It's 90+ pages, but quite an excellent read even if you disagree with most of it like I do.
But I also expect that anything I put on e Internet, whether in email or through a search engine, might end up on the front page of the newspaper.
I seem to be in fairly small company on that, though. For some reason, most people seem to expect that unencrypted data sent over what is essentially a long chain of random machines belonging to other parties to be private in some meaningful sense.
It's called a red herring. Palin's team managed to send her political enemies on a multi-year fool's errand and, by doing so, dissipated large amounts of time and effort that may have been more profittably spent on other tactics.
If the emails had been promptly released, this would have been a short lived controversy and folks would have moved on rather quickly. But Palin had a vested interest in keeping the anti-Palin forces distracted and misdirected.
This would have been a tempest in a teapot if the FOIA request had been promptly filled back during the election cycle. But by fighting the request tooth and nail and then delaying as long as possible once that fight was lost, Palin's camp gave the impression that there was a smoking gun buried somewhere in those emails. That there appears that no smoking gun suggests that Palin's foes got played. No small amount of anti-Palin energy got sucked into a massive black hole of irrelevency.
Privacy laws sometimes are in effect even in public places.
There are two sets of laws that I'm aware of. One covers voice recordings (regardless of where they happen). This set is generally considered to even apply in public places. The widest distinction is generally along the lines of who needs to provide consent. In some jurisdictions, so long as one party gives consent, the audio recording is fine. In other jurisdictions, the consent of all parties involved is requited.
The other set covers photography (and video, note that this set generally only consists of the video aspect of video recordings as the audio in a video recording is part of the other set). This second set is generally less limited. But sometimes there are restrictions, such as any public display of the work in question without consent of the subject.
You can make, I think, a good argument that officers of the court (judges, lawyers, police officers)/should/ generally be fair game to record anywhere, anytime that they are acting in their official capacity except for situations where special privileges apply (e.g. when an attorney is advising his or her client). But whether or not the courts generally conform to what I think/should/ be the case is an open question.
Burial at sea is fine for Muslims. In this particular context the important bit is most likely this bit: " if an enemy may dig up the grave to mutilate the body, it is also allowed to bury the deceased at sea to avoid mutilation." (And if you don't trust Wikipedia on the matter, go to their source: Rules About Burial of the Dead Body.)
Given all the comments I've seen that he ought to have been buried in a box of pork chops, I think it's fair to say that this was a real concern.
As one example, being found not guilty by reason of insanity is does not mean that one is "innocent" but insane. The consequences are far different than being found innocent.
Moreover, courts do sometimes declare innocence as part of a finding of fact. This is an entirely different sort of judgment than a judgment of "not guilty" with far different implications. In fact, on occasion the same subject will be both be declared innocent and be held as guilty as happens sometimes when appeals actually demonstrate innocence but do not offer sufficient legal grounds to overturn a verdict.
(And trials with fantasticly wrong judgments aren't exactly rare. The only thing aberrant about the Simpson trial was the amount of money spent by both the prosecution and the defense. Guilty men going free and free men being convicted are hardly exceptional affairs.)
I lived for a bit in an apartment complex owned by the Teamsters. (Gotta do something with that retirement fund rather than just let it sit there, so...)
There was no talk of "prevailing wage" or unionizing the folks hired to manage and maintain that complex.
Just like nothing is stopping you from moving to another country.
Consequently, your obedience to every law of the US is a voluntary action on your part. If you don't like the social contract that the US offers, go find a better one.
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"No matter what interpretation you use, you're clearly always 'right'"
Well, no. No matter what interpretation you use, you're clearly always right from the point of view of that interpretation (and maybe also from some other interpretations). But there are also many interpretations by which you're clearly wrong.
Which is why we don't have one supreme court justice, but a multiplicity of supreme court justices. The idea being that if a majority of justices have the same interpretation, it's more likely to be the correct one than if only a single justice has a particular interpretation. (Where "correct" means "in line with the way that most people interpret the law.")
As I said, interpretations don't happen in a vacuum. They happen in the context of a culture, a language, a people, a political spectrum, a set of rules, etc. While sometimes it is clear that most people use words the same way, sometimes it is that people are using words in different ways and sometimes it is not clear if the words are being used the same way.
But back to the idea that "they could just decide that ..." That does happen from time to time. Bush v. Gore is a clear case of that. Virtually every sitting justice of the court set aside their usual methodology for interpretting the constitution and voted along party lines. And no one stopped them. Moreover, no one had the right to stop them. The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the law means and if they say it means one thing, there is no legal mechanism by which one can say that they are incorrect.
Some interpretations are wrong, and obviously so, according to some other interpretations.
Take the claim that the meaning of "freedom of speech" having a clear and univocal meaning with no room for interpretation. Does that mean that we are free to slander someone, to shout 'fire' in a crowded movie theater when there is no evidence of such, to use words judged as obscene by one's local community, to use "fighting words" when speaking to others? Those uses of language are sometimes counted as falling under "freedom of speech" and sometimes not.
As for definitions of words not changing, consider the use of the 'gay' 100 years ago compared to today. For that matter, consider the way a libertarian uses the word 'freedom' compared to a neoplatonist. Or consider the use of the word 'happiness' in the Declaration of Independence. The "pursuit of happiness" did not mean to the intelligentsia of the 18th century what it means to most people today. Language is not static. Consider what it means to be a conservative in formerly Soviet regions of the world compared to what it means to be a conservative in the US.
In other words, definitions follow usage. And usage is determined by a whole host of factors that include culture, history, tradition, rule following, and more. These factors change over time. Sometimes they change slowly. Sometimes they change quickly.
Got new for you, /every/ understanding of what the US Constitution means is an /interpretation/ of what the US constitution means.
That some sections are more likely to find a consensus of interpretations in no way makes them less interpretted.
Funny, I thought he was in it for the money. Getting paid to do it is the very definition of a professional.
With the Supreme Court being the highest law of the land, their judgment as to whether a law is constitutional or not is effectively the last word on whether or not it is constitutional.
Moreover, I think you are unclear on the limits of language. The issues of inherent meaning and interpretation are so intertwined that it is next to impossible to separate them in a useful and meaningful fashion.
Should a supreme court justice be tried for impeachment, they are tried in the Senate. As there is no mechanism for appeal, this means that it is the US Congress that decides what constitutes an impeachable offense for a sitting supreme court justice.
While it's unlikely that the US Senate would vote to impeach a justice on ideological grounds, it's not outside the realm of possibility.
IIRC, supreme court justices are open to charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors" which has whatever meaning the US Congress assigns to it should it decide to have a trial.
... while it means that they don't have the goal of maximizing shareholder's equity, doesn't meant that they don't exhibit profit-seeking behavior. It just means that the profit isn't paid out in the form of dividends. It could, as one example, be paid out in the form of executive compensation.
Moreover, many credit unions are for-profit concerns. But the dividends go to account holders rather than third-party investors that don't deposit money into the credit union. And the money that is deposited is used by members rather than non-members. Rather than your deposits going towards providing the backing for third-parties to get loans, etc., they go towards loans, etc., for members of the credit union. This distinction starts to break down, however, when the credit union decides to invest the money in instruments to increase dividends to the members.
You can cancel before you pay off.
Either phone them and tell them that you want to close the account or next time they try to change the terms, send them a letter that you don't accept. In either case, the account will be closed with regards to new transactions but you'll be able to continue to pay off the balance at the current rate.
Maybe 99.99% of people over the age of 60.
The rest of us hate having a dozen different remote controls on the coffee table and would prefer that the DVD Player/Blue Ray Player/Cable Box/etc. all fit into one neat package instead of having a nightmare of cables, boxes, wall warts and remote controls.
No installable porn apps for the iOS running on the TV.
But porn channels from the cable company and subscriptions to streatming porn from web sites would work just fine.
Most people rarely "interact" with their TV the same way that they rarely interact with their cell phones and mustic players. Note the shift from the prevailing view not all that long ago of "I don't want all these features, I just want to make a damned phone call" to wanting the latest iPhone or Android. Ditto with music players.
These days, when people watch TV, they want to schedule recordings, pause, play, rewind, watch two shows at once with picture in a picture, have a stock ticker running while they watch a comedy, stream video sources, stream audio over the internet while they play a video game, make phone calls, etc. Turning what essentially a dumb disply into a smart device capable of doing that is the next logical step.
So the market that would be targetted is not the existing market of people buying an Apple set top box. Rather, it's people looking for new TVs and, if the rumors are true, the strategy is to get a sizeable portion of that market to buy one that has Apple's iOS built into it. I think that's a reasonable strategy. The biggest obstacle seems to me to not be the market itself but barriers to entry for varioius services. Cable companies hate cable-ready TVs. They absolutely loved the advent of digital TV where they could start encrypting the signal and requiring a set top box in every room. Apple is going to have to pull a rabbit out of the hat to convince cable companies to allow Apple branded TVs to use the Apple interface rather than the set top box of the cable company. As long as consumers pretty much have to use the cable company interface, or as long as cable card is inconvenient to install, it's going to be difficult to break into the market.
That is, until such time as streaming over the Internet is capable of replacing cable service.
But if they price them the same way they price their monitors, I'll stick to underpriced Sony kit and the like.
I understand better specs and all that, but at $900+ bucks for a 27" monitor, Apple screens are almost four times as much as perfectly suitable (for my purposes) alternatives with the same screen size.
That said, there is almost certainly a market for top of the line, high quality smart HDTVs. Despite cheapskates like me, Apple might very well make a killing.
(1) Most people saying that it's "almost worth it" aren't really serious. If they were, this sort of case would be unexceptional. But it is exceptional. These sorts of events are relatively rare. So if you think the point of criminal punishment is deterence, any penalty at all will still deter most people.
(2) The deterence theory of punishment is largely discredited, at least in western style liberal democracies. Take the death penalty in the US as one example. There is quite a bit of good data that suggests that capital punishment does not act as a deterent. Yet, many (if not most) US citizens want to keep the death penalty legal and cheer when murders are put to death. Better theories are the retributive and restorative theories of punishment. The first seems crass to me, but there is good evidence to support it. The second is pretty interesting but one has to take a few metaphysical leaps to make sense out of it. For a good treatment see the section dealing with justice and punishment in John Finnis, ``Natural Law, Natural Right''
They'll have most of the books. But if you have JSTOR access, I suggest first looking up his article "The Problematics of Legal and Moral Theory". It's 90+ pages, but quite an excellent read even if you disagree with most of it like I do.
FWIW, they were appealing /receiving/ a mere 27,000.
In turn, Posner wanted to knock that down to a symbolic $1.
And the only reason that they won any money to start is by default. Spamhaus didn't show up for the original trial.
I would.
But I also expect that anything I put on e Internet, whether in email or through a search engine, might end up on the front page of the newspaper.
I seem to be in fairly small company on that, though. For some reason, most people seem to expect that unencrypted data sent over what is essentially a long chain of random machines belonging to other parties to be private in some meaningful sense.
It's called a red herring. Palin's team managed to send her political enemies on a multi-year fool's errand and, by doing so, dissipated large amounts of time and effort that may have been more profittably spent on other tactics.
If the emails had been promptly released, this would have been a short lived controversy and folks would have moved on rather quickly. But Palin had a vested interest in keeping the anti-Palin forces distracted and misdirected.
This would have been a tempest in a teapot if the FOIA request had been promptly filled back during the election cycle. But by fighting the request tooth and nail and then delaying as long as possible once that fight was lost, Palin's camp gave the impression that there was a smoking gun buried somewhere in those emails. That there appears that no smoking gun suggests that Palin's foes got played. No small amount of anti-Palin energy got sucked into a massive black hole of irrelevency.
Privacy laws sometimes are in effect even in public places.
There are two sets of laws that I'm aware of. One covers voice recordings (regardless of where they happen). This set is generally considered to even apply in public places. The widest distinction is generally along the lines of who needs to provide consent. In some jurisdictions, so long as one party gives consent, the audio recording is fine. In other jurisdictions, the consent of all parties involved is requited.
The other set covers photography (and video, note that this set generally only consists of the video aspect of video recordings as the audio in a video recording is part of the other set). This second set is generally less limited. But sometimes there are restrictions, such as any public display of the work in question without consent of the subject.
You can make, I think, a good argument that officers of the court (judges, lawyers, police officers) /should/ generally be fair game to record anywhere, anytime that they are acting in their official capacity except for situations where special privileges apply (e.g. when an attorney is advising his or her client). But whether or not the courts generally conform to what I think /should/ be the case is an open question.
In some jurisdictions, it is illegal to record anyone without their consent.
Burial at sea is fine for Muslims. In this particular context the important bit is most likely this bit: " if an enemy may dig up the grave to mutilate the body, it is also allowed to bury the deceased at sea to avoid mutilation." (And if you don't trust Wikipedia on the matter, go to their source: Rules About Burial of the Dead Body.)
Given all the comments I've seen that he ought to have been buried in a box of pork chops, I think it's fair to say that this was a real concern.
You're quite incorrect.
As one example, being found not guilty by reason of insanity is does not mean that one is "innocent" but insane. The consequences are far different than being found innocent.
Moreover, courts do sometimes declare innocence as part of a finding of fact. This is an entirely different sort of judgment than a judgment of "not guilty" with far different implications. In fact, on occasion the same subject will be both be declared innocent and be held as guilty as happens sometimes when appeals actually demonstrate innocence but do not offer sufficient legal grounds to overturn a verdict.
(And trials with fantasticly wrong judgments aren't exactly rare. The only thing aberrant about the Simpson trial was the amount of money spent by both the prosecution and the defense. Guilty men going free and free men being convicted are hardly exceptional affairs.)
I lived for a bit in an apartment complex owned by the Teamsters. (Gotta do something with that retirement fund rather than just let it sit there, so ...)
There was no talk of "prevailing wage" or unionizing the folks hired to manage and maintain that complex.
Just like nothing is stopping you from moving to another country.
Consequently, your obedience to every law of the US is a voluntary action on your part. If you don't like the social contract that the US offers, go find a better one.