The InfoSec industry has a terrible reputation. It will take more then a terminology change, but this *might* be a good first step towards making the industry more attractive. I think/. ers living in their mother's basements probably rank higher in the social pecking order.
We allow and deny *sincere* request all of the time with no punishment. The issue here is that the prankster doesn't actually believe in the religion. The crime is lying on the drivers license application. When it comes to the court, we only punish people for the most egregiously frivolous suits. This would be a good example though. There is no sincere belief. It's an attempt to make a mockery of the system.
Of course not. There are some beliefs that simply won't be accommodated at all. There are lawyers who devote their entire careers to this stuff specifically and I'm clearly not one of them. There are two separate issues here. Is the belief sincerely held and is the believer entitled to a reasonable accommodation for the sincerely held belief. If the answer to either of those questions is no, there won't be any accommodation given. The courts are generally free to address things in whatever order they deem most sensible and if a case can be decided without reaching every issue in the case, it's not necessary to do so. For a more relevant analogy, this is the equivalent of short-circuit boolean evaluation.
If you want a religions accommodation, you have to have the sincere belief and there has to be a reasonable accommodation available. These cases get adjudicated fairly regularly. In the particular case in front of us, there's no point of dealing with the reasonable accommodation question since the petitioner isn't sincere.
This case is fascinating on/. for all of the wrong reasons.
I don't think the church of the FSM was involved here. As others have pointed out, the church of the FSM doesn't believe in the church of the FSM. It's a parody. Another poster has brought up the legitimate case of somebody who doesn't realize that FSM is fake and adopts the tenets. If the FSM were involved, there could now be a perjury and/or contempt charge. People on/. seem to think that the legal system is a game and you can "win on a technicality." No judge wants to make that kind of ruling and they work pretty hard to ensure that the *intent* of a law is upheld. There is a purpose for religious accommodation laws. Not everybody like those laws or their purpose. But we have separation of church and state in this country and those laws exist to implement one of the tenets of our constitution. In order to make those laws work, you have to respond to the legitimate petitioners and harshly reject those who demand accommodation under false pretenses. I would expect the courts to try to achieve this.
There is a far-fetched scenario where this thing goes all the way to the Supreme court and a constitutional question is reached about *how much* the government can infringe upon religious liberties and the outcome is that DMV can require everyone to be photographed without head ware (which seems to be what the prankster is advocating for) and the government is generally given more latitude because more narrowly tailored solutions are unworkable.
As you point out, a situation like this is ambiguous and harder to decide. The normal government reaction is to increase the penalty for a false application so that the risk/reward equation precludes all but the most mentally feeble from trying this sort of thing. At first this is done through creative prosecution and then more specific legislation.
Courts sort out similar things all the time, but as far as I know, this would be a somewhat original situation. I'm certainly not in a position to handicap the legal process. However, I wouldn't want to face those charges even if found not guilty. If you get a DMV administrator and a prosecutor who want to go after you, it's a heck of an uphill climb. And there's nothing to be gained. The girl who did this thinks she is making fun of religion and pointing out the absurdity of religious accommodation sensational way. It's unlikely to change anybody's mind. The DMV has a will to live and operate. So now they have an untenable situation. To resolve that, they will go after the easiest target. Fighting against religious accommodation is not a path of least resistance. Looking for an excuse to charge this lady with a crime is easy. That's the course that I imagine will be taken. Again it's pretty clear in this case that the person didn't really want religious accommodation, they wanted to prove a point. If somebody else that isn't an absurd joke, but this isn't that case.
Only for a plane of a certain weight. If I apply a certain amount of thrust to a 1kg object, it will go faster than if I apply it to a 10000 kg object. You expect a certain speed for a certain thrust and weight. But I think you're point is still valid, because you're not building ground speed at the expected rate. I still hope the OP comes back and comments as I'd like to think that the pilots could have known sooner that they weren't building enough speed. Then, adding thrust would have been easy.
The issue here is that, since there are always going to be people on this planet, there is no "end." Everything is a means. I can go out and try to suppress an entire group of disenfranchised people in the name of preventing violence. If I define the "end" to be at the height of the repression I can declare success. But this may make a bigger problem later on. That's why we have to pay attention to the means.
Just read your post again. I think the challenge is that the "too slow" speed is a function of how heavy you are. A lightly loaded plane can take off at a slower speed. Since they both thought the plane was 10k kg lighter than it was, the speed may not have been an indicator. But the fact that they didn't seem to be generating *lift* *could* have been an indicator but again I'm now very curious but don't have any hard knowledge.
It seems (and again I'm speaking about something where I have very little knowledge) that they did realize at some point which is why they pulled up hard on the stick and struck the tail. I don't know the procedure in this case. Should they have also opened up the throttle? Should they have known sooner? I hate to be an armchair quarterback but the OP was good enough to raise these types of questions and I'm curious to know the answers.
In accounting, they would call this an offsetting error. Two mistakes that cancelled each other out but still left the wrong answer. That seems a better name here. A transpositional error would be swapping two digits. $12.32 instead of $12.2.
This all makes sense and I too wish I had mod points as I would use them instead of responding.
What I don't understand here is how the error wasn't noticed while going down the runway. I'm going to explain this using all of the wrong terminology but hopefully my point comes across.
As the plane travels down the runway, the generated lift causes the nose to start to rise at a certain angle. As you get closer and closer to leaving the ground, the pitch rises. My understanding is that the Concorde relied on starting to take off with no flaps or elevator to build up maximum speed and then at the last second the pilots pulled up as hard as they could. But subsonic passenger planes set the flaps prior to engaging thrust and so a takeoff has a certain "feel."
How is it that the pilots didn't notice that they weren't getting enough lift. As a passenger, I think that I would notice it and I have no flying experience. (For reasons I can't fathom, they don't give commercial pilots licenses to us blind people)
Here you go another link for the state in question.
http://www.bostoncriminaldefen...
Again, I'm not a lawyer. I don't like on applications to government entities. I have done quite a few of them and had people encourage me to be dishonest in the past (for example stating that an investment property is a primary residence). Fortunately I've had the sense not to go down that path.
What we have here is somebody committing what looks like a serious crime (again, I don't think you're quite understanding that I'm not a lawyer, just a guy with some sense) in order to show that other people are stupid!
It's not the DMVs place to make that determination, that is true. But these determinations do get made. Courts do make these determinations. I've pointed out the salient examples other places. When people said that war was against their religion, the courts allowed draftees to perform alternative service. When they said that war wasn't generally against their religion but that the Vietnam was was, they essentially got laughed out of the court room. Courts make these determinations all the time. They also do it in asylum cases. They do it all the time when Amish people apply to travel across the Canada/US/Mexican border without photo identification.
I'm not a lawyer, but there are pretty serious penalties for making false statements when applying for government issued identification. Worse, those are anti-terrorism laws which guarantees that the penalties are insane. That's what we have here. Courts don't evaluate objective reasonableness of beliefs, but they do perform tests all the time for whether or not those beliefs are sincerely held.
Committing what might be a serious crime in order to play a ridiculous prank makes most religions seem rational in comparison. What we have here is a pretty unsympathetic party who clearly doesn't have sincere beliefs. He's trying to make the news in hopes of proving that religion is stupid and instead has only showed that he's a bit challenged in the IQ department!
No the grounds for prosecution are laws written that explicitly make certain false statements grounds for prosecution. But these laws have been written for just about every statement that you make to the government. Even if you don't know of a specific law that makes a particular false statement to government illegal, it probably exists. And ignorance of the law isn't a defense.
So here we have a guy going into DMV making a false statement that may or may not be grounds for prosecution (but most likely is) so that he can wear a spaghetti strainer on his head! And his purpose is to make fun of other people's religious beliefs? Believing in a flying spaghetti monster sounds rational compared to this kind of stunt.
Making misrepresntations to government is almost always illegal and carries sever punishment. Not being a lawyer, I can't comment on specific laws in specific states. But you can be pretty sure there is a law, for the stated purpose of preventing terrorism, that makes it a serious crime to provide a false or misleading statement when applying for government issued identification such as a drivers license. And if you piss the wrong person off you very well may get prosecuted for it.
I'm not saying this *should* be the law. I'm saying that this particular behavior by this person is counter-productive and stupid.
BitTorrent is a protocol. The *operators* of BitTorrent networks should be required to operate honestly. (i.e. not setup a network for the purpose of piracy while trying to maintain a veneer of legitimacy). But if you substitute HTTP for BitTorrent in your post, you'll see why the argument isn't quite right.
There are some technical aspects of the BitTorrent protocol that make this a bit harder because, except for the tracker, there really isn't a network operator, but I see your point. We have to make *somebody* liable for infringement because, if we don't, we might as well not have the copyrights in the first place. There doesn't seem to be an ideal solution. No matter what parties you try to take action against, you'll encounter a sympathetic situation. Big Music and Big Video seem to have lost the PR wars.
I'm certainly not making that inference and I'm also not a lawyer but, from what I can tell, when dealing with the government, almost any false statement is a fraud. The only defenses are that you didn't make the statement or an affirmative defense that you believed the statement at the time you made it. Government doesn't like being deceived. DMV is not known for it's sense of humor.
The must allow it for every religion that claims the same tenets. As an example, Amish people can travel internationally without passports. They don't need photo IDs to operate their buggies because getting their photo taken is entirely against their religion. However, Catholics do have to have photo ID since the photo ID isn't against their religion.
The problem that the (false) Pastafarians are facing is that if they say their religion requires head ware in "official" photos only, there is no other religion with the same belief, so a unique situation will have to be found.
What we see here is some creative arguing trying to come up with a set of religious tenets designed to get a particular outcome while avoiding the problems that will occur when those beliefs are found out to not be sincere. It's a dangerous game and I posit that the only winning move is not to play.
Well then let me make it clearer. The reason that we enforce fraud laws is because the original rules were put in place for some purpose and it's not acceptable for any individual to decide that they know better and are exempt. In a fraud case, first you are violating the rule and second you are engaging in a deception as a means of doing so. This could be because (a) the fraudster has malicious intent or (b) the fraudster thinks that their fraud is harmless. Both of these are problematic. In the first case prosecuting the fraud may allow the fraudster to be stopped before they carry out their evil plan. In the second, it allows the fraudster to be stopped before they carry out their stupid plan. The only reason there is any support around here is that a lot of people seem to like this particular fraud because they think it makes some sort of profound social statement and maybe it does, but ends don't justify means. I can't foresee any harm in this at all, but I have no special qualifications to evaluate DMV photos so there very well may be something that an expert knows that none of us do.
The issue is that *you* are not the arbiter of somebody being affected or not. And I gave a great example. Bankers felt the same way when they overstated customer's incomes on their loan applications and you see where it got us. If you think that the rules are wrong, work to change them. Fraud is *intrinsically* harmful because if something is truly harmless you can find a way to achieve it without the deception. As a better example, I'm a member of the Nexus program so I can travel between US and Canada without talking to customs. I once went up to the machine and indicated that I had no food while holding a bag of groceries. Our customs guys rightly yelled at me. I was thinking "nothing to declare" since I knew that everything in the bag was allowed. But their argument is that program members aren't qualified to decide what is and isn't allowed. You have to declare all food even if you know it's allowed and they make the final decision. It's the same principle here. You're declaring yourself to be the final arbiter of whether or not something is harmless and then once in your infallible wisdom you decide that it's okay, you are willing to use fraud and deception to do it. Then, when you're wrong, others suffer the consequences. This type of thinking can only occur with a severely over-inflated sense of self.
Which is why the courts don't evaluate religions for whether they are true, correct, or even reasonable. The standard applied is sincerely held belief. This seems to offend a lot of the/. crowd but it probably shouldn't. Sure it might mean some extra paperwork dealing with Amish passports, but it may also mean protecting people from working on weapons systems. There's nothing wrong with trying to change people's beliefs, there is something quite wrong with forcing people to violate them. This is a slippery slope that leads to tyranny of the majority.
Amish people can travel between Canada, US, and Mexico without a passport for exactly this reason.
https://help.cbp.gov/app/answe....
Accommodations are available for sincere beliefs. It's not available to pranksters.
They are subject to more scrutiny due to the strong incentive to lie (most people don't like becoming cannon fodder). But the standard is the same - sincerely held belief.
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I so wish I had mod points.
The InfoSec industry has a terrible reputation. It will take more then a terminology change, but this *might* be a good first step towards making the industry more attractive. I think /. ers living in their mother's basements probably rank higher in the social pecking order.
BB10 QNX phones run Android apps just about as well as they run natively from what I can tell.
We allow and deny *sincere* request all of the time with no punishment. The issue here is that the prankster doesn't actually believe in the religion. The crime is lying on the drivers license application. When it comes to the court, we only punish people for the most egregiously frivolous suits. This would be a good example though. There is no sincere belief. It's an attempt to make a mockery of the system.
Of course not. There are some beliefs that simply won't be accommodated at all. There are lawyers who devote their entire careers to this stuff specifically and I'm clearly not one of them. There are two separate issues here. Is the belief sincerely held and is the believer entitled to a reasonable accommodation for the sincerely held belief. If the answer to either of those questions is no, there won't be any accommodation given. The courts are generally free to address things in whatever order they deem most sensible and if a case can be decided without reaching every issue in the case, it's not necessary to do so. For a more relevant analogy, this is the equivalent of short-circuit boolean evaluation. If you want a religions accommodation, you have to have the sincere belief and there has to be a reasonable accommodation available. These cases get adjudicated fairly regularly. In the particular case in front of us, there's no point of dealing with the reasonable accommodation question since the petitioner isn't sincere. This case is fascinating on /. for all of the wrong reasons.
I don't think the church of the FSM was involved here. As others have pointed out, the church of the FSM doesn't believe in the church of the FSM. It's a parody. Another poster has brought up the legitimate case of somebody who doesn't realize that FSM is fake and adopts the tenets. If the FSM were involved, there could now be a perjury and/or contempt charge. People on /. seem to think that the legal system is a game and you can "win on a technicality." No judge wants to make that kind of ruling and they work pretty hard to ensure that the *intent* of a law is upheld. There is a purpose for religious accommodation laws. Not everybody like those laws or their purpose. But we have separation of church and state in this country and those laws exist to implement one of the tenets of our constitution. In order to make those laws work, you have to respond to the legitimate petitioners and harshly reject those who demand accommodation under false pretenses. I would expect the courts to try to achieve this.
There is a far-fetched scenario where this thing goes all the way to the Supreme court and a constitutional question is reached about *how much* the government can infringe upon religious liberties and the outcome is that DMV can require everyone to be photographed without head ware (which seems to be what the prankster is advocating for) and the government is generally given more latitude because more narrowly tailored solutions are unworkable.
As you point out, a situation like this is ambiguous and harder to decide. The normal government reaction is to increase the penalty for a false application so that the risk/reward equation precludes all but the most mentally feeble from trying this sort of thing. At first this is done through creative prosecution and then more specific legislation.
Courts sort out similar things all the time, but as far as I know, this would be a somewhat original situation. I'm certainly not in a position to handicap the legal process. However, I wouldn't want to face those charges even if found not guilty. If you get a DMV administrator and a prosecutor who want to go after you, it's a heck of an uphill climb. And there's nothing to be gained. The girl who did this thinks she is making fun of religion and pointing out the absurdity of religious accommodation sensational way. It's unlikely to change anybody's mind. The DMV has a will to live and operate. So now they have an untenable situation. To resolve that, they will go after the easiest target. Fighting against religious accommodation is not a path of least resistance. Looking for an excuse to charge this lady with a crime is easy. That's the course that I imagine will be taken. Again it's pretty clear in this case that the person didn't really want religious accommodation, they wanted to prove a point. If somebody else that isn't an absurd joke, but this isn't that case.
Only for a plane of a certain weight. If I apply a certain amount of thrust to a 1kg object, it will go faster than if I apply it to a 10000 kg object. You expect a certain speed for a certain thrust and weight. But I think you're point is still valid, because you're not building ground speed at the expected rate. I still hope the OP comes back and comments as I'd like to think that the pilots could have known sooner that they weren't building enough speed. Then, adding thrust would have been easy.
The issue here is that, since there are always going to be people on this planet, there is no "end." Everything is a means. I can go out and try to suppress an entire group of disenfranchised people in the name of preventing violence. If I define the "end" to be at the height of the repression I can declare success. But this may make a bigger problem later on. That's why we have to pay attention to the means.
Just read your post again. I think the challenge is that the "too slow" speed is a function of how heavy you are. A lightly loaded plane can take off at a slower speed. Since they both thought the plane was 10k kg lighter than it was, the speed may not have been an indicator. But the fact that they didn't seem to be generating *lift* *could* have been an indicator but again I'm now very curious but don't have any hard knowledge.
It seems (and again I'm speaking about something where I have very little knowledge) that they did realize at some point which is why they pulled up hard on the stick and struck the tail. I don't know the procedure in this case. Should they have also opened up the throttle? Should they have known sooner? I hate to be an armchair quarterback but the OP was good enough to raise these types of questions and I'm curious to know the answers.
In accounting, they would call this an offsetting error. Two mistakes that cancelled each other out but still left the wrong answer. That seems a better name here. A transpositional error would be swapping two digits. $12.32 instead of $12.2.
This all makes sense and I too wish I had mod points as I would use them instead of responding. What I don't understand here is how the error wasn't noticed while going down the runway. I'm going to explain this using all of the wrong terminology but hopefully my point comes across. As the plane travels down the runway, the generated lift causes the nose to start to rise at a certain angle. As you get closer and closer to leaving the ground, the pitch rises. My understanding is that the Concorde relied on starting to take off with no flaps or elevator to build up maximum speed and then at the last second the pilots pulled up as hard as they could. But subsonic passenger planes set the flaps prior to engaging thrust and so a takeoff has a certain "feel." How is it that the pilots didn't notice that they weren't getting enough lift. As a passenger, I think that I would notice it and I have no flying experience. (For reasons I can't fathom, they don't give commercial pilots licenses to us blind people)
Here you go another link for the state in question. http://www.bostoncriminaldefen... Again, I'm not a lawyer. I don't like on applications to government entities. I have done quite a few of them and had people encourage me to be dishonest in the past (for example stating that an investment property is a primary residence). Fortunately I've had the sense not to go down that path. What we have here is somebody committing what looks like a serious crime (again, I don't think you're quite understanding that I'm not a lawyer, just a guy with some sense) in order to show that other people are stupid!
Well here's a link *from a lawyer* about it being perjury in California. Anything else that I can Google for you? http://www.shouselaw.com/perju...
It's not the DMVs place to make that determination, that is true. But these determinations do get made. Courts do make these determinations. I've pointed out the salient examples other places. When people said that war was against their religion, the courts allowed draftees to perform alternative service. When they said that war wasn't generally against their religion but that the Vietnam was was, they essentially got laughed out of the court room. Courts make these determinations all the time. They also do it in asylum cases. They do it all the time when Amish people apply to travel across the Canada/US/Mexican border without photo identification. I'm not a lawyer, but there are pretty serious penalties for making false statements when applying for government issued identification. Worse, those are anti-terrorism laws which guarantees that the penalties are insane. That's what we have here. Courts don't evaluate objective reasonableness of beliefs, but they do perform tests all the time for whether or not those beliefs are sincerely held. Committing what might be a serious crime in order to play a ridiculous prank makes most religions seem rational in comparison. What we have here is a pretty unsympathetic party who clearly doesn't have sincere beliefs. He's trying to make the news in hopes of proving that religion is stupid and instead has only showed that he's a bit challenged in the IQ department!
No the grounds for prosecution are laws written that explicitly make certain false statements grounds for prosecution. But these laws have been written for just about every statement that you make to the government. Even if you don't know of a specific law that makes a particular false statement to government illegal, it probably exists. And ignorance of the law isn't a defense. So here we have a guy going into DMV making a false statement that may or may not be grounds for prosecution (but most likely is) so that he can wear a spaghetti strainer on his head! And his purpose is to make fun of other people's religious beliefs? Believing in a flying spaghetti monster sounds rational compared to this kind of stunt. Making misrepresntations to government is almost always illegal and carries sever punishment. Not being a lawyer, I can't comment on specific laws in specific states. But you can be pretty sure there is a law, for the stated purpose of preventing terrorism, that makes it a serious crime to provide a false or misleading statement when applying for government issued identification such as a drivers license. And if you piss the wrong person off you very well may get prosecuted for it. I'm not saying this *should* be the law. I'm saying that this particular behavior by this person is counter-productive and stupid.
BitTorrent is a protocol. The *operators* of BitTorrent networks should be required to operate honestly. (i.e. not setup a network for the purpose of piracy while trying to maintain a veneer of legitimacy). But if you substitute HTTP for BitTorrent in your post, you'll see why the argument isn't quite right. There are some technical aspects of the BitTorrent protocol that make this a bit harder because, except for the tracker, there really isn't a network operator, but I see your point. We have to make *somebody* liable for infringement because, if we don't, we might as well not have the copyrights in the first place. There doesn't seem to be an ideal solution. No matter what parties you try to take action against, you'll encounter a sympathetic situation. Big Music and Big Video seem to have lost the PR wars.
I'm certainly not making that inference and I'm also not a lawyer but, from what I can tell, when dealing with the government, almost any false statement is a fraud. The only defenses are that you didn't make the statement or an affirmative defense that you believed the statement at the time you made it. Government doesn't like being deceived. DMV is not known for it's sense of humor.
The must allow it for every religion that claims the same tenets. As an example, Amish people can travel internationally without passports. They don't need photo IDs to operate their buggies because getting their photo taken is entirely against their religion. However, Catholics do have to have photo ID since the photo ID isn't against their religion. The problem that the (false) Pastafarians are facing is that if they say their religion requires head ware in "official" photos only, there is no other religion with the same belief, so a unique situation will have to be found. What we see here is some creative arguing trying to come up with a set of religious tenets designed to get a particular outcome while avoiding the problems that will occur when those beliefs are found out to not be sincere. It's a dangerous game and I posit that the only winning move is not to play.
Well then let me make it clearer. The reason that we enforce fraud laws is because the original rules were put in place for some purpose and it's not acceptable for any individual to decide that they know better and are exempt. In a fraud case, first you are violating the rule and second you are engaging in a deception as a means of doing so. This could be because (a) the fraudster has malicious intent or (b) the fraudster thinks that their fraud is harmless. Both of these are problematic. In the first case prosecuting the fraud may allow the fraudster to be stopped before they carry out their evil plan. In the second, it allows the fraudster to be stopped before they carry out their stupid plan. The only reason there is any support around here is that a lot of people seem to like this particular fraud because they think it makes some sort of profound social statement and maybe it does, but ends don't justify means. I can't foresee any harm in this at all, but I have no special qualifications to evaluate DMV photos so there very well may be something that an expert knows that none of us do.
The issue is that *you* are not the arbiter of somebody being affected or not. And I gave a great example. Bankers felt the same way when they overstated customer's incomes on their loan applications and you see where it got us. If you think that the rules are wrong, work to change them. Fraud is *intrinsically* harmful because if something is truly harmless you can find a way to achieve it without the deception. As a better example, I'm a member of the Nexus program so I can travel between US and Canada without talking to customs. I once went up to the machine and indicated that I had no food while holding a bag of groceries. Our customs guys rightly yelled at me. I was thinking "nothing to declare" since I knew that everything in the bag was allowed. But their argument is that program members aren't qualified to decide what is and isn't allowed. You have to declare all food even if you know it's allowed and they make the final decision. It's the same principle here. You're declaring yourself to be the final arbiter of whether or not something is harmless and then once in your infallible wisdom you decide that it's okay, you are willing to use fraud and deception to do it. Then, when you're wrong, others suffer the consequences. This type of thinking can only occur with a severely over-inflated sense of self.
Which is why the courts don't evaluate religions for whether they are true, correct, or even reasonable. The standard applied is sincerely held belief. This seems to offend a lot of the /. crowd but it probably shouldn't. Sure it might mean some extra paperwork dealing with Amish passports, but it may also mean protecting people from working on weapons systems. There's nothing wrong with trying to change people's beliefs, there is something quite wrong with forcing people to violate them. This is a slippery slope that leads to tyranny of the majority.
Amish people can travel between Canada, US, and Mexico without a passport for exactly this reason. https://help.cbp.gov/app/answe.... Accommodations are available for sincere beliefs. It's not available to pranksters.
They are subject to more scrutiny due to the strong incentive to lie (most people don't like becoming cannon fodder). But the standard is the same - sincerely held belief.