Basically, if you commit a crime like this, ANYTHING YOU OWN that could potentially have been used in the commission of the crime, whether or not it WAS used, can be seized by the authorities.
You don't even have to be convicted of a crime. A lot of the time, they keep the property anyway.
Guy: Whew. Glad I was finally found not guilty of that possession charge. Too bad I have a large debt to pay to my lawyers. So when do I get my house back?
Cops: Your what?
Guy: My house. You confiscated it and all of the stuff in it when you raided me.
Cops: Exactly. We confiscated it. It's not your house anymore.
Guy: I want my property back.
Cops: You should have thought of that before you committed the crime.
Guy: But I was found not guilty. There was no crime.
Cops: Yeah. Right. Sure. Doesn't matter anyway, we get to keep anything we confiscate.
Well, you're not a government agency, are you? The "damages" he could have caused by breaking into Joe Shmoe's computer are a just a teensy bit little less than those caused by breaking into a large organization/government agency's, don't you think?
That's exactly the problem in computer crime cases. People are always being punished based on what they could have done.
"Your honor, upon searching the house of the accused, we found a substance that could have been C4 plastic explosive. Upon later analysis, it turned out not to be, but the fact that it could have been shows that the defendant is a danger to society."
You are never done reading WoT. I'm assuming you're done with the 10 books + 1 prequel that are out. As far as I know, Robert Jordan plans to write at least 2 more books and 2 more prequels.
Robert Jordan will keep writing WoT books until he dies, leaving everyone hanging on a cliffhanger ending from the last book he's written.
Does this "copying of music for private use" law only apply to blank media that has levies applied?
Nope. If you can find a wax cylinder to record music on, you can do it.
The levy only applies to blank media used primarily for music (CDRs, CDRWs, cassettes) but if music is not the primary usage (DVDRs, hard drives, flash memory), the levy doesn't apply.
That sounds rather scandalous. Why haven't they distributed ALL of it?!
They're basically a government agency and therefore slow as hell at sending out money. It took them a couple years to start making payments to artists.
If you read how the money gets distributed, it breaks down to a survey period they do once per year. Fees paid are based on how many times the artist's song is played on the radio and also by sales. Quite a job to sort and calculate all of that and there's no incentive for them to go fast.
Not only is it legal to make copies of your own music, you can borrow friends CDs and make copies of their music too. Or just download music from your favorite P2P program.
Something that's often forgotten is that Canada followed the British "Fair Dealing" doctorine rather than "Fair Use". Fair Dealing doesn't include the right to media shifting. Until Part VIII of the Copyright Act came into existence, it was not legal in Canada to copy from your own CD to a casette tape so you could play it in the car (Part VIII is actually quite old. I believe in came in sometime in the 80s).
This law was brought in so that Canadians could have something equivalent to the fair use that Americans enjoyed at the time. It actually leapfrogged past fair use and added extra rights but with the cost of the levy.
Don't have time to check my facts here, but I remember hearing that the levies on blank CDR's only apply to those that are designated "Music" CDR's. You may notice that some stores (COSTCO is one place I've noticed) have these CDR's located in a different area and cost quite a bit more.
There's a levy on both. The levy on Music CDRs is quite a bit higher though. 77 cents per music CDR, 21 cents for a normal one. There is a difference between the two types but it's not quality related. I seem to remember that there are certain standalone burners that only accept audio CDRs
In this example [innocenceproject.org], a guy spent 15 years of his life in prison - post conviction DNA testing proved him to be the wrong guy.
There are 3 cases famous cases like this in Canada. The three M's. Morin, Milgaard, and Marshall. Morin spent 3 years in prison, Marshall spent 11 years, and Milgaard spent 23 years. All were saved by DNA evidence and all were convicted of crimes that could have gotten them death in certain states.
"Rural" Canadians have no higher access to broadband than Rural Americans. It's just percentage wise, overall Canadians are higher.
Bullshit. I live in a village of less than 1000 people. Cable modems have been here for a few years and DSL is coming soon. Smaller places already have DSL because we already had access to cable modems. The only places that don't have high speed access are truly rural areas that are too far from the CO. That'll probably change once wireless starts to be rolled out.
Try and explain to a Canadian how on the East Coast of the US your town borders on 6 other towns and they all have town halls and blah blah blah. They don't understand (and I'm referring to people that grew up in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver). They have the impression that you have your town, drive 50 miles, and you get the next town.
That's exactly how the Toronto area is setup. If you're not familiar with the area, you can be driving in Mississauga, look up and see a sign that says Brampton. There's no transition between the two. The same thing happens in Kitchener-Waterloo.
You should see the neurons misfiring when I say, ok -- so if you say it's 50 miles to the next town and the area in between is "nothing", it's gotta belong to some jurisdiction. Is it part of one of hte towns? Just under Provincial? Just under Federal? Never got a good answer to that logic, lol.
I'm not sure who you were talking to, but most of the "nothing" areas in provinces with people in them are part of a township or municipality. Sure if you go to the territories you'll find plenty of land that no one lives on but is probably technically owned by either a native tribe or the federal government.
This is the same type of reasonaing that the Bell System used to claim millions in losses in the 911 hacker case. The company used a complicated formula to compute losses on a document that they sold copies of for $14. The court's didn't buy it in the 80's and should buy it now...
In case someone saw "911" in there and thought this had to do with terrorists, the parent poster is referring to the Craig Neidorf case. It actually happened in the early 90s. At the time, Neidorf published an online magazine called Phrack. In one issue, he published a document which described some really boring aspects of Enhanced 911. The company which produced the document included incredible things to up the price of the document. Salaries of employees, entire computer systems, hospital bills for the birth of employees, etc. The total came to somewhere around $80,000.
Thankfully, Neidorf won. Of course, he had a $100,000 bill for lawyer fees at the end of it. Justice is expensive.
Oh, and the fates of Marcus and Lennier -- the only two truly honourable characters in the whole series -- were very sad, too. Their destinies may have been perfect for the reality of the series, but if we can save the whole universe, couldn't they at least have found room for two characters in five whole series to have the happy endings they deserved?
I'm not sure about Lennier, but you should remember that Marcus is not dead, he's frozen.
JMS wrote a short story where Marcus is thawed out (something like 200 years after B5). He clones Ivanova, they go to a deserted planet, and live happily ever after. And JMS considers it canon.
Extradition does work fairly well for capital crimes, as long as solid evidence is involved.
Just a slight clarification, Canada no longer has any capital crimes. You will not receive the death penalty for any offense committed in Canada.
I have heard that the Canadian government will often refuse to extradite someone accused of a capital crime in the US unless it is promised that the prosecution will not seek the death penalty.
Clearly the broke Canadian law. However, the fact is that the Canadians can't do anything about it except invade Sealand, impose sanctions of some sort on the entire country, or hope the guy flys back to Canada so that they can arrest him at Immigration.
Even Canada could win a war against Sealand. It probably wouldn't come to that in a murder case. As another poster said, the person would probably eventually end up in a country with an extradition treaty with Canada. In the case of Sealand, it would probably be England.
1. Canada is fairly diverse--geographically, demographically and politically. Were Canada to become the 52nd state I'm willing to bet that it wouldn't be a blue state--it would be a swing state. In the last federal election Conservatives got almost as many votes as Liberals. Canada isn't Liberal--ONTARIO is liberal and the rest of the country is a mixed bag of other parites. In fact, if you didn't count Ontario then Canada would have a Conservative government. Even Ontario isn't solidly liberal the way it used to be (granted, our idea of "conservative" is probably along the lines of a McCain or Swartzenegger Republican)
If Canada was incorporated as a single state, it would not be a swing state in presidential elections. You can't just ignore the vote of the people of Ontario. It has about 1/3 of the population of the country. The last polls I heard had about 66% of Canadians against Bush. Sure if someone like McCain or Schwarzenegger was running, Canada might become a swing state but so would quite a few other traditionally blue states.
Statistically, no matter how you play, the house eventually wins at roulette.
Statistics only work reliably over long periods of time. Let's say you roll a 12 sided die. Each side has a 1 in 12 chance of coming up. Now let's say that 1-5 represent black, 6 and 7 represent 0 and 00, and 8-12 represent red. The odds are even more against you than in roulette, but it's still quite possible to win 3 or 4 times in a row and then quit.
Overall the house still wins and it's more likely to win than you but it's not improbable to come out ahead in the short term. The key is to quit while you're ahead.
That's ok, just make sure you set pm_walkbob "0" in the console.
Maybe it's just me, but I find games that don't have that head bounce motion are more likely to make me queasy. Wolfenstein 3d didn't have head bobbing and it felt wrong somehow. I'm fine with any of the ones that have head bobbing.
Wager on black/red, odd/even, you have a 50/50 chance of doubling your bet.
That's not completely true. Roulette wheels have a 0 and sometimes a 00 on them to skew things slightly in favour of the casino. Your point still stands though. The odds aren't horrible and you can win a bit of money in the short term.
Good point, why would I ever want to download "things" at a fairly constant 2.6-2.8Mbps (on my 3 Mb connection) from newsgroups when I can do so at a very inconsitent 50-100Kbps from a torrent?
Perhaps your ISP hasn't "improved" (or in my case "enhanced") your service and increased the number of connections allowed from 3 to 2 and upped the speed from 5Mbit to 64kbit (actually 2 32kbit connections).
Be proud, the chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams.
I think it depends on which system you grew up using. It also depends on where you live. If the temperature range is 10C to 40C during the entire year, maybe the extra precision in the F scale helps. But if temperatures range from -30C to 40C, precision doesn't matter so much. Especially when it's the humidity and wind chill that really makes you feel uncomfortable.
Here in the UK (and other countries) when you purchase a CD, you purchase a licence to listen to the music on that medium only.
That's actually what led to Canada bringing in its current copyright laws. We used to be under that system but copying from record to cassette tape wasn't legal. This seemed incredibly stupid so a law was brought in that allows transfer between mediums and allows copying music for personal use no matter the source of that music.
Of course, it also brought in a levy on such things as blank tapes and later CDRs and Minidiscs. The music industry gets quite a bit of money from this but they're now lobbying to get the copying for personal use part dropped. I doubt they'd want to get rid of the levy though.
There are really two factors that help explain this phenomenon.
I think you're missing a third factor. The current generation in power was raised in the belief that if the Communists did it, then America should do the opposite. Americans (in general) have an attitude that everything is black and white. Middle ground is not an option because there is no middle ground.
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Sam Fisher vs. Football players? My money is on Sam Fisher.
But what if da football players have Ditka on der side?
I'm thinking Fisher 0, Ditka and football players...147.
Da Bears.
Basically, if you commit a crime like this, ANYTHING YOU OWN that could potentially have been used in the commission of the crime, whether or not it WAS used, can be seized by the authorities.
You don't even have to be convicted of a crime. A lot of the time, they keep the property anyway.
Guy: Whew. Glad I was finally found not guilty of that possession charge. Too bad I have a large debt to pay to my lawyers. So when do I get my house back?
Cops: Your what?
Guy: My house. You confiscated it and all of the stuff in it when you raided me.
Cops: Exactly. We confiscated it. It's not your house anymore.
Guy: I want my property back.
Cops: You should have thought of that before you committed the crime.
Guy: But I was found not guilty. There was no crime.
Cops: Yeah. Right. Sure. Doesn't matter anyway, we get to keep anything we confiscate.
Well, you're not a government agency, are you? The "damages" he could have caused by breaking into Joe Shmoe's computer are a just a teensy bit little less than those caused by breaking into a large organization/government agency's, don't you think?
That's exactly the problem in computer crime cases. People are always being punished based on what they could have done.
"Your honor, upon searching the house of the accused, we found a substance that could have been C4 plastic explosive. Upon later analysis, it turned out not to be, but the fact that it could have been shows that the defendant is a danger to society."
The rest of the nation could actually learn a thing or two from Nevada of all places.
There's a reason Nevada knows about this type of stuff. Slot machines.
You are never done reading WoT. I'm assuming you're done with the 10 books + 1 prequel that are out. As far as I know, Robert Jordan plans to write at least 2 more books and 2 more prequels.
Robert Jordan will keep writing WoT books until he dies, leaving everyone hanging on a cliffhanger ending from the last book he's written.
Does this "copying of music for private use" law only apply to blank media that has levies applied?
Nope. If you can find a wax cylinder to record music on, you can do it.
The levy only applies to blank media used primarily for music (CDRs, CDRWs, cassettes) but if music is not the primary usage (DVDRs, hard drives, flash memory), the levy doesn't apply.
That sounds rather scandalous. Why haven't they distributed ALL of it?!
They're basically a government agency and therefore slow as hell at sending out money. It took them a couple years to start making payments to artists.
If you read how the money gets distributed, it breaks down to a survey period they do once per year. Fees paid are based on how many times the artist's song is played on the radio and also by sales. Quite a job to sort and calculate all of that and there's no incentive for them to go fast.
Not only is it legal to make copies of your own music, you can borrow friends CDs and make copies of their music too. Or just download music from your favorite P2P program.
Something that's often forgotten is that Canada followed the British "Fair Dealing" doctorine rather than "Fair Use". Fair Dealing doesn't include the right to media shifting. Until Part VIII of the Copyright Act came into existence, it was not legal in Canada to copy from your own CD to a casette tape so you could play it in the car (Part VIII is actually quite old. I believe in came in sometime in the 80s).
This law was brought in so that Canadians could have something equivalent to the fair use that Americans enjoyed at the time. It actually leapfrogged past fair use and added extra rights but with the cost of the levy.
Don't have time to check my facts here, but I remember hearing that the levies on blank CDR's only apply to those that are designated "Music" CDR's. You may notice that some stores (COSTCO is one place I've noticed) have these CDR's located in a different area and cost quite a bit more.
There's a levy on both. The levy on Music CDRs is quite a bit higher though. 77 cents per music CDR, 21 cents for a normal one. There is a difference between the two types but it's not quality related. I seem to remember that there are certain standalone burners that only accept audio CDRs
In this example [innocenceproject.org], a guy spent 15 years of his life in prison - post conviction DNA testing proved him to be the wrong guy.
There are 3 cases famous cases like this in Canada. The three M's. Morin, Milgaard, and Marshall. Morin spent 3 years in prison, Marshall spent 11 years, and Milgaard spent 23 years. All were saved by DNA evidence and all were convicted of crimes that could have gotten them death in certain states.
"Rural" Canadians have no higher access to broadband than Rural Americans. It's just percentage wise, overall Canadians are higher.
Bullshit. I live in a village of less than 1000 people. Cable modems have been here for a few years and DSL is coming soon. Smaller places already have DSL because we already had access to cable modems. The only places that don't have high speed access are truly rural areas that are too far from the CO. That'll probably change once wireless starts to be rolled out.
Try and explain to a Canadian how on the East Coast of the US your town borders on 6 other towns and they all have town halls and blah blah blah. They don't understand (and I'm referring to people that grew up in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver). They have the impression that you have your town, drive 50 miles, and you get the next town.
That's exactly how the Toronto area is setup. If you're not familiar with the area, you can be driving in Mississauga, look up and see a sign that says Brampton. There's no transition between the two. The same thing happens in Kitchener-Waterloo.
You should see the neurons misfiring when I say, ok -- so if you say it's 50 miles to the next town and the area in between is "nothing", it's gotta belong to some jurisdiction. Is it part of one of hte towns? Just under Provincial? Just under Federal? Never got a good answer to that logic, lol.
I'm not sure who you were talking to, but most of the "nothing" areas in provinces with people in them are part of a township or municipality. Sure if you go to the territories you'll find plenty of land that no one lives on but is probably technically owned by either a native tribe or the federal government.
This is the same type of reasonaing that the Bell System used to claim millions in losses in the 911 hacker case. The company used a complicated formula to compute losses on a document that they sold copies of for $14. The court's didn't buy it in the 80's and should buy it now...
In case someone saw "911" in there and thought this had to do with terrorists, the parent poster is referring to the Craig Neidorf case. It actually happened in the early 90s. At the time, Neidorf published an online magazine called Phrack. In one issue, he published a document which described some really boring aspects of Enhanced 911. The company which produced the document included incredible things to up the price of the document. Salaries of employees, entire computer systems, hospital bills for the birth of employees, etc. The total came to somewhere around $80,000.
Thankfully, Neidorf won. Of course, he had a $100,000 bill for lawyer fees at the end of it. Justice is expensive.
Oh, and the fates of Marcus and Lennier -- the only two truly honourable characters in the whole series -- were very sad, too. Their destinies may have been perfect for the reality of the series, but if we can save the whole universe, couldn't they at least have found room for two characters in five whole series to have the happy endings they deserved?
I'm not sure about Lennier, but you should remember that Marcus is not dead, he's frozen.
JMS wrote a short story where Marcus is thawed out (something like 200 years after B5). He clones Ivanova, they go to a deserted planet, and live happily ever after. And JMS considers it canon.
Extradition does work fairly well for capital crimes, as long as solid evidence is involved.
Just a slight clarification, Canada no longer has any capital crimes. You will not receive the death penalty for any offense committed in Canada.
I have heard that the Canadian government will often refuse to extradite someone accused of a capital crime in the US unless it is promised that the prosecution will not seek the death penalty.
Clearly the broke Canadian law. However, the fact is that the Canadians can't do anything about it except invade Sealand, impose sanctions of some sort on the entire country, or hope the guy flys back to Canada so that they can arrest him at Immigration.
Even Canada could win a war against Sealand. It probably wouldn't come to that in a murder case. As another poster said, the person would probably eventually end up in a country with an extradition treaty with Canada. In the case of Sealand, it would probably be England.
1. Canada is fairly diverse--geographically, demographically and politically. Were Canada to become the 52nd state I'm willing to bet that it wouldn't be a blue state--it would be a swing state. In the last federal election Conservatives got almost as many votes as Liberals. Canada isn't Liberal--ONTARIO is liberal and the rest of the country is a mixed bag of other parites. In fact, if you didn't count Ontario then Canada would have a Conservative government. Even Ontario isn't solidly liberal the way it used to be (granted, our idea of "conservative" is probably along the lines of a McCain or Swartzenegger Republican)
If Canada was incorporated as a single state, it would not be a swing state in presidential elections. You can't just ignore the vote of the people of Ontario. It has about 1/3 of the population of the country. The last polls I heard had about 66% of Canadians against Bush. Sure if someone like McCain or Schwarzenegger was running, Canada might become a swing state but so would quite a few other traditionally blue states.
Statistically, no matter how you play, the house eventually wins at roulette.
Statistics only work reliably over long periods of time. Let's say you roll a 12 sided die. Each side has a 1 in 12 chance of coming up. Now let's say that 1-5 represent black, 6 and 7 represent 0 and 00, and 8-12 represent red. The odds are even more against you than in roulette, but it's still quite possible to win 3 or 4 times in a row and then quit.
Overall the house still wins and it's more likely to win than you but it's not improbable to come out ahead in the short term. The key is to quit while you're ahead.
That's ok, just make sure you set pm_walkbob "0" in the console.
Maybe it's just me, but I find games that don't have that head bounce motion are more likely to make me queasy. Wolfenstein 3d didn't have head bobbing and it felt wrong somehow. I'm fine with any of the ones that have head bobbing.
Wager on black/red, odd/even, you have a 50/50 chance of doubling your bet.
That's not completely true. Roulette wheels have a 0 and sometimes a 00 on them to skew things slightly in favour of the casino. Your point still stands though. The odds aren't horrible and you can win a bit of money in the short term.
Good point, why would I ever want to download "things" at a fairly constant 2.6-2.8Mbps (on my 3 Mb connection) from newsgroups when I can do so at a very inconsitent 50-100Kbps from a torrent?
Perhaps your ISP hasn't "improved" (or in my case "enhanced") your service and increased the number of connections allowed from 3 to 2 and upped the speed from 5Mbit to 64kbit (actually 2 32kbit connections).
Be proud, the chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams.
I think it depends on which system you grew up using. It also depends on where you live. If the temperature range is 10C to 40C during the entire year, maybe the extra precision in the F scale helps. But if temperatures range from -30C to 40C, precision doesn't matter so much. Especially when it's the humidity and wind chill that really makes you feel uncomfortable.
I think there's a lesson to be learned from that.
Pass stricter laws to allow for the death penalty in such cases?
Here in the UK (and other countries) when you purchase a CD, you purchase a licence to listen to the music on that medium only.
That's actually what led to Canada bringing in its current copyright laws. We used to be under that system but copying from record to cassette tape wasn't legal. This seemed incredibly stupid so a law was brought in that allows transfer between mediums and allows copying music for personal use no matter the source of that music.
Of course, it also brought in a levy on such things as blank tapes and later CDRs and Minidiscs. The music industry gets quite a bit of money from this but they're now lobbying to get the copying for personal use part dropped. I doubt they'd want to get rid of the levy though.
There are really two factors that help explain this phenomenon.
I think you're missing a third factor. The current generation in power was raised in the belief that if the Communists did it, then America should do the opposite. Americans (in general) have an attitude that everything is black and white. Middle ground is not an option because there is no middle ground.
What country do you live in? In the US, and in quite a lot of other countries, judges can and do impose fines for frivolous or harrassing lawsuits.
I think the grandparent post was referring to physically slapping such people.