It's not Trump. The US antitrust environment has been very pro-business and anti-consumer for a while now. I would be more concerned about the incoming administration using antitrust powers to attack businesses it doesn't like than I would be about a general decrease in antitrust activity which happened decades ago.
The internet was NOT British invented, the web was. And you're uneducated if you think the two words are even remotely interchangeable.
The two words are interchangeable outside of the tech community, and maybe even inside large parts of it. Ordinary people don't know the levels of the OSI model and will parse going "on the web" and going "on the internet" interchangeably. It's like how a person is not uneducated just because they think "scientist" and "physicist" are interchangeable words. For 99% of people 99% of the time, they are.
If you're in the 1% of people (you are) or the 1% of the time (like discussing who invented what), of course, it sounds ridiculous.
This was obvious a year ago if you were paying attention in the healthcare startup space. It doesn't mean there's no market, but they haven't made it to the general market some were hoping for. On the upside, more specialized uses should continue to drive some work in the space (and perhaps yield successful B2B exits) in the future. But they will (for the most part) be focused more on utility than fashion.
Electronic Discovery is quite possibly the way to go. A mid-sized company has to sort through documents the size of the empire state building (or they would be if they were printed) in litigation, and electronic discovery experts are paid well. The other things that immediately come to mind are law firm IT, law school IT, and programming work in highly regulated fields with substantial legal components, like health care startups (or another area looking for people with your skill set where their work overlaps with your legal interests, at least a little).
1. I said password or fingerprint because they are deeply related in this instance, and will need to be considered in the context of cases on the testimonial status of a password.
2. Taking a fingerprint for purposes of identity verification is different than using a fingerprint as a password. In what ways is it different? In what ways is it the same? Does it make sense to treat it differently under the law? Of course there is precedent for using fingerprints when someone is arrested and considering them non-testimonial, but someone can argue they are being used in a testimonial way here.
We have very little information to go on. I'd like to read the actual warant and know the cirumstances, but based on the article it seems like a violation of the FOURTH amendment. The cops are supposed to have a warrant, based on probable cause, describing what particular things they are searching for and where, and why they think those things are in that place.
I can't imagine a probable cause to believe that everyone in the building has some specific evidence on their phone. Thus the search itself is unconstitutional under the fourth, with or without a fingerprint.
The fifth says you don't have to testify against yourself. It doesn't say you can't be fingerprinted. Thus I see no *fifth* amendment violation, though it seems like a rather onerous *fourth* amendment violation.
The Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is implicated primarily by (1) the question of whether a password or fingerprint is "testimonial" and therefore cannot be coerced without violating the prohibition on self-incrimination and secondarily by (2) the question of whether the Fifth Amendment can be used to prevent the search of your phones because they are an extension of your mind (a very weak argument under well-established law--the second point is worth a footnote in a law review article but probably not in a brief to the court.). The Fourth Amendment is implicated by search and seizure of the phones.
We do antitrust routinely, we just don't do a lot of it. We do much more deal-blocking than we do company-busting, which hasn't really been done much in a long time. With populist sentiments rising on both sides of the aisle, the environment might almost reward politicians who favor a return to more robust antitrust activity.
Now, Congress is talking about it because of the election. It is the downside of announcing a major merger two weeks before an election. On the other hand, AT&T donates a lot...
not only this but the inept users whose devices get pawned and used to attack other systems should be held legally responsible for the attacks.
Only up to a point. It's not really fair to expect the random non-computer guy who owns an IoT light bulb to secure it against electronic attack. The company that manufactures the bulb and decides telnet is an appropriate protocol to use to connect to it, on the other hand...
Keep that in mind every time you log into Slashdot. Et tu/.?
While I suppose this is an argument for submitting anonymous content, I only run the risk of being hung for my own posting foolishness, while you could easily be mistaken for another coward.
Fifteen domains, including Google, are asking to run javascript on this page of slashdot.
"And, while you're at it, could you tell Marissa where she left her car keys? She's been searching for days without any luck. "
No this is more like the federal government orders you not to tell Marissa or anyone else where the car keys are, but you can write a very public letter asking them to do so without admitting that you haven't been told not to.
Laws are not supposed to be enforced according to someone's interpretation of their intent. If the law is not performing as intended, then it can be amended by the lawmakers.
Oh yeah -- the courts are not supposed to interpret intent either; they're supposed to make judgements according to the way laws are written. This, of course, is an area where practice often departs from theory.
Several centuries would like to disagree with your talking point.
Intent is *one* factor in interpreting what a law means. How persuasive a factor it is depends on the circumstances and the jurisdiction in which the law is being interpreted and all of the other factors that suggest a different result. Sometimes it comes in through lenses like "consistent with public policy" or "intent to solely regulate the entire area of law" or "under a statutory scheme designed to" or "the legislative history of the Amendment..." or "the intent of the framers" and in a dozen other ways. Sometimes it is rejected because one or two legislators cite some reason and that's not enough to tell that's what the whole legislature meant.
... There isn't even an attempt to reconcile it with constitutional law.
Judges simply don't work that way. We may disagree with them, but by and large they are struggling to figure out the right answer according to constitutional precedent. The fact that multiple circuits of federal appeals judges have held that way emphasizes the fact that this is not some court going off the rails and neglecting the Constitution. Federal judges are much nicer, more thoughtful, and more considerate of the right result than the vast majority of people you meet in your everyday life.
I haven't read the case, but could easily construct a Fourth Amendment argument here that favors the police ability to scan the card and contact the vendors. Most obviously, the pen register case (Maryland v. Smith, IIRC) and the thermal sensor case (Kylo, maybe?) apply. You are transmitting information about the gift card to a third party without privilege (the store), so obviously you are not expecting that its contents will be private and you do not have a reasonable expectation in privacy in it under Smith. Personally I might be willing to revisit Smith on the other side, because it was passed in an age when Supreme Court Justices grew up with party lines and no actual expectation of privacy on the phone, but there is still a strong chain of well-established precedent that is respected in a common-law system like ours and will convince most judges--even ones who disagree with it.
Similarly, under the thermal sensor case, the fact that the tech for card reading is widely available in the civilian market means that the mere fact that you have to use tech doesn't help you.
Also, your description fails to capture the fact that the guy was under arrest because of an open warrant. I could construct arguments on his behalf that would give him some chance of winning, but the precedent clearly disfavors him. Just because we disagree with the decision of a court doesn't mean it was wrong, or that the judges were not trying to follow precedent. Case law is reasoning by analogy. It's not engineering, and it's not neat. It gives you a probability distribution that good arguments can shift one way or the other as a series of people try to figure out what the best answer is.
I consider myself a fairly laid back person, liberal (in a more original sense than is perhaps used today), with a strong live and let live attitude towards life, and yet I can't bring myself to see eye to eye with some of the articles and the overall wording of that declaration.
While it is undoubtedly a 'good thing' (TM) I suspect you have to live with unicorns and smoke rainbows to fully jive with what it says...
As individuals we may disagree over whether certain things should be considered universal rights--personally, I often disagree with decisions about whether someone should have a right. But that document is a core part of the accepted definition of human rights.
The definition of human rights is an artifact of public international law. Most lawyers, scholars, and diplomats consider the primary documents to be the "International Bill of Rights," which includes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Eleanor Roosevelt's legacy after WW2), as well as two other treaties--one on Civil and Political Rights (The ICCPR), and one on Social and Economic Rights (the ICESCR). Of the two treaties, each has about 160 states who are parties. The United States is one of the outliers in that it has signed but not ratified the one on Social and Economic Rights, which means the treaty is not entirely binding in domestic law of the United States, although it is incorporated into United States law indirectly under something called the "Charming Betsy" doctrine.
I really hate to say this, but it's not inconceivable that the Chinese might be intentionally gaming the citation-based rankings by citing each other a lot (we have seen such things happen in the west, too, albeit on a smaller scale). I'd like to see how many citations these papers get from non-Chinese sources as well.
Citations in academia are also not entirely a measure of how useful the cited paper is--it is a political act and one about increasing your reputation, expressing appreciation for someone else's work, showing you know the field, and even increasing the number of people who notice and read your paper, all depending on your particular position. Most cited works in a good paper are on-point to a significant degree, but there is a lot of room for discretion.
So citation count can occasionally be useful, but it doesn't mean a lot on its own.
How about just take the money and build more damn houses and apartment complexes. Of course, all those people that already have housing in SF don't want their property values to drop or lose the "lifestyle" of living in hip little neighborhoods.
Subsidize demand, not supply. Housing vouchers that go with an individual, not with the unit. Right now, some housing subsidies are tied to units and some are tied to individuals. So if the individual has a bad month and can't make rent, they have to scramble trying to find help, e.g. from the Salvation army. That not only feels degrading to many people, but it takes time they could spend working or looking for work, and they don't always get the help for that month, so if they have a unit-based subsidy then they can lose their single most valuable asset--a housing voucher worth thousands a year--because they didn't make rent one month. Plus then they have to pay attorney fees for their eviction.
Also, confusing things further, a lot of people don't *know* whether they have a unit-based subsidy or a subsidy that they get to keep if they lose their apartment.
The massive liability issue is half of it. The other half is that Samsung has a brand to protect, and is smart enough to know that no single product is worth destroying their brand.
Do these awards even matter? My understanding is that science-fiction sells pretty well.
They matter, just not as much (from a business perspective) as sales.
Awards help drive sales. They give something to add to the blurb on the back of the book, they give the author a credential on their resume for any article they ever want to write, they make it MUCH more likely the author will be allowed to teach creative writing at a top school if she wants to, etc...
A sizable set of the people they drive sales to are also people with significant disposable income and a lot of friends who also read books that win awards. So selling just one of them to people in that group helps word-of-mouth.
And finally, the award helps shift literary norms. So if you want your kid to be able to even HAVE a college class on science fiction, or to be able to discuss science fiction there and have her professors not talk down at her for it, it's a big deal to be able to move that needle. It is also important just as a general way to fight again anti-intellectualism, because the best kinds of intellectualism are all about the marketplace of ideas that aren't incredibly stupid, and there are DEFINITELY some parts of sci-fi that can add to that marketplace meaningfully.
Any State-laws banning certain kinds of weapons are themselves in violation of the Bill of Rights
State-laws banning certain kinds of weapons can be perfectly Constitutional, but if they try to ban other kinds of weapons they're arguably not.
First of all, the Bill of Rights was *designed* to prevent the federal government from intruding on the power of the states. It was not designed to prevent individual states from passing their own laws. The battles at Lexington and Concord were fought when the Redcoats moved to seize gunpowder stored by *the militia*, after all. The idea was some federal government sitting in Pennsylvania shouldn't be able to dictate to a random village in Massachusetts that it can't have guns. That doesn't mean that a local militia can't decide all the guns need to be stored in a central location in town, for example, or that crazy uncle Bob can't have his own cannon.
It has only been expanded to apply to the states (and protect you from things like unauthorized search and seizure) by Supreme Courts that had to decide over decades that "due process" meant respecting a series of rights that happened to mostly line up with ones mentioned in the Bill of Rights. They had to do that because state after state abused its power. You can argue it has gone too far, although truthfully it remains one of the most thoughtful, deliberative, and cautious part of the entire federal government.
But it's more than that. Assume the second amendment applies. It's still undefined. It's like you write a function that can take inputs in the range 1 through 9. Now somebody invents 10 (the handgun). Now they invent 100 (the machine gun). Now they invent 1000 (the tank). Now they invent 1,000,000 (the nuclear bomb). Now they invent 10,000,000 (the hydrogen bomb). Now they invent infinity (a genetics lab). They violate the assertions that were preconditions of running the program and calling BillofRights(). In this context, absolute claims that the Bill of Rights requires these things be treated the same way as numbers one through ten are absurd.
a u.s. court is hearing a case involving property rights in foreign countries? wtf. i get that they may have a valid complaint; but shit, this is just a little out-of-bounds... even by twisted u.s. government standards.
And that's a point which people can argue in the court and (depending on the case) usually win on. The US Courts--especially the federal courts--are much more thoughtful about these things than most people give them credit for. Obviously terrorists will have a harder time, but the courts still follow the law--IIRC the DC Circuit released a terrorist on an ex post facto clause violation a few years back, for example.
People do really bad things in lots of places where the rule of law is effectively nil; activists and victims go after them in US courts where possible, but it is still only possible in rare cases. The Supreme Court has approximately your level of skepticism for jurisdiction over acts committed in foreign countries, but there are rare exceptions. As to property, a US court can't directly affect title to property in a foreign country, but it may have jurisdiction over a person who controls the property, or have an agreement with or understanding by the country in question whereby the country will honor certain actions or documents. (A will that has been probated in the US or a US divorce decree, for example, might be used in another country's court to transfer title to property).
In the United States, contracts with underage individuals are usually not enforceable unless ratified after the minor reaches adulthood or approved by a court. I am guessing there is something similar in Spain, although the ages may vary.
Perform review manipulation on your COMPETITOR and get them removed from the marketplace!
This is a real problem, obviously, with the security-through-obscurity system that fraud detection partially relies on. If they disclose precisely why they believe there is fraud, they help fraudsters in the future--but also will catch some false positives. There is also the business case--it costs money and time to seriously investigate and review a fraud detection case, and arguably it increases legal exposure.
I've heard that a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Trump, from the Clinton camp. I've heard that a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Clinton, from the Trump camp. And a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Gary Johnson. It's the best deal on the market, three votes for one!
While that is rhetorically amusing, the reality is that for most people, their presidential vote is unimportant, and vote for a third-party candidate is entirely appropriate as a mechanism to encourage further political discussion in our country--although they should pay more attention to their local races.
But for people who live in swing states, they have the opportunity to influence the election at almost no cost to themselves, and they give that up if they vote for a third party. "Vote Gary Johnson" should not be treated with the dogmatic purity of "Goto considered harmful."
To be fair, it may be the NSA is upset that nobody is going for the honey-pot.
Surely the auction is either a honey-pot or very closely watched. It would be a bad investment for most people to try buying it under such circumstances, and may even result in criminal prosecution.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not Trump. The US antitrust environment has been very pro-business and anti-consumer for a while now. I would be more concerned about the incoming administration using antitrust powers to attack businesses it doesn't like than I would be about a general decrease in antitrust activity which happened decades ago.
"At Slashdot, it's hard to say that anyone here will not be able to tell fake news from a real one."
This is blatantly untrue. If you're sure you can spot fake news, odds are you can't. (Or at least, that you can only spot some of it.)
The internet was NOT British invented, the web was. And you're uneducated if you think the two words are even remotely interchangeable.
The two words are interchangeable outside of the tech community, and maybe even inside large parts of it. Ordinary people don't know the levels of the OSI model and will parse going "on the web" and going "on the internet" interchangeably. It's like how a person is not uneducated just because they think "scientist" and "physicist" are interchangeable words. For 99% of people 99% of the time, they are.
If you're in the 1% of people (you are) or the 1% of the time (like discussing who invented what), of course, it sounds ridiculous.
This was obvious a year ago if you were paying attention in the healthcare startup space. It doesn't mean there's no market, but they haven't made it to the general market some were hoping for. On the upside, more specialized uses should continue to drive some work in the space (and perhaps yield successful B2B exits) in the future. But they will (for the most part) be focused more on utility than fashion.
Electronic Discovery is quite possibly the way to go. A mid-sized company has to sort through documents the size of the empire state building (or they would be if they were printed) in litigation, and electronic discovery experts are paid well. The other things that immediately come to mind are law firm IT, law school IT, and programming work in highly regulated fields with substantial legal components, like health care startups (or another area looking for people with your skill set where their work overlaps with your legal interests, at least a little).
1. I said password or fingerprint because they are deeply related in this instance, and will need to be considered in the context of cases on the testimonial status of a password.
2. Taking a fingerprint for purposes of identity verification is different than using a fingerprint as a password. In what ways is it different? In what ways is it the same? Does it make sense to treat it differently under the law? Of course there is precedent for using fingerprints when someone is arrested and considering them non-testimonial, but someone can argue they are being used in a testimonial way here.
We have very little information to go on. I'd like to read the actual warant and know the cirumstances, but based on the article it seems like a violation of the FOURTH amendment. The cops are supposed to have a warrant, based on probable cause, describing what particular things they are searching for and where, and why they think those things are in that place.
I can't imagine a probable cause to believe that everyone in the building has some specific evidence on their phone. Thus the search itself is unconstitutional under the fourth, with or without a fingerprint.
The fifth says you don't have to testify against yourself. It doesn't say you can't be fingerprinted. Thus I see no *fifth* amendment violation, though it seems like a rather onerous *fourth* amendment violation.
The Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is implicated primarily by (1) the question of whether a password or fingerprint is "testimonial" and therefore cannot be coerced without violating the prohibition on self-incrimination and secondarily by (2) the question of whether the Fifth Amendment can be used to prevent the search of your phones because they are an extension of your mind (a very weak argument under well-established law--the second point is worth a footnote in a law review article but probably not in a brief to the court.). The Fourth Amendment is implicated by search and seizure of the phones.
We do antitrust routinely, we just don't do a lot of it. We do much more deal-blocking than we do company-busting, which hasn't really been done much in a long time. With populist sentiments rising on both sides of the aisle, the environment might almost reward politicians who favor a return to more robust antitrust activity.
Now, Congress is talking about it because of the election. It is the downside of announcing a major merger two weeks before an election. On the other hand, AT&T donates a lot...
not only this but the inept users whose devices get pawned and used to attack other systems should be held legally responsible for the attacks.
Only up to a point. It's not really fair to expect the random non-computer guy who owns an IoT light bulb to secure it against electronic attack. The company that manufactures the bulb and decides telnet is an appropriate protocol to use to connect to it, on the other hand...
Keep that in mind every time you log into Slashdot. Et tu /.?
While I suppose this is an argument for submitting anonymous content, I only run the risk of being hung for my own posting foolishness, while you could easily be mistaken for another coward.
Fifteen domains, including Google, are asking to run javascript on this page of slashdot.
"Anonymous" is not a thing.
"And, while you're at it, could you tell Marissa where she left her car keys? She's been searching for days without any luck. "
No this is more like the federal government orders you not to tell Marissa or anyone else where the car keys are, but you can write a very public letter asking them to do so without admitting that you haven't been told not to.
Laws are not supposed to be enforced according to someone's interpretation of their intent. If the law is not performing as intended, then it can be amended by the lawmakers.
Oh yeah -- the courts are not supposed to interpret intent either; they're supposed to make judgements according to the way laws are written. This, of course, is an area where practice often departs from theory.
Several centuries would like to disagree with your talking point.
Intent is *one* factor in interpreting what a law means. How persuasive a factor it is depends on the circumstances and the jurisdiction in which the law is being interpreted and all of the other factors that suggest a different result. Sometimes it comes in through lenses like "consistent with public policy" or "intent to solely regulate the entire area of law" or "under a statutory scheme designed to" or "the legislative history of the Amendment..." or "the intent of the framers" and in a dozen other ways. Sometimes it is rejected because one or two legislators cite some reason and that's not enough to tell that's what the whole legislature meant.
... There isn't even an attempt to reconcile it with constitutional law.
Judges simply don't work that way. We may disagree with them, but by and large they are struggling to figure out the right answer according to constitutional precedent. The fact that multiple circuits of federal appeals judges have held that way emphasizes the fact that this is not some court going off the rails and neglecting the Constitution. Federal judges are much nicer, more thoughtful, and more considerate of the right result than the vast majority of people you meet in your everyday life.
I haven't read the case, but could easily construct a Fourth Amendment argument here that favors the police ability to scan the card and contact the vendors. Most obviously, the pen register case (Maryland v. Smith, IIRC) and the thermal sensor case (Kylo, maybe?) apply. You are transmitting information about the gift card to a third party without privilege (the store), so obviously you are not expecting that its contents will be private and you do not have a reasonable expectation in privacy in it under Smith. Personally I might be willing to revisit Smith on the other side, because it was passed in an age when Supreme Court Justices grew up with party lines and no actual expectation of privacy on the phone, but there is still a strong chain of well-established precedent that is respected in a common-law system like ours and will convince most judges--even ones who disagree with it.
Similarly, under the thermal sensor case, the fact that the tech for card reading is widely available in the civilian market means that the mere fact that you have to use tech doesn't help you.
Also, your description fails to capture the fact that the guy was under arrest because of an open warrant. I could construct arguments on his behalf that would give him some chance of winning, but the precedent clearly disfavors him. Just because we disagree with the decision of a court doesn't mean it was wrong, or that the judges were not trying to follow precedent. Case law is reasoning by analogy. It's not engineering, and it's not neat. It gives you a probability distribution that good arguments can shift one way or the other as a series of people try to figure out what the best answer is.
Have you read that document in its entirety?
I consider myself a fairly laid back person, liberal (in a more original sense than is perhaps used today), with a strong live and let live attitude towards life, and yet I can't bring myself to see eye to eye with some of the articles and the overall wording of that declaration.
While it is undoubtedly a 'good thing' (TM) I suspect you have to live with unicorns and smoke rainbows to fully jive with what it says...
As individuals we may disagree over whether certain things should be considered universal rights--personally, I often disagree with decisions about whether someone should have a right. But that document is a core part of the accepted definition of human rights.
The definition of human rights is an artifact of public international law. Most lawyers, scholars, and diplomats consider the primary documents to be the "International Bill of Rights," which includes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Eleanor Roosevelt's legacy after WW2), as well as two other treaties--one on Civil and Political Rights (The ICCPR), and one on Social and Economic Rights (the ICESCR). Of the two treaties, each has about 160 states who are parties. The United States is one of the outliers in that it has signed but not ratified the one on Social and Economic Rights, which means the treaty is not entirely binding in domestic law of the United States, although it is incorporated into United States law indirectly under something called the "Charming Betsy" doctrine.
I really hate to say this, but it's not inconceivable that the Chinese might be intentionally gaming the citation-based rankings by citing each other a lot (we have seen such things happen in the west, too, albeit on a smaller scale). I'd like to see how many citations these papers get from non-Chinese sources as well.
Citations in academia are also not entirely a measure of how useful the cited paper is--it is a political act and one about increasing your reputation, expressing appreciation for someone else's work, showing you know the field, and even increasing the number of people who notice and read your paper, all depending on your particular position. Most cited works in a good paper are on-point to a significant degree, but there is a lot of room for discretion.
So citation count can occasionally be useful, but it doesn't mean a lot on its own.
How about just take the money and build more damn houses and apartment complexes. Of course, all those people that already have housing in SF don't want their property values to drop or lose the "lifestyle" of living in hip little neighborhoods.
Subsidize demand, not supply. Housing vouchers that go with an individual, not with the unit. Right now, some housing subsidies are tied to units and some are tied to individuals. So if the individual has a bad month and can't make rent, they have to scramble trying to find help, e.g. from the Salvation army. That not only feels degrading to many people, but it takes time they could spend working or looking for work, and they don't always get the help for that month, so if they have a unit-based subsidy then they can lose their single most valuable asset--a housing voucher worth thousands a year--because they didn't make rent one month. Plus then they have to pay attorney fees for their eviction.
Also, confusing things further, a lot of people don't *know* whether they have a unit-based subsidy or a subsidy that they get to keep if they lose their apartment.
... massive liability issue.
The massive liability issue is half of it. The other half is that Samsung has a brand to protect, and is smart enough to know that no single product is worth destroying their brand.
Do these awards even matter? My understanding is that science-fiction sells pretty well.
They matter, just not as much (from a business perspective) as sales.
Awards help drive sales. They give something to add to the blurb on the back of the book, they give the author a credential on their resume for any article they ever want to write, they make it MUCH more likely the author will be allowed to teach creative writing at a top school if she wants to, etc...
A sizable set of the people they drive sales to are also people with significant disposable income and a lot of friends who also read books that win awards. So selling just one of them to people in that group helps word-of-mouth.
And finally, the award helps shift literary norms. So if you want your kid to be able to even HAVE a college class on science fiction, or to be able to discuss science fiction there and have her professors not talk down at her for it, it's a big deal to be able to move that needle. It is also important just as a general way to fight again anti-intellectualism, because the best kinds of intellectualism are all about the marketplace of ideas that aren't incredibly stupid, and there are DEFINITELY some parts of sci-fi that can add to that marketplace meaningfully.
Any State-laws banning certain kinds of weapons are themselves in violation of the Bill of Rights
State-laws banning certain kinds of weapons can be perfectly Constitutional, but if they try to ban other kinds of weapons they're arguably not.
First of all, the Bill of Rights was *designed* to prevent the federal government from intruding on the power of the states. It was not designed to prevent individual states from passing their own laws. The battles at Lexington and Concord were fought when the Redcoats moved to seize gunpowder stored by *the militia*, after all. The idea was some federal government sitting in Pennsylvania shouldn't be able to dictate to a random village in Massachusetts that it can't have guns. That doesn't mean that a local militia can't decide all the guns need to be stored in a central location in town, for example, or that crazy uncle Bob can't have his own cannon.
It has only been expanded to apply to the states (and protect you from things like unauthorized search and seizure) by Supreme Courts that had to decide over decades that "due process" meant respecting a series of rights that happened to mostly line up with ones mentioned in the Bill of Rights. They had to do that because state after state abused its power. You can argue it has gone too far, although truthfully it remains one of the most thoughtful, deliberative, and cautious part of the entire federal government.
But it's more than that. Assume the second amendment applies. It's still undefined. It's like you write a function that can take inputs in the range 1 through 9. Now somebody invents 10 (the handgun). Now they invent 100 (the machine gun). Now they invent 1000 (the tank). Now they invent 1,000,000 (the nuclear bomb). Now they invent 10,000,000 (the hydrogen bomb). Now they invent infinity (a genetics lab). They violate the assertions that were preconditions of running the program and calling BillofRights(). In this context, absolute claims that the Bill of Rights requires these things be treated the same way as numbers one through ten are absurd.
a u.s. court is hearing a case involving property rights in foreign countries? wtf. i get that they may have a valid complaint; but shit, this is just a little out-of-bounds... even by twisted u.s. government standards.
And that's a point which people can argue in the court and (depending on the case) usually win on. The US Courts--especially the federal courts--are much more thoughtful about these things than most people give them credit for. Obviously terrorists will have a harder time, but the courts still follow the law--IIRC the DC Circuit released a terrorist on an ex post facto clause violation a few years back, for example.
People do really bad things in lots of places where the rule of law is effectively nil; activists and victims go after them in US courts where possible, but it is still only possible in rare cases. The Supreme Court has approximately your level of skepticism for jurisdiction over acts committed in foreign countries, but there are rare exceptions. As to property, a US court can't directly affect title to property in a foreign country, but it may have jurisdiction over a person who controls the property, or have an agreement with or understanding by the country in question whereby the country will honor certain actions or documents. (A will that has been probated in the US or a US divorce decree, for example, might be used in another country's court to transfer title to property).
In the United States, contracts with underage individuals are usually not enforceable unless ratified after the minor reaches adulthood or approved by a court. I am guessing there is something similar in Spain, although the ages may vary.
It will be used for more than fighting terrorism.
Of course they matter! Now more than ever!
Perform review manipulation on your COMPETITOR and get them removed from the marketplace!
This is a real problem, obviously, with the security-through-obscurity system that fraud detection partially relies on. If they disclose precisely why they believe there is fraud, they help fraudsters in the future--but also will catch some false positives. There is also the business case--it costs money and time to seriously investigate and review a fraud detection case, and arguably it increases legal exposure.
I've heard that a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Trump, from the Clinton camp. I've heard that a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Clinton, from the Trump camp. And a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Gary Johnson. It's the best deal on the market, three votes for one!
While that is rhetorically amusing, the reality is that for most people, their presidential vote is unimportant, and vote for a third-party candidate is entirely appropriate as a mechanism to encourage further political discussion in our country--although they should pay more attention to their local races.
But for people who live in swing states, they have the opportunity to influence the election at almost no cost to themselves, and they give that up if they vote for a third party. "Vote Gary Johnson" should not be treated with the dogmatic purity of "Goto considered harmful."
FBI upset that no one is going for the honey-pot.
To be fair, it may be the NSA is upset that nobody is going for the honey-pot.
Surely the auction is either a honey-pot or very closely watched. It would be a bad investment for most people to try buying it under such circumstances, and may even result in criminal prosecution.