Well, they don't run out of fuel, since they aren't at war and therefore nobody is shooting at the refueling ships.
In an actual serious war, the tankers would be very obvious targets. They'd have to travel thousands of miles across open ocean and any sub could sink one without breaking a sweat. To effectively clear an area of subs would probably require several escort vessels. That's why the task force model works so well - by putting all your eggs in one basket they're much easier to defend (unless nukes are an option for the opponent).
In WWII the tankers were always the first targets. They don't shoot back and they're REALLY easy to sink (you could probably sink one with a few well-placed matches). Once they're sunk the rest of the convoy will be dead in the water in a few days (in the pre-nuke days). These days most of the ships are still dependent on fuel - only the biggest ones have nuclear plants.
That is something that hasn't come up - while taking care of the jet fuel certainly is a big help, you can't get rid of the tankers unless you also address the need for fuel for all the escorts. Then again, that is probably just a matter of scale as it wouldn't surprise me if most of those ships could use aviation fuel (I think that most are turbine driven).
Hadn't even thought about this. Sure, that would work, although I can't imagine the solar atmospheric density at 0.1-1 AU is all that large. You'd also need to start breaking out of the dive well before 0.1AU since you don't have much thrust, but that wouldn't be a problem with the idea at all.
The only force acting on a solar sail is outwards from the sun. If the sail is angled the force would be reduced (less cross-sectional area), but the direction of the force would remain the same. A sailboat can only turn because it has a keel that exerts force against the relatively-motionless water normal to its direction of motion. There is nothing to push against in space.
The only way to move in a direction other than away from the sun is to employ alternate propulsion, or to somehow find another source of light (such as the concept of getting sunward force by detaching a reflector that bounces sunlight back at the far side of the sail). Keeping everything aligned would be very tricky.
I would also consider the fact that probably 80% of the space in the original cover is obscured by the change. While a likeness of Joker is drawn, this does not directly copy an depictions of the Joker that have been made (and the idea of painting somebody's face white and red isn't copyrightable). It doesn't call him the "joker" either (which is a very weak trademark anyway - when the guy looks like a fairly traditional depiction of a joker).
The content is also political in nature.
Fair use is a set of principles. So, it is hard to say with certainty whether something is fair use. However, I'd say that anybody who wants to sue this guy is going to have a very hard time. What damages would they even claim? Are people not going to buy the magazine from months ago because they've already gotten to read the cover they put on the newstand shelf as an advertisement for all to see? Are people not going to watch The Dark Knight since they've already gotten to see what the Joker looks like? The guy isn't even making money off of this.
I don't know the victim at all, so I can only guess at his motives.
However, if he goes after the attacker he'll just make himself a victim of the judicial process. Most likely his assailant would just put on a minimal pro se defense, and then declare bankruptcy once the trial is over. Suing somebody with no assets is just going to court to make a point, and that is a lot of money spent to just make a point. It isn't like the guy who beat him up would be punished in any way. The only way to punish him would be through a criminal case, and it sounds like thugs beating people up is just the way people live in the eyes of the DA...
Or maybe the guy feels that verizon isn't entirely blameless in this, and that there isn't any point in suing somebody who likely doesn't have any assets. Would you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a lawyer for a suit that isn't likely to collect a single dime?
By suing verizon he can probably get a lawyer to take the case on contingency.
If Verizon has to pay out a few hundred thousand in a settlement to people assaulted by their workers every once in a while, then perhaps they'll give more thought to sending these guys out on their own to enter people's houses without any background checks.
Can frequency-hopping technologies like GSM/CDMA be effectively handled by GNU Radio? How much of the hopping needs to be implemented in the hardware vs being able to just have the hardware capture a broad range of frequencies and have the software figure out what the do with it?
I've been following the project a little over the years and it certainly looks interesting (but expensive as you point out). Once upon a time I did study up to get an amateur license, but never followed through with it (never really got up to 5WPM in code which was required back then - must not be genetic since my father was able to transmit ~60wpm from his car back in those days).
You seem to know what you're talking about, and I have to confess that I don't know much about GSM/CDMA in general, although I can theorize some attacks. How does the network defend against the following attacks:
1. Passive listener intercepts the credentials necessary to make calls as a phone transmitting nearby. (I assume they're encrypted, but is it strong, is everything encrypted, and is it secure against replay attacks?). This is easily defeated using encryption if done right.
2. Active transmitter broadcasts GSM service (as a base station), allows a phone to connect, and then when that phone places a call the fake base station records its credentials. Optionally then impersonate the phone to a real base station and perform a MITM. Possible defenses against this include having phones only talk to stations that present a trusted certificate and pass a challenge/response, or by having the phone pass a challenge/response rather than simply transmitting a static identifier.
3. Cell phone company employee or maybe even a shopper copies down the numbers on the outside of a phone's box and uses that to clone the phone. I'm not sure if those numbers are sufficient to impersonate the phone, or if it has some private key of some kind hidden inside.
Basically, to be secure the system has to use some kind of challenge/response system (RSA/etc) and not simply broadcast passwords/etc. The old analog phones worked in this way and cloning was a big problem with them. The question is whether they truly fixed these vulnerabilities or if they simply relied on the fact that the cost of intercepting a spread-spectrum transmission is so high that most thieves would be halted (kind of like the way that CDs were effectively protected back in the 80s by the high cost of writers).
I have to agree with this one. Sure, the body is complex, but so are lots of other things. I think the real problem is that you simply can't experiment on it.
People argue about the latest fad diets. Well, if you wanted to use the scientific method the solution would be simple - lock 10000 randomly selected people into individual cages and assign them to various diets. They would be fed a steady diet of whatever you want to treat, and you would measure the health outcomes. Ideally you'd make those 10,000 people identical twins (not outside the realm of possibility today - just start dicing early blastulas). Or, at the very least start breeding cousins to get some strains that breed true.
Want to know what the spleen does? Take those 10,000 people and start removing spleens at various points of development. Expose groups to various maladies (diseases, feed them carcinogens, stuff them with pasta until they have heart disease and diabetes, etc). Sacrifice a few at various points and see how things are going.
Of course, doing any of that would be horrible for any number of reasons, so we rely on fairly poorly controlled trials and get glimmers of answers. Despite the HUGE amount of spending on medical research we know more about mice...
No doubt, but this is a social problem nonetheless.
For example - it could probably be argued that mechanization of automotive factories has yielded more than enough of a productivity boost to just pay the former auto workers to not work for the rest of their lives. However, this is not what happens. The robots are owned by the corporation, and they didn't buy them so that they could keep making the same money and allow their employess to keep getting paid not to work. Rather, they fire the employees and increase their dividends (unless you're a US automaker - then you're so inept that you still lose money).
The problem is that our distribution of wealth depends on work. People who don't work don't get money - generally speaking. Well, what happens when only 1% of the population can be gainfully employed - do they each draw a billion dollars a year in salary, and everybody else starves? Will those people resent everybody else just sitting at home watching TV?
At some point, what happens when AI develops to the point where nobody can do useful work. Sure, humans could spend their time doing paintings, but nobody would buy them since RoboRembrandt puts out 3000 paintings a day each far more amazing than anything any human has ever drawn. Such a society could be the ultimate utopia - but only if resources can be fairly allocated without reliance on employment.
The issue is that all people have value. It isn't like I am able to hold a decent paying job because I was a nicer person in a previous life than the guy who hauls my trash. I just happened to win the genetic lottery in certain regards. It is my responsibility to look after those who don't have all the advantages I do. If you want to know how people will fare in a society run by robots, just look at how mentally retarded people fare in a society run by those who are intelligent.
Don't forget to throw in video bandwidth. Video bandwidth essentially limits how fast the tube can go from full white to full black. While the number of vertical lines is fixed, those who aren't familiar with TV might not realize that there is no set horizontal resolution of a TV set. The display is analog - so if your pixels vary between two very siliar levels of brightness you theoretically could fit a huge number of pixels on a line. On the other hand if you try to draw alternating black and white pixels you'll get a big blur unless you spread them out. Just look closely at the color bars in a test pattern to see evidence of this (granted most modern sets use tricks to change the scan rate when high contrast is detected - this makes borders sharp but does not effectively raise resolution).
Bottom line is that if you want to display text on an SD set you need to make the letters fairly large - even if theoretically you have so much resolution the fact is that the video bandwidth is just going to kill you.
I think the problem is that too often the people who run the servers and the people who benefit from the servers have entirely different budgets and suffer from terrible myopia.
If some IT budget administrators were put in charge of telecom they'd save money by not letting anybody have a phone. Sure, that saves money, but of course completely ignores why employees have phones in the first place.
I can't tell you how many times at work I've seen applications suffering with performance where the application is designed to load balance across an almost arbitrary number of servers but some bureaucrat wants $100k worth of studies done to justify a $10k expenditure (if you're generous and include all the provisioning costs in addition to the hardware). In the meantime the business might be losing $10k per week in productivity easily.
In business everything has a cost, and everything has a return. The problem is in how you measure each. When somebody has an incentive to reduce cost at any cost, you get foolish decisions. The reverse is also true. Ditto for crazy metrics that encourage people to spend more money tracking expenses than on the expenses themselves.
Oversubscription, virtualization, and this latest technology are all great tools for maximizing ROI. However, when misused they reduce the R and damage the business.
In my very limited observations of how the military works, the guys designing the processes don't tend to not think of stuff like this. Launching a nuclear missile almost certainly involves an inch-thick procedures manual, with every step engineered to ensure that the only way you get to hitting the launch button is by having valid orders.
Uh, have you ever actually talked to somebody in the military?
I'm not terribly concerned about loyalty. Even some 18-year-old can appreciate the importance of following protocol when admitting somebody into the missile launch room on a sub.
Plus, you really need to subvert the whole chain of command anyway. It isn't like you can just push one button and launch a missile. For starters the sub needs to be just below the surface and it isn't like they just drive themselves there...
Couldn't agree with you more. I have some pretty strong feelings about the importance of marriage, and its meaning. However, that is all the more reason to get government out of it. If some crazy people down the street want to do marriage their way, that's between them and God. Just don't tell my wife and I how things should be done.
As always, reasonable laws for everybody's protection will still apply.
Only when they have child-bearing relationships (traditionally between married couples) regulated, can the government provide incentives and benefits to the people raising kids.
That's nice - except that a huge percentage of kids have divorced parents. And, there certainly is no requirement to be married before having kids. If you want to regulate who can have kids you better put everybody on Norplant (and some male equivalent) at the age of 10.
And if this daughter was a minor? Remember, there is a case that was tried against a church that did just this, and they lost.
Since marriage has no legal meaning, it doesn't matter if a 3-year-old wants to marry a 75-year-old. Now, if they have sex, that is an entirely different issue.
If the church of wacko down the street declares that I'm married to the guy down the street, who cares. Now, if they decide to walk into my house as if they belong there I'm calling the cop and they're going to be arrested for trespassing.
The whole point is that marriage should have no legal recognition in any way. It confers no rights or restrictions in the eyes of the law.
Except we'd fill the courts with claims to ownership or liens that would only have heresay as evidence. I'd rather not wait behind that docket. A state may explicitly declare how ownership works within marriage (CA's 50% law) or it may not, but it overwhelmingly simplifies things from the onset.
And why doesn't that happen with cohabitation?
Just sign a contract stating how you want your pssessions sorted out if you split up. That isn't a big deal.
The state formalizes this contract and adds a few other things (hospital visitation, rights of survivorship, credit responsibilities) and they called it "Marriage".
Except that the state decides who can and can't get married, and decides on all the terms of the agreement. You can't marry somebody under your own terms. For some bizarre reason we allow people tax benefits for having the legal status of marriage.
Two people would be able to disagree on the fact if they were even married, ever.
And since in the eyes of the law it doesn't matter if they were ever married, the state wouldn't even care whether they were or not. The only questions are simple factual ones like:
1. Did the parties sign a contract containing binding terms?
2. Did the parties have a child?
Sorry, no "contract" no crime? Do you really want a society built around that much welfare?
Yes - I do. I'm fine with child support since the child was not a party to the decision of their birth. However, if the parties want to be "married" they should put in writing exactly what that means.
And romantically, who wants to have a giant meandering semantic discussion instead of following social custom?
Perhaps they don't agree with the social customs? Do you think that two people should enter into marriage without actually discussing the consequences? Also, it isn't like the parties would need to draft their own contracts. Most likely every church or other interested organization will publish boilerplate agreements that parties could sign to enter into whatever it is that they consider marriage to be.
Yes, but he was not convicted of any crimes. Refusal to pay a civil judgement should not be punishible by life in prison (which this case could easily have been since he was placed there indefinitely). There isn't even any evidence that he could pay the judgement in the first place. Some might aruge he had money, some might argue he didn't. Well, that's exactly what juries are for!
Because of the constitutional right to a jury trial, I don't believe a judge can override an acquittal. They can override a guilty verdict under various circumstances. Basically, the judge can only take action in the defendents interest. The rights to trial by jury and the prohibition of double jeopardy essentially guarantee this.
Or, perhaps, they could just execute a search warrent on any property the guy had and just look for the documents.
I suspect that in the vast majority of criminal proceedings the defendent doesn't just hand the presecution a case. They only find evidence by looking for it. I'm not quite sure why defendents should be compelled to turn over any kind of evidence - other than the fact that the 5th ammendment as written only covers testimony.
Except convict him. There have been other cases in history where there was "nothing for a jury to do" and yet a jury verdict was still necessary. There have even been cases where the judge basically instructed the jury to return a guilty verdict because no facts were in dispute, and yet the verdict was still required.
If he doesn;t have the money he still oes $2.5m and needs to go through insolvency so that his creditors (including his wife) can be paid from what assets he DOES have.
Bankruptcy doesn't exist for the benefit of creditors - it exists for the benefit of debtors. Those creditors can pursue collection against his assets without his cooperation. He only needs to file for bankruptcy if he wants to be shielded from these collection activities.
Trying people for contempt only delays other trials if the total resources available to the courts remains fixed. If you simply build more courtrooms then you can accomodate the additional load. The question is whether justice is worth the cost of justice.
As far as summary judgement goes - the reason I brought that up is that it is analogous to what happened here. Some have argued that no facts are in contention therefore there is nothing for a jury to try. Well, that amounts to summary judgment. I imagine that in a criminal court a jury verdict is always necessary to imprison somebody unless the right to a jury is waived or there is a guilty plea. It doesn't really matter whether there are facts in dispute.
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Well, they don't run out of fuel, since they aren't at war and therefore nobody is shooting at the refueling ships.
In an actual serious war, the tankers would be very obvious targets. They'd have to travel thousands of miles across open ocean and any sub could sink one without breaking a sweat. To effectively clear an area of subs would probably require several escort vessels. That's why the task force model works so well - by putting all your eggs in one basket they're much easier to defend (unless nukes are an option for the opponent).
In WWII the tankers were always the first targets. They don't shoot back and they're REALLY easy to sink (you could probably sink one with a few well-placed matches). Once they're sunk the rest of the convoy will be dead in the water in a few days (in the pre-nuke days). These days most of the ships are still dependent on fuel - only the biggest ones have nuclear plants.
That is something that hasn't come up - while taking care of the jet fuel certainly is a big help, you can't get rid of the tankers unless you also address the need for fuel for all the escorts. Then again, that is probably just a matter of scale as it wouldn't surprise me if most of those ships could use aviation fuel (I think that most are turbine driven).
Hadn't even thought about this. Sure, that would work, although I can't imagine the solar atmospheric density at 0.1-1 AU is all that large. You'd also need to start breaking out of the dive well before 0.1AU since you don't have much thrust, but that wouldn't be a problem with the idea at all.
You'd just need lots of patience...
The only force acting on a solar sail is outwards from the sun. If the sail is angled the force would be reduced (less cross-sectional area), but the direction of the force would remain the same. A sailboat can only turn because it has a keel that exerts force against the relatively-motionless water normal to its direction of motion. There is nothing to push against in space.
The only way to move in a direction other than away from the sun is to employ alternate propulsion, or to somehow find another source of light (such as the concept of getting sunward force by detaching a reflector that bounces sunlight back at the far side of the sail). Keeping everything aligned would be very tricky.
I would also consider the fact that probably 80% of the space in the original cover is obscured by the change. While a likeness of Joker is drawn, this does not directly copy an depictions of the Joker that have been made (and the idea of painting somebody's face white and red isn't copyrightable). It doesn't call him the "joker" either (which is a very weak trademark anyway - when the guy looks like a fairly traditional depiction of a joker).
The content is also political in nature.
Fair use is a set of principles. So, it is hard to say with certainty whether something is fair use. However, I'd say that anybody who wants to sue this guy is going to have a very hard time. What damages would they even claim? Are people not going to buy the magazine from months ago because they've already gotten to read the cover they put on the newstand shelf as an advertisement for all to see? Are people not going to watch The Dark Knight since they've already gotten to see what the Joker looks like? The guy isn't even making money off of this.
They'd be lucky to get a dollar...
Dislaimer, IANAL...
I don't know the victim at all, so I can only guess at his motives.
However, if he goes after the attacker he'll just make himself a victim of the judicial process. Most likely his assailant would just put on a minimal pro se defense, and then declare bankruptcy once the trial is over. Suing somebody with no assets is just going to court to make a point, and that is a lot of money spent to just make a point. It isn't like the guy who beat him up would be punished in any way. The only way to punish him would be through a criminal case, and it sounds like thugs beating people up is just the way people live in the eyes of the DA...
Or maybe the guy feels that verizon isn't entirely blameless in this, and that there isn't any point in suing somebody who likely doesn't have any assets. Would you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a lawyer for a suit that isn't likely to collect a single dime?
By suing verizon he can probably get a lawyer to take the case on contingency.
If Verizon has to pay out a few hundred thousand in a settlement to people assaulted by their workers every once in a while, then perhaps they'll give more thought to sending these guys out on their own to enter people's houses without any background checks.
If the guy had agreed to plead guilty, then how is it that Verizon states that there is no conviction? A guilty plea is a conviction.
Or are they just never going to arraign this guy?
Can frequency-hopping technologies like GSM/CDMA be effectively handled by GNU Radio? How much of the hopping needs to be implemented in the hardware vs being able to just have the hardware capture a broad range of frequencies and have the software figure out what the do with it?
I've been following the project a little over the years and it certainly looks interesting (but expensive as you point out). Once upon a time I did study up to get an amateur license, but never followed through with it (never really got up to 5WPM in code which was required back then - must not be genetic since my father was able to transmit ~60wpm from his car back in those days).
You seem to know what you're talking about, and I have to confess that I don't know much about GSM/CDMA in general, although I can theorize some attacks. How does the network defend against the following attacks:
1. Passive listener intercepts the credentials necessary to make calls as a phone transmitting nearby. (I assume they're encrypted, but is it strong, is everything encrypted, and is it secure against replay attacks?). This is easily defeated using encryption if done right.
2. Active transmitter broadcasts GSM service (as a base station), allows a phone to connect, and then when that phone places a call the fake base station records its credentials. Optionally then impersonate the phone to a real base station and perform a MITM. Possible defenses against this include having phones only talk to stations that present a trusted certificate and pass a challenge/response, or by having the phone pass a challenge/response rather than simply transmitting a static identifier.
3. Cell phone company employee or maybe even a shopper copies down the numbers on the outside of a phone's box and uses that to clone the phone. I'm not sure if those numbers are sufficient to impersonate the phone, or if it has some private key of some kind hidden inside.
Basically, to be secure the system has to use some kind of challenge/response system (RSA/etc) and not simply broadcast passwords/etc. The old analog phones worked in this way and cloning was a big problem with them. The question is whether they truly fixed these vulnerabilities or if they simply relied on the fact that the cost of intercepting a spread-spectrum transmission is so high that most thieves would be halted (kind of like the way that CDs were effectively protected back in the 80s by the high cost of writers).
I have to agree with this one. Sure, the body is complex, but so are lots of other things. I think the real problem is that you simply can't experiment on it.
People argue about the latest fad diets. Well, if you wanted to use the scientific method the solution would be simple - lock 10000 randomly selected people into individual cages and assign them to various diets. They would be fed a steady diet of whatever you want to treat, and you would measure the health outcomes. Ideally you'd make those 10,000 people identical twins (not outside the realm of possibility today - just start dicing early blastulas). Or, at the very least start breeding cousins to get some strains that breed true.
Want to know what the spleen does? Take those 10,000 people and start removing spleens at various points of development. Expose groups to various maladies (diseases, feed them carcinogens, stuff them with pasta until they have heart disease and diabetes, etc). Sacrifice a few at various points and see how things are going.
Of course, doing any of that would be horrible for any number of reasons, so we rely on fairly poorly controlled trials and get glimmers of answers. Despite the HUGE amount of spending on medical research we know more about mice...
No doubt, but this is a social problem nonetheless.
For example - it could probably be argued that mechanization of automotive factories has yielded more than enough of a productivity boost to just pay the former auto workers to not work for the rest of their lives. However, this is not what happens. The robots are owned by the corporation, and they didn't buy them so that they could keep making the same money and allow their employess to keep getting paid not to work. Rather, they fire the employees and increase their dividends (unless you're a US automaker - then you're so inept that you still lose money).
The problem is that our distribution of wealth depends on work. People who don't work don't get money - generally speaking. Well, what happens when only 1% of the population can be gainfully employed - do they each draw a billion dollars a year in salary, and everybody else starves? Will those people resent everybody else just sitting at home watching TV?
At some point, what happens when AI develops to the point where nobody can do useful work. Sure, humans could spend their time doing paintings, but nobody would buy them since RoboRembrandt puts out 3000 paintings a day each far more amazing than anything any human has ever drawn. Such a society could be the ultimate utopia - but only if resources can be fairly allocated without reliance on employment.
The issue is that all people have value. It isn't like I am able to hold a decent paying job because I was a nicer person in a previous life than the guy who hauls my trash. I just happened to win the genetic lottery in certain regards. It is my responsibility to look after those who don't have all the advantages I do. If you want to know how people will fare in a society run by robots, just look at how mentally retarded people fare in a society run by those who are intelligent.
Don't forget to throw in video bandwidth. Video bandwidth essentially limits how fast the tube can go from full white to full black. While the number of vertical lines is fixed, those who aren't familiar with TV might not realize that there is no set horizontal resolution of a TV set. The display is analog - so if your pixels vary between two very siliar levels of brightness you theoretically could fit a huge number of pixels on a line. On the other hand if you try to draw alternating black and white pixels you'll get a big blur unless you spread them out. Just look closely at the color bars in a test pattern to see evidence of this (granted most modern sets use tricks to change the scan rate when high contrast is detected - this makes borders sharp but does not effectively raise resolution).
Bottom line is that if you want to display text on an SD set you need to make the letters fairly large - even if theoretically you have so much resolution the fact is that the video bandwidth is just going to kill you.
I think the problem is that too often the people who run the servers and the people who benefit from the servers have entirely different budgets and suffer from terrible myopia.
If some IT budget administrators were put in charge of telecom they'd save money by not letting anybody have a phone. Sure, that saves money, but of course completely ignores why employees have phones in the first place.
I can't tell you how many times at work I've seen applications suffering with performance where the application is designed to load balance across an almost arbitrary number of servers but some bureaucrat wants $100k worth of studies done to justify a $10k expenditure (if you're generous and include all the provisioning costs in addition to the hardware). In the meantime the business might be losing $10k per week in productivity easily.
In business everything has a cost, and everything has a return. The problem is in how you measure each. When somebody has an incentive to reduce cost at any cost, you get foolish decisions. The reverse is also true. Ditto for crazy metrics that encourage people to spend more money tracking expenses than on the expenses themselves.
Oversubscription, virtualization, and this latest technology are all great tools for maximizing ROI. However, when misused they reduce the R and damage the business.
In my very limited observations of how the military works, the guys designing the processes don't tend to not think of stuff like this. Launching a nuclear missile almost certainly involves an inch-thick procedures manual, with every step engineered to ensure that the only way you get to hitting the launch button is by having valid orders.
Uh, have you ever actually talked to somebody in the military?
I'm not terribly concerned about loyalty. Even some 18-year-old can appreciate the importance of following protocol when admitting somebody into the missile launch room on a sub.
Plus, you really need to subvert the whole chain of command anyway. It isn't like you can just push one button and launch a missile. For starters the sub needs to be just below the surface and it isn't like they just drive themselves there...
Where does the consitution give the legislature the right to allow the courts to imprison somebody without a jury trial?
The fact that congress approved this procedure doesn't make it constitutional.
I'm all for congress making contempt a crime. I'm all for prosecuting people for it, and jailing them for it - AFTER a jury delivers a guilty verdict.
Couldn't agree with you more. I have some pretty strong feelings about the importance of marriage, and its meaning. However, that is all the more reason to get government out of it. If some crazy people down the street want to do marriage their way, that's between them and God. Just don't tell my wife and I how things should be done.
As always, reasonable laws for everybody's protection will still apply.
Only when they have child-bearing relationships (traditionally between married couples) regulated, can the government provide incentives and benefits to the people raising kids.
That's nice - except that a huge percentage of kids have divorced parents. And, there certainly is no requirement to be married before having kids. If you want to regulate who can have kids you better put everybody on Norplant (and some male equivalent) at the age of 10.
And if this daughter was a minor? Remember, there is a case that was tried against a church that did just this, and they lost.
Since marriage has no legal meaning, it doesn't matter if a 3-year-old wants to marry a 75-year-old. Now, if they have sex, that is an entirely different issue.
If the church of wacko down the street declares that I'm married to the guy down the street, who cares. Now, if they decide to walk into my house as if they belong there I'm calling the cop and they're going to be arrested for trespassing.
The whole point is that marriage should have no legal recognition in any way. It confers no rights or restrictions in the eyes of the law.
Except we'd fill the courts with claims to ownership or liens that would only have heresay as evidence. I'd rather not wait behind that docket. A state may explicitly declare how ownership works within marriage (CA's 50% law) or it may not, but it overwhelmingly simplifies things from the onset.
And why doesn't that happen with cohabitation?
Just sign a contract stating how you want your pssessions sorted out if you split up. That isn't a big deal.
The state formalizes this contract and adds a few other things (hospital visitation, rights of survivorship, credit responsibilities) and they called it "Marriage".
Except that the state decides who can and can't get married, and decides on all the terms of the agreement. You can't marry somebody under your own terms. For some bizarre reason we allow people tax benefits for having the legal status of marriage.
Two people would be able to disagree on the fact if they were even married, ever.
And since in the eyes of the law it doesn't matter if they were ever married, the state wouldn't even care whether they were or not. The only questions are simple factual ones like:
1. Did the parties sign a contract containing binding terms?
2. Did the parties have a child?
Sorry, no "contract" no crime? Do you really want a society built around that much welfare?
Yes - I do. I'm fine with child support since the child was not a party to the decision of their birth. However, if the parties want to be "married" they should put in writing exactly what that means.
And romantically, who wants to have a giant meandering semantic discussion instead of following social custom?
Perhaps they don't agree with the social customs? Do you think that two people should enter into marriage without actually discussing the consequences? Also, it isn't like the parties would need to draft their own contracts. Most likely every church or other interested organization will publish boilerplate agreements that parties could sign to enter into whatever it is that they consider marriage to be.
Yes, but he was not convicted of any crimes. Refusal to pay a civil judgement should not be punishible by life in prison (which this case could easily have been since he was placed there indefinitely). There isn't even any evidence that he could pay the judgement in the first place. Some might aruge he had money, some might argue he didn't. Well, that's exactly what juries are for!
Because of the constitutional right to a jury trial, I don't believe a judge can override an acquittal. They can override a guilty verdict under various circumstances. Basically, the judge can only take action in the defendents interest. The rights to trial by jury and the prohibition of double jeopardy essentially guarantee this.
Or, perhaps, they could just execute a search warrent on any property the guy had and just look for the documents.
I suspect that in the vast majority of criminal proceedings the defendent doesn't just hand the presecution a case. They only find evidence by looking for it. I'm not quite sure why defendents should be compelled to turn over any kind of evidence - other than the fact that the 5th ammendment as written only covers testimony.
There is nothing for a jury to do.
Except convict him. There have been other cases in history where there was "nothing for a jury to do" and yet a jury verdict was still necessary. There have even been cases where the judge basically instructed the jury to return a guilty verdict because no facts were in dispute, and yet the verdict was still required.
If he doesn;t have the money he still oes $2.5m and needs to go through insolvency so that his creditors (including his wife) can be paid from what assets he DOES have.
Bankruptcy doesn't exist for the benefit of creditors - it exists for the benefit of debtors. Those creditors can pursue collection against his assets without his cooperation. He only needs to file for bankruptcy if he wants to be shielded from these collection activities.
Trying people for contempt only delays other trials if the total resources available to the courts remains fixed. If you simply build more courtrooms then you can accomodate the additional load. The question is whether justice is worth the cost of justice.
As far as summary judgement goes - the reason I brought that up is that it is analogous to what happened here. Some have argued that no facts are in contention therefore there is nothing for a jury to try. Well, that amounts to summary judgment. I imagine that in a criminal court a jury verdict is always necessary to imprison somebody unless the right to a jury is waived or there is a guilty plea. It doesn't really matter whether there are facts in dispute.
Strangely, we manage to convict murderers without their cooperation in the investigation.
If there isn't any evidence that the guy was lying about the $2.5M, then isn't it wrong to stick him in prison for 14 years?