A la carte cable would be the death of 75% of cable channels out there.
Yep, especially the more niche ones. Which is why it's actually the cable channel broadcasters who oppose it. A lot of those channels get on there because in order to get a desirable channel (such as ESPN) a cable company is forced to take other channels they might not want and add them to their basic tier. Indeed, most all of them try to force their way onto the basic tier, while wanting to charge premium rates. In the cable companies defense, this is the biggest pressure there is causing basic cable rates to rise.
There was a recent battle between Comcast (I think it was them) and the NFL network... The NFL and other leagues now think that even being shown on sports networks like ESPN isn't good enough and what their own channel. They've since started moving games there that used to be shown by broadcast networks which pissed a lot of football fans off. They are one of the ones wanting to charge outrageous fees for their channel, yet insist it be on basic cable. Comcast agreed to carry the NFL Network but insisted it be on a premium sports tier, which would mean less money for the NFL (but would also mean that subscribers who didn't want it wouldn't have to pay for it). The NFL threw a hissy fit over that. Haven't heard anything about that in awhile but Comcast was sticking to their guns on it.
ESPN loves to milk tons of money out of cable systems, and in fact, their channels are amongst the most expensive for cable providers, mostly because Disney insists that they be on the "basic" tier. Funny thing is the more ESPN channels they add the worse their programming seems to get, and my days of making sure I didn't miss SportsCenter are LONG gone thanks to the Internet, but I digress.
So, I'm not surprised that they are trying the same thing with ISP's. I don't think this is going to work out that well though. Getting to see broadcasts of games online won't be more than a niche until much faster broadband is available and wireless broadband is more ubiquitous. ESPN was one of the first to start charging for web content in the first place, which is where I'd think it'd be appropriate to sell subscriptions to their video service, but it seems to me that they want to force the ISP's to pay, hence forcing every SUBSCRIBER of that ISP to pay for it as it will be passed on, thus netting them cash from people who don't want their video service and won't use it.
Given how they've been larding up their website with screaming video ads that start playing immediately I've been going to it less and less. They really are living on past reputation only as their content has really gone down hill the past couple years. I certainly don't want my ISP to pay and pass the charges on to me.
You don't think that would actually do any good do you? Pedophiles can't be cured of liking children any more than a heterosexual man can be cured of liking skinny 22 year olds with big tits.
If they can't be cured, then they need to be confined. Unfortunately the "system" is far more zealous about trying to catch people with "child porn" than it is with actually protecting children from sick individuals like that.
As for your other example, that's not a good comparison. Men being attracted to lovely women with "huge tracts of.. land" in their prime reproductive years is normal and desired natural behavior as it perpetuates the species:) Any desire different than that represents a deviancy that isn't normal or natural. We tolerate those that involve consenting adults, as we should, but in the case of children, individuals who engage in that need to be kept off the streets.
That said, I have to admit when I see stories of hot blonde teachers getting it on with their teenage students, I've wished "why couldn't that have been ME back in high school":) But I'd think totally different on that if I had children, to be sure.
How about if someone attempts to purchase drugs from an undercover DEA agent? Or solicits prostitution from a police officer undercover? In the first case, the agent has drugs in their possession, and are attempting to sell them. In the second case, a police officer is making others believe that they are a prostitute and are attempting to sell themselves. In my opinion, if law enforcement personnel break the law to catch people breaking the law, they both should be charged. I know that they claim they are not breaking the law, however it is what it is regardless of how they try to justify it. I agree with your statement.
As a civil libertarian, this sort of thing is something I very much object to, and think rapes the spirit AND LETTER of the Constitution.
No one should be above the law, ESPECIALLY not the government. If it's a crime for ME to have drugs in my possession and offer to sell them to someone, it should be a crime for the POLICE to do so.
This is so fucked up. A cop can pose as a drug dealer, as a prostitute, etc, and get away with lying to you. You, however, can be busted for lying to THEM, even if they do not identify themselves as a police officer, and you don't know that they are.
That is serious abuse of power, that unfortunately happens every day. I often wonder how many are enticed by "sting" operators into committing crimes they never would have had the police not solicited it?
That is a correct, yet secondary problem. I've always had a problem with registering sex offenders, because thinking back when I was 16 and my girlfriends were also in the 14-17 range, I probably would have been convicted by today's standards.
I'm glad I grew up when I did (1980's, graduated 1991). I was 18 when I was a senior, and the girl I dated that year was 17. Of course her parents had NO problems with that, but I shudder to think what could happen today, what with digital cameras, etc. I certainly WOULD have liked to have salacious pics of my girlfriends back in the day, but back then you had to use film cameras and let someone else develop them, which is why such pics were NEVER taken.
I guess this is an example of technology enabling old taboos to drop.
Is that with child porn, people get a very "witch hunt" mentality with little consideration for the whole situation. What I mean is if a 19 year old kid has a naked picture of his girlfriend, taken when she was 17, that is "child porn" in the same way that a picture of a 10 year old being sexually abused by a parent is where the law is concerned. You get charged with the same thing for possessing either. Now most rational people would agree that these are not the same things, however it doesn't matter in the eyes of the law. Also, prosecutors are extremely zealous about this stuff. Maybe it is because they don't want to be labeled soft or whatever. No matter the reason, they tend to nail people to the wall even if they shouldn't.
You are correct. That is another huge problem. The irony is that a 19 year old can (in most states) legally have sex with or even MARRY a 17 year old with their consent (but not their parents) but if they filmed the honeymoon be arrested for child pornography.
The problem is that law enforcement REQUIRES the application of common sense, from the street cop on up to the prosecutors and judges. But common sense is becoming more and more uncommon these days, thus increasing the incidents where the system is going from one that has potential for abuse to one that is ROUTINELY abused. See Mike Nifong and the the Duke Lacrosse "rape" case.
But that's not an issue here. According to the summary (I'm not going to go digging through actual court filings), the guy argued that CC didn't have a right to snoop. He didn't argue that the evidence was untrustworthy because of the chain of custody. Thus, your point doesn't touch on this case (you can't introduce new theories in further appeals; you're limited to what you argued originally).
A better lawyer would have argued that and likely would have won.
There is one remedy in that case.
Failing to bring up the "chain of custody" status of the evidence is serious malpractice in the case of the lawyer representing the defendant. Seems to me the lawyer locked in on the argument "techs shouldn't be searching hard drives for porn" (which isn't settled law) and ignored the more conventional argument. Huge mistake, and if the accused got himself a new lawyer might be able to get a new trial based on that.
You're assuming that "illegal images" is a cut and dry term. Not anymore. Have some myspace photos of your young looking friend in just her underwear? A "jailbait" inspirational photo in your picture folder as a joke? Manga which might be considered obscene?
No matter how innocuous you may think your hard drive is, if you are a heavy internet user there's a chance there's something on there that someone might consider child porn.
Have any naked baby photos of your kids? Remember the mother who got arrested at Wal-Mart after taking such photos to be developed?
This sort of thing isn't nearly as black and white as it is made to seem. Child pornography is a really HORRIBLE thing, and people who create it should be castrated, and people who DESIRE it need to be put into an asylum for psychological treatment. But I just pointed out something that could be subjectively called "child pornography" that probably in in the possession of the majority parents out there...
Hell, I always HATED it when I was a kid and at the family gatherings my mom and grandparents would inevitably drag out my baby pictures... To me, that was annoying. To some freak in law enforcement who's out there trolling the `net trying to entice people to download his government sanctified stash of child porn so they can "bust" them, they were guilty of creating and disseminating child porn...
Hold on there. What makes you think that, if a cop had done what the Circuit City techs had, that evidence would have been inadmissible?
The police couldn't have gotten away with doing this because that would have amounted to an illegal search without a warrant, without probable cause, done "just because I can". That hardly meets even the loosest standard applied to the 4th/5th Amendments.
A PC is private property, after all.
The reason why searches are restricted by the Constitution is to prevent exactly that scenario, ie: government agents randomly or otherwise busting into people's houses "just to check".
It would be very surprising if mechanics asked to check a car would ignore a dead body in a truck.
There is a big difference between seeing drugs on the back seat, or a dead body inside the car, and reporting that, and reporting on drugs found under the carpet in the trunk or in the glovebox if the car was brought in for an oil change...
The mechanic would have had no reasonable need to have searched those two areas to perform the job he was hired to do. Same with a PC tech, if someone brings in a PC to have a CD-ROM drive replaced, there is absolutely NO REASON for the tech to need to search the browser cache or the images directory...
Now, I know, it's a rite of passage thing. We've ALL done it, looked at a customer's PC to see what pr0n he has.. In my case I was permanently cured of that the first time I found GAY pr0n, not the good kind, ie: girl on girl, the OTHER kind:)
But still, I shouldn't have done that then, and techs hired to replace a bad CD drive shouldn't be doing that NOW.
A random technician is elevated to the rank of police forensic tech! but how can you trust him not making mistakes (restoring somebody else's partition) or him being corrupted into intentionally downloading illegal stuff to a client PC? nevermind child porn, all you need to ruin a person are a bunch of mp3s, in this brave new world.
A good lawyer should, in that case, call upon another tech as an expert witness to explain to the court how easy it is, with admin/root access to a PC AND physical access to put ANYTHING you want onto it and phony file creation/change dates to make it look like it was there 1 day ago, 1 week ago, 1 year ago, and hide it from the system owner so that they go home with it not even knowing it's there, then tip off the cops.
A tech who has a vendetta against you could easily do such a thing.
As a career IT professional, I don't WANT to have that kind of potentially abused power... Which is why this is a BAD decision.
While I certainly despite people who desire or who peddle in child porn (and that includes the government "sting" entrappers themselves who are the LARGEST distributor of the stuff in the country, and who keep the largest amount of it around) this decision dumps barrels of oil onto the slippery slope.
I guarantee that the aforementioned "stingers" are going to start pressuring IT shops to search for the disgusting stuff and report to them. I can even see localities passing laws REQUIRING technicians to search hard drives for illegal material, and probably not just porn, but imagine the RIAA buying themselves some laws requiring techs to report file sharing software and MP3's...
It's a HUGE loophole that needs to be closed. If the evidence would be inadmissible in a criminal court if government actors collected it in that manner (ie: no warrant, no probable cause, no witnessing something happening in front of them) then evidence collected by civilians passed to the government should also be inadmissible. Indeed, in those circumstances, a citizen getting involved in law enforcement by implication is part of the "unorganized militia" and should be subject to the same limitations because they ARE, in effect, a government actor.
If the publishers want to compete with the used market, it seems to me their best option is to either:
1. Produce such a high quality product with so much content and replay value that everyone will WANT to own it first hand, and that it's so good that it will be months or never that a first sale customer is willing to let it go.
2. Sell at a price that makes it make no sense to wait for used copies to become widely available.
Neither of which the game publishing industry is willing to even seriously consider. Instead they want to use RIAA tactics to force the used market out of existence.
Because clearly, popularity is the only worthwhile measurement of quality.
They don't like it when you compare WOW to the popularity of "reality" shows.
Popularity doesn't necessarily equate to quality. McDonalds hamburgers are undoubtedly the most popular burgers, but is that because they are also the highest in quality? Of course not. There are MANY places you can go and get a lot better burger than at McDonalds.
Getting back to topic: What the CO$ doesn't like is when people point out that what they are selling is (intentionally) fucked up amateur psychological therapy, calling it a "religion" and charging more for it than it would cost to go to a REAL, college educated, trained, certified, psychologist.
Theirs is an organization that MUST present a public face made of smoke and mirrors because the truth isn't an option for them, so they CANNOT tolerate anyone who can blow away some of that smoke screen, exposing the very poorly written science fiction behind the curtain.
As opposed to a WoW fan trying to justify his purchase by mocking a small number of people playing some other game?
As someone who's first MMO was Pre-CU (as in pre SOE destruction) Star Wars Galaxies and who has played EVE for the last 2 years, I have to say I am GLAD the typical WOW player doesn't play my game:)
The CO$ got banned because they systematically abused the PRIVILEGE (not a right) to do edits on Wikipedia because they were doing so to silence criticism.
If they'd made edits to correct factual errors instead of their own (since they have already violated Godwin's Law) NAZI like internet tactics this never would have happened.
Now I wish Wikipedia would start banning other corporate abusers, such as Sony, who also notoriously edits out any criticism of them and their ethics. Go look at all the edits on the Star Wars Galaxies article and SOE liar in chief John "Smed" Smedley.
The EU, which is largely beyond the influence of individuals but not lobbies to influence, is passing laws that trump the laws of nations, and even their constitutions.
This is why we must NEVER allow the United States to end up in such a thing, which a lot of the internationalist statist types would like to see.
We must remain vigilant that we don't wake up one day and find that by treaty, the US Constitution and it's Bill of Rights can be overridden by a foreign bureaucracy.
Obama has appointed more czars than any other President that I can remember. And I think this is a bad thing, as czars end up with the same (or more) power as a constitutional cabinet official and don't have to go through the scrutiny of confirmation.
This makes it easy to slip in cronies and lobbyists. And yes, I expect the person to have MAFIAA ties.
The Obama administration runs like it has two cabinets, the one that had to be confirmed by Congress, and the "shadow" one made up of czars and all these "focus groups" he's been running.
This definitely doesn't lead to transparency in government.
Isn't this the company that is losing billions of dollars, that is notorious for cheating their customers, installing rootkits, running their MMORPG's in an unethical manner? This is a company that for 15 years has been living off their name and the fact that it used to make rock solid quality products.
Yeah, I as a consumer SO need to be lectured on ethics by a stuffed shirt from Sony.
...without a warrant is going to suffer some lead poisoning caused by a.30-06 bullet. And the law in my state allows you to shoot intruders so it'd be perfectly legal.
The Bill of Rights spells out prohibitions on government authority in general and on Congress in particular. The FCC is a creation of Congress and is run by the executive branch and CANNOT be given any authority by the legislation that created it if Congress doesn't have that authority to give in the first place.
They are saving time and money with a highly accurate technology. As a tax payer, I think this approach sounds great. As a citizen, I think this approach should always require a warrant.
I completely agree. The police can even obtain wiretaps and permission to place a bug if they have a warrant to do so. A GPS tracker is nothing more than another form of that, so it should be assumed by any reasonable person that if bugs and wiretaps require a warrant, so does a GPS tracker.
Instead these guys did it willfully without one, which in my mind makes them bad cops and the prosecutors who intentionally used this evidence to get a conviction criminals themselves.
Sadly, not all police are "Sergeant Joe Friday" (of Dragnet fame). Joe Friday would have followed the suspect and used good police work.
What I meant and said poorly, is that there must have been some sort of stolen goods that the guy had in his possession. That alone should be good enough for the guy to be put in jail. The fact that police followed improper procedures needs to be addressed in a very harsh manner. However, I still think that someone should not be able to get away with a crime on a technicality.
Doesn't matter. They illegally placed a tracking device and used that as the method of catching him with the stolen goods. Because the method they used to catch him with the stolen stuff was illegal, then that evidence is tainted and inadmissible.
Trust me, you don't want it any other way. Had the police done good police work (ie: followed him with police detectives) instead of the quick and easy way (slap the GPS onto his vehicle) they would have caught him and the conviction would have stood.
We shouldn't allow the government to get away with circumventing the Constitution with technology for their own convenience.
Plus, given that the police and prosecution now have been proven to have broken the law THEMSELVES to collect this evidence, I don't necessarily take their word for it that this was the burglar. Since they were clearly willing to break the law to get a conviction, who's to say they didnt' plant this evidence? The guilty don't deserve a presumption of innocence, and by this ruling, those involved in this case have been found guilty of violating the rights of the accused.
If they didn't have enough evidence going in to get a warrant for the suspect in the first place, one wonders how flimsy their case was otherwise...
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History, A&E, Discovery, etc other than the news channels are basically all I watch on cable...
Yep, especially the more niche ones. Which is why it's actually the cable channel broadcasters who oppose it. A lot of those channels get on there because in order to get a desirable channel (such as ESPN) a cable company is forced to take other channels they might not want and add them to their basic tier. Indeed, most all of them try to force their way onto the basic tier, while wanting to charge premium rates. In the cable companies defense, this is the biggest pressure there is causing basic cable rates to rise.
There was a recent battle between Comcast (I think it was them) and the NFL network... The NFL and other leagues now think that even being shown on sports networks like ESPN isn't good enough and what their own channel. They've since started moving games there that used to be shown by broadcast networks which pissed a lot of football fans off. They are one of the ones wanting to charge outrageous fees for their channel, yet insist it be on basic cable. Comcast agreed to carry the NFL Network but insisted it be on a premium sports tier, which would mean less money for the NFL (but would also mean that subscribers who didn't want it wouldn't have to pay for it). The NFL threw a hissy fit over that. Haven't heard anything about that in awhile but Comcast was sticking to their guns on it.
ESPN loves to milk tons of money out of cable systems, and in fact, their channels are amongst the most expensive for cable providers, mostly because Disney insists that they be on the "basic" tier. Funny thing is the more ESPN channels they add the worse their programming seems to get, and my days of making sure I didn't miss SportsCenter are LONG gone thanks to the Internet, but I digress.
So, I'm not surprised that they are trying the same thing with ISP's. I don't think this is going to work out that well though. Getting to see broadcasts of games online won't be more than a niche until much faster broadband is available and wireless broadband is more ubiquitous. ESPN was one of the first to start charging for web content in the first place, which is where I'd think it'd be appropriate to sell subscriptions to their video service, but it seems to me that they want to force the ISP's to pay, hence forcing every SUBSCRIBER of that ISP to pay for it as it will be passed on, thus netting them cash from people who don't want their video service and won't use it.
Given how they've been larding up their website with screaming video ads that start playing immediately I've been going to it less and less. They really are living on past reputation only as their content has really gone down hill the past couple years. I certainly don't want my ISP to pay and pass the charges on to me.
If they can't be cured, then they need to be confined. Unfortunately the "system" is far more zealous about trying to catch people with "child porn" than it is with actually protecting children from sick individuals like that.
As for your other example, that's not a good comparison. Men being attracted to lovely women with "huge tracts of.. land" in their prime reproductive years is normal and desired natural behavior as it perpetuates the species :) Any desire different than that represents a deviancy that isn't normal or natural. We tolerate those that involve consenting adults, as we should, but in the case of children, individuals who engage in that need to be kept off the streets.
That said, I have to admit when I see stories of hot blonde teachers getting it on with their teenage students, I've wished "why couldn't that have been ME back in high school" :) But I'd think totally different on that if I had children, to be sure.
As a civil libertarian, this sort of thing is something I very much object to, and think rapes the spirit AND LETTER of the Constitution.
No one should be above the law, ESPECIALLY not the government. If it's a crime for ME to have drugs in my possession and offer to sell them to someone, it should be a crime for the POLICE to do so.
This is so fucked up. A cop can pose as a drug dealer, as a prostitute, etc, and get away with lying to you. You, however, can be busted for lying to THEM, even if they do not identify themselves as a police officer, and you don't know that they are.
That is serious abuse of power, that unfortunately happens every day. I often wonder how many are enticed by "sting" operators into committing crimes they never would have had the police not solicited it?
I'm glad I grew up when I did (1980's, graduated 1991). I was 18 when I was a senior, and the girl I dated that year was 17. Of course her parents had NO problems with that, but I shudder to think what could happen today, what with digital cameras, etc. I certainly WOULD have liked to have salacious pics of my girlfriends back in the day, but back then you had to use film cameras and let someone else develop them, which is why such pics were NEVER taken.
I guess this is an example of technology enabling old taboos to drop.
You are correct. That is another huge problem. The irony is that a 19 year old can (in most states) legally have sex with or even MARRY a 17 year old with their consent (but not their parents) but if they filmed the honeymoon be arrested for child pornography.
The problem is that law enforcement REQUIRES the application of common sense, from the street cop on up to the prosecutors and judges. But common sense is becoming more and more uncommon these days, thus increasing the incidents where the system is going from one that has potential for abuse to one that is ROUTINELY abused. See Mike Nifong and the the Duke Lacrosse "rape" case.
There is one remedy in that case.
Failing to bring up the "chain of custody" status of the evidence is serious malpractice in the case of the lawyer representing the defendant. Seems to me the lawyer locked in on the argument "techs shouldn't be searching hard drives for porn" (which isn't settled law) and ignored the more conventional argument. Huge mistake, and if the accused got himself a new lawyer might be able to get a new trial based on that.
Have any naked baby photos of your kids? Remember the mother who got arrested at Wal-Mart after taking such photos to be developed?
This sort of thing isn't nearly as black and white as it is made to seem. Child pornography is a really HORRIBLE thing, and people who create it should be castrated, and people who DESIRE it need to be put into an asylum for psychological treatment. But I just pointed out something that could be subjectively called "child pornography" that probably in in the possession of the majority parents out there...
Hell, I always HATED it when I was a kid and at the family gatherings my mom and grandparents would inevitably drag out my baby pictures... To me, that was annoying. To some freak in law enforcement who's out there trolling the `net trying to entice people to download his government sanctified stash of child porn so they can "bust" them, they were guilty of creating and disseminating child porn...
The police couldn't have gotten away with doing this because that would have amounted to an illegal search without a warrant, without probable cause, done "just because I can". That hardly meets even the loosest standard applied to the 4th/5th Amendments.
A PC is private property, after all.
The reason why searches are restricted by the Constitution is to prevent exactly that scenario, ie: government agents randomly or otherwise busting into people's houses "just to check".
There is a big difference between seeing drugs on the back seat, or a dead body inside the car, and reporting that, and reporting on drugs found under the carpet in the trunk or in the glovebox if the car was brought in for an oil change...
The mechanic would have had no reasonable need to have searched those two areas to perform the job he was hired to do. Same with a PC tech, if someone brings in a PC to have a CD-ROM drive replaced, there is absolutely NO REASON for the tech to need to search the browser cache or the images directory...
Now, I know, it's a rite of passage thing. We've ALL done it, looked at a customer's PC to see what pr0n he has.. In my case I was permanently cured of that the first time I found GAY pr0n, not the good kind, ie: girl on girl, the OTHER kind :)
But still, I shouldn't have done that then, and techs hired to replace a bad CD drive shouldn't be doing that NOW.
A good lawyer should, in that case, call upon another tech as an expert witness to explain to the court how easy it is, with admin/root access to a PC AND physical access to put ANYTHING you want onto it and phony file creation/change dates to make it look like it was there 1 day ago, 1 week ago, 1 year ago, and hide it from the system owner so that they go home with it not even knowing it's there, then tip off the cops.
A tech who has a vendetta against you could easily do such a thing.
As a career IT professional, I don't WANT to have that kind of potentially abused power... Which is why this is a BAD decision.
While I certainly despite people who desire or who peddle in child porn (and that includes the government "sting" entrappers themselves who are the LARGEST distributor of the stuff in the country, and who keep the largest amount of it around) this decision dumps barrels of oil onto the slippery slope.
I guarantee that the aforementioned "stingers" are going to start pressuring IT shops to search for the disgusting stuff and report to them. I can even see localities passing laws REQUIRING technicians to search hard drives for illegal material, and probably not just porn, but imagine the RIAA buying themselves some laws requiring techs to report file sharing software and MP3's...
It's a HUGE loophole that needs to be closed. If the evidence would be inadmissible in a criminal court if government actors collected it in that manner (ie: no warrant, no probable cause, no witnessing something happening in front of them) then evidence collected by civilians passed to the government should also be inadmissible. Indeed, in those circumstances, a citizen getting involved in law enforcement by implication is part of the "unorganized militia" and should be subject to the same limitations because they ARE, in effect, a government actor.
If the publishers want to compete with the used market, it seems to me their best option is to either:
1. Produce such a high quality product with so much content and replay value that everyone will WANT to own it first hand, and that it's so good that it will be months or never that a first sale customer is willing to let it go.
2. Sell at a price that makes it make no sense to wait for used copies to become widely available.
Neither of which the game publishing industry is willing to even seriously consider. Instead they want to use RIAA tactics to force the used market out of existence.
My main toon is "Jack Gilligan", I fly for Dragon's Rage in Ethereal Dawn Alliance.
Because clearly, popularity is the only worthwhile measurement of quality.
They don't like it when you compare WOW to the popularity of "reality" shows.
Popularity doesn't necessarily equate to quality. McDonalds hamburgers are undoubtedly the most popular burgers, but is that because they are also the highest in quality? Of course not. There are MANY places you can go and get a lot better burger than at McDonalds.
Getting back to topic: What the CO$ doesn't like is when people point out that what they are selling is (intentionally) fucked up amateur psychological therapy, calling it a "religion" and charging more for it than it would cost to go to a REAL, college educated, trained, certified, psychologist.
Theirs is an organization that MUST present a public face made of smoke and mirrors because the truth isn't an option for them, so they CANNOT tolerate anyone who can blow away some of that smoke screen, exposing the very poorly written science fiction behind the curtain.
Very OT, but I just have to comment on this:
As opposed to a WoW fan trying to justify his purchase by mocking a small number of people playing some other game?
As someone who's first MMO was Pre-CU (as in pre SOE destruction) Star Wars Galaxies and who has played EVE for the last 2 years, I have to say I am GLAD the typical WOW player doesn't play my game :)
The CO$ got banned because they systematically abused the PRIVILEGE (not a right) to do edits on Wikipedia because they were doing so to silence criticism.
If they'd made edits to correct factual errors instead of their own (since they have already violated Godwin's Law) NAZI like internet tactics this never would have happened.
Now I wish Wikipedia would start banning other corporate abusers, such as Sony, who also notoriously edits out any criticism of them and their ethics. Go look at all the edits on the Star Wars Galaxies article and SOE liar in chief John "Smed" Smedley.
The EU, which is largely beyond the influence of individuals but not lobbies to influence, is passing laws that trump the laws of nations, and even their constitutions.
This is why we must NEVER allow the United States to end up in such a thing, which a lot of the internationalist statist types would like to see.
We must remain vigilant that we don't wake up one day and find that by treaty, the US Constitution and it's Bill of Rights can be overridden by a foreign bureaucracy.
Obama has appointed more czars than any other President that I can remember. And I think this is a bad thing, as czars end up with the same (or more) power as a constitutional cabinet official and don't have to go through the scrutiny of confirmation.
This makes it easy to slip in cronies and lobbyists. And yes, I expect the person to have MAFIAA ties.
The Obama administration runs like it has two cabinets, the one that had to be confirmed by Congress, and the "shadow" one made up of czars and all these "focus groups" he's been running.
This definitely doesn't lead to transparency in government.
Isn't this the company that is losing billions of dollars, that is notorious for cheating their customers, installing rootkits, running their MMORPG's in an unethical manner? This is a company that for 15 years has been living off their name and the fact that it used to make rock solid quality products.
Yeah, I as a consumer SO need to be lectured on ethics by a stuffed shirt from Sony.
...without a warrant is going to suffer some lead poisoning caused by a .30-06 bullet. And the law in my state allows you to shoot intruders so it'd be perfectly legal.
The Bill of Rights spells out prohibitions on government authority in general and on Congress in particular. The FCC is a creation of Congress and is run by the executive branch and CANNOT be given any authority by the legislation that created it if Congress doesn't have that authority to give in the first place.
Obambi won't be around if this passes, and it will never happen.
To require this will result in extremely UNSAFE cars that no one wants to buy.
They are saving time and money with a highly accurate technology. As a tax payer, I think this approach sounds great. As a citizen, I think this approach should always require a warrant.
I completely agree. The police can even obtain wiretaps and permission to place a bug if they have a warrant to do so. A GPS tracker is nothing more than another form of that, so it should be assumed by any reasonable person that if bugs and wiretaps require a warrant, so does a GPS tracker.
Instead these guys did it willfully without one, which in my mind makes them bad cops and the prosecutors who intentionally used this evidence to get a conviction criminals themselves.
Sadly, not all police are "Sergeant Joe Friday" (of Dragnet fame). Joe Friday would have followed the suspect and used good police work.
What I meant and said poorly, is that there must have been some sort of stolen goods that the guy had in his possession. That alone should be good enough for the guy to be put in jail. The fact that police followed improper procedures needs to be addressed in a very harsh manner. However, I still think that someone should not be able to get away with a crime on a technicality.
Doesn't matter. They illegally placed a tracking device and used that as the method of catching him with the stolen goods. Because the method they used to catch him with the stolen stuff was illegal, then that evidence is tainted and inadmissible.
Trust me, you don't want it any other way. Had the police done good police work (ie: followed him with police detectives) instead of the quick and easy way (slap the GPS onto his vehicle) they would have caught him and the conviction would have stood.
We shouldn't allow the government to get away with circumventing the Constitution with technology for their own convenience.
Plus, given that the police and prosecution now have been proven to have broken the law THEMSELVES to collect this evidence, I don't necessarily take their word for it that this was the burglar. Since they were clearly willing to break the law to get a conviction, who's to say they didnt' plant this evidence? The guilty don't deserve a presumption of innocence, and by this ruling, those involved in this case have been found guilty of violating the rights of the accused.
If they didn't have enough evidence going in to get a warrant for the suspect in the first place, one wonders how flimsy their case was otherwise...