If they hadn't (illegally) withheld the video, it's possible the contradiction might've helped get an acquittal though, depending on how strong the other evidence was and who was on the jury. It's true that $80k is still illegal, but confronted by multiple inconsistencies in the witness's testimony, the defense might be able to get the testimony thrown out entirely, or at least bring up doubts about the witness's credibility.
This isn't some nit-picking technical error, though. One of the prosecution's main witnesses contradicted his trial testimony in a recorded interview, which the prosecution deliberately withheld from the defense.
Stevens is almost certainly still guilty, but I don't think you can now say that he was convicted at a fair trial, which is why if the DOJ still wished to convict him, they would have to move for a retrial.
I should've been more precise: I don't know of any serious moves afoot. Yeah, someone introduces legislation on almost any possible subject every Congressional term, but most of it has no chance of passing. In this case, it seems Rep. Rush hasn't even managed to attract a single cosponsor.
I don't actually see a proposal for a meaningful gun ban in those links either. The closest I see is the admittedly stupid (and poorly named) Assault Weapons Ban, which would ban some ad-hoc class of rarely-used weapons. Hardly every law-abiding gun owner in the country would be inconvenienced.
I was going to add that such moves aren't particularly plausible post-Heller even if theoretically it were a major part of Obama's agenda (unlikely), given that any meaningful gun ban would be unlikely to be upheld.
They have an effectively exclusive right to do so, though. As part of the class-action settlement, Google is given a right to republish all the involved works, including orphan works. The agreement does not provide a mechanism by which competitors to Google might also gain the right to republish orphan works under similar terms (there is a provision that they can gain similar rights to Google's for non-orphan works, with agreement of the copyright holder).
As a nitpick, not all universities charge for access. University of California libraries, for example, are generally open to any member of the public to just walk in.
I always end up confusing them, so I'll ascribe something to MediaSentry only to be corrected that no, the company involved was MediaDefender, or vice versa. Every time I wanted to complain to my alma mater about Randy Saaf being on their board of trustees (fortunately no longer the case), I had to go look up which of the two he was associated with.
So, I would like to thank the companies for kindly removing this frequent source of error.
Although I also oppose the death penalty, I don't think you can do a "no matter what the reason" analysis. How bad an unethical government-imposed penalty is depends not only on its severity, but on how frequently and to whom it's applied.
From that perspective, I think a government imprisoning someone for 15 years for criticizing the head of state, which should not be a crime at all, is worse, by many orders of magnitude, than a government executing someone who's been convicted of murder.
There's ways to balance that, depending on what your needs and visualization methods are. For example, if you know that a significant proportion of your crime reporting gives only district-level precision, not pinpointing to specific addresses, then it'd be more honest data presentation to just produce a colored-in map on a district-by-district level, and not attempt to give more detailed maps. If you do still want to give the more detailed maps, then at least average the un-localized things across the district instead of putting them all in one place.
To use an actual (fairly simple) example that came up in my work recently: say you have some date figures, most of them with years but some only with decades. The wrong thing to do is to put the "1960s" datapoint at 1965, because then you get spurious spikes in the middle of every decade. Several more correct options are: just produce decade-by-decade visualizations, or else produce year-by-year visualizations, but assign a "1960s" datapoint as a 1/10-weight datapoint in each of 1960 through 1969.
Ah yeah, I wasn't meaning to use "factual matter" as a term of art. The court relied on facts that were conceded by both sides, such as how Google AdSense operates, to determine whether, as a matter of law, such usage would constitute "use in commerce".
The ruling holds little besides the fact that Google did engage in a "use in commerce" of the trademarks. The Court followed the not hugely surprising line of reasoning that: 1) AdSense is clearly a commercial endeavor; and 2) AdSense clearly uses the trademarks, e.g. in its keyword suggestion tool. Therefore Google's claim, that the case should be dismissed immediately for failing to even fall within the scope of trademark law, was rejected.
Of course, Google's uses may still be perfectly legal. All the court's held is that Google does, as a factual matter, use the trademarks, and does so commercially. The case going forward will decide whether that use was within the scope permitted by trademark law.
Selective enforcement is precisely a lot of the concern. If my damage deposit is not returned by my landlord in accordance with the contract, that's illegal; if my landlord deliberately fudged documents to do so, that's fraud. But you will not find the FBI doing much on these sorts of things; it's generally up to the wronged individuals to file civil suits themselves. On the other hand, the FBI does seem to frequently enter the battle on the side of large companies alleging what amounts to contract violations, sometimes with allegations of fraud involved as well. The worry is that this further unbalances the judicial system. Large corporations are already the best equipped to pursue redress themselves, via civil suits demanding damages and/or injunctions; individuals are the worst equipped to do so, due to lack of in-house legal expertise or money to fund extensive litigation. The government intervening disproportionately often to help the side that is already best equipped to defend its interests does not help.
Different scientific fields have somewhat different practices for what does imply causation, driven often by some form of pragmatism. In physics, for example, you typically hypothesize causation, then try to think of things that your hypothesis predicts that haven't yet been shown, and see if you can find those, or find contrary evidence. In medicine and the social sciences, you often try to collect many sets of correlations and then try to factor them out of each other, e.g. compute effect of income on disease X, after controlling for level of education and geographic location and diet. Then in cases where it's practical to do so, you might try the "gold standard" of controlled experiments, though these too must often deal with confounding factors. In other fields there are yet more subtly different standards.
For one attempt to treat the issue fully rigorously, which also shows how complex it is both mathematically and philosophically, I recommend Judea Pearl's book Causality.
That would be the case for a general definition of hate crimes as something that's intended to intimidate a group of similarly-minded people. But hate crime statutes generally only protect specific, enumerated groups of similarly-minded people. So, for example, the federal Hate Crime Sentencing Enhancement Act provides for enhanced penalties if the victim was selected due to "actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation".
Note that your example, violence based on hair color, is not covered; similar lists, differing usually in one or two of the enumerated categories, are part of most state hate-crime legislation. They exclude a number of things that conceptually fit your definition that actually happen; for example, no statute of which I'm aware provides for considering assaults motivated by political beliefs to be a hate crime, despite the fact that e.g. assaulting Communists for their political beliefs intimidates a class of people. But assaulting Communists for their atheism might be covered in states that enumerate religious belief. Do these kinds of special categories for protection actually make sense?
I should add though, that your post did an oddly good job of illustrating the point of the one to which you replied to. I haven't considered voting for Republicans on civil-liberties grounds in quite some time, because the Democrats have generally been better on everything that's come up (habeas corpus, torture, wiretapping, etc.). I'd almost forgotten if there were any civil-liberties issues that I care about on which Republicans were better (I don't greatly care about guns), but you came along and provided an example.;-)
I agree with most of your post except the apparently unrelated bit about hate-crimes legislation. How does that help you to have all of your rights? It establishes more severe penalties for identical crimes if there's a finding that they were influenced by a specific category of hatred. By implication, there are lower penalties if you are a victim of the same crime but it wasn't because of one of those categories of hatred. That somehow doesn't seem like much comfort to me if I'm "only" assaulted because someone wanted my wallet, not because they hated me; or if I'm assaulted because someone hated me for a non-enumerated reason, like my political viewpoints.
That was actually the previous introduction, in 2007, which died at the end of the last Congressional session. This reintroduced one is here. It was introduced by the same person, though, so no substantive disagreement with your post.
The 2007 version had 30 cosponsors, who were 27 Democrats and 3 Republicans. The 2009 version has 17 consponsors so far, who are 15 Democrats and 2 Republicans. So I wouldn't say it's hugely bipartisan, especially since one of the few Republicans in both cases was Republican-with-an-asterisk Ron Paul (Jeff Flake is the other).
The Thomas link you give shows that the 2007 version was passed out of subcommittee in 2008 by a 7-3 vote. I'd be curious who the votes on each side were. By which I mean, of course, I want the names of those 3 fellows.
This bill has 17 cosponsors: 15 Democrats and 2 Republicans. I will admit that, on the issue of National Security Letter reform, there are two Republicans so far who have shown an interest: Ron Paul and Jeff Flake. And Ron Paul is well known for his frequent divergence from the party's positions. What about everyone else? Of course, they can still vote for this when it hopefully comes up; Representatives need not consponsor everything. But there seems to be a decidedly lopsided enthusiasm in the 15 vs. 2 cosponsors there.
Although obviously corrupt judges are a problem, the part I find more disturbing in this case is that a single judge, corrupt or otherwise, even had the power to send a person to prison. Apparently minors don't enjoy the right to jury trial according to various bits of precedent (wtf?), but the very minimum acceptable safeguard should be some sort of multi-person committee, before which the defendant would enjoy legal representation, that would be required to find an actual crime committed.
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If they hadn't (illegally) withheld the video, it's possible the contradiction might've helped get an acquittal though, depending on how strong the other evidence was and who was on the jury. It's true that $80k is still illegal, but confronted by multiple inconsistencies in the witness's testimony, the defense might be able to get the testimony thrown out entirely, or at least bring up doubts about the witness's credibility.
This isn't some nit-picking technical error, though. One of the prosecution's main witnesses contradicted his trial testimony in a recorded interview, which the prosecution deliberately withheld from the defense.
Stevens is almost certainly still guilty, but I don't think you can now say that he was convicted at a fair trial, which is why if the DOJ still wished to convict him, they would have to move for a retrial.
I should've been more precise: I don't know of any serious moves afoot. Yeah, someone introduces legislation on almost any possible subject every Congressional term, but most of it has no chance of passing. In this case, it seems Rep. Rush hasn't even managed to attract a single cosponsor.
I don't actually see a proposal for a meaningful gun ban in those links either. The closest I see is the admittedly stupid (and poorly named) Assault Weapons Ban, which would ban some ad-hoc class of rarely-used weapons. Hardly every law-abiding gun owner in the country would be inconvenienced.
I was going to add that such moves aren't particularly plausible post- Heller even if theoretically it were a major part of Obama's agenda (unlikely), given that any meaningful gun ban would be unlikely to be upheld.
In what sense? Outside the paranoid fantasies of cop-killers, I don't know of any moves afoot to restrict gun rights.
They have an effectively exclusive right to do so, though. As part of the class-action settlement, Google is given a right to republish all the involved works, including orphan works. The agreement does not provide a mechanism by which competitors to Google might also gain the right to republish orphan works under similar terms (there is a provision that they can gain similar rights to Google's for non-orphan works, with agreement of the copyright holder).
As a nitpick, not all universities charge for access. University of California libraries, for example, are generally open to any member of the public to just walk in.
As part of their settlement, Google got an exclusive license to orphaned works, so no competitor can now do the same thing Google is doing.
I always end up confusing them, so I'll ascribe something to MediaSentry only to be corrected that no, the company involved was MediaDefender, or vice versa. Every time I wanted to complain to my alma mater about Randy Saaf being on their board of trustees (fortunately no longer the case), I had to go look up which of the two he was associated with.
So, I would like to thank the companies for kindly removing this frequent source of error.
Although I also oppose the death penalty, I don't think you can do a "no matter what the reason" analysis. How bad an unethical government-imposed penalty is depends not only on its severity, but on how frequently and to whom it's applied.
From that perspective, I think a government imprisoning someone for 15 years for criticizing the head of state, which should not be a crime at all, is worse, by many orders of magnitude, than a government executing someone who's been convicted of murder.
Many of them don't seem to believe that propaganda though, judging by the flood of refugees into China.
There's ways to balance that, depending on what your needs and visualization methods are. For example, if you know that a significant proportion of your crime reporting gives only district-level precision, not pinpointing to specific addresses, then it'd be more honest data presentation to just produce a colored-in map on a district-by-district level, and not attempt to give more detailed maps. If you do still want to give the more detailed maps, then at least average the un-localized things across the district instead of putting them all in one place.
To use an actual (fairly simple) example that came up in my work recently: say you have some date figures, most of them with years but some only with decades. The wrong thing to do is to put the "1960s" datapoint at 1965, because then you get spurious spikes in the middle of every decade. Several more correct options are: just produce decade-by-decade visualizations, or else produce year-by-year visualizations, but assign a "1960s" datapoint as a 1/10-weight datapoint in each of 1960 through 1969.
Ah yeah, I wasn't meaning to use "factual matter" as a term of art. The court relied on facts that were conceded by both sides, such as how Google AdSense operates, to determine whether, as a matter of law, such usage would constitute "use in commerce".
The ruling holds little besides the fact that Google did engage in a "use in commerce" of the trademarks. The Court followed the not hugely surprising line of reasoning that: 1) AdSense is clearly a commercial endeavor; and 2) AdSense clearly uses the trademarks, e.g. in its keyword suggestion tool. Therefore Google's claim, that the case should be dismissed immediately for failing to even fall within the scope of trademark law, was rejected.
Of course, Google's uses may still be perfectly legal. All the court's held is that Google does, as a factual matter, use the trademarks, and does so commercially. The case going forward will decide whether that use was within the scope permitted by trademark law.
Selective enforcement is precisely a lot of the concern. If my damage deposit is not returned by my landlord in accordance with the contract, that's illegal; if my landlord deliberately fudged documents to do so, that's fraud. But you will not find the FBI doing much on these sorts of things; it's generally up to the wronged individuals to file civil suits themselves. On the other hand, the FBI does seem to frequently enter the battle on the side of large companies alleging what amounts to contract violations, sometimes with allegations of fraud involved as well. The worry is that this further unbalances the judicial system. Large corporations are already the best equipped to pursue redress themselves, via civil suits demanding damages and/or injunctions; individuals are the worst equipped to do so, due to lack of in-house legal expertise or money to fund extensive litigation. The government intervening disproportionately often to help the side that is already best equipped to defend its interests does not help.
There's plenty of other history that we have learned from in developing a strong suspicion of questionable-sounding government raids.
Valve actually found the opposite when they tested the demand curve.
Different scientific fields have somewhat different practices for what does imply causation, driven often by some form of pragmatism. In physics, for example, you typically hypothesize causation, then try to think of things that your hypothesis predicts that haven't yet been shown, and see if you can find those, or find contrary evidence. In medicine and the social sciences, you often try to collect many sets of correlations and then try to factor them out of each other, e.g. compute effect of income on disease X, after controlling for level of education and geographic location and diet. Then in cases where it's practical to do so, you might try the "gold standard" of controlled experiments, though these too must often deal with confounding factors. In other fields there are yet more subtly different standards.
For one attempt to treat the issue fully rigorously, which also shows how complex it is both mathematically and philosophically, I recommend Judea Pearl's book Causality .
That would be the case for a general definition of hate crimes as something that's intended to intimidate a group of similarly-minded people. But hate crime statutes generally only protect specific, enumerated groups of similarly-minded people. So, for example, the federal Hate Crime Sentencing Enhancement Act provides for enhanced penalties if the victim was selected due to "actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation".
Note that your example, violence based on hair color, is not covered; similar lists, differing usually in one or two of the enumerated categories, are part of most state hate-crime legislation. They exclude a number of things that conceptually fit your definition that actually happen; for example, no statute of which I'm aware provides for considering assaults motivated by political beliefs to be a hate crime, despite the fact that e.g. assaulting Communists for their political beliefs intimidates a class of people. But assaulting Communists for their atheism might be covered in states that enumerate religious belief. Do these kinds of special categories for protection actually make sense?
I should add though, that your post did an oddly good job of illustrating the point of the one to which you replied to. I haven't considered voting for Republicans on civil-liberties grounds in quite some time, because the Democrats have generally been better on everything that's come up (habeas corpus, torture, wiretapping, etc.). I'd almost forgotten if there were any civil-liberties issues that I care about on which Republicans were better (I don't greatly care about guns), but you came along and provided an example. ;-)
I agree with most of your post except the apparently unrelated bit about hate-crimes legislation. How does that help you to have all of your rights? It establishes more severe penalties for identical crimes if there's a finding that they were influenced by a specific category of hatred. By implication, there are lower penalties if you are a victim of the same crime but it wasn't because of one of those categories of hatred. That somehow doesn't seem like much comfort to me if I'm "only" assaulted because someone wanted my wallet, not because they hated me; or if I'm assaulted because someone hated me for a non-enumerated reason, like my political viewpoints.
That was actually the previous introduction, in 2007, which died at the end of the last Congressional session. This reintroduced one is here. It was introduced by the same person, though, so no substantive disagreement with your post.
The 2007 version had 30 cosponsors, who were 27 Democrats and 3 Republicans. The 2009 version has 17 consponsors so far, who are 15 Democrats and 2 Republicans. So I wouldn't say it's hugely bipartisan, especially since one of the few Republicans in both cases was Republican-with-an-asterisk Ron Paul (Jeff Flake is the other).
The Thomas link you give shows that the 2007 version was passed out of subcommittee in 2008 by a 7-3 vote. I'd be curious who the votes on each side were. By which I mean, of course, I want the names of those 3 fellows.
This bill has 17 cosponsors: 15 Democrats and 2 Republicans. I will admit that, on the issue of National Security Letter reform, there are two Republicans so far who have shown an interest: Ron Paul and Jeff Flake. And Ron Paul is well known for his frequent divergence from the party's positions. What about everyone else? Of course, they can still vote for this when it hopefully comes up; Representatives need not consponsor everything. But there seems to be a decidedly lopsided enthusiasm in the 15 vs. 2 cosponsors there.
Although obviously corrupt judges are a problem, the part I find more disturbing in this case is that a single judge, corrupt or otherwise, even had the power to send a person to prison. Apparently minors don't enjoy the right to jury trial according to various bits of precedent (wtf?), but the very minimum acceptable safeguard should be some sort of multi-person committee, before which the defendant would enjoy legal representation, that would be required to find an actual crime committed.