Porn would be considered by the court as an "unsavory" connection to a trademarked product, and the trademark would likely be upheld.
Read the Groklaw piece. It's mentioned there.
Granted, I think it's dumb to worry about "Linux porn" denigrating an operating system, but the laws and the people who interpret them are just primates worried about where they are in the hierarchy, so it's understandable.
Remember when Star Trek people got upset over Kirk and Spock gay fan porn? Same thing.
However, the Groklaw article DOES state that when you refer to Linux, the preferred way is to include the trademark symbol and include a sentence that the trademark is registered to Linus.
I sincerely doubt that the LMI has the funds to hassle anybody who doesn't do this or cares to do this anyway.
They just want people to do it so the fact of the trademark becomes clear and contributes to the defense of the trademark, in particular to reduce the chances that it will become a generic term like "Xerox vrs xerox" has, which could be important in court. As everyone knows, Xerox has gone to some lengths to prevent their brand name being used generically to mean "copying".
But I doubt the LMI will bother going as far as Xerox, if for no other reason than they don't have the money to do so.
He was not referring to administrative and legal costs PER APPLICANT.
He was referring to the admin and legal costs of registering trademarks in other countries and of maintaining those trademarks against infringers.
The purpose of the fees is to fund the operation of the LMI.
The only persons who might be negatively affected by a $200 fee would be one-man distros - and it's not clear to me that a distro per se has to pay the fee if it's not a revenue-producing distro.
If "non-profit" means any free distro, then they do. I doubt most free distros will worry much about $200 a year.
In any event, people have been moaning about "too many distros", this might weed out the ones that are utterly irrelevant except as personal projects. And as pointed out, call them Knoppix and that solves that - until Klaus trademarks that name.
As PJ so carefully pointed out - and you seem unable to comprehend - this is the way the system is set up. You either defend a name or you lose it.
You WANT Microsoft to produce a version of Windows OR Linux called Windows Linux? One that breaks every essential of Linux?
There's nothing stopping them from doing that, homes, except trademark law. The GPL allows Microsoft to produce their own distro tomorrow, if they feel like it.
I agree - it's IP bullshit. But in this system, you either do it or you lose the name - any name you come up with. That simple.
Personally I think it would be fun to drop the name and call Linux 'the other OS' - but the net effect would be the same: nobody would know a priori to a source code examination what was Linux and what wasn't.
In the end, the GPL is more important than this trademark business and that hasn't changed - and won't. Linux will continue to be free as in freedom and mostly free as in beer. Linus is just trying to see that you know which Linux is really Linux without having to analyze source code.
LMI and Maddog have been, according to the Groklaw article, EXPLICITLY authorized to do this.
And your entire position on "eclipsing the Linux brand" is completely irrelevant to Linus, I would believe, because it is not the BRAND that he cares about WHEN we are talking about the CODE. It is only the BRAND he cares about when we are talking about the NAME as used by commercial entities.
I believe that as long as the code is GPL and derived from Linux code, he doesn't care what it ultimately ends up being called, as long as someone isn't producing something that ISN'T Linux code and calling it Linux.
The entire point of this is to prevent people from turning out something that is NOT LINUX CODE and calling it Linux.
The revenue letters are to get some companies to support the trademark protection effort, which, as the Groklaw article points out, is a necessary effort to prevent the dilution of the name Linux, which would allow people to produce NON-LINUX-DERIVED products and call them Linux.
If you HAVE Linux code and you call it Brandix, it's irrelevant. First, because people will simply call it Brandix Linux. Secondly, because it is still Linux code.
Knoppix is Linux code, does not use the Linux name, and nobody (that I know of) misunderstands what it is, nor does Linus AFAIK insist that it pay a trademark fee.
If you create a Linux distro, and give it away, AFAIK you don't have to pay the trademark fee - you only have to refer to its origin as "LinuxCircleR", the trademark symbol. If you derive revenue from that distro, then you need to pay the trademark fee so that Linus and the LMI can demonstrate in court that they control that trademark.
I could be wrong about whether other free distros need to pay the fee - someone correct me about this if that is the case. In any event, a free distro would be considered a non-profit according to the fee scale, and the fee would be $200, then - which would only affect one-man distros who are too poor to pay it.
So how is that in any way different from your scenario? It's already happened and nobody cares. And it has had absolutely no effect on the Linux name except to protect it from people like Microsoft.
Personally, I find the whole thing unfortunate that it has to be done, but I'm an anarchist, so that's irrelevant.
But then, I suppose everybody assumes politicians are psychopaths, so nobody cares.
Bush is a psychotic, dry drunk, typically Chistian hypocritical chimpanzee.
Latest word is the White House has "weather reports" among the staff each day to see if he's feeling good - or on some rage where he's likely to lash out at anyone around him. Shades of the Watergate Nixon White House.
Right now, since he's taken yet ANOTHER "vacation" at his "all hat, no cattle" ranch, where he's been forced into hiding by a mother who wants answers for his stupid, greed-and-power-driven policies, we can all expect another "terrorist attack" (read: Reichstag fire incident) in a few weeks, since reportedly all military leaves have been canceled from September into December.
Presumably the next victim is Iran.
It's not surprising he's supported by corporate types like Bill Gates and morons like Ah-nuld who generally show similar characteristics.
Not that Clinton was any better - as he once told Genifer Flowers, he was "born 17 and stayed 17. Hillary was born 40 and stayed 40."
And don't even get me started on Donnie Rumsfeld, a rambling, lying, arrogant, senile pissant who wouldn't be respected by the counter clerks if he was running a McDonald's in Podunk.
Still, you monkeys all demand that people respect these assholes, because otherwise you wouldn't know where you are in the primate hierarchy - which might cause chimpanzee anxiety.
Just read an article this morning quoting Henry Kissinger from Woodward's book saying how military men were all dumb, stupid animals to be manipulated for foreign policy aims, and stating how Kissinger used to dress down General Al Haig in front of the secretaries in the White House for alleged incompetence.
Well within this century, nanotech and bioengineering will allow recreating virtually any species as long as relatively complete DNA is available - and certainly all the existing megafauna - and much fauna, mega or otherwise, that died out in recent centuries - will have recoverable DNA from one source or another.
And once nanotech accelerates humans to Transhumans, recreating any species will be trivial - assuming Transhumans care enough to bother. And with most humans out of the picture, repopulation of the megafauna will be rapid and unopposed.
In a few hundreds or thousands of years - an eyeblink in evolutionary and geological time - the Earth will look as it did thousands of years ago. Even long-term changes wrought by thousands of years of human existence can be reversed by nanotech mega-engineering projects - again, if deemed useful.
I remember that pardon frenzy in the last minutes of Clinton's office. I think Mark Rich got a pardon, too - and the cops have been after him for years. Yeah, that probably was Leonard's best and only chance - unless somebody slightly less crooked than Clinton gets in and actually does it.
Naah, never happen - unless that President REALLY wants to piss off the FBI - not a good move, since who knows whether the FBI was involved in one or more of the Kennedy assassinations...:-) I remember watching the British spy show, "The Sandbaggers", and they had an episode about US assassinations - and the script was worded as if everybody in the world already KNEW the FBI assassinated Kennedy. It was interesting to see the take from a foreign country on that - they just assumed it was the FBI straight up.
And everybody everywhere assumes the FBI was behind the Martin Luther King assassination.
In five years, Sun will be the new SCO suing Linus for destroying their market. And Linus will be saying as he has before, "That was just an unintended side effect."
Solaris has absolutely no hope of producing a development community to top Linux. It MAY produce one that allows it to maintain a niche market like the BSD's or for companies who continue to run Sun hardware or are used to Solaris. In other words, it MAY extend Solaris' lifespan.
I'm not the kind of guy who causes societies to erode.
They don't need my help, they're doing great all on their one. Mostly because of self-righteous dickwads who think they're better than anyone else - in fact, HAVE to think they're better than anyone else because they're fucking primates.
What I am is a guy who wants human societies to fucking totally self-destruct - just so long as I get the technology I want first. And if they don't self-destruct, once I get the tech I need, I'll make sure they get burned down.
You monkeys have had your time and fucked it up. Stand aside for the next wave or get left behind.
You want to get rid of kiddie porn? Go bust Bush and his cronies - there are plenty of rumors about Bush's old man and the REAL kiddie slave ring operated by senior Republicans whose main operator WALKED from prosecution some years back and it is still in operation.
Not to mention that Bush and his cronies have killed more fucking kids in Iraq in the last two years than every sex slave ring on the planet.
So take your self-righteous horseshit and shove it.
Yes, there are photos of Ryder wearing the Peltier button on the Net - I've got some on my hard drive in my babe collection.
Ryder was also recently involved in lobbying for some murder case review in southern California.
She needs to chill out before the cops find a more permanent way to get rid of her than shoplifting.
She's the god-daughter of Tim Leary and she should remember how he got framed into prison.
I hadn't heard about Sarandon being involved with Peltier but I know she does a lot of political stuff so it's no surprise.
When I was at Leavenworth, I worked on Peltier's Unicore furniture factory crew for a couple days. We had a discussion about Web sites (this was late '90's). He had a lot of sites discussing his case but he was interested in getting up some sort of "official" site, it seemed, and he was asking me about how to promote a Web site.
Waste of time - he's never getting out ever. If he did, the FBI would have to go down, so it isn't happening.
Shoplifting in the vast majority of cases is considered a misdemeanor and is so prosecuted in LA. Only if a very large dollar value is involved is the case prosecuted as a felony. There were NO cases larger than hers so prosecuted over the previous several years. Her case was immediately prosecuted as a felony.
Secondly, the DA reassigned lawyers in the office from a MURDER case to this lame shoplifting case. Reports were that a number of the DA's office lawyers were highly irritated by this.
Third, the case was tried by the police department and the DA in the press with statements made about video evidence and the like which proved non-existent when the case came to trial. The only significant evidence they had was the security guard testimony. It was a case of "he said, she said" - or more precisely, "they said, she said" - but her idiot lawyer did not let her testify.
Fourth, she got no free publicity that worked to her advantage. Her movie career was set back by a couple years at least, and she's only now getting some more serious offers. Conviction of a crime can raise the cost of insurance for a motion picture production - production companies need indemnification in case an actor fails to complete a role. This was Bob Downey's problem after his drug convictions.
Joel Mowbray at the National Review made a number of critical comments of this case at the time, so this isn't only my opinion.
As far as the jury goes, as I said, the testimony was obviously perjured and the defense was poorly conducted by that idiot Garregos. The jury chose to believe the security guards which is certainly their right, but I think a little celebrity envy went along with that.
Finally, "Noni" is her long-time known nickname.
My interest in her comes from her being the god-daughter of Dr. Timothy Leary - she was one of the last people to take care of him when he was dying, and her and her family (well-known Bay Area hippies from the Sixties - her father runs an alternative bookstore and her mother was one of the founders of the Free Clinic here) were close to Dr. Tim for years.
She's also known here for being part of the Polly Klass murder case - she went on public TV and urged people to help search for Polly. Klass's father attended Ryder's trial and spoke out on her behalf. By all accounts she's quite a responsible person, at least compared to many celebrities.
My only complaint about her is she smokes...:-) And she dates rock stars instead of me...:-)
Well, the plain view clause is fairly obvious, since by definition it means a crime is being committed in "plain view" of the police - not the smartest thing someone can do, and obviously search and seizure should not be an issue there. You wouldn't require a warrant if you shoot someone in front of a cop, either. The point of search and seizure is to prevent searches when there is no "probable cause" to believe a crime is IN FACT being committed.
I agree that the main issue in the case is lack of a warrant - the privacy issue is a side issue.
One related problem recently is that part of the Patriot Act which requires financial institutions to assign a "Money Laundering Officer" to examine all transactions and report anything that looks suspicious - to him. This makes every J Random Asshole in a bank or a brokerage an informer by definition.
And given the number of transactions, the only way any institution can handle this is either err on the side of over-reporting or err on the side of under-reporting. Which means that too many false positives will be made or too few proper identifications will be made.
Both of which defeat the purpose of the legislation - assuming the purpose was legit in the first place and not just another effort to collect privacy-violating information on the citizenry in the first place.
I disagree with the notion that free speech rights apply on private property. I think you can order anyone to leave your property for any reason, including speech you disagree with. You can't stop him from talking, but you can order him to leave.
I'm also inclined not to agree that someone whose toilet habits are broadcast has any particular case to bring to suit. There may certainly be laws that allow that, but I'm not sure any significant damage has been done to the individual other than embarassment which justifies such a law. In any event, a civil suit is different than a criminal investigation, so this gets a bit far afield from the issue in the original article.
As libertarians have argued strongly, property rights ARE personal rights and should have equal strength, because if you don't control your property, someone else does and that means your personal freedom and rights are limited. The only right libertarians recognize as stronger than property rights is the right to be free of coercion - meaning you can't use property rights to justify beating someone in your home unless you are exercising the right of self-defense. Privacy is a much less significant right than non-coercion in my view. It's more a cultural issue than a "right."
Again, as far as 7-11 goes, it may be privately held, but it's not AFAIK PERSONALLY held. I think that is a significant difference. A corporation should not have property or personal rights the same as a person and thus should be required to respect privacy rights more than an individual home or business owner needs to.
And the only reason the Defcon guys didn't get 145 miles was that they couldn't reach the proper position to set up their equipment. The road ended two miles too soon and they didn't get the altitude they needed.
The problem is, at what point does "wireless" mean anything at all?
The standard is 802.11. That's what the Defcon and other teams are working on. That's what people care about - extending off the shelf wireless systems.
Holding up another proprietary system as "wireless" - even it technically is - just to claim a record sounds like a marketing stunt to me.
"The equipment used was not based on standard 802.11 wireless technology, but instead was based on proprietary radio technology from Trango."
This would seem to be irrelevant to the Defcon record which was unamplified standard 802.11.
It's comparing apples and oranges, isn't it?
I suppose you can say it's a new "wireless" record, but then what about the Navy's ULF submarine communication methods? Aren't they "wireless"? And they go a lot further than 100 miles.
Point one: a toilet cam would be dumb, but should be perfectly legal in one's own home.
Point two: I don't see that opening up a space to the public for commerce changes anything about PERSONAL property control. While the state evidently does think that, since I don't approve of the state, I don't agree. It's still dumb to spy on customers, of course, but I don't think there is any "right" to privacy in such a space.
Corporate ownership is another matter.
Actually, my issue is with employees more than ownership. Even in scenario 2, where you operate a commercial space personally, if you have an employee spying on your customers, I don't agree with that. He doesn't own the space, and even if you do, he's responsible for his actions, even if under your direction. It's an iffy proposition since I'm saying that you as owner may spy on people but others under your direction may not.
Bottom line for all this is social contract and culture. Anybody can actually spy on anybody anywhere and the consequences are determined by culture and social negotiation. Family members spy on each other all the time because it's culturally accepted that family members in the same residence have more or less equal "rights". I think a good case could be made for opposing even that if you want to argue for inviolable individual rights.
So I think my point on spying by an individual owner of property is acceptable, but not spying by employees or persons other than the owner in commercial property.
And the real bottom line is that spying for anything other than physical security reasons is dumb as it violates trust relationships which could end up costing more than any benefit from spying.
"This ruling could threaten to 'turn your friendly neighborhood computer repair technician into a government informer' "
Your average human is a rat because every human wants advantage over every other human. Ratting somebody out is an easy way to get advantage.
These/. posters are the same rightwing punks who BOHICA every time George Bush opens his mouth. Pathetic wannabe cops. And we all know cops are pathetic cowardly bullies hiding behind a uniform and "backup".
Yeah, but your average Geek Squad moron isn't going to be using Coroner's Toolkit or the Auditor live CD while fixing your computer - unless Best Buy is REALLY a front for the CIA.
The advice is sound. Never send your data disk out to a repair shop. If the data disk dies, better have a backup - and then melt the broken one with a blowtorch. Run file shredders on any file on the system disk that is the least bit suspicious to some paranoid moron working at Best Buy.
Best general advice: trust no one - especially your fellow monkey at Best Buy.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily.
Porn would be considered by the court as an "unsavory" connection to a trademarked product, and the trademark would likely be upheld.
Read the Groklaw piece. It's mentioned there.
Granted, I think it's dumb to worry about "Linux porn" denigrating an operating system, but the laws and the people who interpret them are just primates worried about where they are in the hierarchy, so it's understandable.
Remember when Star Trek people got upset over Kirk and Spock gay fan porn? Same thing.
This should not be modded "Funny", it should be modded "Troll".
I see the Windows shills have mod points again today.
When Linus has as much profit as Bill Gates, somebody wake me.
However, the Groklaw article DOES state that when you refer to Linux, the preferred way is to include the trademark symbol and include a sentence that the trademark is registered to Linus.
I sincerely doubt that the LMI has the funds to hassle anybody who doesn't do this or cares to do this anyway.
They just want people to do it so the fact of the trademark becomes clear and contributes to the defense of the trademark, in particular to reduce the chances that it will become a generic term like "Xerox vrs xerox" has, which could be important in court. As everyone knows, Xerox has gone to some lengths to prevent their brand name being used generically to mean "copying".
But I doubt the LMI will bother going as far as Xerox, if for no other reason than they don't have the money to do so.
He was not referring to administrative and legal costs PER APPLICANT.
He was referring to the admin and legal costs of registering trademarks in other countries and of maintaining those trademarks against infringers.
The purpose of the fees is to fund the operation of the LMI.
The only persons who might be negatively affected by a $200 fee would be one-man distros - and it's not clear to me that a distro per se has to pay the fee if it's not a revenue-producing distro.
If "non-profit" means any free distro, then they do. I doubt most free distros will worry much about $200 a year.
In any event, people have been moaning about "too many distros", this might weed out the ones that are utterly irrelevant except as personal projects. And as pointed out, call them Knoppix and that solves that - until Klaus trademarks that name.
You're an idiot.
Nothing you've said is in any way either true or relevant.
Read the Groklaw piece and get a clue.
I'm an anarchist and totally against IP, and even I can see why Linus is forced to do this.
You entirely missed the point.
As PJ so carefully pointed out - and you seem unable to comprehend - this is the way the system is set up. You either defend a name or you lose it.
You WANT Microsoft to produce a version of Windows OR Linux called Windows Linux? One that breaks every essential of Linux?
There's nothing stopping them from doing that, homes, except trademark law. The GPL allows Microsoft to produce their own distro tomorrow, if they feel like it.
I agree - it's IP bullshit. But in this system, you either do it or you lose the name - any name you come up with. That simple.
Personally I think it would be fun to drop the name and call Linux 'the other OS' - but the net effect would be the same: nobody would know a priori to a source code examination what was Linux and what wasn't.
In the end, the GPL is more important than this trademark business and that hasn't changed - and won't. Linux will continue to be free as in freedom and mostly free as in beer. Linus is just trying to see that you know which Linux is really Linux without having to analyze source code.
LMI and Maddog have been, according to the Groklaw article, EXPLICITLY authorized to do this.
And your entire position on "eclipsing the Linux brand" is completely irrelevant to Linus, I would believe, because it is not the BRAND that he cares about WHEN we are talking about the CODE. It is only the BRAND he cares about when we are talking about the NAME as used by commercial entities.
I believe that as long as the code is GPL and derived from Linux code, he doesn't care what it ultimately ends up being called, as long as someone isn't producing something that ISN'T Linux code and calling it Linux.
The entire point of this is to prevent people from turning out something that is NOT LINUX CODE and calling it Linux.
The revenue letters are to get some companies to support the trademark protection effort, which, as the Groklaw article points out, is a necessary effort to prevent the dilution of the name Linux, which would allow people to produce NON-LINUX-DERIVED products and call them Linux.
If you HAVE Linux code and you call it Brandix, it's irrelevant. First, because people will simply call it Brandix Linux. Secondly, because it is still Linux code.
Knoppix is Linux code, does not use the Linux name, and nobody (that I know of) misunderstands what it is, nor does Linus AFAIK insist that it pay a trademark fee.
If you create a Linux distro, and give it away, AFAIK you don't have to pay the trademark fee - you only have to refer to its origin as "LinuxCircleR", the trademark symbol. If you derive revenue from that distro, then you need to pay the trademark fee so that Linus and the LMI can demonstrate in court that they control that trademark.
I could be wrong about whether other free distros need to pay the fee - someone correct me about this if that is the case. In any event, a free distro would be considered a non-profit according to the fee scale, and the fee would be $200, then - which would only affect one-man distros who are too poor to pay it.
So how is that in any way different from your scenario? It's already happened and nobody cares. And it has had absolutely no effect on the Linux name except to protect it from people like Microsoft.
Personally, I find the whole thing unfortunate that it has to be done, but I'm an anarchist, so that's irrelevant.
But then, I suppose everybody assumes politicians are psychopaths, so nobody cares.
Bush is a psychotic, dry drunk, typically Chistian hypocritical chimpanzee.
Latest word is the White House has "weather reports" among the staff each day to see if he's feeling good - or on some rage where he's likely to lash out at anyone around him. Shades of the Watergate Nixon White House.
Right now, since he's taken yet ANOTHER "vacation" at his "all hat, no cattle" ranch, where he's been forced into hiding by a mother who wants answers for his stupid, greed-and-power-driven policies, we can all expect another "terrorist attack" (read: Reichstag fire incident) in a few weeks, since reportedly all military leaves have been canceled from September into December.
Presumably the next victim is Iran.
It's not surprising he's supported by corporate types like Bill Gates and morons like Ah-nuld who generally show similar characteristics.
Not that Clinton was any better - as he once told Genifer Flowers, he was "born 17 and stayed 17. Hillary was born 40 and stayed 40."
And don't even get me started on Donnie Rumsfeld, a rambling, lying, arrogant, senile pissant who wouldn't be respected by the counter clerks if he was running a McDonald's in Podunk.
Still, you monkeys all demand that people respect these assholes, because otherwise you wouldn't know where you are in the primate hierarchy - which might cause chimpanzee anxiety.
Just read an article this morning quoting Henry Kissinger from Woodward's book saying how military men were all dumb, stupid animals to be manipulated for foreign policy aims, and stating how Kissinger used to dress down General Al Haig in front of the secretaries in the White House for alleged incompetence.
Primate politics at its best.
Well within this century, nanotech and bioengineering will allow recreating virtually any species as long as relatively complete DNA is available - and certainly all the existing megafauna - and much fauna, mega or otherwise, that died out in recent centuries - will have recoverable DNA from one source or another.
And once nanotech accelerates humans to Transhumans, recreating any species will be trivial - assuming Transhumans care enough to bother. And with most humans out of the picture, repopulation of the megafauna will be rapid and unopposed.
In a few hundreds or thousands of years - an eyeblink in evolutionary and geological time - the Earth will look as it did thousands of years ago. Even long-term changes wrought by thousands of years of human existence can be reversed by nanotech mega-engineering projects - again, if deemed useful.
The proposed project does sound like fun, though.
Or picked the wrong week to give up booze.
Or picked the wrong week to give up cigarettes.
Or picked the wrong week to give up amphetabmines.
And DON'T call me Shirley!
(Now let's see how many
I remember that pardon frenzy in the last minutes of Clinton's office. I think Mark Rich got a pardon, too - and the cops have been after him for years. Yeah, that probably was Leonard's best and only chance - unless somebody slightly less crooked than Clinton gets in and actually does it.
Naah, never happen - unless that President REALLY wants to piss off the FBI - not a good move, since who knows whether the FBI was involved in one or more of the Kennedy assassinations...:-) I remember watching the British spy show, "The Sandbaggers", and they had an episode about US assassinations - and the script was worded as if everybody in the world already KNEW the FBI assassinated Kennedy. It was interesting to see the take from a foreign country on that - they just assumed it was the FBI straight up.
And everybody everywhere assumes the FBI was behind the Martin Luther King assassination.
I'll say it again.
In five years, Sun will be the new SCO suing Linus for destroying their market. And Linus will be saying as he has before, "That was just an unintended side effect."
Solaris has absolutely no hope of producing a development community to top Linux. It MAY produce one that allows it to maintain a niche market like the BSD's or for companies who continue to run Sun hardware or are used to Solaris. In other words, it MAY extend Solaris' lifespan.
Kill Linux? No fucking chance.
I'm not the kind of guy who causes societies to erode.
They don't need my help, they're doing great all on their one. Mostly because of self-righteous dickwads who think they're better than anyone else - in fact, HAVE to think they're better than anyone else because they're fucking primates.
What I am is a guy who wants human societies to fucking totally self-destruct - just so long as I get the technology I want first. And if they don't self-destruct, once I get the tech I need, I'll make sure they get burned down.
You monkeys have had your time and fucked it up. Stand aside for the next wave or get left behind.
You want to get rid of kiddie porn? Go bust Bush and his cronies - there are plenty of rumors about Bush's old man and the REAL kiddie slave ring operated by senior Republicans whose main operator WALKED from prosecution some years back and it is still in operation.
Not to mention that Bush and his cronies have killed more fucking kids in Iraq in the last two years than every sex slave ring on the planet.
So take your self-righteous horseshit and shove it.
Yes, there are photos of Ryder wearing the Peltier button on the Net - I've got some on my hard drive in my babe collection.
Ryder was also recently involved in lobbying for some murder case review in southern California.
She needs to chill out before the cops find a more permanent way to get rid of her than shoplifting.
She's the god-daughter of Tim Leary and she should remember how he got framed into prison.
I hadn't heard about Sarandon being involved with Peltier but I know she does a lot of political stuff so it's no surprise.
When I was at Leavenworth, I worked on Peltier's Unicore furniture factory crew for a couple days. We had a discussion about Web sites (this was late '90's). He had a lot of sites discussing his case but he was interested in getting up some sort of
"official" site, it seemed, and he was asking me about how to promote a Web site.
Waste of time - he's never getting out ever. If he did, the FBI would have to go down, so it isn't happening.
You missed some of the details of the case.
Shoplifting in the vast majority of cases is considered a misdemeanor and is so prosecuted in LA. Only if a very large dollar value is involved is the case prosecuted as a felony. There were NO cases larger than hers so prosecuted over the previous several years. Her case was immediately prosecuted as a felony.
Secondly, the DA reassigned lawyers in the office from a MURDER case to this lame shoplifting case. Reports were that a number of the DA's office lawyers were highly irritated by this.
Third, the case was tried by the police department and the DA in the press with statements made about video evidence and the like which proved non-existent when the case came to trial. The only significant evidence they had was the security guard testimony. It was a case of "he said, she said" - or more precisely, "they said, she said" - but her idiot lawyer did not let her testify.
Fourth, she got no free publicity that worked to her advantage. Her movie career was set back by a couple years at least, and she's only now getting some more serious offers. Conviction of a crime can raise the cost of insurance for a motion picture production - production companies need indemnification in case an actor fails to complete a role. This was Bob Downey's problem after his drug convictions.
Joel Mowbray at the National Review made a number of critical comments of this case at the time, so this isn't only my opinion.
As far as the jury goes, as I said, the testimony was obviously perjured and the defense was poorly conducted by that idiot Garregos. The jury chose to believe the security guards which is certainly their right, but I think a little celebrity envy went along with that.
Finally, "Noni" is her long-time known nickname.
My interest in her comes from her being the god-daughter of Dr. Timothy Leary - she was one of the last people to take care of him when he was dying, and her and her family (well-known Bay Area hippies from the Sixties - her father runs an alternative bookstore and her mother was one of the founders of the Free Clinic here) were close to Dr. Tim for years.
She's also known here for being part of the Polly Klass murder case - she went on public TV and urged people to help search for Polly. Klass's father attended Ryder's trial and spoke out on her behalf. By all accounts she's quite a responsible person, at least compared to many celebrities.
My only complaint about her is she smokes...:-) And she dates rock stars instead of me...:-)
Well, the plain view clause is fairly obvious, since by definition it means a crime is being committed in "plain view" of the police - not the smartest thing someone can do, and obviously search and seizure should not be an issue there. You wouldn't require a warrant if you shoot someone in front of a cop, either. The point of search and seizure is to prevent searches when there is no "probable cause" to believe a crime is IN FACT being committed.
I agree that the main issue in the case is lack of a warrant - the privacy issue is a side issue.
One related problem recently is that part of the Patriot Act which requires financial institutions to assign a "Money Laundering Officer" to examine all transactions and report anything that looks suspicious - to him. This makes every J Random Asshole in a bank or a brokerage an informer by definition.
And given the number of transactions, the only way any institution can handle this is either err on the side of over-reporting or err on the side of under-reporting. Which means that too many false positives will be made or too few proper identifications will be made.
Both of which defeat the purpose of the legislation - assuming the purpose was legit in the first place and not just another effort to collect privacy-violating information on the citizenry in the first place.
I disagree with the notion that free speech rights apply on private property. I think you can order anyone to leave your property for any reason, including speech you disagree with. You can't stop him from talking, but you can order him to leave.
I'm also inclined not to agree that someone whose toilet habits are broadcast has any particular case to bring to suit. There may certainly be laws that allow that, but I'm not sure any significant damage has been done to the individual other than embarassment which justifies such a law. In any event, a civil suit is different than a criminal investigation, so this gets a bit far afield from the issue in the original article.
As libertarians have argued strongly, property rights ARE personal rights and should have equal strength, because if you don't control your property, someone else does and that means your personal freedom and rights are limited. The only right libertarians recognize as stronger than property rights is the right to be free of coercion - meaning you can't use property rights to justify beating someone in your home unless you are exercising the right of self-defense. Privacy is a much less significant right than non-coercion in my view. It's more a cultural issue than a "right."
Again, as far as 7-11 goes, it may be privately held, but it's not AFAIK PERSONALLY held. I think that is a significant difference. A corporation should not have property or personal rights the same as a person and thus should be required to respect privacy rights more than an individual home or business owner needs to.
And the only reason the Defcon guys didn't get 145 miles was that they couldn't reach the proper position to set up their equipment. The road ended two miles too soon and they didn't get the altitude they needed.
This story is a marketing stunt, nothing more.
The problem is, at what point does "wireless" mean anything at all?
The standard is 802.11. That's what the Defcon and other teams are working on. That's what people care about - extending off the shelf wireless systems.
Holding up another proprietary system as "wireless" - even it technically is - just to claim a record sounds like a marketing stunt to me.
"The equipment used was not based on standard 802.11 wireless technology, but instead was based on proprietary radio technology from Trango."
This would seem to be irrelevant to the Defcon record which was unamplified standard 802.11.
It's comparing apples and oranges, isn't it?
I suppose you can say it's a new "wireless" record, but then what about the Navy's ULF submarine communication methods? Aren't they "wireless"? And they go a lot further than 100 miles.
This seems like an advertising stunt to me.
Point one: a toilet cam would be dumb, but should be perfectly legal in one's own home.
Point two: I don't see that opening up a space to the public for commerce changes anything about PERSONAL property control. While the state evidently does think that, since I don't approve of the state, I don't agree. It's still dumb to spy on customers, of course, but I don't think there is any "right" to privacy in such a space.
Corporate ownership is another matter.
Actually, my issue is with employees more than ownership. Even in scenario 2, where you operate a commercial space personally, if you have an employee spying on your customers, I don't agree with that. He doesn't own the space, and even if you do, he's responsible for his actions, even if under your direction. It's an iffy proposition since I'm saying that you as owner may spy on people but others under your direction may not.
Bottom line for all this is social contract and culture. Anybody can actually spy on anybody anywhere and the consequences are determined by culture and social negotiation. Family members spy on each other all the time because it's culturally accepted that family members in the same residence have more or less equal "rights". I think a good case could be made for opposing even that if you want to argue for inviolable individual rights.
So I think my point on spying by an individual owner of property is acceptable, but not spying by employees or persons other than the owner in commercial property.
And the real bottom line is that spying for anything other than physical security reasons is dumb as it violates trust relationships which could end up costing more than any benefit from spying.
Who wants to be a boon to a society of jackasses?
DiDio is a paid Microsoft FUD merchant - period.
And her "sound advice" is just obvious crap intended to cover up her bias.
Get a clue.
this is already true. No ruling required.
/. posters are the same rightwing punks who BOHICA every time George Bush opens his mouth. Pathetic wannabe cops. And we all know cops are pathetic cowardly bullies hiding behind a uniform and "backup".
"This ruling could threaten to 'turn your friendly neighborhood computer repair technician into a government informer' "
Your average human is a rat because every human wants advantage over every other human. Ratting somebody out is an easy way to get advantage.
These
Yeah, but your average Geek Squad moron isn't going to be using Coroner's Toolkit or the Auditor live CD while fixing your computer - unless Best Buy is REALLY a front for the CIA.
The advice is sound. Never send your data disk out to a repair shop. If the data disk dies, better have a backup - and then melt the broken one with a blowtorch. Run file shredders on any file on the system disk that is the least bit suspicious to some paranoid moron working at Best Buy.
Best general advice: trust no one - especially your fellow monkey at Best Buy.