Now, this is where the bullshit starts: Netflix passes the cost for the Comcast toll on to both you and ME, even though I'm not a Comcast customer, and this toll did nothing to increase MY speed. In fact, I already had to pay extra to my ISP to get my speed fixed.
As a Comcast customer, it's also bullshit. I'm *already* paying them for my internet service, so if part of my Netflix bill is going to pay protection money to Comcast (and, that's what this is: a protection racket) I'm paying Comcast twice. I fundamentally have a problem with that.
It's amazing to read articles like this and nobody on the government side is named, just agencies and some "spokesperson". Name them. Somebody arrested this guy, and somebody is trying to prosecute him. Everybody involved in this needs to be named and publicly shamed. They need to be in a situation where they go home at night and their wife says "hey, why is everybody we know calling and asking why you're prosecuting some guy for not turning over a password? Is that even illegal? Why is this so important?"
Yeah, not only is the civil settlement (not criminal - nobody's going to jail) ludicrous in size, it's also ludicrous that they act like it takes a multi-year investigation to figure out who's making the calls. It's not difficult, you use their service and then find out who did what. Given normal police detective work it should take up to a week tops to shut one of these operations down.
I love how they're still talking about taking Rachel from cardholder services down a couple of years ago. How stupid can these people be? I still get calls from Rachel as well as her sister Bridgette. Hell, she even has a brother.
Their needs to be a way to take these people's assets and throw them in jail. It's sad that we can steal a Mexican guy's cash at the side of the road because he might be a drug dealer (not that we can prove it or that we need to prove it) but get caught running an illegal business - exactly, by the way, exactly what asset forfeiture laws were created for - and you get a civil settlement of $500,000. No investigation into how much money was actually made.
You know this guy is still doubled over in his mansion laughing at the schmucks at the FTC who were stupid enough to settle for half a million.
People love to talk about the free market as if it were a genie.
The law of capitalism means that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a regulation to raise the price of anything - all it can do is reduce the profit a corporation takes.
Wow. Look up the dairy market for a good counterexample. I'll stop there even though I don't need to.
Congress might fund NIH, if they could agree on anything, including whether to have Coke or Pepsi in the Senate Dining Room.
the immediate beneficiaries would be medical insurance companies, but the short-term is all they think about. if they say NO! now, they don't have to say NO! a thousand times, ten thousand times, when somebody is rotting out from infection by the minute and a doctor tries to prescribe a new $10,000 antibiotic.
if we had single-payer insurance, and ponied up along with the other developed nations, all of which are single-payer, a share of the prize, we might get someplace. I like the idea, but not its chances.
So, um, quick question: Why are all of those other developed nations with single-payer not "getting someplace" on this? I mean, surely they're not (again) waiting for the US to do it, right?
You're missing something really obvious, but the issue is that a word is missing in the phrase to which you respond. "Blinding weapons" should be "Permanently blinding weapons". The Russians have now multiple times used lasers against American helicopter pilots with the intent to blind them permanently - that's what we want to outlaw. Weapons that temporarily blind people are very useful and I see no more ethical problems with those than we would with other weapons of war.
Yep. The point is that "bad forensics" isn't the problem. The problem is that prosecutors (along with the rest of the criminal justice system) have no incentive to actually solve crimes - they have an incentive to put someone in jail for a crime. Bad forensics goes away on its own if we disincentivize locking up the wrong guy. Put another way - when the prosecutor has a little skin in the game he'll make damned sure he's prosecuting the criminal before he bothers to prosecute.
There was a great quora question about prosecution and a guy who prosecuted someone in a rather dubious manner responded with a well-written piece. Long story short the criminal had taken an airsoft gun into an arcade, cops were called, arrested him, and the prosecutor tried to prosecute under a law that had to do with carrying a deadly weapon there. But it wasn't a deadly weapon and there were no victims (he hadn't tried to rob or shoot anybody), so the statute clearly didn't apply. The prosecutor talked as if it were no big deal to try to apply that law to put the guy in prison. Ultimately the judge didn't buy it and the guy walked, but he had to shell out for an attorney, time off work, time in jail - it's a big deal for him.
It was fascinating to see how flippantly the prosecutor treated it - like, "oh well, didn't work, whatever".
One other thing that I forgot is the biggy - if people are found to be factually innocent then the DA's office needs to be forced to pay for their defense. Yes - specifically the DA's office. And it wouldn't matter what the defense cost. If that means the DA is bankrupted then so be it. The point, again, is to make it expensive to prosecute some poor guy because he can't afford a lawyer. If he can prove innocence then a good lawyer would take the case on so he could later just make the government pay for it, anyway. Suddenly, poor people who are innocent have less to worry about.
1. Removed absolute immunity from civil and criminal liability from all players in the criminal justice system. Yes, that means you can sue the judge who screwed up your trial. Suddenly a lot of people who are judges now will find another line of work as the liability isn't worth it for them.
2. Hone qualified immunity back to such a tiny nub that nobody sees it as a reliable fallback. Right now, if a police officer arrests you for, say, photographing them (yes, this happens often) the judge will look and say "well, it's not well established that someone can photograph a cop, so the arrest is still legal because the cop might have no known. Hence, he gets qualified immunity" This needs to be turned on its head. The judge needs to say "it's not well-established that someone can be arrested for photographing a cop, so the arrest is illegal and qualified immunity therefore cannot apply". See the difference? Again, cops would think twice before doing something.
3. Statutorily define that when an actor in the justice system does something wrong that he/she personally is responsible for a certain percentage of any settlements or judgements with such debt being ineligible to be lessened or removed through bankruptcy.
4. Remove the statute of limitations for any crimes committed by any actor in the justice system. Right now, innocent people who have been in prison for years can't sue people who harmed them because of the statute of limitations which typically runs out during their sentence. See John Burge in Chicago for a prime example, or Louis Scarcella in New York. Malicious prosecutors love the whole statute of limitations because they get to play both sides: "Hey, we want to prosecute this criminal but, darn the luck, looks like it's too late".
5. Force actual scientific method on all forensic methodologies. If a drug dog alerts on a car, for instance, that car should be parked in a lot and a different officer should take a dog around the lot and see if the dog alerts on any of the cars. If the second officer can't figure out which car it is, then the alert was false and excluded. Take that to every kind of forensic test out there.
6. Forensics should have nothing to do with the prosecution and independent (not state owned) crime labs should work for the court itself. The idea is to remove all incentives to "find a match". Crime labs should have no idea about what crime a particular piece of evidence is from or anything like that.
7. If somebody is found to be factually innocent then everybody involved in the case who didn't initially object to that person's prosecution should be removed from the criminal justice system. I know that's harsh, but prosecutors need to be in a position where they say "I don't know if this guy did it or not so, for the sake of my family, house, car, etc. I'm going to decline prosecution".
8. Prosecution's files should be not just "open" but literally unhidable from the defense. Any evidence that shows up later should be an automatic felony charge for the DA with harsh minimum sentences.
The point is that we need to treat a false prosecution with the same seriousness as we treat a kidnapping, because that's what it is. Mike Nifong should not only be in a maximum security prison for the rest of his life, his possessions should have been sold and all proceeds given to his victims (the ones we know of). All his past cases should have been scrutinized with perhaps time given off his sentence if he confessed and helped bring true justice in those cases.
You could toss in the tranny (although it should be holding up for much more than a single year of stop and go). But even if they're only getting 1 year out of a tranny, and they drop $5k for a new tranny installed each year, that's still only 10 cents a mile.
Have you checked backpage or craigslist recently? I think you could get a better deal on a tranny if you looked around a bit.
...since I thought you were serious, but then I did read TFA which makes no mention (and apparently Morgan Fairchild is not even married right now and her real name seems to be the much less glamorous "Patsy Ann McClenny").
"GOTO" existed before subroutines and functions were added, and it was back in the days of line numbers. This was the point where the main menu part of a program had to jump over to the appropriate part of the program, now we just call the appropriate routine.
But more than that, GOTO is how processors work at the lowest level. All of those fancy blocks in a modern language get turned into "jumps" and such at the lowest levels when compiled. The first computer languages - such as fortran - were a pretty thin veneer over assembly, anyway, so gotos made sense.
Consequences to a government agency are not and should not be the same as they are for an individual... When a great wrong has been done by an individual, punishment is arguably useful and usually satisfying from other individuals perspective, but retribution for an organisation (esp government) it's not very useful to anyone.
It depends. Many of us have argued for an official corporate "death penalty", and the government here (US) actually does shut down businesses sometimes and courts often order the people who set up scam businesses to never engage in that sort of business again. Ultimately action needs to be taken against individuals, though.
Also the legality of this ruling should not determine punishment or justification, it should determine change. If the ruling was "lawful", then clearly the laws involved are not comprehensive enough or are poorly defined.
Whatever the ruling, it's clear that the GCHQ overreached. Inadequate oversight, bad policy and fallible laws could be the cause. The ruling and findings along the way can provide insight into how much of each is to blame.
Which is why - in the case of governmental misconduct - *individuals* need to be held accountable, including hard time in prison. That way, next time a higher up at [spy agency] tells his minions to [break the law], the minions get to say "Hey, Jim did that shit last year and he and his boss are locked up in a maximum security prison for the next 10 years. I'll pass and I'll also be turning you over for prosecution."
Not to invoke Godwin, but following your logic we should have handed out a bunch of harsh rebukes at Nuremberg.
Don't like libertarian nutters, then how about some left wingers with basically the same story (and a book to sell of course): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
That's from Radley Balko, a pretty well-known libertarian journalist. He's at the Washington Post now.
I mean, in a sardonic way. They go to such great lengths to say "IT'S ILLEGAL!!!" and "THEY CAN'T DO THAT". They dance around, yell about all this, and they're doing that so that you won't notice something conspicuous in its absence: consequences.
Imagine if you robbed a liquor store and went to court and the judge yelled about how it's illegal to rob liquor stores, you should have known that, yes, you, liquor store robber! You law breaker! Scoundrel! You're terrible, I can't believe you robbed the liquor store. Okay, you can leave now, just don't rob any more liquor stores because it's illegal to do that!
It's ludicrous, really. We need to understand that these issues are far more serious than people knocking off liquor stores and it's time we started treating it as such. Real consequences for those who broke the law - and I don't mean the minimum security marriott.
Exactly. Note that when a plane crashes the NTSB goes nuts figuring out everything that they can about the crash and about the airplane right before the crash. They've been doing so for decades. This is why planes are so very safe and why they can pretty accurately determine the cause of the crash in almost all cases.
I doubt they took this lightly, especially since they're speaking ill of a dead man (at least it could be taken in that way).
I've had shingles twice before age 45 and finally got the vaccine (didn't know what it was the first time as there were no outward symptoms). But, yes, it's chicken pox. I had to stay away from babies for a month when I had it, which was pretty easy, anyway.
The point is that Perry tried to mandate that girls get the HPV vaccine made by Merck, with the implication being that Merck bought the support. HPV is a good vaccine to have but there's no comparison between HPV and measles.
We again have this issue where the soundbite media can't handle nuance and blind partisanship is going to reign. Let's face it, had Christie parroted Obama's exact words there would still be people here who would claim he's an idiot for saying that.
The anti-vax crowd is wrong - deadly wrong - but that doesn't mean that every vaccine out there should be mandated. I mean, how about the flu vaccine? Shingles?
Slashdot Mirror
Now, this is where the bullshit starts: Netflix passes the cost for the Comcast toll on to both you and ME, even though I'm not a Comcast customer, and this toll did nothing to increase MY speed. In fact, I already had to pay extra to my ISP to get my speed fixed.
As a Comcast customer, it's also bullshit. I'm *already* paying them for my internet service, so if part of my Netflix bill is going to pay protection money to Comcast (and, that's what this is: a protection racket) I'm paying Comcast twice. I fundamentally have a problem with that.
It's amazing to read articles like this and nobody on the government side is named, just agencies and some "spokesperson". Name them. Somebody arrested this guy, and somebody is trying to prosecute him. Everybody involved in this needs to be named and publicly shamed. They need to be in a situation where they go home at night and their wife says "hey, why is everybody we know calling and asking why you're prosecuting some guy for not turning over a password? Is that even illegal? Why is this so important?"
Quit letting scum bags hide behind anonymity.
And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.
Let me guess - you're also against coal because global warming. Am I right?
Yeah, not only is the civil settlement (not criminal - nobody's going to jail) ludicrous in size, it's also ludicrous that they act like it takes a multi-year investigation to figure out who's making the calls. It's not difficult, you use their service and then find out who did what. Given normal police detective work it should take up to a week tops to shut one of these operations down.
I love how they're still talking about taking Rachel from cardholder services down a couple of years ago. How stupid can these people be? I still get calls from Rachel as well as her sister Bridgette. Hell, she even has a brother.
Their needs to be a way to take these people's assets and throw them in jail. It's sad that we can steal a Mexican guy's cash at the side of the road because he might be a drug dealer (not that we can prove it or that we need to prove it) but get caught running an illegal business - exactly, by the way, exactly what asset forfeiture laws were created for - and you get a civil settlement of $500,000. No investigation into how much money was actually made.
You know this guy is still doubled over in his mansion laughing at the schmucks at the FTC who were stupid enough to settle for half a million.
Mod this guy up.
People love to talk about the free market as if it were a genie.
The law of capitalism means that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a regulation to raise the price of anything - all it can do is reduce the profit a corporation takes.
Wow. Look up the dairy market for a good counterexample. I'll stop there even though I don't need to.
Congress might fund NIH, if they could agree on anything, including whether to have Coke or Pepsi in the Senate Dining Room.
the immediate beneficiaries would be medical insurance companies, but the short-term is all they think about. if they say NO! now, they don't have to say NO! a thousand times, ten thousand times, when somebody is rotting out from infection by the minute and a doctor tries to prescribe a new $10,000 antibiotic.
if we had single-payer insurance, and ponied up along with the other developed nations, all of which are single-payer, a share of the prize, we might get someplace. I like the idea, but not its chances.
So, um, quick question: Why are all of those other developed nations with single-payer not "getting someplace" on this? I mean, surely they're not (again) waiting for the US to do it, right?
Right?
You're missing something really obvious, but the issue is that a word is missing in the phrase to which you respond. "Blinding weapons" should be "Permanently blinding weapons". The Russians have now multiple times used lasers against American helicopter pilots with the intent to blind them permanently - that's what we want to outlaw. Weapons that temporarily blind people are very useful and I see no more ethical problems with those than we would with other weapons of war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Yep. The point is that "bad forensics" isn't the problem. The problem is that prosecutors (along with the rest of the criminal justice system) have no incentive to actually solve crimes - they have an incentive to put someone in jail for a crime. Bad forensics goes away on its own if we disincentivize locking up the wrong guy. Put another way - when the prosecutor has a little skin in the game he'll make damned sure he's prosecuting the criminal before he bothers to prosecute.
There was a great quora question about prosecution and a guy who prosecuted someone in a rather dubious manner responded with a well-written piece. Long story short the criminal had taken an airsoft gun into an arcade, cops were called, arrested him, and the prosecutor tried to prosecute under a law that had to do with carrying a deadly weapon there. But it wasn't a deadly weapon and there were no victims (he hadn't tried to rob or shoot anybody), so the statute clearly didn't apply. The prosecutor talked as if it were no big deal to try to apply that law to put the guy in prison. Ultimately the judge didn't buy it and the guy walked, but he had to shell out for an attorney, time off work, time in jail - it's a big deal for him.
It was fascinating to see how flippantly the prosecutor treated it - like, "oh well, didn't work, whatever".
One other thing that I forgot is the biggy - if people are found to be factually innocent then the DA's office needs to be forced to pay for their defense. Yes - specifically the DA's office. And it wouldn't matter what the defense cost. If that means the DA is bankrupted then so be it. The point, again, is to make it expensive to prosecute some poor guy because he can't afford a lawyer. If he can prove innocence then a good lawyer would take the case on so he could later just make the government pay for it, anyway. Suddenly, poor people who are innocent have less to worry about.
The main answer to this is multi-faceted:
1. Removed absolute immunity from civil and criminal liability from all players in the criminal justice system. Yes, that means you can sue the judge who screwed up your trial. Suddenly a lot of people who are judges now will find another line of work as the liability isn't worth it for them.
2. Hone qualified immunity back to such a tiny nub that nobody sees it as a reliable fallback. Right now, if a police officer arrests you for, say, photographing them (yes, this happens often) the judge will look and say "well, it's not well established that someone can photograph a cop, so the arrest is still legal because the cop might have no known. Hence, he gets qualified immunity" This needs to be turned on its head. The judge needs to say "it's not well-established that someone can be arrested for photographing a cop, so the arrest is illegal and qualified immunity therefore cannot apply". See the difference? Again, cops would think twice before doing something.
3. Statutorily define that when an actor in the justice system does something wrong that he/she personally is responsible for a certain percentage of any settlements or judgements with such debt being ineligible to be lessened or removed through bankruptcy.
4. Remove the statute of limitations for any crimes committed by any actor in the justice system. Right now, innocent people who have been in prison for years can't sue people who harmed them because of the statute of limitations which typically runs out during their sentence. See John Burge in Chicago for a prime example, or Louis Scarcella in New York. Malicious prosecutors love the whole statute of limitations because they get to play both sides: "Hey, we want to prosecute this criminal but, darn the luck, looks like it's too late".
5. Force actual scientific method on all forensic methodologies. If a drug dog alerts on a car, for instance, that car should be parked in a lot and a different officer should take a dog around the lot and see if the dog alerts on any of the cars. If the second officer can't figure out which car it is, then the alert was false and excluded. Take that to every kind of forensic test out there.
6. Forensics should have nothing to do with the prosecution and independent (not state owned) crime labs should work for the court itself. The idea is to remove all incentives to "find a match". Crime labs should have no idea about what crime a particular piece of evidence is from or anything like that.
7. If somebody is found to be factually innocent then everybody involved in the case who didn't initially object to that person's prosecution should be removed from the criminal justice system. I know that's harsh, but prosecutors need to be in a position where they say "I don't know if this guy did it or not so, for the sake of my family, house, car, etc. I'm going to decline prosecution".
8. Prosecution's files should be not just "open" but literally unhidable from the defense. Any evidence that shows up later should be an automatic felony charge for the DA with harsh minimum sentences.
The point is that we need to treat a false prosecution with the same seriousness as we treat a kidnapping, because that's what it is. Mike Nifong should not only be in a maximum security prison for the rest of his life, his possessions should have been sold and all proceeds given to his victims (the ones we know of). All his past cases should have been scrutinized with perhaps time given off his sentence if he confessed and helped bring true justice in those cases.
And he's just one guy.
So, suddenly when the government is on the line the Constitution is useful for something more than toilet paper? Got it.
It's amazing how so many judges lack sound judgement, which, by definition, should be a basic requirement for the job....
Is Lois Lerner working in Scotland now?
You could toss in the tranny (although it should be holding up for much more than a single year of stop and go). But even if they're only getting 1 year out of a tranny, and they drop $5k for a new tranny installed each year, that's still only 10 cents a mile.
Have you checked backpage or craigslist recently? I think you could get a better deal on a tranny if you looked around a bit.
Can I use it over at that darkleaks site?
At least they're being honest about it.
...since I thought you were serious, but then I did read TFA which makes no mention (and apparently Morgan Fairchild is not even married right now and her real name seems to be the much less glamorous "Patsy Ann McClenny").
Dude:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
ATT is acting like a monopoly that needs to be broken up by the courts.
What is "Double Jeopardy!"?
I thought AT&T was already broken up three decades ago for monopoly abuse.
They were, this is not the same AT&T. It basically died and Southwestern Bell bought the name. You can find more about it here:
http://www.teletruth.org/Histo...
Are consumers just that dumb or is AT&T just that arrogant?
YES!
"GOTO" existed before subroutines and functions were added, and it was back in the days of line numbers. This was the point where the main menu part of a program had to jump over to the appropriate part of the program, now we just call the appropriate routine.
But more than that, GOTO is how processors work at the lowest level. All of those fancy blocks in a modern language get turned into "jumps" and such at the lowest levels when compiled. The first computer languages - such as fortran - were a pretty thin veneer over assembly, anyway, so gotos made sense.
Consequences to a government agency are not and should not be the same as they are for an individual... When a great wrong has been done by an individual, punishment is arguably useful and usually satisfying from other individuals perspective, but retribution for an organisation (esp government) it's not very useful to anyone.
It depends. Many of us have argued for an official corporate "death penalty", and the government here (US) actually does shut down businesses sometimes and courts often order the people who set up scam businesses to never engage in that sort of business again. Ultimately action needs to be taken against individuals, though.
Also the legality of this ruling should not determine punishment or justification, it should determine change. If the ruling was "lawful", then clearly the laws involved are not comprehensive enough or are poorly defined.
Whatever the ruling, it's clear that the GCHQ overreached. Inadequate oversight, bad policy and fallible laws could be the cause. The ruling and findings along the way can provide insight into how much of each is to blame.
Which is why - in the case of governmental misconduct - *individuals* need to be held accountable, including hard time in prison. That way, next time a higher up at [spy agency] tells his minions to [break the law], the minions get to say "Hey, Jim did that shit last year and he and his boss are locked up in a maximum security prison for the next 10 years. I'll pass and I'll also be turning you over for prosecution."
Not to invoke Godwin, but following your logic we should have handed out a bunch of harsh rebukes at Nuremberg.
There a dozens of examples of innocents losing their lives at http://www.cato.org/raidmap
Don't like libertarian nutters, then how about some left wingers with basically the same story (and a book to sell of course): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
That's from Radley Balko, a pretty well-known libertarian journalist. He's at the Washington Post now.
I mean, in a sardonic way. They go to such great lengths to say "IT'S ILLEGAL!!!" and "THEY CAN'T DO THAT". They dance around, yell about all this, and they're doing that so that you won't notice something conspicuous in its absence: consequences.
Imagine if you robbed a liquor store and went to court and the judge yelled about how it's illegal to rob liquor stores, you should have known that, yes, you, liquor store robber! You law breaker! Scoundrel! You're terrible, I can't believe you robbed the liquor store. Okay, you can leave now, just don't rob any more liquor stores because it's illegal to do that!
It's ludicrous, really. We need to understand that these issues are far more serious than people knocking off liquor stores and it's time we started treating it as such. Real consequences for those who broke the law - and I don't mean the minimum security marriott.
Exactly. Note that when a plane crashes the NTSB goes nuts figuring out everything that they can about the crash and about the airplane right before the crash. They've been doing so for decades. This is why planes are so very safe and why they can pretty accurately determine the cause of the crash in almost all cases.
I doubt they took this lightly, especially since they're speaking ill of a dead man (at least it could be taken in that way).
I've had shingles twice before age 45 and finally got the vaccine (didn't know what it was the first time as there were no outward symptoms). But, yes, it's chicken pox. I had to stay away from babies for a month when I had it, which was pretty easy, anyway.
I agree with Christie's comments in this case. There are plenty of vaccines that should be mandated, with MMR being at the top of the list.
But read this:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/15/...
The point is that Perry tried to mandate that girls get the HPV vaccine made by Merck, with the implication being that Merck bought the support. HPV is a good vaccine to have but there's no comparison between HPV and measles.
We again have this issue where the soundbite media can't handle nuance and blind partisanship is going to reign. Let's face it, had Christie parroted Obama's exact words there would still be people here who would claim he's an idiot for saying that.
The anti-vax crowd is wrong - deadly wrong - but that doesn't mean that every vaccine out there should be mandated. I mean, how about the flu vaccine? Shingles?
Where's that line?