I'm not a lawyer either (and I don't ANAL), but I do have some experience with the legal system. I've been in court a dozen or so times, as defendant, plaintiff, and witness, in criminal, civil, and small claims trials. Aside from traffic court, I haven't lost a case. (The first time I was in court was for a traffic case. I lost because I was wearing shorts and sandals.)
One thing I've learned is that a little humility goes a long way.
For instance, instead of introducing an illegal tape recording with "Under rules of evidence, statute number blah blah blah...", say instead, "Your honor, he told me on the phone that he blah blah blah. I have a tape recording of the call here if you want to hear it."
The latter will be more likely to lead to the judge asking the defendant if he really said that, and the defendant admitting it, fearing that the judge will listen to the tape recording. (Remember, the defendant, for all his attempts to intimidate you, probably doesn't have any more actual experience than you do.)
It's even possible that in such a case, the judge may agree to listen to the tape recording, if it's short.
From the article, the writer comes off as if he's telling the judge how to do his job. Judges hate that as much as an engineer, or anybody else, would. That makes him defensive and more strict about how he treats you and your evidence, which is the last thing you want. You don't have to convince the judge that you're smarter than him, you have to convince him that you've been wronged and he can set things right. Let him know he can safely give you an inch without worrying about you trying to take a mile.
Also, don't try to talk like a lawyer. Never say "the defendant", say "him" (or "her" if appropriate). You're not playing Perry Mason, you're playing Joe Blow off the street who has been seriously aggrieved and after trying everything is finally taking it to court. Don't look like you're enjoying it, even if you are.
Trying to explain to the judge how clever you were in getting around the law he's sworn to uphold probably doesn't win any points, either.
The US taps phone calls in an attempt to uncover evidence of violent crimes, to prevent them from happening, and to prosecute and jail those responsible.
How do you know?
The Bush administration spent years denying it was tapping communications without warrants.
Then, when found out, their only defense was "It should be legal."
But, with no warrants, no oversight, no public records, even after the fact, there is no way to know what the phone calls are actually being tapped for.
The only support for your statement above is that you trust the current government officials to do what they say they are, and not to be doing anything nefarious with the information, and to always have your best interest in mind as they step outside legal boundaries to "do what must be done."
The United States was founded on a system of checks and balances. Oversight was the single most important guiding principle in the design of the Constitution. There is therefore no attitude more anti-American than your trust in government.
In fact, I don't know of any state where employment is not "at-will", unless specified in an employment contract.
I work on short-term contracts, 3-6 months at a time. In the past ten years, I've worked in Oregon, California, Arizona, Colorado, and Missouri. Every single one of those contracts contained a provision stating that employment is at-will, and that the company could let me go at any time. I can also quit at any time before the specified end of contract, but if I do I have to pay back any relocation or up-front bonuses they've given me.
Maybe it's different if you're working directly for the company rather than through a contracting agency?
Know enough about a person you're going against for a job and you could probably get them blown out of the interview waters with a few entries onto a fake mySpace or FaceBook account.
How?
I'm a contractor/consultant, so I'm pretty much always in job-search mode, and I've never once known the name of any other candidates for jobs I'm looking into.
I'm sorry Mr. Dragon, the numerous grammatical and spelling errors in your previous post have dissuaded us from extending an offer of employment at this time. We felt there was no need to look into your social networking persona after reading that.
Not to mention his need to pad his resume to "just to get in and past HR".
That line there would be a big ol' red flag if I found it associated with any potential candidate I was researching. And yes, I do occasionally participate in hiring decisions, and I always do a google search before contacting our candidates.
And, if you'll recall, many of those stories of vandalism and attacks were based on police reports which were later proven to be perjury by evidence supplied by amateur videographers, causing charges to be dropped, and millions of dollars lost in lawsuits.
Fortunately, they've confiscated lots of video equipment this year, including all the computers, cameras, and cell phones belonging to one of the larger groups, so that shouldn't happen this year.
Molotov cocktails are even more common than most of the other items on the list.
I have all the ingredients in the back seat of my car right now. A few empty glass bottles (used to contain iced coffee), two pints of motor oil (gee, why would anyone carry *that* in their car?), and a couple of old T-shirts that have been sitting in the back seat for a month or two because I never get around to bringing them back inside when I'm home.
According to the videos that have been posted, the search warrants included such things as "cloth, flammable liquids, glass bottles" and "metal, plastic, or cardboard boxes."
The hard part would be to find a house in America that doesn't have all of those in it.
If a large number of people are ignorant about what science is and isn't, that points to a lack of quality in science education. That means we need to strive harder to increase the quality of science education, not to dilute it further.
Science is not democracy. Facts are not decided by voting. If a class of fifth graders votes that their guinea pig is male that won't prevent it from getting pregnant. If someone wants to play in the science arena, they need to stop trying to go to the courts to get their pet theories taught as fact and buckle down and do some research.
The reason Creationists go to the courts with their theories instead of to scientific journals isn't because of a giant international conspiracy amongst all scientists to keep them out, it's because they don't have any science to publish. All they have is ideas and pronouncements. People who can't tell the difference between an idea and a theory need to stop trying to mess around with science education.
I think your post almost all by itself demonstrates why the attack on science is so bad. Even though you don't seem like you yourself are a proponent of Creationism, your post shows, in three sentences, three very common fallacies perpetuated by the creationists:
I don't see anything wrong with teaching the history of humanity's understanding of the planet's origins. For a long time, consensus was that the planet was 6,000 years old. Without learning about creationism, it is harder for students to grasp the extent of the impact that Darwin's On the Origin of Species had on the development of biology.
1. Evolution has nothing to say one way or another about the planet's origins. It doesn't even address the origins of life. It addresses solely how individual Species might originate.
2. At the time Darwin published his book, most people generally agreed that the earth was at least a few hundred thousand, possibly millions of years old. The concept of a 6000 year old Earth was introduced by Thomas Aquinas and largely ignored until the 19th century. And even he was simply speculating on the length of time since Adam left the Garden, based on genealogies given in the Bible, not on the age of the entire Earth, and certainly not on the relative age of the universe. Even amongst Christians, a 6000 year old universe didn't become an article of faith until the rise of radio preachers in the 1920s.
3. Evolution was widely accepted in 1859, when Darwin published his book. What was hotly debated was the mechanism by which species may evolve. The revolutionary idea Darwin put forth was that natural selection alone would be powerful enough to be that mechanism. There were many other theories being put forth at the time.
Hah, reminds me of when California created the "Snack tax". Letterman got laughs for a week just reading out the tax code. ("A jelly donut is a snack, and is taxed. A plain donut is a breakfast item, and is not taxed, unless it's served with coffee in which case it's restaurant meal, and taxed. A slice of pizza is taxed if it's served on a plate, but if it's served in a box, it's not taxed. Unless they give you a fork with it, in which case it's a carryout meal, and taxed again. But if there is a box of forks and you take one, then it's still a grocery and not taxed but you owe use tax on the value of the fork at the end of the year.")
Have you ever BUILT an information system/database before???
No.
I mean, not unless MS Access counts.
OK, so so far, I've been down-modded, and insulted (sort of), but nobody's actually answered the question at all.
Even if you assume every data type has its own table (would it really?)that's still only a couple of dozen tables. Why are there 463? What possible information could be in this database that makes it so big?
For example, some things we know are not in the database are:
- Date of birth (or else a five-year-old would not have been confused with a 35-year old with a similar name)
- Social Security Number (or else it wouldn't keep confusing people with similar names)
- Previous flight history (or else it would figure out that terrorists don't fly twice a week for months on end)
- Employment information (or else it wouldn't have caught members of congress)
So what is in this database? Basically it's a list of names, with very little additional information on each. What is it that uses 463 tables?
I suppose a photo of the license plat alone would not be sufficient, but that's not how most places do it. I once got a ticket from an automated red light camera in San Jose. The picture, unfortunately, clearly showed not just my license plate, but my face.
I was for a while. I apparently got taken off of it a few months before they publicly admitted its existence.
It was fun. During my time on it, I flew 37 times. I got "randomly" selected for the extra search all 37 times. I ran the numbers for a TSA agent once who insisted it was purely random, and came up with something like one in a few hundred quintillion chance of that actually happening if it was truly random. Still failed to convince the agent it was not, though.
It was great when I had to fly out of LAX. Unlike most airports, that one had a special line for the special searches. So, instead of standing in line for an hour and a half to walk through the metal detector in ten seconds like most people, I waited in line for five minutes, then spent another 2-3 getting searched.
Most airports made me wait in line with the non-terrorists, though.
I'm still not sure what it was that got me on the list, whether it was carrying a knife onto the plane, twice, or the rather obvious joke I made while taking off my shoes. ("It's a good thing that that guy didn't put the bomb in his underwear").
Did you know that it's illegal to even say the word "bomb" in an airport? TSA explained this to me at great length that day.
(The knife, by the way, was a cub scout pocket knife, and it had already been through three searches without being noticed. Four if you count my checking the bag before I left to make sure I didn't leave anything in it.)
Anyway, at some point I got dropped off the list. I don't know why. Maybe it got too full, or maybe they decided that after 37 flights I wasn't a threat, or perhaps they were cleaning up the database before they publicly admitted its existence.
Before I dropped off of it, though, I purchased one-way tickets for a couple of friends who'd helped me move to another state. (We drove out, they flew back). They've both been pulled over for the extra "random" searches now, too.
Having designed a couple of poorly-designed databases myself, I can understand how this can happen.
What I don't understand is why the hell there are 463 tables in this thing?
I mean, what all information do they need in there? Names, maybe a list of known addresses, social security numbers, phone numbers, other identifying information?
Perhaps a reason why they're on the watchlist at all? List of evidence putting them there? Political activities they've been involved in, letters to congress they've written? Types of books they've checked out of the library?
Maybe a list of all flights they've taken, and notes on how much trouble they've given to the TSA people when going through the checkpoints?
OK, that's three tables. What on earth are the other 460 for??
Too bad there isn't some kind of internationally distributed magazine, read primarily by pencil and paper style gamers, that they could have advertised it in...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a lawyer either (and I don't ANAL), but I do have some experience with the legal system. I've been in court a dozen or so times, as defendant, plaintiff, and witness, in criminal, civil, and small claims trials. Aside from traffic court, I haven't lost a case. (The first time I was in court was for a traffic case. I lost because I was wearing shorts and sandals.)
One thing I've learned is that a little humility goes a long way.
For instance, instead of introducing an illegal tape recording with "Under rules of evidence, statute number blah blah blah...", say instead, "Your honor, he told me on the phone that he blah blah blah. I have a tape recording of the call here if you want to hear it."
The latter will be more likely to lead to the judge asking the defendant if he really said that, and the defendant admitting it, fearing that the judge will listen to the tape recording. (Remember, the defendant, for all his attempts to intimidate you, probably doesn't have any more actual experience than you do.)
It's even possible that in such a case, the judge may agree to listen to the tape recording, if it's short.
From the article, the writer comes off as if he's telling the judge how to do his job. Judges hate that as much as an engineer, or anybody else, would. That makes him defensive and more strict about how he treats you and your evidence, which is the last thing you want. You don't have to convince the judge that you're smarter than him, you have to convince him that you've been wronged and he can set things right. Let him know he can safely give you an inch without worrying about you trying to take a mile.
Also, don't try to talk like a lawyer. Never say "the defendant", say "him" (or "her" if appropriate). You're not playing Perry Mason, you're playing Joe Blow off the street who has been seriously aggrieved and after trying everything is finally taking it to court. Don't look like you're enjoying it, even if you are.
Trying to explain to the judge how clever you were in getting around the law he's sworn to uphold probably doesn't win any points, either.
You might also want to check into the water.
Quality and filtration processes may be different enough to be another factor.
How do you know?
The Bush administration spent years denying it was tapping communications without warrants.
Then, when found out, their only defense was "It should be legal."
But, with no warrants, no oversight, no public records, even after the fact, there is no way to know what the phone calls are actually being tapped for.
The only support for your statement above is that you trust the current government officials to do what they say they are, and not to be doing anything nefarious with the information, and to always have your best interest in mind as they step outside legal boundaries to "do what must be done."
The United States was founded on a system of checks and balances. Oversight was the single most important guiding principle in the design of the Constitution. There is therefore no attitude more anti-American than your trust in government.
They played under the same accounts over and over for four years??
It's like they were begging to be caught.
In the words of the Stainless Steel Rat, "Learn to graft and walk away and live to graft another day."
Yeah, that'd show up in PVCS 7 occasionally. "Error: The operation completed successfully"
Dude, you use a vacuum flute.
Duh.
I doubt that's true.
In fact, I don't know of any state where employment is not "at-will", unless specified in an employment contract.
I work on short-term contracts, 3-6 months at a time. In the past ten years, I've worked in Oregon, California, Arizona, Colorado, and Missouri. Every single one of those contracts contained a provision stating that employment is at-will, and that the company could let me go at any time. I can also quit at any time before the specified end of contract, but if I do I have to pay back any relocation or up-front bonuses they've given me.
Maybe it's different if you're working directly for the company rather than through a contracting agency?
Or maybe your HR guy is just wrong.
How?
I'm a contractor/consultant, so I'm pretty much always in job-search mode, and I've never once known the name of any other candidates for jobs I'm looking into.
Not to mention his need to pad his resume to "just to get in and past HR".
That line there would be a big ol' red flag if I found it associated with any potential candidate I was researching. And yes, I do occasionally participate in hiring decisions, and I always do a google search before contacting our candidates.
In that case, my landlord's really gonna be in trouble...
Wait... are you actually saying you won't even consider an applicant whose username doesn't show up in the first page on a Google search?
What's the point of that?
Sure, I'll blame Vista.
It seems to work just fine on XP.
And, if you'll recall, many of those stories of vandalism and attacks were based on police reports which were later proven to be perjury by evidence supplied by amateur videographers, causing charges to be dropped, and millions of dollars lost in lawsuits.
Fortunately, they've confiscated lots of video equipment this year, including all the computers, cameras, and cell phones belonging to one of the larger groups, so that shouldn't happen this year.
Molotov cocktails are even more common than most of the other items on the list.
I have all the ingredients in the back seat of my car right now. A few empty glass bottles (used to contain iced coffee), two pints of motor oil (gee, why would anyone carry *that* in their car?), and a couple of old T-shirts that have been sitting in the back seat for a month or two because I never get around to bringing them back inside when I'm home.
According to the videos that have been posted, the search warrants included such things as "cloth, flammable liquids, glass bottles" and "metal, plastic, or cardboard boxes."
The hard part would be to find a house in America that doesn't have all of those in it.
No.
Absolutely no.
You should not.
If a large number of people are ignorant about what science is and isn't, that points to a lack of quality in science education. That means we need to strive harder to increase the quality of science education, not to dilute it further.
Science is not democracy. Facts are not decided by voting. If a class of fifth graders votes that their guinea pig is male that won't prevent it from getting pregnant. If someone wants to play in the science arena, they need to stop trying to go to the courts to get their pet theories taught as fact and buckle down and do some research.
The reason Creationists go to the courts with their theories instead of to scientific journals isn't because of a giant international conspiracy amongst all scientists to keep them out, it's because they don't have any science to publish. All they have is ideas and pronouncements. People who can't tell the difference between an idea and a theory need to stop trying to mess around with science education.
1. Evolution has nothing to say one way or another about the planet's origins. It doesn't even address the origins of life. It addresses solely how individual Species might originate.
2. At the time Darwin published his book, most people generally agreed that the earth was at least a few hundred thousand, possibly millions of years old. The concept of a 6000 year old Earth was introduced by Thomas Aquinas and largely ignored until the 19th century. And even he was simply speculating on the length of time since Adam left the Garden, based on genealogies given in the Bible, not on the age of the entire Earth, and certainly not on the relative age of the universe. Even amongst Christians, a 6000 year old universe didn't become an article of faith until the rise of radio preachers in the 1920s.
3. Evolution was widely accepted in 1859, when Darwin published his book. What was hotly debated was the mechanism by which species may evolve. The revolutionary idea Darwin put forth was that natural selection alone would be powerful enough to be that mechanism. There were many other theories being put forth at the time.
Because when people talk about presenting "both" sides of an issue, they usually don't mean the "informed" and "uninformed" sides.
Wouldn't that only be a few thousand years?
Hah, reminds me of when California created the "Snack tax".
Letterman got laughs for a week just reading out the tax code. ("A jelly donut is a snack, and is taxed. A plain donut is a breakfast item, and is not taxed, unless it's served with coffee in which case it's restaurant meal, and taxed. A slice of pizza is taxed if it's served on a plate, but if it's served in a box, it's not taxed. Unless they give you a fork with it, in which case it's a carryout meal, and taxed again. But if there is a box of forks and you take one, then it's still a grocery and not taxed but you owe use tax on the value of the fork at the end of the year.")
No.
I mean, not unless MS Access counts.
OK, so so far, I've been down-modded, and insulted (sort of), but nobody's actually answered the question at all.
Even if you assume every data type has its own table (would it really?)that's still only a couple of dozen tables. Why are there 463? What possible information could be in this database that makes it so big?
For example, some things we know are not in the database are:
- Date of birth (or else a five-year-old would not have been confused with a 35-year old with a similar name)
- Social Security Number (or else it wouldn't keep confusing people with similar names)
- Previous flight history (or else it would figure out that terrorists don't fly twice a week for months on end)
- Employment information (or else it wouldn't have caught members of congress)
So what is in this database? Basically it's a list of names, with very little additional information on each. What is it that uses 463 tables?
You've obviously never lived with a cat.
I suppose a photo of the license plat alone would not be sufficient, but that's not how most places do it.
I once got a ticket from an automated red light camera in San Jose.
The picture, unfortunately, clearly showed not just my license plate, but my face.
I was for a while. I apparently got taken off of it a few months before they publicly admitted its existence.
It was fun. During my time on it, I flew 37 times. I got "randomly" selected for the extra search all 37 times. I ran the numbers for a TSA agent once who insisted it was purely random, and came up with something like one in a few hundred quintillion chance of that actually happening if it was truly random. Still failed to convince the agent it was not, though.
It was great when I had to fly out of LAX. Unlike most airports, that one had a special line for the special searches. So, instead of standing in line for an hour and a half to walk through the metal detector in ten seconds like most people, I waited in line for five minutes, then spent another 2-3 getting searched.
Most airports made me wait in line with the non-terrorists, though.
I'm still not sure what it was that got me on the list, whether it was carrying a knife onto the plane, twice, or the rather obvious joke I made while taking off my shoes. ("It's a good thing that that guy didn't put the bomb in his underwear").
Did you know that it's illegal to even say the word "bomb" in an airport? TSA explained this to me at great length that day.
(The knife, by the way, was a cub scout pocket knife, and it had already been through three searches without being noticed. Four if you count my checking the bag before I left to make sure I didn't leave anything in it.)
Anyway, at some point I got dropped off the list. I don't know why. Maybe it got too full, or maybe they decided that after 37 flights I wasn't a threat, or perhaps they were cleaning up the database before they publicly admitted its existence.
Before I dropped off of it, though, I purchased one-way tickets for a couple of friends who'd helped me move to another state. (We drove out, they flew back). They've both been pulled over for the extra "random" searches now, too.
Having designed a couple of poorly-designed databases myself, I can understand how this can happen.
What I don't understand is why the hell there are 463 tables in this thing?
I mean, what all information do they need in there? Names, maybe a list of known addresses, social security numbers, phone numbers, other identifying information?
Perhaps a reason why they're on the watchlist at all? List of evidence putting them there? Political activities they've been involved in, letters to congress they've written? Types of books they've checked out of the library?
Maybe a list of all flights they've taken, and notes on how much trouble they've given to the TSA people when going through the checkpoints?
OK, that's three tables. What on earth are the other 460 for??
Too bad there isn't some kind of internationally distributed magazine, read primarily by pencil and paper style gamers, that they could have advertised it in...