Wiretapping is a poor name, it's eavesdropping that the laws are about. Recording or just intercepting audio without the consent of both parties is a felony (in some states you only need permission from one party). Location has nothing to do with the law. It applies if you plant a bug in somebody's office, it applies if you use a long range mic to listen to somebody's conversation in a diner, and depending if the particular state's law only applies to electronic interception and recording, it just might apply if you are walking down the street and overhear somebody's conversation.
The very next sentence after the one you quoted is "An exception to the wiretapping law allows police to film people during traffic stops." So "should" doesn't enter into it, it isn't equally applied, because there is an exception made; Their wiretapping laws only apply to people who are not police.
The article and summary repeatedly use the term "RIAA", which is a typo. It should really read "Atlantic Records, a wholly owned Subsidiary of Time-Warner-AOL drops Yanya Andersen Case", and so on. The RIAA is like a guild. The big labels belong to it, they pay their dues and the RIAA acts like a mouth piece. But it doesn't own the music, Sony and Warner and maybe a few other companies own the music. The RIAA isn't suing, and can't sue. They may have provided the "experts" that will testify that they tracked down these evil pirates, but that is the full extent of their involvement. But I suppose people like to blame it all on the RIAA since if they blame the RIAA and not Atlantic Records and Warner Music, they don't have to stop buying stuff like Led Zepplin and Snoop Dogg and The Stones (Well the early stuff from them) as well as any stuff from matchbox twenty, Sugar Ray, Ray Charles, and hundreds of others.
The RIAA had nothing to do with this case. It was Atlantic V. Andersen. Atlantic Records, a wholly owned subsidiary of Time-Warner-AOL sued her. The RIAA is what The Media, (tm) also a wholly owned subsidiary of Time-Warner-AOL, report as doing the suing because saying "We are suing her" makes them look bad. So remember, Atlantic Records, Time-Warner-AOL. They are the ones suing, not the RIAA. The RIAA is the organization they belong to that recommends investigators to track down offenders but takes no real actions on its own, being only an organization the ACTUAL media corporations belong to. Ahmet Ertegün was the founding chairman of Atlantic until he died December 2006, so I guess blame the lawsuit on the dead guy? Certainly don't stop buying Atlantic albums like Led Zepplin, Cher, Charles Mingus, Coltraine, AC/DC, Bush, Ray Charles, Death Cab for Cutie, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Jennifer Love Hewitt, King Crimson, Lil' Kim, matchbox twenty, The Rolling Stones (Some), Sugar Ray, or Velvet Underground, to name a very very few;) Because remember, its not THEIR fault, right? Its somehow the RIAA who had nothing to do with anything?
Stop saying RIAA. The RIAA didn't sue a single person. Atlantic Records, a wholly owned subsidiary of Time-Warner-AOL's Warner Music Group, sued her. Blaming on the RIAA when the RIAA isn't mentioned once in any of the court documents is what the media reporting on the case, also wholly owned subsidiaries of Time-Warner-AOL, do to shift blame away from themselves.
Here is why you don't do that: Because why wouldn't a terrorist leave corroborating evidence lying around proving it was all just a test to psych the government out, so they can be let go? While they are interviewing your "third parties" you are being beaten half to death, electrocuted, water boarded, and raped. IF, and its a huge, colossally massive if, they ever EVER believe you that you were just kidding about bombing NY with a dirty bomb, they will testify that you cannot be released since after your brutal torture you probably are now a terrorist even through you weren't before. Plus you can't exactly be let go since the torture techniques are classified information and you might leak them. Just like Jose Padilla. First he HAD a dirty bomb, then he was building one, then he was thinking about it, then he knew somebody who was thinking about it, then nothing...but they have ruled he can NEVER face trial, and can NEVER be released. Their reasoning is their "interrogation techniques" have irreversibly damaged him mentally, so he's too unstable to stand trial. But these "interrogation techniques" are highly classified matters of national security, so he can never ever be allowed to talk to anybody in case he tells them what they did to him (especially not a lawyer). And that would be you. Now remember, he _WAS_ a citizen, and there was no evidence against him. Still tortured and given a life sentence without the possibility of a trial. What fucking chance do you think you have if there IS evidence against you? Well you might have white skin so you just may have some kind of chance.
By the time you can see the Tsunami approaching, it's probably too late to run. By the time the winds get bad enough that you decide that maybe, just maybe, the evil gubment weather man wasn't lying about the hurricane, things aren't looking up for you either;) Also in the cases of fires in many areas, you wouldn't be able to see it from your house until it was very close and perhaps surrounding you. If you lived in the top floor of an apartment you wouldn't even be able to tell that the bottom 10 floors were already burning, if you are dismissing the firemen on ladders as lying, and insisting they set of the fire alarm to fool you.
Good, if normal people can have all of their assests seized and sold before trial, without recourse, why on earth should corporations be immune? Remember, if your son is caught selling a single joint, suddenly your family has illegal income, and therefore all of your assests can be immediatly seized, and there is no recourse. Get rid of it for corporations when it goes away for normal people too.
It's a stretch, certainly, but not impossible...except for the exceptions in section 1201, anyways. I imagine the grandfather's idea is that your spyware program is a copyrighted work. It has components that prevent windows uninstaller from removing it, from stopping it from running, and from deleting its files. If deleting is considered "accessing" a work, then this anti-uninstaller is a mechanism that controls access to the work. As such, circumventing it or providing a means to circumvent it is prohibited.
Of course, considering disposing of a work "accessing" it is as I said, a stretch. Further, section 1201 provides for the Librarian of Congress to issue exemptions in cases where the access control is severe enough to have a "substantial adverse effect on the ability of people to make noninfringing uses of copyrighted works" One would hope that getting rid of the damn thing would be a non infringing use of the copyrighted work...plus in the case of Spyware, an existing exemption is that you are allowed "circumvention to protect personal information by disabling part of a system...", well assuming that disabling the whole system is still disabling part of it;)
Thats pretty much nonsense. They already ban your credit card for life if they catch you. The only reason to change contract violations into DMCA violations is so that you can sue cheaters and people who post cheats for millions of dollars. Here is how the cheats work: The guys who make it read the game's memory, and they find the memory locations that various variables such as the player struct, and the array of mob structs, happen to be in, and they figure out all the components of the struct. Then they find pointers that point to or near said structs, and then the find pointers to those, until they reach pointer variables that are static. They code up a bot that uses these fixed pointers to find the dynamic pointers to find the structs they want, and their bot can now read your position and the position of other players and monsters, as well as all of their statuses, etc. Now you can write java/other scripts that use your code to read the variables that are running on the game.
At no point did you modify their code in memory or on disk. In fact, at no point did you read from a single file. All the encryption in the world on the data files won't change the fact that this program is just reading variables from memory. You can't encrypt all the variables in memory, it just wouldn't work. Replacing "X = X + 1;" with "X = Encrypt(Decrypt(X,key)+1,key);" seems like a catastrophic amount of overhead to be adding to every one of millions of lines of code, just so you can use the DMCA on somebody who makes cheats...and even then you'd then have to argue that the position of the player is your creative work, and the encryption was protecting it from being copied.
It really is too bad. If the USA and Britain didn't want Iran building a power plant and enriching fuel for it, they shouldn't have signed a treaty specifically granting Iran that right. I don't mention Israel because although they also don't want a nuclear powerplant, they havn't signed any international treaties at all, which is why they arn't in any trouble for their secret nuke plants under their civilian reactors, or for threatening Iran and even the USA with nuclear attack if they don't start obeying;) Thats why the USA and Britain are so adamant. Israel gave a March deadline before it starts using its nuclear weapons, and has stated the USA won't be happy with where some of them land. And of course this is not an official admission that they have such weapons in the first place, its simply a metaphor or something...yeah...a metaphor...
Just remember that before you go believing what FOX or CNN and NBC or CNN have reported on the issue, that all of them have gone to court defending their First Ammendment right to fabricate evidence and give knowlingly false statements for the purpose of defemation;) The quote from the Iranian President about how he intends to nuke Israel and kill all Jews...are you aware that was fabricated? Are you aware they all retracted it on like, page 97 in fine print? Because its been retracted:O
Thats exactly why I wouldn't. I know a friend who bought XP. He broke his soundcard so he replaced it. It stopped working after one hardware change. See, changing soundcards changes 5 or 6 hardware devices. Changes your game port, your mixer device, your wave out device, your MIDI device, your recording device, your legacy audio device. On top of that when he called Microsoft they refused to allow him to reactivate it, called him a pirate and hung up.
Your popular example is popular because it sparks righteous indignation, but like most examples of why the legal system is screwed up, it never happened. Such multimillion dollar lawsuits where burglar breaks window, burglar cuts hands on glass, burglar sues for a billion dollars for damages since the homeowner had an unsafe house with broken glass everywhere, victim loses house and burglar gets house he was trying to steal from...they aren't real. Search the web. I'm sure you'll find links to hundreds of such cases. Without fail these "news reports" are missing a few key things. First, an actual name. Second, an actual location. Those that do provides names and locations invariably end up being false also. There are real examples of the legal system's failings. Burglars robbing you then successfully suing when they trip running out the back door from police aren't among them. Successfully is a key word though. You can sue for anything. But because you can sue for anything, the fact that somebody sued for something is a non-issue. A convicted rapist sued his victim because she gave him AIDS. Outrageous? Yeah. Did it even make it to trial? Of course not.
The only actual lawsuits involving burglars suing have involved the families of burglars suing because the homeowner either shot them dead for trespassing, which isn't legal most places, or built lethal booby traps. Suing because they put a land mine in their backyard that blew off your leg is entirely different than suing because you tripped on a rock in their backyard and twisted your ankle.
Wikipedia is uncitable because its an encyclopedia. You can't cite Funk & Wagnells either but that doesn't make it in any way illegitimate or not taken seriously. Also they aren't being sued.
It was completely toast as evidence. It wasn't submitted as evidence. It was submitted to a judge as probably cause in order to obtain a search warrant. This judge felt it was sufficient. The search turned up actual photos, diary entries, and pictures on his work computer, which wasn't hacked. Those were used as evidence against him. That and the guilty plea...
Thats their fault, not the cameras. They might have different cameras where you are, but where I am, you can't get your picture taken unless you pass the sensor while the light is red, then enter the intersection. If you run a yellow light you had ample time to stop for, and it goes red when you are half way through, you won't be photographed. Its only if you actually pass the stop-line after its gone fully red. Also theoretically the person behind should be watching the lights and slowing down, since if the person in front was borderline, the next person should be stopping...maybe if people didn't try to run red lights and didn't speed and didn't drive up the next persons asshole there would be less rear endings.
I almost got smushed at a red light that had a camera. I was making a left turn at an advanced arrow. My arrow turns green, I look both ways like a good driver, see to the right everything stopped, to the left, a semi in the near lane, looks like a car in the far lane, everything is good to go. I start accelerating, I see the camera flash and slam the breaks. Turns on the car in the far lane was in the turn lane, there was nobody actually in the far lane, and the guy in the sports car ran through the completely red light that was red a full 10 seconds before he got to the stop line...red light camera may have saved my life, and I've never seen anybody slam the breaks on at an intersection to avoid running a yellow, at camera lights or otherwise. In fact at that light I regularly see people enter on the yellow when they had ample time to stop...its one of the reasons at that particular left turn I make every day its guaranteed that when the arrow comes on, you wait for people to finish clearing the intersection...none of them get shot because they entered on a yellow and they only photograph people who entered on a fully red light.
Anyways, your suggestion is an interesting one, but I don't think its true based on my personal observations...people just don't care about the camera until they get caught and start cursing up a storm about big brother raping them up the ass, plus it doesn't photograph people entering on a yellow anyways.
As an aside, I had a room mate who hated redlight cameras. She got caught at one. Made it out like its the cameras fault "Its total bullshit, I bent over to get a new cd to put in, and when I look up I'm in the intersection already and the light is red and this bullshit box is taking my picture. Its not my fault it was too late to stop!"
Yes, it definitely will strike soon. After all, the scientists at the CDC are acting awfully suspicious about the whole thing. Apparently they are genetically engineering the "perfect flu" by crossing the bird flu with various strains of the Spanish flu that the military has kept frozen. Obstinately, they are doing this because without a super-virus, human-human, 100% lethal, short incubation version of the bird flu, how could they come up with an inoculation against the potential bird flu mutation before it actually happens. Ummm, I guess they are bad scientists, because considering how often flu shots don't even work, they aren't terribly good at coming up with a vaccine against a normal flu because in the few months between when it sweeps across Asia and when it sweeps across North America, it mutates too much and the vaccine tends to only work sometimes, if they are lucky. But somehow they are able to predict exactly how this bird flu will mutate? It will mutate by crossbreeding with the 1918 influenza virus? Apparently so. Either that or they forgot all their basics and watched MI2 and thought "Awesome! Apparently if you genetically engineer the ultimate virus, then the vaccine you make for it will cure all ailments in the world!" Either way, a world-annihilating flu is only a dropped vial away. Good thing they and they alone control the vaccine!
Quite right! This disgusting, despicable, liberal, pinko, swine judge recently ruled that it was LEGAL to have an oak tree in ones back yard! Can you believe that! Sure, there is nothing wrong with a tree...now. But what if years later, you cut off a limb, and you whittled it down on a lathe into a baseball bat, and you beat your grandmother to death with it? This "judge" has just set precedent that beating grandmothers to death is 100% legal! Clearly, everybody is able to commit a crime in the future, so we should execute the lot of them right now to make sure it never happens!
Along the same lines, I hope you never masturbated before you turned 18. Otherwise you should be jailed for life, you Satan worshiping child rapist! And were you ever breastfed? Your mother should be in irons! Breasts are legally considered as sexual organs, sounds like sexual contact with a minor! Sexual interaction with a newborn! SICK! In fact, the vagina is a sexual organ, too! You better have been a c-section, raped by your own mother the second you were born?! ARREST HER RIGHT NOW!
Hahahahaha, in all seriousness, I bet thats what this DA does next, too. Goes to a hospital, arrests each woman who goes in to give birth for sexual contact with a minor. He's apparently found plenty of judges who will convict!
Thats brilliant! It also explains why all of the characters only read old public domain books and listen to old music, and never mention anything written in the intervening centuries;)
Not in all of the US, each state has its own copyright laws. In California all photographs are copyright of the people in the photograph. Hollywood made damn sure of this, so its illegal to photograph celebrities, even when they appear in public;)
Re:Not so funny candidate--Christine Boskoff
on
Darwin Awards 2006
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Read that article more carefully. It wasn't a thunderstorm. He hit some power lines with his kite, which the "article" says is like Franklin because power lines are sort of like an artificial thunder storm;)
I happen to agree that a completely secure system can be established fairly easily. Give the voter a touch screen for all of their choices, they push buttons, it says "Person/Initiative/Proposal/Whatever X are you sure?" and you confirm it, once all things you are voting on are done with, you get a final summary page to confirm, then it records that information and says have a nice day, and also prints out a human readable slip that contains all your votes. You fold it in half just like a normal paper ballot, the person running things seals it and plops it in the ballot box like always. There you have it. Instant the polls close, you have your numbers, and the number can be verified by hand counting of the printouts. In fact, have the electronic number the "Tentative" count, and only the hand count is official. You get instant preliminary results and trusted final results.
That being said voting regardless of system boils down to trust. I will use trust in the same sense the parent has used it as, severely scrutinized. The problem with pure electronic voting is that, while it requires utmost trust, as do all methods of voting, this trust cannot be given. The machine has a tally in it, and the master machine tallies all of the tallies and gives the final result. A person wrote the code and a person assembled the machine. Let us say the code is fully open and completely trusted. How trusted is the fact that the machine is running THAT code? How hard is it to switch out a rom chip? Was the machine fully inspected to make sure the code is identical in all ways to that which is trusted? Its just not possible to trust this machines numbers. Trust is an issue because there is nothing to prevent this machine from being designed to randomly, with chance 1/5, reassign votes from person X to person Y when writing them down. Where is the log? The log may be 10000% fool proof but the vote was logged normally, everything was normal. All it takes is one tiny piece of code to switch how the vote is recorded. Its displayed for the user as normal, but a single line of code randomly flips it over when its recorded. How can this sort of thing be stopped? Hopefully such tampering would be obvious in the code with enough eyes looking for it. As I said however, how hard is the code to change? If its just on a disk of a windows box as some of these voting stations are...well its trivial to swap the code out at any point. If its on a ROM as it should be, how hard is it to switch out the ROM? Is there only one ROM? It ended up that in many of the voting terminals used in previous elections, there were actually TWO ROM chips, and a hidden switch in the back to switch between them. With such a device, it would be trivial to have your trusted code on one, and your malfeasant code on the other. No amount of auditing the code and verifying the correct code is running will save you from this, you would have to fully verify the hardware too. But what if it wasn't a switch, what if the hidden rom is selected by a timer, only active when its actually the election, and switching back to the trusted ROM the second the polls close? Well, then you could set the system clock to whenever the election is supposed to be and always test under those conditions. Unless of course there is a second clock elsewhere that is not changed when the admin adjusts the system clock.
That was a lot of text. What it boils down to is its possible to build a very devious voting machine that to the user appears fully functional and seems to record their votes correctly, but does not actually record them correctly. A software audit will not protect you, and machine audit will not protect you, and a detailed examination of the device will not protect you. You would have to crack them open and verify every circuit in there, every IC chip, every single ROM. How could you do this? A full verification would, I imagine, destroy the machine beyond all hope of repair. It would be impossible to verify the actual machines used in vot
Slashdot Mirror
Wiretapping is a poor name, it's eavesdropping that the laws are about. Recording or just intercepting audio without the consent of both parties is a felony (in some states you only need permission from one party). Location has nothing to do with the law. It applies if you plant a bug in somebody's office, it applies if you use a long range mic to listen to somebody's conversation in a diner, and depending if the particular state's law only applies to electronic interception and recording, it just might apply if you are walking down the street and overhear somebody's conversation.
The very next sentence after the one you quoted is "An exception to the wiretapping law allows police to film people during traffic stops." So "should" doesn't enter into it, it isn't equally applied, because there is an exception made; Their wiretapping laws only apply to people who are not police.
The article and summary repeatedly use the term "RIAA", which is a typo. It should really read "Atlantic Records, a wholly owned Subsidiary of Time-Warner-AOL drops Yanya Andersen Case", and so on. The RIAA is like a guild. The big labels belong to it, they pay their dues and the RIAA acts like a mouth piece. But it doesn't own the music, Sony and Warner and maybe a few other companies own the music. The RIAA isn't suing, and can't sue. They may have provided the "experts" that will testify that they tracked down these evil pirates, but that is the full extent of their involvement. But I suppose people like to blame it all on the RIAA since if they blame the RIAA and not Atlantic Records and Warner Music, they don't have to stop buying stuff like Led Zepplin and Snoop Dogg and The Stones (Well the early stuff from them) as well as any stuff from matchbox twenty, Sugar Ray, Ray Charles, and hundreds of others.
The RIAA had nothing to do with this case. It was Atlantic V. Andersen. Atlantic Records, a wholly owned subsidiary of Time-Warner-AOL sued her. The RIAA is what The Media, (tm) also a wholly owned subsidiary of Time-Warner-AOL, report as doing the suing because saying "We are suing her" makes them look bad. So remember, Atlantic Records, Time-Warner-AOL. They are the ones suing, not the RIAA. The RIAA is the organization they belong to that recommends investigators to track down offenders but takes no real actions on its own, being only an organization the ACTUAL media corporations belong to. Ahmet Ertegün was the founding chairman of Atlantic until he died December 2006, so I guess blame the lawsuit on the dead guy? Certainly don't stop buying Atlantic albums like Led Zepplin, Cher, Charles Mingus, Coltraine, AC/DC, Bush, Ray Charles, Death Cab for Cutie, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Jennifer Love Hewitt, King Crimson, Lil' Kim, matchbox twenty, The Rolling Stones (Some), Sugar Ray, or Velvet Underground, to name a very very few ;) Because remember, its not THEIR fault, right? Its somehow the RIAA who had nothing to do with anything?
Stop saying RIAA. The RIAA didn't sue a single person. Atlantic Records, a wholly owned subsidiary of Time-Warner-AOL's Warner Music Group, sued her. Blaming on the RIAA when the RIAA isn't mentioned once in any of the court documents is what the media reporting on the case, also wholly owned subsidiaries of Time-Warner-AOL, do to shift blame away from themselves.
Here is why you don't do that: Because why wouldn't a terrorist leave corroborating evidence lying around proving it was all just a test to psych the government out, so they can be let go? While they are interviewing your "third parties" you are being beaten half to death, electrocuted, water boarded, and raped. IF, and its a huge, colossally massive if, they ever EVER believe you that you were just kidding about bombing NY with a dirty bomb, they will testify that you cannot be released since after your brutal torture you probably are now a terrorist even through you weren't before. Plus you can't exactly be let go since the torture techniques are classified information and you might leak them. Just like Jose Padilla. First he HAD a dirty bomb, then he was building one, then he was thinking about it, then he knew somebody who was thinking about it, then nothing...but they have ruled he can NEVER face trial, and can NEVER be released. Their reasoning is their "interrogation techniques" have irreversibly damaged him mentally, so he's too unstable to stand trial. But these "interrogation techniques" are highly classified matters of national security, so he can never ever be allowed to talk to anybody in case he tells them what they did to him (especially not a lawyer). And that would be you. Now remember, he _WAS_ a citizen, and there was no evidence against him. Still tortured and given a life sentence without the possibility of a trial. What fucking chance do you think you have if there IS evidence against you? Well you might have white skin so you just may have some kind of chance.
By the time you can see the Tsunami approaching, it's probably too late to run. By the time the winds get bad enough that you decide that maybe, just maybe, the evil gubment weather man wasn't lying about the hurricane, things aren't looking up for you either ;) Also in the cases of fires in many areas, you wouldn't be able to see it from your house until it was very close and perhaps surrounding you. If you lived in the top floor of an apartment you wouldn't even be able to tell that the bottom 10 floors were already burning, if you are dismissing the firemen on ladders as lying, and insisting they set of the fire alarm to fool you.
You missed the memo, it's not torture unless the bad guys do it to Jack Bauer. It's "innovative interrogation techniques."
Good, if normal people can have all of their assests seized and sold before trial, without recourse, why on earth should corporations be immune? Remember, if your son is caught selling a single joint, suddenly your family has illegal income, and therefore all of your assests can be immediatly seized, and there is no recourse. Get rid of it for corporations when it goes away for normal people too.
Of course, considering disposing of a work "accessing" it is as I said, a stretch. Further, section 1201 provides for the Librarian of Congress to issue exemptions in cases where the access control is severe enough to have a "substantial adverse effect on the ability of people to make noninfringing uses of copyrighted works" One would hope that getting rid of the damn thing would be a non infringing use of the copyrighted work...plus in the case of Spyware, an existing exemption is that you are allowed "circumvention to protect personal information by disabling part of a system...", well assuming that disabling the whole system is still disabling part of it ;)
Thats pretty much nonsense. They already ban your credit card for life if they catch you. The only reason to change contract violations into DMCA violations is so that you can sue cheaters and people who post cheats for millions of dollars. Here is how the cheats work: The guys who make it read the game's memory, and they find the memory locations that various variables such as the player struct, and the array of mob structs, happen to be in, and they figure out all the components of the struct. Then they find pointers that point to or near said structs, and then the find pointers to those, until they reach pointer variables that are static. They code up a bot that uses these fixed pointers to find the dynamic pointers to find the structs they want, and their bot can now read your position and the position of other players and monsters, as well as all of their statuses, etc. Now you can write java/other scripts that use your code to read the variables that are running on the game.
At no point did you modify their code in memory or on disk. In fact, at no point did you read from a single file. All the encryption in the world on the data files won't change the fact that this program is just reading variables from memory. You can't encrypt all the variables in memory, it just wouldn't work. Replacing "X = X + 1;" with "X = Encrypt(Decrypt(X,key)+1,key);" seems like a catastrophic amount of overhead to be adding to every one of millions of lines of code, just so you can use the DMCA on somebody who makes cheats...and even then you'd then have to argue that the position of the player is your creative work, and the encryption was protecting it from being copied.
Indeed, so far beyond cliché it has reached the status of YTMND fad! Take Future Conan Enslaving Asia, which set off the 1984 Conan fad: Future Conan in 1984, the Defeat of Future Conan, and the Defeat of Futurama Conan
You're right, they can't. But they can bust you for telling anybody else about it.
Just remember that before you go believing what FOX or CNN and NBC or CNN have reported on the issue, that all of them have gone to court defending their First Ammendment right to fabricate evidence and give knowlingly false statements for the purpose of defemation
Thats exactly why I wouldn't. I know a friend who bought XP. He broke his soundcard so he replaced it. It stopped working after one hardware change. See, changing soundcards changes 5 or 6 hardware devices. Changes your game port, your mixer device, your wave out device, your MIDI device, your recording device, your legacy audio device. On top of that when he called Microsoft they refused to allow him to reactivate it, called him a pirate and hung up.
Your popular example is popular because it sparks righteous indignation, but like most examples of why the legal system is screwed up, it never happened. Such multimillion dollar lawsuits where burglar breaks window, burglar cuts hands on glass, burglar sues for a billion dollars for damages since the homeowner had an unsafe house with broken glass everywhere, victim loses house and burglar gets house he was trying to steal from...they aren't real. Search the web. I'm sure you'll find links to hundreds of such cases. Without fail these "news reports" are missing a few key things. First, an actual name. Second, an actual location. Those that do provides names and locations invariably end up being false also. There are real examples of the legal system's failings. Burglars robbing you then successfully suing when they trip running out the back door from police aren't among them. Successfully is a key word though. You can sue for anything. But because you can sue for anything, the fact that somebody sued for something is a non-issue. A convicted rapist sued his victim because she gave him AIDS. Outrageous? Yeah. Did it even make it to trial? Of course not.
The only actual lawsuits involving burglars suing have involved the families of burglars suing because the homeowner either shot them dead for trespassing, which isn't legal most places, or built lethal booby traps. Suing because they put a land mine in their backyard that blew off your leg is entirely different than suing because you tripped on a rock in their backyard and twisted your ankle.
Wikipedia is uncitable because its an encyclopedia. You can't cite Funk & Wagnells either but that doesn't make it in any way illegitimate or not taken seriously. Also they aren't being sued.
It was completely toast as evidence. It wasn't submitted as evidence. It was submitted to a judge as probably cause in order to obtain a search warrant. This judge felt it was sufficient. The search turned up actual photos, diary entries, and pictures on his work computer, which wasn't hacked. Those were used as evidence against him. That and the guilty plea...
I almost got smushed at a red light that had a camera. I was making a left turn at an advanced arrow. My arrow turns green, I look both ways like a good driver, see to the right everything stopped, to the left, a semi in the near lane, looks like a car in the far lane, everything is good to go. I start accelerating, I see the camera flash and slam the breaks. Turns on the car in the far lane was in the turn lane, there was nobody actually in the far lane, and the guy in the sports car ran through the completely red light that was red a full 10 seconds before he got to the stop line...red light camera may have saved my life, and I've never seen anybody slam the breaks on at an intersection to avoid running a yellow, at camera lights or otherwise. In fact at that light I regularly see people enter on the yellow when they had ample time to stop...its one of the reasons at that particular left turn I make every day its guaranteed that when the arrow comes on, you wait for people to finish clearing the intersection...none of them get shot because they entered on a yellow and they only photograph people who entered on a fully red light.
Anyways, your suggestion is an interesting one, but I don't think its true based on my personal observations...people just don't care about the camera until they get caught and start cursing up a storm about big brother raping them up the ass, plus it doesn't photograph people entering on a yellow anyways.
As an aside, I had a room mate who hated redlight cameras. She got caught at one. Made it out like its the cameras fault "Its total bullshit, I bent over to get a new cd to put in, and when I look up I'm in the intersection already and the light is red and this bullshit box is taking my picture. Its not my fault it was too late to stop!"
Yes, it definitely will strike soon. After all, the scientists at the CDC are acting awfully suspicious about the whole thing. Apparently they are genetically engineering the "perfect flu" by crossing the bird flu with various strains of the Spanish flu that the military has kept frozen. Obstinately, they are doing this because without a super-virus, human-human, 100% lethal, short incubation version of the bird flu, how could they come up with an inoculation against the potential bird flu mutation before it actually happens. Ummm, I guess they are bad scientists, because considering how often flu shots don't even work, they aren't terribly good at coming up with a vaccine against a normal flu because in the few months between when it sweeps across Asia and when it sweeps across North America, it mutates too much and the vaccine tends to only work sometimes, if they are lucky. But somehow they are able to predict exactly how this bird flu will mutate? It will mutate by crossbreeding with the 1918 influenza virus? Apparently so. Either that or they forgot all their basics and watched MI2 and thought "Awesome! Apparently if you genetically engineer the ultimate virus, then the vaccine you make for it will cure all ailments in the world!" Either way, a world-annihilating flu is only a dropped vial away. Good thing they and they alone control the vaccine!
Along the same lines, I hope you never masturbated before you turned 18. Otherwise you should be jailed for life, you Satan worshiping child rapist! And were you ever breastfed? Your mother should be in irons! Breasts are legally considered as sexual organs, sounds like sexual contact with a minor! Sexual interaction with a newborn! SICK! In fact, the vagina is a sexual organ, too! You better have been a c-section, raped by your own mother the second you were born?! ARREST HER RIGHT NOW!
Hahahahaha, in all seriousness, I bet thats what this DA does next, too. Goes to a hospital, arrests each woman who goes in to give birth for sexual contact with a minor. He's apparently found plenty of judges who will convict!
Thats brilliant! It also explains why all of the characters only read old public domain books and listen to old music, and never mention anything written in the intervening centuries ;)
Not in all of the US, each state has its own copyright laws. In California all photographs are copyright of the people in the photograph. Hollywood made damn sure of this, so its illegal to photograph celebrities, even when they appear in public ;)
Read that article more carefully. It wasn't a thunderstorm. He hit some power lines with his kite, which the "article" says is like Franklin because power lines are sort of like an artificial thunder storm ;)
I happen to agree that a completely secure system can be established fairly easily. Give the voter a touch screen for all of their choices, they push buttons, it says "Person/Initiative/Proposal/Whatever X are you sure?" and you confirm it, once all things you are voting on are done with, you get a final summary page to confirm, then it records that information and says have a nice day, and also prints out a human readable slip that contains all your votes. You fold it in half just like a normal paper ballot, the person running things seals it and plops it in the ballot box like always. There you have it. Instant the polls close, you have your numbers, and the number can be verified by hand counting of the printouts. In fact, have the electronic number the "Tentative" count, and only the hand count is official. You get instant preliminary results and trusted final results.
That being said voting regardless of system boils down to trust. I will use trust in the same sense the parent has used it as, severely scrutinized. The problem with pure electronic voting is that, while it requires utmost trust, as do all methods of voting, this trust cannot be given. The machine has a tally in it, and the master machine tallies all of the tallies and gives the final result. A person wrote the code and a person assembled the machine. Let us say the code is fully open and completely trusted. How trusted is the fact that the machine is running THAT code? How hard is it to switch out a rom chip? Was the machine fully inspected to make sure the code is identical in all ways to that which is trusted? Its just not possible to trust this machines numbers. Trust is an issue because there is nothing to prevent this machine from being designed to randomly, with chance 1/5, reassign votes from person X to person Y when writing them down. Where is the log? The log may be 10000% fool proof but the vote was logged normally, everything was normal. All it takes is one tiny piece of code to switch how the vote is recorded. Its displayed for the user as normal, but a single line of code randomly flips it over when its recorded. How can this sort of thing be stopped? Hopefully such tampering would be obvious in the code with enough eyes looking for it. As I said however, how hard is the code to change? If its just on a disk of a windows box as some of these voting stations are...well its trivial to swap the code out at any point. If its on a ROM as it should be, how hard is it to switch out the ROM? Is there only one ROM? It ended up that in many of the voting terminals used in previous elections, there were actually TWO ROM chips, and a hidden switch in the back to switch between them. With such a device, it would be trivial to have your trusted code on one, and your malfeasant code on the other. No amount of auditing the code and verifying the correct code is running will save you from this, you would have to fully verify the hardware too. But what if it wasn't a switch, what if the hidden rom is selected by a timer, only active when its actually the election, and switching back to the trusted ROM the second the polls close? Well, then you could set the system clock to whenever the election is supposed to be and always test under those conditions. Unless of course there is a second clock elsewhere that is not changed when the admin adjusts the system clock.
That was a lot of text. What it boils down to is its possible to build a very devious voting machine that to the user appears fully functional and seems to record their votes correctly, but does not actually record them correctly. A software audit will not protect you, and machine audit will not protect you, and a detailed examination of the device will not protect you. You would have to crack them open and verify every circuit in there, every IC chip, every single ROM. How could you do this? A full verification would, I imagine, destroy the machine beyond all hope of repair. It would be impossible to verify the actual machines used in vot