Wow, it's like our national security apparatus is doing its job. Almost as if the whole "spying on your own population" and "remote-control war by drone" and "harassing everyone who gets on a plane" and "entrapping as many people as possible" parts of their jobs were all really just silly and stupid wastes of taxpayer money to make us less safe.
A lot of good guys in intelligence. Almost as if they started down a road paved with good intentions...
Obama has what? Nine months left? This commission is nothing but a publicity stunt to try and make it look like his administration actually did something in the eight years they had.
Um. No. The end of a two-term presidency is when a president is free to actually try to do useful things.
When investors are willing to place a $9B valuation on a tech unicorn that is so secretive nobody even knows what their actual product is or whether it even works.
It's a health care bubble, actually. There's over-investment in the health care sector right now, at least in startup costs.
Of course, there are also massive startup hurdles there for regulatory and bill-payment reasons
The really sad part isthat these are people who voted in, they are not dictators or such. A majority of people are actually stupid enough to vote for such idiots, and it makes me wonder where our future is headed. Given the rather extreme views that have become fashionable over the last year, I don't think it's too far off we'll soon be looking at the level of control shown in Russia today. I sure hope it was worth losing our privacy, safety, and fundamental values to save us from those "evil terrorists", who haven't played a role in 99.999% of the population. Might I point out, that's not an exaggeration.
It's not just stupid people. It's also people who don't understand the issues because they have never studied encryption or computer security. Smart people and policy-makers.
Couldn't affect customer service in any way, it's impossible to do worse.
FIOS around NYC provided one of the most reliable residential internet services I ever used, and I've only seen them send good technicians and linemen. I've seen cable service that just kicks out randomly for half an hour like crappy DSL, but the FIOS worked when semis knocked it down and ran over it.
And you are free not to buy their overpriced USB cables. Period.
Right up until the point where they use authentication to prevent it from working. Like Dell with their power adapters. (Oh, you didn't pay the dell power supply tax, so your 19.5V can't be allowed to charge the battery!)
There are good reasons for authentication--it's very hard to find USB cables that are actually up to spec. It has cost these companies probably millions of dollars in development time to hunt down bugs related to USB cables that are below spec.
But the solution isn't authenticated cables--it's having a robust cable testing protocol. Authenticated cables are fine and can be helpful, so long as they don't *disable* non-authenticated cables, but on their own they don't solve the underlying problem.
Yes, historically Congress passed an unfunded mandate which effectively made women into a class of people who it costs more to employ, with no benefit to the employer.
Um... no. Women are a class of people who it costs more to employ in many jobs, because they take more leave. Congress didn't make that happen. Biology and social pressures did.
Now presumably there is some benefit to employing women which makes the extra cost necessary. And if someone could actually identify and quantify that particular set of benefits, then calculations on the hiring of women can be added to the calculations and appropriate measures can be taken to show that it is a benefit to the bottom line.
Yes, the theory is that it is a moral good to pay women equally for the same job, even though they take more leave on average. There may be some substantial second-order economic benefits, but the primary imperative was a normative decision.
And let's be honest, just saying "it's fair" is completely bogus. You could say that, *based on one set of priorities*. However, it is distinctly *unfair* if you evaluate another set of priorities. And then you ask yourself, whose priorities are they? Are they an employer's priorities or the government's priorities.
Yes, fairness and equality are inherently words subject to nearly infinite malleability. But your sources of priorities are limited in your example--the priorities may actually be the priorities of the people who elect legislators. "Government" is not some disembodied evil.
If it is the government's priorities, then the government should pay for it. Of course, the government loves getting votes by listening to the "there oughta be a law" people, but the whole "paying for it" thing would make them unpopular, so they just dump the responsibility on someone else.
So you would prefer your taxes go up and your female employees get a subsidy from government?
Or we could just have a vote to entirely remove the onus on employers for the responsibility for undertaking "enhanced equality methods" and move it to the government and tax people for it appropriately instead of hiding in their usual weaselly way and making the employers the bad guys for simply trying to not get shafted by what even you admit was unfair.
I didn't admit it was "unfair" to employers, I admitted it was unfair to men. It's a choice we've made as a society that you don't agree with and that taxes men by forcing wage parity (which increases women's salaries and decreases men's salaries, assuming a competitive market). If you don't like it, you are free to try to change the law.
The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that all treaties may not sign away and rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Which exist no matter where you reside, in or out of Canada.
The Canadian Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over activities by the United States government in the United States. At the most it is a persuasive authority under International Law and principles of comity; it has no binding authority. If Canada failed to attach reservations to the treaty, then Canada's international law obligations can even be in conflict with its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Careful, someone who doesn't take kindly to those remarks might want to have a private meeting with you in the parking lot, kicking the shit out of you.
If only we had something we could call "assault" we could arrest people for. Or "jobs" that we could fire people from.
Insults are the first refuge of the insecure. I'm not talking Torvalds-style insults of the code, I'm talking about when they insult you.
Um, no. Or at least, not only that.
Human beings learn from modelling, from environment, from role models. While insecurity can be a part of what feeds an insult, an insult can also just be "this is how I learned to interact with people." Sometimes it was from an environment where the insult was considered friendly (and yes, insults can be intended and taken in a friendly way), and sometimes it was from an environment where that was the only way a boss knew how to get through to people, and sometimes it was from an environment where some other person learned it from someone who was abusive toward them, and sometimes...
Blaming this all on insecurity is inaccurate at best. At worst, it's more a strategy to urge people to be polite based on shaming them. And while shame can be an effective motivator, it's also a really insulting motivator to use.
I'm sorry you don't read "international" news, but it's been a major topic for many years now.
Just like Free Trade and NAFTA were.
1. I believe you, but you are also not knowing the name of the thing you are talking about, and he can't find it on Google, so there's no evidence that it exists except for your memory of a news report of a couple of years ago. While Canadian news is often better (and is certainly funnier) than American news, that's like remembering the time a chimpanzee told you that your dog was up to something. Maybe you're right, but between the flying poop and the time that's passed chances are information got lost.
2. The closest treaty google pops up info about is this information sharing treaty, related to immigration and databases of people who come from neither country. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/d...
3. International treaties are not necessarily (as a practical or legal matter) subject to the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms when being interpreted or implemented in the United States. In addition, in non self-executing treaties, domestic implementing law may differ from international treaty, and US courts tend to be hesitant to bring in international law, even though it is technically part of the law of the United States under something called the Charming Betsy doctrine.
They would never agree to willingly lose busieness. It would also highlight the fact there is no competition for broadband in many areas when those customers realized there was no one else to go to for service after being kicked out.
Or maybe even Comcast is unwilling to deal with their own customer service.
It would very much depend on the type of job. When my wife was 5-6 months pregnant she was looking for a new job. She found one, and got hired on. Less then a month into it, she went on bed rest, had the baby at 9 months, and decided not to go back to work at all and raise the child.
Meanwhile the company was forced to hold her position and were essentially down a person.
From her perspective it made sense, it was our first child. She was planning on having the baby, taking a couple months off and then going back to work. Reality changed that.
From the companies perspective, they should of never hired her. She wasted their time and essentially forced everyone else to work extra to take up the slack.
So yes, from a business perspective, in many cases I would not hire someone who's pregnant, especially if its their first pregnancy. It would be different if it was a skilled type job, and the person in question was the top candidate and had a great resume with a good employment history. In that case the investment and risk would be worth it. But the risk of them never coming back from maternity leave is very real.
Do you believe that you working 38 hours a week should make the same wage as someone working 45 hours a week? That is the only way that parity works, unless people work the exact same hours at the same job. Which they do not, for all kinds of reasons. Pregnancy for example, women take time off because they are the only gender that can give birth.
Know your history. Believe it or not, Congress knew and understood very clearly when they passed the Equal Pay Act that it cost businesses more to employ women because of Pregnancy, for example. They had statistics on it, they understood that a purely economic decision would have taken that into account.
And they decided to pass the equal pay act anyway. Because there are social goals that we are willing to pay money for and make the economy less efficient to achieve. That's why we don't allow slavery. That's why we don't allow child labor. That's why we allow antidiscrimination lawsuits around race.
It's not perfectly fair to men, of course--it necessarily means that men are cross-subsidizing women and getting paid less. But it's still something we've decided is desirable. If you want to change it, elect a new Congress.
True. "Worst" is a charged word with an implicit normative value judgment.
"lowest" is a word of measurement that denotes being at one end of a measurement. There is not necessarily normative judgment implicit in it, although people may hear a normative judgment in it depending on what it is measuring.
If I note you are the child with the worst height, I am being cruel; if I note you are the child who is shortest, I am being factual.
if P(getting the job) is much lower for an equally qualified woman, then ExpV(being a professional in the job) is much lower for a woman. For the set of all people qualified, the women get less money because they're less likely to get hired.
Antidiscrimination isn't just about individual salaries of the people who happen to make it--it's about whether you're prejudicing the wages of an entire class of people for a discriminatory reason that society has decided it is not okay to use for discrimination.
In fifteen years, when they write the two paragraphs in the 8th grade history books about this election, do you think Donald Trump will even be mentioned?
Equality in pay for the same job and the same hours is already the law. In fact it has been repeatedly proven that women make more money in the same job as men when they work the same hours and have the same backgrounds.
Can we please stop perpetuating this bullshit about how everyone should be paid the same as everyone else, no matter what the job is. People need to pay attention to the source of this propaganda. Hint: The people pushing this crap down don't put their own money where their mouths are, and won't. They are ultra rich, and you are a peon.
Try getting a job while obviously pregnant. Good luck with that.
So one of the problems with modern depth sensors is handling sunlight. Blackbody radiation can cause all kinds of noise in the signal that is bounced back at the camera from a laser. This makes it harder, not easier, for a lot of depth perception tech to work in good lighting conditions.
Driving at night should, for the most part, be easier for many systems than driving during the day.
>Slashdot is far and away the most repressive leftist forum I have ever seen, with mods absusing their power to censor literally anything but the hard-left party line.
You don't get out much.
Or understand the word "left" in a political context.
There is something like a slashdot party line, without a party--there are a lot of core groupthink ideas you come across here. Open Source Good, Microsoft Bad, People (Other than us) Stupid, Anyone trying to tell other people what to do bad, Social Justice bad, Overt racism bad, cool tech toys good, Star Trek good, Lorf of the Rings (the book) good, etc...
It's still OK (you won't get booted) to challenge any of those positions with logic and reason, but you generally have to make a much more cogent post and still risk more downmodding.
But that line is WAY out-of-sync with the extreme political left, and there's no "party" leadership or organization coordinating talking points and power struggles.
Nothing is censored here. It just gets modded up or down. Brett Buck just cannot handle anyone who doesn't totally agree with him, and lables anyone who disagrees with him as a leftist.
Modding up and down is sort of a "soft" censorship. It does run the risk of promoting groupthink and it does hide positions contrary to majority opinion. Both of these are things slashdot has a problem with.
"defending your brand" does not typically mean preventing any of your copyrighted words and names from being uttered in public.
Wrong. And betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of IP.
It's not about copyright. It's about trademarks.
Defending your trademarks certainly does mean limiting their use in public. If you don't, your billion-dollar brand can turn into a word that takes on a generic meaning, like band-aid or xerox. Google runs this risk, for example.
If Lucasfilm wants to maintain a trademark in the Light Saber, for example, a trademark they sell many millions of dollars of toys based on, then they need to be sending out these cease-and-desist letters. They're not saying the people can't have their festival--they just can't use the term light saber in their official communications.
And what was the probable cause for the kiddie porn?
From the warrant, some pretty disgusting stuff posted on 4chan. Which is totally a legit basis for a warrant, standing on its own.
The only question is whether the cops knew about the TOR exit node and decided that raiding the house still made sense (which would be a very strange judgment call), or failed to disclose it to the judge (which would be really stupid and could open them up to a lawsuit).
Computer using this IP address assigned to this physical address leased by this couple posted kiddie porn at this time. That is probable cause. Running an exit node doesn't remove suspicion, any more than does your 40 being in a paper bag. What it does give is reasonable doubt to the jury. Very different.
Maybe. But that's a call for a judge. (And before that, a call for an officer to decide whether it makes sense to spend the resources on this, or whether he just wants to knock on the door.)
No, this was handled properly. Suspected illegal activity was investigated and they were quickly found to not be part of it with minimal inconvenience. I'm not sure why this is even a story. Guess what, if you are around a store that gets robbed or some other crimes the cops will investigate also.
Also, "Minimal Inconvenience" compared to what? The guy had six cops show up at his home at 6:15, barge in, intimidate him, watch as he got dressed, etc...
Yes, it's a minimal inconvenience compared to them arresting him or sending him to federal prison. And it's GREAT that somebody on-scene had the good sense to say they don't even have to seize any assets. But it's still a MASSIVE intrusion into his life, one that the Constitution exists to protect him from.
Most cops are trying to go a good job, so when an officer and a judge sign off on this kind of intrusion without better cause, it makes them all look bad, because it means they wind up hurting the community, hurting the trust between the community and the police, and wasting resources that could be spent going after actual criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, it's like our national security apparatus is doing its job. Almost as if the whole "spying on your own population" and "remote-control war by drone" and "harassing everyone who gets on a plane" and "entrapping as many people as possible" parts of their jobs were all really just silly and stupid wastes of taxpayer money to make us less safe.
A lot of good guys in intelligence. Almost as if they started down a road paved with good intentions...
Obama has what? Nine months left? This commission is nothing but a publicity stunt to try and make it look like his administration actually did something in the eight years they had.
Um. No. The end of a two-term presidency is when a president is free to actually try to do useful things.
When investors are willing to place a $9B valuation on a tech unicorn that is so secretive nobody even knows what their actual product is or whether it even works.
It's a health care bubble, actually. There's over-investment in the health care sector right now, at least in startup costs.
Of course, there are also massive startup hurdles there for regulatory and bill-payment reasons
The really sad part isthat these are people who voted in, they are not dictators or such. A majority of people are actually stupid enough to vote for such idiots, and it makes me wonder where our future is headed. Given the rather extreme views that have become fashionable over the last year, I don't think it's too far off we'll soon be looking at the level of control shown in Russia today. I sure hope it was worth losing our privacy, safety, and fundamental values to save us from those "evil terrorists", who haven't played a role in 99.999% of the population. Might I point out, that's not an exaggeration.
It's not just stupid people. It's also people who don't understand the issues because they have never studied encryption or computer security. Smart people and policy-makers.
Couldn't affect customer service in any way, it's impossible to do worse.
FIOS around NYC provided one of the most reliable residential internet services I ever used, and I've only seen them send good technicians and linemen. I've seen cable service that just kicks out randomly for half an hour like crappy DSL, but the FIOS worked when semis knocked it down and ran over it.
And you are free not to buy their overpriced USB cables. Period.
Right up until the point where they use authentication to prevent it from working. Like Dell with their power adapters. (Oh, you didn't pay the dell power supply tax, so your 19.5V can't be allowed to charge the battery!)
There are good reasons for authentication--it's very hard to find USB cables that are actually up to spec. It has cost these companies probably millions of dollars in development time to hunt down bugs related to USB cables that are below spec.
But the solution isn't authenticated cables--it's having a robust cable testing protocol. Authenticated cables are fine and can be helpful, so long as they don't *disable* non-authenticated cables, but on their own they don't solve the underlying problem.
Yes, historically Congress passed an unfunded mandate which effectively made women into a class of people who it costs more to employ, with no benefit to the employer.
Um... no. Women are a class of people who it costs more to employ in many jobs, because they take more leave. Congress didn't make that happen. Biology and social pressures did.
Now presumably there is some benefit to employing women which makes the extra cost necessary. And if someone could actually identify and quantify that particular set of benefits, then calculations on the hiring of women can be added to the calculations and appropriate measures can be taken to show that it is a benefit to the bottom line.
Yes, the theory is that it is a moral good to pay women equally for the same job, even though they take more leave on average. There may be some substantial second-order economic benefits, but the primary imperative was a normative decision.
And let's be honest, just saying "it's fair" is completely bogus. You could say that, *based on one set of priorities*. However, it is distinctly *unfair* if you evaluate another set of priorities. And then you ask yourself, whose priorities are they? Are they an employer's priorities or the government's priorities.
Yes, fairness and equality are inherently words subject to nearly infinite malleability. But your sources of priorities are limited in your example--the priorities may actually be the priorities of the people who elect legislators. "Government" is not some disembodied evil.
If it is the government's priorities, then the government should pay for it. Of course, the government loves getting votes by listening to the "there oughta be a law" people, but the whole "paying for it" thing would make them unpopular, so they just dump the responsibility on someone else.
So you would prefer your taxes go up and your female employees get a subsidy from government?
Or we could just have a vote to entirely remove the onus on employers for the responsibility for undertaking "enhanced equality methods" and move it to the government and tax people for it appropriately instead of hiding in their usual weaselly way and making the employers the bad guys for simply trying to not get shafted by what even you admit was unfair.
I didn't admit it was "unfair" to employers, I admitted it was unfair to men. It's a choice we've made as a society that you don't agree with and that taxes men by forcing wage parity (which increases women's salaries and decreases men's salaries, assuming a competitive market). If you don't like it, you are free to try to change the law.
The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that all treaties may not sign away and rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Which exist no matter where you reside, in or out of Canada.
The Canadian Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over activities by the United States government in the United States. At the most it is a persuasive authority under International Law and principles of comity; it has no binding authority. If Canada failed to attach reservations to the treaty, then Canada's international law obligations can even be in conflict with its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Careful, someone who doesn't take kindly to those remarks might want to have a private meeting with you in the parking lot, kicking the shit out of you.
If only we had something we could call "assault" we could arrest people for. Or "jobs" that we could fire people from.
Insults are the first refuge of the insecure. I'm not talking Torvalds-style insults of the code, I'm talking about when they insult you.
Um, no. Or at least, not only that.
Human beings learn from modelling, from environment, from role models. While insecurity can be a part of what feeds an insult, an insult can also just be "this is how I learned to interact with people." Sometimes it was from an environment where the insult was considered friendly (and yes, insults can be intended and taken in a friendly way), and sometimes it was from an environment where that was the only way a boss knew how to get through to people, and sometimes it was from an environment where some other person learned it from someone who was abusive toward them, and sometimes...
Blaming this all on insecurity is inaccurate at best. At worst, it's more a strategy to urge people to be polite based on shaming them. And while shame can be an effective motivator, it's also a really insulting motivator to use.
It was news in Canada.
I'm sorry you don't read "international" news, but it's been a major topic for many years now.
Just like Free Trade and NAFTA were.
1. I believe you, but you are also not knowing the name of the thing you are talking about, and he can't find it on Google, so there's no evidence that it exists except for your memory of a news report of a couple of years ago. While Canadian news is often better (and is certainly funnier) than American news, that's like remembering the time a chimpanzee told you that your dog was up to something. Maybe you're right, but between the flying poop and the time that's passed chances are information got lost.
2. The closest treaty google pops up info about is this information sharing treaty, related to immigration and databases of people who come from neither country. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/d...
3. International treaties are not necessarily (as a practical or legal matter) subject to the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms when being interpreted or implemented in the United States. In addition, in non self-executing treaties, domestic implementing law may differ from international treaty, and US courts tend to be hesitant to bring in international law, even though it is technically part of the law of the United States under something called the Charming Betsy doctrine.
They would never agree to willingly lose busieness. It would also highlight the fact there is no competition for broadband in many areas when those customers realized there was no one else to go to for service after being kicked out.
Or maybe even Comcast is unwilling to deal with their own customer service.
It would very much depend on the type of job. When my wife was 5-6 months pregnant she was looking for a new job. She found one, and got hired on. Less then a month into it, she went on bed rest, had the baby at 9 months, and decided not to go back to work at all and raise the child.
Meanwhile the company was forced to hold her position and were essentially down a person.
From her perspective it made sense, it was our first child. She was planning on having the baby, taking a couple months off and then going back to work. Reality changed that.
From the companies perspective, they should of never hired her. She wasted their time and essentially forced everyone else to work extra to take up the slack.
So yes, from a business perspective, in many cases I would not hire someone who's pregnant, especially if its their first pregnancy. It would be different if it was a skilled type job, and the person in question was the top candidate and had a great resume with a good employment history. In that case the investment and risk would be worth it. But the risk of them never coming back from maternity leave is very real.
Sure--but you'd still be breaking the law.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/type...
Do you believe that you working 38 hours a week should make the same wage as someone working 45 hours a week? That is the only way that parity works, unless people work the exact same hours at the same job. Which they do not, for all kinds of reasons. Pregnancy for example, women take time off because they are the only gender that can give birth.
Know your history. Believe it or not, Congress knew and understood very clearly when they passed the Equal Pay Act that it cost businesses more to employ women because of Pregnancy, for example. They had statistics on it, they understood that a purely economic decision would have taken that into account.
And they decided to pass the equal pay act anyway. Because there are social goals that we are willing to pay money for and make the economy less efficient to achieve. That's why we don't allow slavery. That's why we don't allow child labor. That's why we allow antidiscrimination lawsuits around race.
It's not perfectly fair to men, of course--it necessarily means that men are cross-subsidizing women and getting paid less. But it's still something we've decided is desirable. If you want to change it, elect a new Congress.
Yes, "worst fuel economy" strongly implies something beyond "lowest mileage".
True. "Worst" is a charged word with an implicit normative value judgment.
"lowest" is a word of measurement that denotes being at one end of a measurement. There is not necessarily normative judgment implicit in it, although people may hear a normative judgment in it depending on what it is measuring.
If I note you are the child with the worst height, I am being cruel; if I note you are the child who is shortest, I am being factual.
if P(getting the job) is much lower for an equally qualified woman, then ExpV(being a professional in the job) is much lower for a woman. For the set of all people qualified, the women get less money because they're less likely to get hired.
Antidiscrimination isn't just about individual salaries of the people who happen to make it--it's about whether you're prejudicing the wages of an entire class of people for a discriminatory reason that society has decided it is not okay to use for discrimination.
In fifteen years, when they write the two paragraphs in the 8th grade history books about this election, do you think Donald Trump will even be mentioned?
Equality in pay for the same job and the same hours is already the law. In fact it has been repeatedly proven that women make more money in the same job as men when they work the same hours and have the same backgrounds.
Can we please stop perpetuating this bullshit about how everyone should be paid the same as everyone else, no matter what the job is. People need to pay attention to the source of this propaganda. Hint: The people pushing this crap down don't put their own money where their mouths are, and won't. They are ultra rich, and you are a peon.
Try getting a job while obviously pregnant. Good luck with that.
So one of the problems with modern depth sensors is handling sunlight. Blackbody radiation can cause all kinds of noise in the signal that is bounced back at the camera from a laser. This makes it harder, not easier, for a lot of depth perception tech to work in good lighting conditions.
Driving at night should, for the most part, be easier for many systems than driving during the day.
>Slashdot is far and away the most repressive leftist forum I have ever seen, with mods absusing their power to censor literally anything but the hard-left party line.
You don't get out much.
Or understand the word "left" in a political context.
There is something like a slashdot party line, without a party--there are a lot of core groupthink ideas you come across here. Open Source Good, Microsoft Bad, People (Other than us) Stupid, Anyone trying to tell other people what to do bad, Social Justice bad, Overt racism bad, cool tech toys good, Star Trek good, Lorf of the Rings (the book) good, etc...
It's still OK (you won't get booted) to challenge any of those positions with logic and reason, but you generally have to make a much more cogent post and still risk more downmodding.
But that line is WAY out-of-sync with the extreme political left, and there's no "party" leadership or organization coordinating talking points and power struggles.
Nothing is censored here. It just gets modded up or down. Brett Buck just cannot handle anyone who doesn't totally agree with him, and lables anyone who disagrees with him as a leftist.
Modding up and down is sort of a "soft" censorship. It does run the risk of promoting groupthink and it does hide positions contrary to majority opinion. Both of these are things slashdot has a problem with.
But it also hides the spam. Yay for hiding spam.
"defending your brand" does not typically mean preventing any of your copyrighted words and names from being uttered in public.
Wrong. And betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of IP.
It's not about copyright. It's about trademarks.
Defending your trademarks certainly does mean limiting their use in public. If you don't, your billion-dollar brand can turn into a word that takes on a generic meaning, like band-aid or xerox. Google runs this risk, for example.
If Lucasfilm wants to maintain a trademark in the Light Saber, for example, a trademark they sell many millions of dollars of toys based on, then they need to be sending out these cease-and-desist letters. They're not saying the people can't have their festival--they just can't use the term light saber in their official communications.
And what was the probable cause for the kiddie porn?
From the warrant, some pretty disgusting stuff posted on 4chan. Which is totally a legit basis for a warrant, standing on its own.
The only question is whether the cops knew about the TOR exit node and decided that raiding the house still made sense (which would be a very strange judgment call), or failed to disclose it to the judge (which would be really stupid and could open them up to a lawsuit).
Computer using this IP address assigned to this physical address leased by this couple posted kiddie porn at this time. That is probable cause. Running an exit node doesn't remove suspicion, any more than does your 40 being in a paper bag. What it does give is reasonable doubt to the jury. Very different.
Maybe. But that's a call for a judge. (And before that, a call for an officer to decide whether it makes sense to spend the resources on this, or whether he just wants to knock on the door.)
No, this was handled properly. Suspected illegal activity was investigated and they were quickly found to not be part of it with minimal inconvenience. I'm not sure why this is even a story. Guess what, if you are around a store that gets robbed or some other crimes the cops will investigate also.
Also, "Minimal Inconvenience" compared to what? The guy had six cops show up at his home at 6:15, barge in, intimidate him, watch as he got dressed, etc...
Yes, it's a minimal inconvenience compared to them arresting him or sending him to federal prison. And it's GREAT that somebody on-scene had the good sense to say they don't even have to seize any assets. But it's still a MASSIVE intrusion into his life, one that the Constitution exists to protect him from.
Most cops are trying to go a good job, so when an officer and a judge sign off on this kind of intrusion without better cause, it makes them all look bad, because it means they wind up hurting the community, hurting the trust between the community and the police, and wasting resources that could be spent going after actual criminals.