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User: Etherwalk

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  1. This on Weev's Attorney Says FBI Is Intercepting His Client's Mail · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Civilised society doesn't work like that.

    This.

    When someone violates Constitutional Rights in America, two things happen: First, evidence that comes from that violation is inadmissible in court. Second, the person whose rights have been violated can sue the pants off the government.

    It is more complicated because of a massive fraud on the part of the prosecution to pretend that the information is not based on that violation.

    It is also more complicated because juries, as a whole, care less about the government having violated your constitutional rights when you are a criminal.

    It is also more complicated because when they get caught doing something bad enough, cops usually offer a deal where you won't sue and they won't prosecute.

  2. Story coincidentally expands powers on TSA Missed Boston Bomber Because His Name Was Misspelled In a Database · · Score: 1

    Sometimes they tell the truth; when it is in their best interest.

    This. The story may or may not be true, but their willing and demonstrated duplicity in past Congressional reports makes it suspect. Here the story serves their interests by (1) making it seem like it's not really their fault they missed the guy, and (2) making it seem like should grab and harass near-matches and misspellings of peoples' names. It *ALSO* does not say *WHO* misspelled the name when entering it in the database. Because that person should probably be fired.

  3. Lame players on Xbox One Reputation System Penalizes Gamers Who Behave Badly · · Score: 1

    It's actually extremely easy to tell the difference between a good player and a cheater. It's just hard to tell the difference between two good players, one of which is cheating. A bad player who scores highly thanks to cheats is very easy to spot.

    You've also got lame players who aren't cheating. Campers in a first-person shooter and the like.

  4. Not about rehabilitation on UK Bans Sending Books To Prisoners · · Score: 1

    Prison is also about rehabilitation, or at least it's meant to be.

    Malarkey. I don't think a single serious legal scholar today believes prisons are about rehabilitation.

    Prison is about punishment. That's it. It's a way of hurting someone. This serves three purposes--politics, retribution, and disincentivization. Politically, overcriminalization lets politicians swear they're tough on crime. Retributively, prisons punish in order to hurt the person who did something bad. Finally, the fact that they are punishment disincentivizes criminal behavior.

  5. Zathrus and Thor on Interviews: Ask J. Michael Straczynski What You Will · · Score: 1

    What would the dialog be in a confrontation between Zathrus, Thor, and Loki? If you cannot tell us for legal reasons, what would it be in a meeting between not-Zathrus, not-Thor, and not-Loki, who happen to resemble the characters they are not?

  6. Re:In other news... on Judge Tells Feds To Be More Specific About Email Search Warrants · · Score: 1

    Nobody at DHS is stupid enough to put a Federal Judge on the no-fly list.

    Why not? Congressmen did end up on this list a few times

    Granted, they would probably be taken off when this issue comes up (unlike the rest of us who just have to deal with it).

    Federal Judges are more powerful than Congressmen in many ways. They are also, as a rule, more respectable.

  7. Re:In other news... on Judge Tells Feds To Be More Specific About Email Search Warrants · · Score: 1

    Federal Magistrate Judge John Facciola has been added to the no-fly list.

    He's a good judge who's made a name for himself in electronic discovery. He's also... well, a Federal Magistrate Judge. Nobody at DHS is stupid enough to put a Federal Judge on the no-fly list. Actually, if anything, they would have them on some sort of VIP whitelist.

  8. Re:Higher SAT scores, etc on The Poor Neglected Gifted Child · · Score: 1

    Got to the point the teacher stopped giving me the whole book and I was only given 3-4 pages at a time. So I could "keep up" with other students..meanwhile I coulda had finished the book and been on a 2nd or 3rd by the time the other kids finished the first.

    that teacher should be fined or something. That's ridiculous.

  9. Re:So what if the "presidential whatever" is whate on What If the Next Presidential Limo Was a Tesla? · · Score: 1

    Does it make any practical difference? Is there any point to this post?

    Yes. Practically the poster and various commentators enjoy the hypothetical. In addition, if there were actually a chance of this happening, it would make a practical difference in the security status of the president of the United States.

  10. Alumni on Ask Slashdot: College Club Fundraising On the Fly? · · Score: 1

    Call wealthy alumni. You could probably get a list from the alumni office.

    A school like Georgia Tech would already have a finely tuned fundraising apparatus targeting 'wealthy alumni.'

    It is highly unlikely the alumni office would provide this list to just anyone.

    However, as a 'parent said, there may be funds available at the school.

    The alumni office shouldn't provide this list--it's intelligent to tightly control fundraising efforts, if they know their job; and having someone go off-script or divert a $50K donation from their general fund is a big deal. (Especially since their job is to build that fund and preserve those relationships).

    You might be able to get a donation from alums you are aware of--successful entrepreneurs tend to make the biggest donations, but for $40K it would be worth contacting successful engineers and the like for a few thousand each. Their companies may have matching programs. But if you're an employee, figure out who to ask at the school about the politics.

  11. Appeals are cheap on Calif. Court Orders Preservation of Disputed NSA Phone Records · · Score: 2

    How much time will pass before we get a SCOTUS ruling?

    One of the problems with the judicial branch is that the appeals process is generally only limited by the size of one's purse.

    Bottomless budgets, like governments and large corporations have at their disposal, make for quite the unlevel playing field.

    Actually, appeals are relatively cheap, because all you have to do is look at the record from the court below, research a bunch of cases, and write and talk about why your client should have won.

    Trials, on the other hand, are expensive and a pain in the ass. You have to do discovery--collecting millions of documents, *analyzing* millions of documents, interviewing lots of people while having at least two lawyers and a court reporter in the room, doing a bunch of motions (each basically like an appeal--look at the docs you have and research a bunch of cases and write and talk about why your client should win), and finally arguing your case in court.

  12. Re:Nazis on The NSA Has an Advice Columnist · · Score: 1

    The concept of "justified war" has too major problems:
    1) If you accept it, how do you avoid the slippery slope? I can't think of a government in history that has avoided it.
    2) If you don't accept it, how do you defend yourself from an aggressor?

    The answer to #1 is #2--war is justified when used to defend yourself from an aggressor. The world agreed on this in the Charter of the United Nations, which is why every tinpot dictator now claims his wars are in "self-defense." That claim is what makes wars legal.

    That being said, people disagree on what constitutes self-defense, and they lie about it, so you still have a problem.

  13. Re:An advantage on Embarrassing Stories Shed Light On US Officials' Technological Ignorance · · Score: 1

    There's also still two cans and a string. Doesn't make it a valid means of communication for normal people.

    It's perfectly valid--it works. Because it covers multiple houses, it does not conform to American standards of personal privacy, at all, which is why SCOTUS should revisit the phone privacy question.

  14. Re:An advantage on Embarrassing Stories Shed Light On US Officials' Technological Ignorance · · Score: 2

    but I thought most people on slashdot wouldn't know what they were

    /. is a place wherein denizens brag about using their acoustic couplers, or bbs'ing at 300 baud or computing in the snow, uphill both ways while editing inodes by hand with a magnet. You take a pretty big leap when you guess that "most" people don't know about an outdated technology.

    Not really, at least not for a *particular* *very* outdated technology--there was likely to be a sizable minority who would know and inform the rest, which is what happened. But why would I deliberately make a point in a way which was less clear to everyone else?

  15. Re:Right... on Study: Elephants Have Learned To Tell Certain Languages Apart · · Score: 1

    Because you name age, gender and language, not race. So they are racist.

    Logic and you just don't go along do you.

    Actually, I was just guessing that the different languages spoken were correlated with different races and using that as sufficient evidence of racism to support the joke.

  16. Racist Elephants! on Study: Elephants Have Learned To Tell Certain Languages Apart · · Score: 2

    So... the elephants make decisions about danger based on age, gender, and language?

  17. Racism still racist on 20 Freescale Semiconductor Employees On Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight · · Score: 1

    I see we have never been to Malaysia.

    I remember the first time I was in Kuala Lumpur, I was shocked to see newspaper ads for apartments that openly declared "Chinese only" or "Malay Muslim woman only, 18-25" or some such. The racism is all out in the open and codified in law. Every citizen's mandatory ID card has a field for race and religion. Race is there because different people's votes count differently come election time, and religion is there so that when you're eating during the day on Ramadan, when the religious police come into the restaurants you show them and you don't get arrested.

    Did we learn something today? Much better than just ignorantly shouting "RACISM!" at a culture with which we are unfamiliar.

    Actually, racism is still racism even when and if it is openly endorsed by society.

  18. Re:An advantage on Embarrassing Stories Shed Light On US Officials' Technological Ignorance · · Score: 1

    Ah, the party line. I had almost forgotten about them.

    Yes. I thought about calling it a party line, but I thought most people on slashdot wouldn't know what they were--we had the last one in a particular rural community nearly thirty years ago.

  19. An advantage on Embarrassing Stories Shed Light On US Officials' Technological Ignorance · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is in some ways an advantage--SCOTUS is supposed to change slowly. But it also results in crazy rulings at times, like the idea that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in who you call. The judges who made that decision a few decades ago grew up when there were still *shared phone lines* between neighboring houses.

  20. Fourth Amendment on US Intelligence Officials To Monitor Federal Employees With Security Clearances · · Score: 2

    Don't want the government knowing everything about you? Don't request secret clearance from it.

    It is absurd that we have five *million* people in the country whom the government has forced to waive their right to be free from *unreasonable* search in order to qualify for their jobs.

    If the government inquiries are reasonable, why would they need to make people sign the waiver?

  21. Having a three-tiered system of government employability effectively bars countless Americans from serving in government and *ensures* it is nonrepresentative. In effect, you have cleared employees, non-cleared employees, and ex-cons, in decreasing order of government employability.

  22. Nazis on The NSA Has an Advice Columnist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "just doing a job" is no excuse.

    This. A huge number of corporations and firms, generally because it happens do be profitable rather than out of malice, do *really* bad things. It's not like the guy whose job it is to deny insurance claims or the insurance "adjuster" is somehow insulated from moral culpability because it's his job to basically commit fraud. Excuse me, minimize claims.

    "Just following orders" is a highly relevant phrase here. If freedom from government surveillance is a basic right, then people who are "just following orders" to abridge that right are culpable for having done so, even though they were following orders.

  23. Yay slashdot! on 20 Freescale Semiconductor Employees On Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight · · Score: 2

    Hey, look! Slashdot mods as informative racist rants against Malaysians!

    I know we're a bit of a groupthink crowd, but seriously. Stop. Just stop.

  24. Re:You gotta understand ... on 20 Freescale Semiconductor Employees On Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight · · Score: 1

    the MARA college which produces graduates that the Malaysian private sector itself has steadfastly refuse to employ.

    The private sector may refuse to employ people out of sheer dumb prejudice too. Historically it has and many businesses still do, even in liberal nations.

  25. Re: Was there any ACARS data? on 20 Freescale Semiconductor Employees On Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight · · Score: 1

    The reports are now that the two stolen passports were used at the same time and location to buy consecutive tickets but with different destinations though the same origin. While it doesn't prove a terrorist link, that two passports were stolen from two different people but then used together in this way is pretty suspicious.

    Not that suspicious. Could be low-level or mid-level organized crime, or just illegal immigrants to a location, or people with a felony history that would keep them out of a country, or a victim of human trafficking escorted by a trafficker, or dissidents kept on a no-fly list, or anyone with an interest in being off the grid.

    It does, however, point out the limited usefulness of the move along the US border to require passports rather than birth certificates for entry after 9/11. I'm sure it makes entry slightly harder, which is what security is about, but it's not something that would have prevented 9/11.