As I understand it, only authorized applications will be able to run on these machines. If that is true, that means that they can't be used for programming since students' programs won't be on the whitelist. Am I missing something?
Hmm. I wonder if no one has told her that many musicians earn a perfectly good income by means of live performances, as all musicians did not all that long ago. Earning vast sums from recordings is by no means the only business model for music.
Authorizing police officers to draw blood on the spot, with or without your cooperation (using a contract phlebotomist of course) if you are pulled over under suspicion of DUI.
If it is only done when there is reasonable suspicion of DUI, this is not so bad, given that you are legally required to submit to a test anyhow (assuming that Texas is like almost every other state). The blood test is much more accurate than a breath test. It isn't susceptible to alcohol in the breath or other chemicals in the breath that fool breathalyzers, and the machines are better maintained and much less wonky. Getting a blood sample on the spot not only leads to stronger evidence for convicting the guilty but it protects the innocent.
There is, of course, the issue of what happens to the blood sample after it is tested
for alcohol level.
We've got a similar situation here (Prince George, British Columbia). As is common in Northern Canada, we have no local police force. Instead, the city contracts for police services with the RCMP. A while back, there were allegations of problems due to the romantic relationship between the head of the RCMP detachment and a senior city employee whose duties included working with the RCMP. City Council commissioned an investigation and reviewed the resulting report in a closed session. Shortly thereafter, the report was leaked to the press. A few weeks ago one of our city councilors, Brian Skakun, was charged criminally with leaking the report. In American terms, the offense is a misdemeanor, but nonetheless it is unheard of for criminal charges to brought for this, and there is a great deal of support for him, including a defense fund.
Here in Canada we have Crown copyright at the federal level. The sole use is to prevent the wide circulation of reports that the current government finds embarrassing. That is not a legitimate use. The revenue generated by licensing is trivial. Why would state copyright in the US be any better?
Teaching children touch-typing is an excellent idea, but high school is much too late. Even junior high school kids have reports to write, and still younger kids are using computers. Touch-typing should be taught in elementary school. As far as the curriculum is concerned, grade five or six would probably be alright, but it might need to be earlier to prevent kids from fossilizing bad two-finger habits.
I went to an unusual school that taught touch-typing in grade six back in 1968. We didn't have personal computers then, but for me it was a godsend as I have awful handwriting. Judging from my experience in that school, sixth graders have no difficulty learning touch typing.
Actually, merely copying the book technically infringes the copyright. (I'm assuming you're talking about copying the whole book. Copying small parts would probably fall under fair use.) However, you're much less likely to be caught if you don't distribute the copies.
This is actually a good thing. The reputation of Scientology is sufficiently and deservedly bad that their advocacy of internet censorship will serve as a warning against it. With the Scientologists and Muslims the most prominent advocates of censorship, things are looking good for freedom.
Right. Unfair, isn't it? I have never burned a CD with commercial music. All of the CDs I have burned contain software, hard drive backups, or research data.
True, but at least this kind of terrorist goes after radio towers rather than people. I wonder if we could persuade Islamic terrorists to follow their lead?
Sorry but his subject header together with the single sentence of the post still do not claim that all warrantless searches are illegal.
What he writes in his journal doesn't really bear on his post. The point is not figuring out what his reasoning process may have been, it's whether what he states in his post is ignorant or illogical. And its not unreasonable to treat warrantless searches as by default illegal since that is a pretty good approximation to the Supreme Court's position. Within the US, there has to be either no expectation of privacy or exigent circumstances for a warrantless search to be permissible. There is somewhat more leeway at the border but when you're getting into searches of material for which there is a significant expectation of privacy and on the other hand only a very limited relevance to the lawful purposes of border inspection, the bias against warrantless searches is appropriate.
As there is no prohibition on data entering the country, I'm at a loss as to why border agents would be interested in or have authority to search laptops beyond checking that they are, in fact, actually laptops.
Actually, some data is prohibited, e.g. child pornography. In any case, the claim is that they are looking for evidence that the owner of the laptop is a terrorist. The documents that constitute such evidence might well not be prohibited entry, but they would be useful in determining whether or not to admit the bearer. It's just like examining someone's papers. There's nothing illegal about bringing identification papers into the US, but if someone claims to be a tourist and turns out to have papers that identify him as, say, a member of an Iranian intelligence agency, that would bear on whether or not to admit him to the US.
I don't think that all of the consequences you propose are realistic. If the courts decide that warrants are necessary, the result will be the termination of most laptop searches, for two reasons. First, the burden of obtaining a warrant for each search would be prohibitive. Second, a judge will only issue a warrant if there is probable cause, which in most cases there won't be.
As for dragging people to the border to search them, that won't happen because the US government lacks the authority to remove a citizen from the country except by court ordered extradition. Note that bringing a US citizen to the border would not be sufficient to license a warrantless search: it would be necessary to remove him from the US since customs inspection applies only to persons entering the US from abroad.
The OP may be well aware of the fact that only "unreasonable" warrantless searches are forbidden by the 4th amendment. He neither states nor implies that all warrantless searches are illegal. It's quite possible that he has reached his conclusion that these searches are illegal because he believes them to be unreasonable. I think you're the one making assumptions.
You can read the ACLU's press release here and its
Freedom of Information Act request here.
I'm also curious as to what happens when information is encrypted. In the case of a non-citizen, they may be able to refuse entry if someone will not decrypt it, but they can't refuse entry to a US citizen.
What is it that makes you think that P2P software is especially dangerous?
And how exactly do you think that copyright infringement suits against the federal government will play out? The government is in general immune to tort lawsuits under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. It must specifically authorize exceptions by statute. The exception that permits copyright suits does not allow the award of large statutory damages or attorney's fees, so the government's liability is quite limited. The DMCA, incidentally, does not contain a sovereign immunity exception so suits under the DMCA are not permissible.
No, all that happened is that the appellate court decided that whether or not SCO acquired the Unix copyrights was not sufficiently clear to be decided on summary judgment. Even if SCO did own the Unix copyrights, there would be no real threat to Linux because SCO has failed to show that Linux violates those copyrights.
In any case, all that this decision means is that the contract between SCO and Novell is unclear. That has nothing to do with the validity or interpretation of open source licenses.
The thing I don't get is how refusing to give away the password is a crime. Even if he was wrong to refuse to give it away when asked (which is unclear), that would be grounds for dismissal and a civil suit to obtain the password and/or damages, but I fail to see what criminal offence he might have committed. None of the articles that I have seen explain this. Anybody know what exactly the remaining charge is?
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it, only authorized applications will be able to run on these machines. If that is true, that means that they can't be used for programming since students' programs won't be on the whitelist. Am I missing something?
So, how does it differ from Ask Slashdot?
Hmm. I wonder if no one has told her that many musicians earn a perfectly good income by means of live performances, as all musicians did not all that long ago. Earning vast sums from recordings is by no means the only business model for music.
What is stopping other companies is that the current deal gives Google exclusive rights. What the objectors want is a non-exclusive arrangment.
If it is only done when there is reasonable suspicion of DUI, this is not so bad, given that you are legally required to submit to a test anyhow (assuming that Texas is like almost every other state). The blood test is much more accurate than a breath test. It isn't susceptible to alcohol in the breath or other chemicals in the breath that fool breathalyzers, and the machines are better maintained and much less wonky. Getting a blood sample on the spot not only leads to stronger evidence for convicting the guilty but it protects the innocent.
There is, of course, the issue of what happens to the blood sample after it is tested for alcohol level.
We've got a similar situation here (Prince George, British Columbia). As is common in Northern Canada, we have no local police force. Instead, the city contracts for police services with the RCMP. A while back, there were allegations of problems due to the romantic relationship between the head of the RCMP detachment and a senior city employee whose duties included working with the RCMP. City Council commissioned an investigation and reviewed the resulting report in a closed session. Shortly thereafter, the report was leaked to the press. A few weeks ago one of our city councilors, Brian Skakun, was charged criminally with leaking the report. In American terms, the offense is a misdemeanor, but nonetheless it is unheard of for criminal charges to brought for this, and there is a great deal of support for him, including a defense fund.
Here in Canada we have Crown copyright at the federal level. The sole use is to prevent the wide circulation of reports that the current government finds embarrassing. That is not a legitimate use. The revenue generated by licensing is trivial. Why would state copyright in the US be any better?
Teaching children touch-typing is an excellent idea, but high school is much too late. Even junior high school kids have reports to write, and still younger kids are using computers. Touch-typing should be taught in elementary school. As far as the curriculum is concerned, grade five or six would probably be alright, but it might need to be earlier to prevent kids from fossilizing bad two-finger habits.
I went to an unusual school that taught touch-typing in grade six back in 1968. We didn't have personal computers then, but for me it was a godsend as I have awful handwriting. Judging from my experience in that school, sixth graders have no difficulty learning touch typing.
Actually, merely copying the book technically infringes the copyright. (I'm assuming you're talking about copying the whole book. Copying small parts would probably fall under fair use.) However, you're much less likely to be caught if you don't distribute the copies.
This is actually a good thing. The reputation of Scientology is sufficiently and deservedly bad that their advocacy of internet censorship will serve as a warning against it. With the Scientologists and Muslims the most prominent advocates of censorship, things are looking good for freedom.
Right. Unfair, isn't it? I have never burned a CD with commercial music. All of the CDs I have burned contain software, hard drive backups, or research data.
Don't forget all the elves and trolls. They probably use cell phones too.
True, but at least this kind of terrorist goes after radio towers rather than people. I wonder if we could persuade Islamic terrorists to follow their lead?
I think he must be using the term differently if the disk is going to boot DOS and put up a banner.
What is "military format"?
It happens, but "routinely"? Care to back that up?
Sorry but his subject header together with the single sentence of the post still do not claim that all warrantless searches are illegal.
What he writes in his journal doesn't really bear on his post. The point is not figuring out what his reasoning process may have been, it's whether what he states in his post is ignorant or illogical. And its not unreasonable to treat warrantless searches as by default illegal since that is a pretty good approximation to the Supreme Court's position. Within the US, there has to be either no expectation of privacy or exigent circumstances for a warrantless search to be permissible. There is somewhat more leeway at the border but when you're getting into searches of material for which there is a significant expectation of privacy and on the other hand only a very limited relevance to the lawful purposes of border inspection, the bias against warrantless searches is appropriate.
Actually, some data is prohibited, e.g. child pornography. In any case, the claim is that they are looking for evidence that the owner of the laptop is a terrorist. The documents that constitute such evidence might well not be prohibited entry, but they would be useful in determining whether or not to admit the bearer. It's just like examining someone's papers. There's nothing illegal about bringing identification papers into the US, but if someone claims to be a tourist and turns out to have papers that identify him as, say, a member of an Iranian intelligence agency, that would bear on whether or not to admit him to the US.
I don't think that all of the consequences you propose are realistic. If the courts decide that warrants are necessary, the result will be the termination of most laptop searches, for two reasons. First, the burden of obtaining a warrant for each search would be prohibitive. Second, a judge will only issue a warrant if there is probable cause, which in most cases there won't be.
As for dragging people to the border to search them, that won't happen because the US government lacks the authority to remove a citizen from the country except by court ordered extradition. Note that bringing a US citizen to the border would not be sufficient to license a warrantless search: it would be necessary to remove him from the US since customs inspection applies only to persons entering the US from abroad.
The OP may be well aware of the fact that only "unreasonable" warrantless searches are forbidden by the 4th amendment. He neither states nor implies that all warrantless searches are illegal. It's quite possible that he has reached his conclusion that these searches are illegal because he believes them to be unreasonable. I think you're the one making assumptions.
You can read the ACLU's press release here and its Freedom of Information Act request here.
I'm also curious as to what happens when information is encrypted. In the case of a non-citizen, they may be able to refuse entry if someone will not decrypt it, but they can't refuse entry to a US citizen.
What is it that makes you think that P2P software is especially dangerous?
And how exactly do you think that copyright infringement suits against the federal government will play out? The government is in general immune to tort lawsuits under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. It must specifically authorize exceptions by statute. The exception that permits copyright suits does not allow the award of large statutory damages or attorney's fees, so the government's liability is quite limited. The DMCA, incidentally, does not contain a sovereign immunity exception so suits under the DMCA are not permissible.
No, all that happened is that the appellate court decided that whether or not SCO acquired the Unix copyrights was not sufficiently clear to be decided on summary judgment. Even if SCO did own the Unix copyrights, there would be no real threat to Linux because SCO has failed to show that Linux violates those copyrights.
In any case, all that this decision means is that the contract between SCO and Novell is unclear. That has nothing to do with the validity or interpretation of open source licenses.
How can you tell? :)
The thing I don't get is how refusing to give away the password is a crime. Even if he was wrong to refuse to give it away when asked (which is unclear), that would be grounds for dismissal and a civil suit to obtain the password and/or damages, but I fail to see what criminal offence he might have committed. None of the articles that I have seen explain this. Anybody know what exactly the remaining charge is?