>...not with the verdict, necessarily. The jury heard more evidence in more detail then I did, and more than any of you did.
As far as I know, no evidence or testimony was sealed; some attorneys have posted indicating that they have read the transcripts. What evidence and what detail do you imagine the jury heard that would not be in the transcripts?
And if you'd been Hans's lawyer, you might have used your scenario as part of your defense, for establishing reasonable doubt.
Unfortunately for Hans, he did not do this. He took an altogether different, highly incoherent approach that caused reduction of doubt for the jury, and he also showed contempt to the judge.
>Why would he do this if he really felt his client was innocent?
Because there's still the matter of sentencing. The fact that the defense asked this of the jury, can be brought up in the sentencing phase.
It's possible to get life without parole in Pelican Bay. It's also possible to get half a 25-year sentence in a place where he might survive that long. Many people in his predicament are negotiating for one of the coveted slots in a "nicer" prison like Shafter. Inmates live in open dorms. They have carpeted floors, cable TV, 30 minute phone calls, unit wardens have a certain amount of autonomy in management style, and there is even the possibility of gate passes and outdoor labor.
There's really quite a spectrum of "prison experience" in California, even for a "first degree murderer". But I'm sure Hans has a one-way ticket to PB or Folsom, thanks to his big mouth.
>Yeah, it's just a shame that you can't opt for a non-jury trial.
I think you can, provided all parties agree to waive their right to a jury. The state will never do that for a murder trial but it's routine in civil cases and lesser crimes.
There might be a rule in California code that precludes waiving a right to a trial by jury, but I think there is not one. It's just that the state also has the right, and even if the defendant waived his right, the state would not.
Being an asshole ON THE STAND, in a California court that is accusing you of murder, equals asking for a conviction.
If the jury isn't convinced, it hurts you a LOT that you've insulted the judge. Hans insulted the judge over and over and over again. Maybe this affected the judge's objectivity. In any case, I'm sure it made it that much easier for the judge to condemn Hans. Even if you are going to be found guilty, there is still damage you can mitigate by not hopelessly offending the judge -- not all prisons are equal...
It's going to suck for him at sentencing. The judge has choices to make. He can order life without parole, in the worst jail in the state, and I'll bet he does exactly that. If you don't think that's fair, write an amicus brief. But it's wise not to insult a judge when you're a party to a trial. And it's suicidal if you're a murder defendant.
>Nina seemed like a typical harried mom - devoted to her kids and quite kind (she got a cup of juice for my daughter).
Do you think she was intelligent enough to stay incognito for years and years?
There's something else strange -- it appears to be accepted fact that she was into heavy BDSM. Bet you didn't see that side of her at PTA meetings.
Hans dug his own grave. The fact that he doesn't know where the car seat went, bothers me a lot -- speaking ONLY as a juror in the court of my own opinion -- I've had lots and lots of cars. I've had cars that were literally junk, bought just for parts -- it's pretty much standard among us vintage Volkswagen folks. But here's the thing: I can tell you quite reliably where I got every significant piece of every car I've ever owned, and what happened to every part I've ever taken off a car, even pretty *insignificant* things. I could *damn sure* tell you what happened to a seat frame. For that matter I can tell you what happened to old engine bushings that were worn out when I did an overhaul.
I'm not particularly gifted in memory. Ever since this car seat detail surfaced, I've had a big problem with Reiser. I'm not saying that 25 to Life is an appropriate sentence for forgetting where he left a Honda seat frame. But if it had been the middle seat from a split-window VW van, I'd say so (not joking).
>If his testimony were allowed... It would have guaranteed a mistrial.
Nowhere is it established that Sturgeon killed anyone. And nobody called Sturgeon as a witness for any purpose whatsoever. It would be very different, if there were any evidence that Sturgeon killed anyone (say, because he was testifying from prison or something.)
It's a pretty serious problem for this notion, that none of the people Sturgeon claimed to have killed, are dead.
Depends on the jail. I had a co-worker who learned programming in a prison rehab program. He was very good at what he did.
But, at least to start with, Hans is going to go to one of the standard places where you go for 1st degree murder. He will be lucky if he gets an hour "outdoors" or ever again sees a window. But at least it's California. There's a chance he might, someday, get access to some kind of computer. He might even get a regular IT job, within the system.
But it might be a few years before he even gets a *radio*. Start with "your own roll of toilet paper in your cell".
>No kidding. I would really like to see a poll of the jury members, and if they would change their votes if they had been told that >Hans's ex-friend (the wife's new dude) had confessed to killing 8 people.
Would you share with them the fact that it is known that he was lying? Or would you accept the mistrial (and your own perjury conviction) that results from sharing false, purposely misleading information to the Jury?
If she were indeed "the wife's new dude", she would surface eventually. That's been given some time to happen, and is one of the reasons it took this long for the state to take the case to trial.
>you can't convict a person of first degree murder.
"you" can't but the State of California can, and did. Judge and Jury didn't find reasonable doubt for the accusation. That car situation turned out to be just as bad for him as I said it was going to be. He really, really needed to find that damn seat with no blood on it and the correct serial numbers.
If Nina ever shows up alive, she's in trouble.
The argument relies on Russia being a lawless place where a person of international interest can simply disappear. That may be true to some degree, but she has to *remain* disappeared for *life*. What's she getting out of this that would make such a difficult life worthwhile?
>I think we've just proved that I can be convicted of first degree murder if my friend turns up missing.
Well, you have one thing that Hans did not: reasonable evidence that all this was the case *before* your friend turned up missing.
At least I *hope* you have done this.... photos, and some kind of document signed by your friend and notarized that says he knows his blood's in your car and you didn't kill him:-)
>PLENTY of cases where copyrights are being used as an anti competitive weapon.
Actually that's the misconception I'm addressing.
Such cases are vanishingly rare, at least in terms of them actually being tried.
The "problem", if it's a problem, is that most people who are accused of infringement, to the extent that a copyright holder becomes willing to make a federal case out of it (ALL copyright cases are federal), it turns out that the defendant is usually guilty. Legal defense to reduce your liability, becomes more expensive rapidly, when you're actually guilty.
But court trials to decide copyright infringement cases are much more rare than you've been led to believe.
>To be fair, the longer and stronger the copyright, the more the artist can sell it for. What's the point of buying something if you no >longer own it after the person you bought it from dies?
You have to be willing to share it at some point or the deal's off. The *reason* you get copyright protection for some time is *because* you are willing to allow it to become a public common at some future time. If you are not willing to the the latter, you are not entitled to the former, because society and culture as a whole, is more important than YOU. And that is the whole point of copyright law.
Copyright law will do a very good job of protecting you, to content creator, from somebody who wants to claim that they created your works and will sue you.
Copyright does a very poor job as a weapon for you, the content creator, to use against others.
But I don't know if there's "enough" they could do, so it's not right to say "too little", since there is NOTHING Lars can do to get him or his band off my blacklist. He's on it until death, period. He went so far out of his way to insult me, and was so persistent in his insulting treatment, that he's got a lifetime ban.
>The GPL is not a EULA, it is a legitimate contract.
Oh really?
What is the consideration?
Where is the evidence that the parties had a meeting of the minds or a mutual agreement?
Where is the mutual obligation?
What are the reciprocal rights that the parties have to demand performance from each other?
The GPL can be made part of a contract, but it is not, in itself, a valid contract because it lacks at least one crucial element: valuable consideration.
On the other hand, I can write (and have written) into a contract a clause requiring the GPL to be abided by, and *that* contract is valid, because it was offered and accepted and because it exchanged a valuable service for consideration (money).
The GPL is enforceable in its context, not because it is a contract, but because it is an expression of rights that the content creator has by default, but that are not be extended to others by default. It is enforceable because rights under copyright law are themselves protected.
The GPL comes under attack constantly by well-meaning amateurs who may rightly observe that it is not enforceable as a *contract*, but who do not understand the distinction between a contract and a license, or who do not understand the rights that are reserved exclusively, by default, the content creators.
>If you think otherwise, then there's something seriously wrong with your sense of >property rights.
You have potentially dangerous misconceptions about the legal nature of copyright-protected creative works in the USA. You may think what you said is common sense, and you may think you *should be* right, but you're wrong.
>Would you rather work on code that is a sea of brackets?
Brackets don't bother me as long as indentation is consistent. And if I have an editor that can make them consistent and can show me matches, (which I do) so much the better.
Does not bother me at all, so yes, I have no more problem reading code that is a "sea of brackets" than I have with reading sentences in a book which are in a "sea of commas and periods."
>The reason being is that when you start modularizing off all your while loops that are >more than a dozen lines long, you create a whole new type of spaghetti code.
There is also a risk that you or a maintenance programmer might re-use such a "function" that was created simply to make a while loop more aesthetically pleasing, and introduce a bug because that function was not designed or tested for use in isolation.
And in the spirit of the topic, such functions become awkward to unit test, since you're extracting a unit of work out of a loop or control structure, that logically lives there.
"Certain sectors of the defense industry, for one. Mostly it stems from fear of camera phones, so they ban all phones from the facility period, camera or not. But there are also other concerns that they have, rightly or not."
If I find myself in that situation, it's because I'm being paid a breathtakingly large amount of money. More than enough that I won't care about following rules like "no cell phones in the facility."
My consulting rate is high. My consulting rate for a military enterprise, is *hopefully* high enough that I never have to accept an offer.
>The keylogger would presumably record only the scrambled order, which, although not >perfect, seems a reasonable alternative.
Lots of messages on this thread make assumptions like this. Why do you assume that if a terminal is owned, it's not recording mouse movements, taking screenshots... saving stack frames... Why stop halfway if you're being paranoid?
>>I store my password at mydomain.com/password.txt so I can just copy/paste when I'm remote. >I'm guessing that he is joking. Anyone stupid enough to do this should be fired and shot.
He didn't say what protocol he uses to access it. I assumed SSH.
>At least I thought this is supposed to be 'my' government. If it were, then why can't I see everything they are doing?
Well there's a pretty solid argument that the state has a compelling interest not to disclose certain things, because some disclosure can be detrimental to efforts to enforce laws, and because some disclosures could and would violate the rights of some people. Your desire for transparency does not supersede the rights of others to privacy from you, and you do not have a right to know the details of every investigation.
I understand that government agencies often abuse the secrecy with which they have been entrusted, but I also agree that government *must* be given significant latitude in this regard, in order to be functional.
Probably if you give it some thought, you can come up with a pretty good list of things that you don't mind the government knowing about you, but that you would not want shared with anybody who thinks it should be disclosed to them "because government should be fully transparent."
>Why when documents are 'declassified' is 90% of the text blanked-out?
Why don't you realize that people who actually deal with documentation and FOIA requests know that 90% number is pulled out of your ass, not based on genuine experience?
An insurance policy with a low deductible, specifically written for replacement cost of the laptop. If you have that, you can treat theft as if the thief is doing you a favor.
Slashdot Mirror
>...not with the verdict, necessarily. The jury heard more evidence in more detail then I did, and more than any of you did.
As far as I know, no evidence or testimony was sealed; some attorneys have posted indicating that they have read the transcripts.
What evidence and what detail do you imagine the jury heard that would not be in the transcripts?
>It's plausible.
And if you'd been Hans's lawyer, you might have used your scenario as part of your defense, for establishing reasonable doubt.
Unfortunately for Hans, he did not do this. He took an altogether different, highly incoherent approach that caused reduction of doubt for the jury, and he also showed contempt to the judge.
>Why would he do this if he really felt his client was innocent?
Because there's still the matter of sentencing. The fact that the defense asked this of the jury, can be brought up in the sentencing phase.
It's possible to get life without parole in Pelican Bay. It's also possible to get half a 25-year sentence in a place where he might survive that long. Many people in his predicament are negotiating for one of the coveted slots in a "nicer" prison like Shafter. Inmates live in open dorms. They have carpeted floors, cable TV, 30 minute phone calls, unit wardens have a certain amount of autonomy in management style, and there is even the possibility of gate passes and outdoor labor.
There's really quite a spectrum of "prison experience" in California, even for a "first degree murderer". But I'm sure Hans has a one-way ticket to PB or Folsom, thanks to his big mouth.
>Yeah, it's just a shame that you can't opt for a non-jury trial.
:-)
I think you can, provided all parties agree to waive their right to a jury.
The state will never do that for a murder trial but it's routine in civil cases and lesser crimes.
There might be a rule in California code that precludes waiving a right to a trial by jury, but I think there is not one.
It's just that the state also has the right, and even if the defendant waived his right, the state would not.
Stupid idea anyway
>Oh? Being an asshole equals being a murderer?
NO!
Being an asshole ON THE STAND, in a California court that is accusing you of murder,
equals asking for a conviction.
If the jury isn't convinced, it hurts you a LOT that you've insulted the judge. Hans insulted the judge over and over and over again.
Maybe this affected the judge's objectivity. In any case, I'm sure it made it that much easier for the judge to condemn Hans. Even if you are going to be found guilty, there is still damage you can mitigate by not hopelessly offending the judge -- not all prisons are equal...
It's going to suck for him at sentencing. The judge has choices to make. He can order life without parole, in the worst jail in the state, and I'll bet he does exactly that. If you don't think that's fair, write an amicus brief. But it's wise not to insult a judge when you're a party to a trial. And it's suicidal if you're a murder defendant.
>Nina seemed like a typical harried mom - devoted to her kids and quite kind (she got a cup of juice for my daughter).
Do you think she was intelligent enough to stay incognito for years and years?
There's something else strange -- it appears to be accepted fact that she was into heavy BDSM.
Bet you didn't see that side of her at PTA meetings.
Hans dug his own grave. The fact that he doesn't know where the car seat went, bothers me a lot -- speaking ONLY as a juror in the court of my own opinion --
I've had lots and lots of cars. I've had cars that were literally junk, bought just for parts -- it's pretty much standard among us vintage Volkswagen folks. But here's the thing: I can tell you quite reliably where I got every significant piece of every car I've ever owned, and what happened to every part I've ever taken off a car, even pretty *insignificant* things. I could *damn sure* tell you what happened to a seat frame. For that matter I can tell you what happened to old engine bushings that were worn out when I did an overhaul.
I'm not particularly gifted in memory. Ever since this car seat detail surfaced, I've had a big problem with Reiser. I'm not saying that 25 to Life is an appropriate sentence for forgetting where he left a Honda seat frame. But if it had been the middle seat from a split-window VW van, I'd say so (not joking).
>What happend to the good old "we'd rather have ten guilty men run free than put one innocent man in jail"?
And what makes you so sure that California didn't free ten or eleven guilty men on the same day it convicted Resier?
>If his testimony were allowed ... It would have guaranteed a mistrial.
Nowhere is it established that Sturgeon killed anyone. And nobody called Sturgeon as a witness for any purpose whatsoever.
It would be very different, if there were any evidence that Sturgeon killed anyone (say, because he was testifying from prison or something.)
It's a pretty serious problem for this notion, that none of the people Sturgeon claimed to have killed, are dead.
>Can he work on free software from jail?
Depends on the jail. I had a co-worker who learned programming in a prison rehab program. He was very good at what he did.
But, at least to start with, Hans is going to go to one of the standard places where you go for 1st degree murder.
He will be lucky if he gets an hour "outdoors" or ever again sees a window. But at least it's California. There's a chance he might, someday, get access to some kind of computer. He might even get a regular IT job, within the system.
But it might be a few years before he even gets a *radio*. Start with "your own roll of toilet paper in your cell".
>No kidding. I would really like to see a poll of the jury members, and if they would change their votes if they had been told that
>Hans's ex-friend (the wife's new dude) had confessed to killing 8 people.
Would you share with them the fact that it is known that he was lying? Or would you accept the mistrial (and your own perjury conviction) that results from sharing false, purposely misleading information to the Jury?
If she were indeed "the wife's new dude", she would surface eventually. That's been given some time to happen, and is one of the reasons it took this long for the state to take the case to trial.
>you can't convict a person of first degree murder.
"you" can't but the State of California can, and did.
Judge and Jury didn't find reasonable doubt for the accusation.
That car situation turned out to be just as bad for him as I said it was going to be.
He really, really needed to find that damn seat with no blood on it and the correct serial numbers.
If Nina ever shows up alive, she's in trouble.
The argument relies on Russia being a lawless place where a person of international interest can simply disappear.
That may be true to some degree, but she has to *remain* disappeared for *life*. What's she getting out of this
that would make such a difficult life worthwhile?
>I think we've just proved that I can be convicted of first degree murder if my friend turns up missing.
:-)
Well, you have one thing that Hans did not: reasonable evidence that all this was the case *before* your friend turned up missing.
At least I *hope* you have done this.... photos, and some kind of document signed by your friend and notarized that says he knows his blood's in your car and you didn't kill him
>PLENTY of cases where copyrights are being used as an anti competitive weapon.
Actually that's the misconception I'm addressing.
Such cases are vanishingly rare, at least in terms of them actually being tried.
The "problem", if it's a problem, is that most people who are accused of infringement, to the extent that
a copyright holder becomes willing to make a federal case out of it (ALL copyright cases are federal), it
turns out that the defendant is usually guilty. Legal defense to reduce your liability, becomes more expensive
rapidly, when you're actually guilty.
But court trials to decide copyright infringement cases are much more rare than you've been led to believe.
>To be fair, the longer and stronger the copyright, the more the artist can sell it for. What's the point of buying something if you no
>longer own it after the person you bought it from dies?
You have to be willing to share it at some point or the deal's off. The *reason* you get copyright protection for some time is *because* you are willing to allow it to become a public common at some future time. If you are not willing to the the latter, you are not entitled to the former, because society and culture as a whole, is more important than YOU. And that is the whole point of copyright law.
Copyright law will do a very good job of protecting you, to content creator, from somebody who wants to claim that they created your works and will sue you.
Copyright does a very poor job as a weapon for you, the content creator, to use against others.
But I don't know if there's "enough" they could do, so it's not right to say "too little", since there is NOTHING Lars can do to get him or his band off my blacklist.
He's on it until death, period. He went so far out of his way to insult me, and was so persistent in his insulting treatment, that he's got a lifetime ban.
>The GPL is not a EULA, it is a legitimate contract.
Oh really?
What is the consideration?
Where is the evidence that the parties had a meeting of the minds or a mutual agreement?
Where is the mutual obligation?
What are the reciprocal rights that the parties have to demand performance from each other?
The GPL can be made part of a contract, but it is not, in itself, a valid contract because it lacks at least one crucial element: valuable consideration.
On the other hand, I can write (and have written) into a contract a clause requiring the GPL to be abided by, and *that* contract is valid, because it was offered and accepted and because it exchanged a valuable service for consideration (money).
The GPL is enforceable in its context, not because it is a contract, but because it is an expression of rights that the content creator has by default, but that are not be extended to others by default. It is enforceable because rights under copyright law are themselves protected.
The GPL comes under attack constantly by well-meaning amateurs who may rightly observe that it is not enforceable as a *contract*, but who do not understand the distinction between a contract and a license, or who do not understand the rights that are reserved exclusively, by default, the content creators.
>If you think otherwise, then there's something seriously wrong with your sense of
>property rights.
You have potentially dangerous misconceptions about the legal nature of copyright-protected creative works in the USA. You may think what you
said is common sense, and you may think you *should be* right, but you're
wrong.
>Would you rather work on code that is a sea of brackets?
Brackets don't bother me as long as indentation is consistent. And if I have an editor
that can make them consistent and can show me matches, (which I do) so much the better.
Does not bother me at all, so yes, I have no more problem reading code that is a "sea of brackets" than I have with reading sentences in a book which are in a "sea of commas and periods."
>The reason being is that when you start modularizing off all your while loops that are
>more than a dozen lines long, you create a whole new type of spaghetti code.
There is also a risk that you or a maintenance programmer might re-use such a "function"
that was created simply to make a while loop more aesthetically pleasing, and introduce a bug because that function was not designed or tested for use in isolation.
And in the spirit of the topic, such functions become awkward to unit test, since you're extracting a unit of work out of a loop or control structure, that logically lives there.
"Certain sectors of the defense industry, for one. Mostly it stems from fear of camera phones, so they ban all phones from the facility period, camera or not. But there are also other concerns that they have, rightly or not."
If I find myself in that situation, it's because I'm being paid a breathtakingly large amount of money. More than enough that I won't care about following rules like "no cell phones in the facility."
My consulting rate is high. My consulting rate for a military enterprise, is *hopefully* high enough that I never have to accept an offer.
>Is that truly necessary?
The LAST thing I want is contact with anybody from my High School.
So
>The keylogger would presumably record only the scrambled order, which, although not
>perfect, seems a reasonable alternative.
Lots of messages on this thread make assumptions like this.
Why do you assume that if a terminal is owned, it's not recording
mouse movements, taking screenshots... saving stack frames...
Why stop halfway if you're being paranoid?
>>I store my password at mydomain.com/password.txt so I can just copy/paste when I'm remote.
>I'm guessing that he is joking. Anyone stupid enough to do this should be fired and shot.
He didn't say what protocol he uses to access it.
I assumed SSH.
>At least I thought this is supposed to be 'my' government. If it were, then why can't I see everything they are doing?
Well there's a pretty solid argument that the state has a compelling interest not to disclose certain things,
because some disclosure can be detrimental to efforts to enforce laws, and because some disclosures could and
would violate the rights of some people. Your desire for transparency does not supersede the rights of others
to privacy from you, and you do not have a right to know the details of every investigation.
I understand that government agencies often abuse the secrecy with which they have been entrusted, but I also
agree that government *must* be given significant latitude in this regard, in order to be functional.
Probably if you give it some thought, you can come up with a pretty good list of things that you don't mind the government knowing about you, but that you would not want shared with anybody who thinks it should be disclosed to them "because government should be fully transparent."
>Why when documents are 'declassified' is 90% of the text blanked-out?
Why don't you realize that people who actually deal with documentation and FOIA requests know that 90% number is pulled out of your ass, not based on genuine experience?
An insurance policy with a low deductible, specifically written for replacement cost of the laptop.
If you have that, you can treat theft as if the thief is doing you a favor.