I never said that you shouldn't stick your nose in if you see injustice and have evidence that could stop it, only that if you've not stuck your nose in on either side yet and the case doesn't concern you, you shouldn't have to when a man in a wig tells you to.
What if you get called to testify in a case where your testimony will be used to try and push through an 'evil' agenda? In that case you'd do better to do nothing than comply. Since, once you're in the witness box, you have to answer whatever your asked (unless the judge tosses the question) it should be entirely YOUR choice as to wether you enter the witness box at all. The defendant can choose not to testify at all, why shouldn't anyone else?
but the law still (presumably) restricted what instructions the bus driver could give (for instance, I doubt if the driver had instructed Parks to 'drop and give me twenty', or to bark like a dog she'd have been in violation of the law) and therefore the fact that she was able to break the law by refusing to comply with an instruction to move to satisfy the whim of another passenger means that there was something specifically wrong with that law with regards to being able to tell african-american people to move (presumably if she'd demanded the caucasian passenger move instead, the driver would not have used his super-driver-powers to make him move).
Conclusion: Although the law may not have said "African-Americans must give up their row of seats to caucasian passengers" the fact that it didn't prevent the driver from instructing African-American to vacate a row at the whim of a caucasian passenger means that the law was wrong.
Which may have been your original point, thinking about it...
"First off, I never said an unjust law should remain unchanged just because it is unenforced. It's simply that civil disobedience is irrelevant to bringing about such a change"
Depends on who's arguing for the change and who they're arguing to. If you can point and say "100% of the X-thousand confirmed cases of this in the past year have gone unprosecuted although there's sufficient evidence to do so - therefore this law is obviously being kept solely for the purposes of abusive enforcement (targetted selective enforcement because you can't get someone on anything else). We should get rid of it, that's not what the law is for." and the legislature you're arguing to is compelled by such an argument, then it's not irrelevant. But yeah, the rest of the time it probably is.
On the other hand I salute people brave enough to unilaterally return to themselves the right to live as if a bad law didn't exist until the long arm of the law catches up with them.
Look at it as a road. Justice is at the end. You're travelling along the road, the attorney for the justice department is behind you. Not pulling over so he can overtake isn't 'obstructing' anything, it's going about your own business and entirely neutral. 'Obstructing' would be swerving infront of him so he can't overtake. Not pulling over and insisting that if he wants to get there faster he can pull around you is the duty of a responsible citizen. Conclusion: Not actively helping is not the same as obstructing, if a third party wants to keep themselves out of both sides of a legal proceeding, they should be allowed to do so and, indeed, should be applauded for doing it.
Why SHOULD you drop everything when a court considering a case which you've previously had nothing to do with calls?
I want something that will do 1.8 trillion integer operations per second (single threaded). This simulation is taking 5 hours per run with this A64 3200+. Gimme give me 1.8TIOPs and I'll be listening.
"The backbone of digital photography has become tangled up in the fight for making sure music companies get every nickel and dime they feel that they can get their grubby mitts on and get away with it."
I fixed it
The ability of an individual officer to summararilly hand out a fine which the person who gets it has to risk greater punishment to fight is a disgrace to justice. As it is, people cough up fine money when the presented evidence against them and diligence of proceedure wouldn't have got through a civil trial.
1) We know it'll be completely unenforcible for the purposes of actually being useful. On the other hand, it'll be easy to prove for the purposes of throwing the book at someone that an individual prosecutor takes a dislike to. This is not what we have laws for.
2) Sadly, the actual text from the radio report this morning isn't on the website, but it was something along the lines of "Politicians, parents and teachers are increasing worried". Notice, it doesn't say "teenagers" or "children", i.e. the people actually affected. This is for one reason - these people are not technologically illiterate and KNOW that the internet itself is not a risk and aren't worrying about it. The problme is with kids who don't know enough about the real world not to meet, in real life, people who they meet on the internet.
3) If they're worried about kids giving out their personal information and allowing themselves to be tracked down with it, a far better approach would be to have a quiet word with Myspace & Facebook and the like and ask them what on earth they were thinking when they included address and telephone number fields on their profile pages in the first place. If you don't give someone a box labelled "mobile phone number" they probably won't put one in.
that's not actually a war and they're (mostly) not employed by the United States Army. The people driving the tanks into Iraq in 2003 were American soldiers.
and when the US needs to fight a major war is hires a million mercenaries...
Ok, it doesn't, the US has an army for that kind of thing. Some things are best done in-house, the discussion is whether space travel is one of them. Pointing out different situations where things are not done in-house isn't really very useful unless it's used to illustrate an advantage.
Although it should be pointed out that while NASA operates the shuttles, all the major components were built by contractors anyway (Lockheed-Martin IIRC) - perhaps the fact that most of the space program has not been done as an in-house project would have been a better example.
And all the pieces fall into place...
Ever wondered what cretin was responsible for making you hold the power button in for about 10 seconds before the computer will turn off and why they did it? Now we know - the time betwen your door being knocked down and you knocking the computer off has a confortable 10 seconds (excluding reaction time) for you to be stopped built in... Unless you hit reboot and then power - then it'll go down immediately. The fascists are foiled again!
The number one way of dealing with any customer service department is to make yourself such a PitA that it takes less expenditure of effort to just do what you want than to keep trying to fob you off.
Lycos have tried to take the easy way out and take the lowest effort option of saying "no, go away and we won't talk to you again" and it's rightly bitten them in the ass. The reason for having a customer service department is to have people dedicated to giving a response other than that. If your policy is just to reply 'no' and then add their email address to a blackhole filter, your 'customer service' department might as well be the janitor from Scrubs.
justice is also supposed to be just. Let's get that principle into the court room (in civil cases particularly) before we worry about wether or not the jury is making its decision blindly.
we should stick with the lethal weapons. 'the authorities' are far less likely to use them if they're lethal - if they're non-lethal they think 'oh, it doesn't matter when I use this' and just fire away. The simple fact is that the threshold for deciding the escalate the situation to shooting someone is no higher now that TASERs are available than when they weren't, but now TASERing someone who won't shut up is easy to do and impossible to verify for evidence purposes. Take, for instance, the Iranian-American student who got TASERed 6 times a few months back because someone police officers decided to use their TASERs as 'motivational tools' to try and make him stand up. Would they have knee-capped him with a few rounds of 9mm if they only had guns and no TASERs?
What will we see with this new weapon? When the crowd in the 'free speech zone' starts getting more vocal than you like, in the old day's you'de just have to have put up with it. Today you can just shoot them with a heat ray until they quieten down and hey! it's non-lethal so it doesn't matter!
Dunno. We have this lovely thing called the human right act which one would assume to have been enacted with the express purpose of being a final unmovable roadblock to dangerous legislation like this. Now, however, many politicians are calling for its repealing because it's, you guessed it, getting in the way of dangerous legislation like this which they want to push through. Clearly unjust laws are more important than human rights if the present bunch of ministers want the unjust laws instead. Remember these 600-odd MPs represent the will of the people without wavering for 5 years after election - it's the people's will to be oppressed, they elected the MPs so it must we what they want! And you wonder why we still persist in having an unelected (and therefore not easily swayed by party whips) upper house - The House of Lords may be undemocratic but it's the last constitutional obstacle between here and the founding of the ministry of love. (The Queen is the last obstacle because she COULD refuse to sign a passed piece of legislation into law, but since that would trigger a constitutional crisis and probably result in the end of the monarchy, it probably won't happen.)
We had a new law enforcement agency set up in the UK about a year back and the new chief of the agency was on the radio stating quite blatantly that the plan was to confiscate anything of value that the criminals owned (however acquired) and sell it on with the express aim of funding the department - nothing like your funding being provided by how much stuff you take to get you taking anything you can get near ("you're in prison but your wife and child still live in the house? pffft, out!"). IIRC I shouted at the radio, even though it was so early that everyone else was asleep.
Now, in the last few days, we have proposals to allow this to be done to *suspected* criminals who they haven't been able to secure a conviction for. They instead want it dealt with as a civil matter ("We can't prove you did it, but you probably did it, so we'll have your assets anyway. You won't have anywhere to live? pffft, out! Oh, and give us that shirt you're wearing too."). Also, there are proposals afoot to ban such people (who've had no case proven against them) from using computers or mobile phones (with court orders imposed, again, on a balance-of-probabilities basis. Breach the order; 5 years prison. Which smacks of handing out criminal sentences on civil evidence). Sadly all the opposition can do is claim that they'll be 'ineffective', like we want unjust laws like that to actually be effective.
Ministers who propose this sort of stuff should have a copy of the human rights act, with the relevant portions highlighted, stapled to their foreheads.
I have a fairly modest (domestic) wired router with 8 ports (which cost £150 about 5 years ago). It has VPN. Why would any business have equipment which DIDN'T do VPN today?
500 is about the ideal number they can bump the 'readership' up to by changing the homepage of everyone in the FBI to a given blog. Then you can get any extremist nutter on this law and if they claim "ha! I've only got about 50 readers" they can say "na-aah, everyone at the FBI who started their web browser read your blog this morning, now you've got 534 readers, minimum". 500 means that you don't get slammed for not chasing everyone but can easily catch people who you want to be able to catch.
It's a giant conspiracy I tell ya!
'Cows' make milk. At the end of their useful milk-producing life they're WAY over the 30-month limit for sending them to slaughter. The animals used to make beef are almost exclusively bulls because you only need one, (or possibly two for genetic diversity) on your farm (as they're only use is getting the cows pregnant) and you send the rest of them off to become burgers (again, before they're 30 months old) so they don't get to produce much methane anyway.
but he does have the World at War box set and all 3 extended edition boxes of LotR so that makes up for it. What are the silver cases up in the top left?
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the longbowmen at the battle of Agincourt were Welsh.
I never said that you shouldn't stick your nose in if you see injustice and have evidence that could stop it, only that if you've not stuck your nose in on either side yet and the case doesn't concern you, you shouldn't have to when a man in a wig tells you to.
What if you get called to testify in a case where your testimony will be used to try and push through an 'evil' agenda? In that case you'd do better to do nothing than comply. Since, once you're in the witness box, you have to answer whatever your asked (unless the judge tosses the question) it should be entirely YOUR choice as to wether you enter the witness box at all. The defendant can choose not to testify at all, why shouldn't anyone else?
but the law still (presumably) restricted what instructions the bus driver could give (for instance, I doubt if the driver had instructed Parks to 'drop and give me twenty', or to bark like a dog she'd have been in violation of the law) and therefore the fact that she was able to break the law by refusing to comply with an instruction to move to satisfy the whim of another passenger means that there was something specifically wrong with that law with regards to being able to tell african-american people to move (presumably if she'd demanded the caucasian passenger move instead, the driver would not have used his super-driver-powers to make him move).
Conclusion: Although the law may not have said "African-Americans must give up their row of seats to caucasian passengers" the fact that it didn't prevent the driver from instructing African-American to vacate a row at the whim of a caucasian passenger means that the law was wrong.
Which may have been your original point, thinking about it...
"First off, I never said an unjust law should remain unchanged just because it is unenforced. It's simply that civil disobedience is irrelevant to bringing about such a change"
Depends on who's arguing for the change and who they're arguing to. If you can point and say "100% of the X-thousand confirmed cases of this in the past year have gone unprosecuted although there's sufficient evidence to do so - therefore this law is obviously being kept solely for the purposes of abusive enforcement (targetted selective enforcement because you can't get someone on anything else). We should get rid of it, that's not what the law is for." and the legislature you're arguing to is compelled by such an argument, then it's not irrelevant. But yeah, the rest of the time it probably is.
On the other hand I salute people brave enough to unilaterally return to themselves the right to live as if a bad law didn't exist until the long arm of the law catches up with them.
Look at it as a road. Justice is at the end. You're travelling along the road, the attorney for the justice department is behind you. Not pulling over so he can overtake isn't 'obstructing' anything, it's going about your own business and entirely neutral. 'Obstructing' would be swerving infront of him so he can't overtake. Not pulling over and insisting that if he wants to get there faster he can pull around you is the duty of a responsible citizen. Conclusion: Not actively helping is not the same as obstructing, if a third party wants to keep themselves out of both sides of a legal proceeding, they should be allowed to do so and, indeed, should be applauded for doing it.
Why SHOULD you drop everything when a court considering a case which you've previously had nothing to do with calls?
I want something that will do 1.8 trillion integer operations per second (single threaded). This simulation is taking 5 hours per run with this A64 3200+. Gimme give me 1.8TIOPs and I'll be listening.
"The backbone of digital photography has become tangled up in the fight for making sure music companies get every nickel and dime they feel that they can get their grubby mitts on and get away with it."
I fixed it
The ability of an individual officer to summararilly hand out a fine which the person who gets it has to risk greater punishment to fight is a disgrace to justice. As it is, people cough up fine money when the presented evidence against them and diligence of proceedure wouldn't have got through a civil trial.
1) We know it'll be completely unenforcible for the purposes of actually being useful. On the other hand, it'll be easy to prove for the purposes of throwing the book at someone that an individual prosecutor takes a dislike to. This is not what we have laws for.
2) Sadly, the actual text from the radio report this morning isn't on the website, but it was something along the lines of "Politicians, parents and teachers are increasing worried". Notice, it doesn't say "teenagers" or "children", i.e. the people actually affected. This is for one reason - these people are not technologically illiterate and KNOW that the internet itself is not a risk and aren't worrying about it. The problme is with kids who don't know enough about the real world not to meet, in real life, people who they meet on the internet.
3) If they're worried about kids giving out their personal information and allowing themselves to be tracked down with it, a far better approach would be to have a quiet word with Myspace & Facebook and the like and ask them what on earth they were thinking when they included address and telephone number fields on their profile pages in the first place. If you don't give someone a box labelled "mobile phone number" they probably won't put one in.
that's not actually a war and they're (mostly) not employed by the United States Army. The people driving the tanks into Iraq in 2003 were American soldiers.
and when the US needs to fight a major war is hires a million mercenaries...
Ok, it doesn't, the US has an army for that kind of thing. Some things are best done in-house, the discussion is whether space travel is one of them. Pointing out different situations where things are not done in-house isn't really very useful unless it's used to illustrate an advantage.
Although it should be pointed out that while NASA operates the shuttles, all the major components were built by contractors anyway (Lockheed-Martin IIRC) - perhaps the fact that most of the space program has not been done as an in-house project would have been a better example.
And all the pieces fall into place...
Ever wondered what cretin was responsible for making you hold the power button in for about 10 seconds before the computer will turn off and why they did it? Now we know - the time betwen your door being knocked down and you knocking the computer off has a confortable 10 seconds (excluding reaction time) for you to be stopped built in...
Unless you hit reboot and then power - then it'll go down immediately. The fascists are foiled again!
Little to gain? There's a catering size can of bad PR with their name on it waiting to be claimed.
The number one way of dealing with any customer service department is to make yourself such a PitA that it takes less expenditure of effort to just do what you want than to keep trying to fob you off.
Lycos have tried to take the easy way out and take the lowest effort option of saying "no, go away and we won't talk to you again" and it's rightly bitten them in the ass. The reason for having a customer service department is to have people dedicated to giving a response other than that. If your policy is just to reply 'no' and then add their email address to a blackhole filter, your 'customer service' department might as well be the janitor from Scrubs.
no. The fact that they promise not to sue isn't a defence when they do, so no-one can really take the risk to do something that would infringe anyway.
justice is also supposed to be just. Let's get that principle into the court room (in civil cases particularly) before we worry about wether or not the jury is making its decision blindly.
Listen to me sonny, I know a dead telescope when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now...
3? It was 2 last week! Who's the sucker?
we should stick with the lethal weapons. 'the authorities' are far less likely to use them if they're lethal - if they're non-lethal they think 'oh, it doesn't matter when I use this' and just fire away. The simple fact is that the threshold for deciding the escalate the situation to shooting someone is no higher now that TASERs are available than when they weren't, but now TASERing someone who won't shut up is easy to do and impossible to verify for evidence purposes. Take, for instance, the Iranian-American student who got TASERed 6 times a few months back because someone police officers decided to use their TASERs as 'motivational tools' to try and make him stand up. Would they have knee-capped him with a few rounds of 9mm if they only had guns and no TASERs?
What will we see with this new weapon? When the crowd in the 'free speech zone' starts getting more vocal than you like, in the old day's you'de just have to have put up with it. Today you can just shoot them with a heat ray until they quieten down and hey! it's non-lethal so it doesn't matter!
Dunno. We have this lovely thing called the human right act which one would assume to have been enacted with the express purpose of being a final unmovable roadblock to dangerous legislation like this. Now, however, many politicians are calling for its repealing because it's, you guessed it, getting in the way of dangerous legislation like this which they want to push through. Clearly unjust laws are more important than human rights if the present bunch of ministers want the unjust laws instead. Remember these 600-odd MPs represent the will of the people without wavering for 5 years after election - it's the people's will to be oppressed, they elected the MPs so it must we what they want!
And you wonder why we still persist in having an unelected (and therefore not easily swayed by party whips) upper house - The House of Lords may be undemocratic but it's the last constitutional obstacle between here and the founding of the ministry of love. (The Queen is the last obstacle because she COULD refuse to sign a passed piece of legislation into law, but since that would trigger a constitutional crisis and probably result in the end of the monarchy, it probably won't happen.)
We had a new law enforcement agency set up in the UK about a year back and the new chief of the agency was on the radio stating quite blatantly that the plan was to confiscate anything of value that the criminals owned (however acquired) and sell it on with the express aim of funding the department - nothing like your funding being provided by how much stuff you take to get you taking anything you can get near ("you're in prison but your wife and child still live in the house? pffft, out!"). IIRC I shouted at the radio, even though it was so early that everyone else was asleep.
Now, in the last few days, we have proposals to allow this to be done to *suspected* criminals who they haven't been able to secure a conviction for. They instead want it dealt with as a civil matter ("We can't prove you did it, but you probably did it, so we'll have your assets anyway. You won't have anywhere to live? pffft, out! Oh, and give us that shirt you're wearing too."). Also, there are proposals afoot to ban such people (who've had no case proven against them) from using computers or mobile phones (with court orders imposed, again, on a balance-of-probabilities basis. Breach the order; 5 years prison. Which smacks of handing out criminal sentences on civil evidence). Sadly all the opposition can do is claim that they'll be 'ineffective', like we want unjust laws like that to actually be effective.
Ministers who propose this sort of stuff should have a copy of the human rights act, with the relevant portions highlighted, stapled to their foreheads.
I have a fairly modest (domestic) wired router with 8 ports (which cost £150 about 5 years ago). It has VPN. Why would any business have equipment which DIDN'T do VPN today?
500 is about the ideal number they can bump the 'readership' up to by changing the homepage of everyone in the FBI to a given blog. Then you can get any extremist nutter on this law and if they claim "ha! I've only got about 50 readers" they can say "na-aah, everyone at the FBI who started their web browser read your blog this morning, now you've got 534 readers, minimum". 500 means that you don't get slammed for not chasing everyone but can easily catch people who you want to be able to catch. It's a giant conspiracy I tell ya!
'Cows' make milk. At the end of their useful milk-producing life they're WAY over the 30-month limit for sending them to slaughter. The animals used to make beef are almost exclusively bulls because you only need one, (or possibly two for genetic diversity) on your farm (as they're only use is getting the cows pregnant) and you send the rest of them off to become burgers (again, before they're 30 months old) so they don't get to produce much methane anyway.
but he does have the World at War box set and all 3 extended edition boxes of LotR so that makes up for it. What are the silver cases up in the top left?