How will a suipreme court precedent stop prosecutors from bringing cases anyway if 20% (say) will plead out to avoid the expense of fighting it, 40% will fight the first round, lose, and not be able to afford to assert the precedent in an appeal, and the remaining 40% will come out of the legal process largely unscathed (but $1000s poorer) with no meaningful recourse against the prosecutor?
Absolutely. A daily log of which cameras are malfunctioning should be kept. At the end of each day, that log should be handed over to a 3rd party for safe keeping. It should then be assumed that every camera not in that log was functioning, and that if it SHOULD have caught evidence then it did, and that the evidence has been destroyed. If footage of an incident is 'missing' it should be assumed that the party in posession of it destroyed it because it was unfavourable to them (and so make any chance of a conviction where they should be video of the incident, but isn't, as good as impossible). A handful of genuinely guilty people may go free by claiming that footage from genuinely malfunctioning cameras would have exonerated them (when it wouldn't), but that should stop it pretty-much dead.
It may be a little more tricky to balance it for allowing a person who claims to have been abused by the police to try and use absence of the video as evidence in a civil claim against the police. That would probably require a complete overhaul of the system - if a conviction for an offence related to the reason for the arrest cannot be obtained (because footage is 'missing', or otherwise), the prosecution should be assumed to be malicious, and the initial arrest false. A doctor's report documenting the injuries, and the presumption that they were inflicted in the course of a false arrest ought then to be able to establish a claim for damages. But the substantial additional burden that would place on the public purse would probably be politically difficult.
People can then get grades to show they have an aptitude in using a computer and universities can properly weight the qualification.
As I remember, from a friend who was head of a computer science department (but is now deceased, so I can't check), they read "A-level Computing" as "great, we're going to have to try and unteach this person everything they think they know"
Dr Srangelove was released in 1964, over 25 years before the fall of the Soviet Union. It was also base[sic] on a book called Red Alert, which was earlier again.
and, of course, your appeal team have much less to work with, if your first team weren't competent enough to 'preserve' issues for appeal, or if you live in some screwed-up place where items of 'fact' are not up for challenge after the conclusion of the original trial, even if they can be proved to be objectively wrong.
I'm not sure about the second part, but the first bit is absolutely spot on. Protecting justice against a corrupt establishment is exactly what juries are for. This seems to have been forgotten
but you can turn that around. You ask the judge "what's an ottoman?", and he can tell you that it's the BDSM thing, because he wants to see the defendant found guilty. This is the risk of allowing a single person to be the final arbiter of 'truth'. Yes, I know that the defence could appeal the decision to give that as a definition, and even work their way all the way up through the courts, but that's still only about 20 people, at most. If the judges at the very top are as corrupt as, or in collusion with, the judge at the bottom, 'truth' can simply be redefined, and the jury left making a decision in ignorance.
The Courts need to ensure that jurors do not rely on prejudicial sources of information in making their decision as to guilt.
and they do this by forcing them to rely upon incomplete information sources. Or worse, information sources which the court can manipulate in a prejudicial fashion. If the only definition of a word that you can use is the one the judge gives you, then he can give you a false one, and you won't know any better. The whole purpose of juries is to bring in people from outside, who can think for themselves, and are less likely to be involved in some closed system of corruption.
I was thinking about this WRT Assange, and this bizarre 'remand' system we have in the UK. The government convinces a judge that a person needs to be detained to ensure their appearance for trial, so they just get shoved in with the general prison population as if that's the only possible facility to keep people in. Far better to have secure remand hostel facilities where people have individual rooms (rather than cells), privacy, general liberty within the walls (no 'lights out' time, for instance), unlimited access to TV, DVDs, exercise, etc., (limited) access to the internet, visitors, conjugal visits. Basically, everything except the freedom to leave or obvious means to influence their case. This would, of course, be horrendously expensive - perhaps that would encourage judges to avoid holding people on remand. Infact, there is presently no real deterrent to holding people on remand, as, while remand counts as imprisonment for the purposes of 'time served' if the accused is convicted, it doesn't count as imprisonment for the purposes of paying compensation if the accused is not convicted.
If you have concerns about facts or presented evidence, you raise them with the judge who will ask the prosecutors or lawyers for further information relating to that.
I suggest you watch Yes Minister, especially the last episode of Series 1. "I know there's something I don't know, but I can't find the question to ask you what it is because I don't know!" (paraphrased)
Juror's should only be able to convict or free someone based on information presented in the court room.
While I agree that only presented evidence should be used to convict so as to maintain a proper deterrent to (for instance) illegal evidence gathering. Jurors should be able to acquit on any basis they please. Sometimes it's just not in the interests of justice that a person should be convicted, even if the law as written would make the case absolutely watertight - it is for those cases that juries exist.
Fair point! Tell you what, you wander down to your local court house and see what proportion of the judges & other court staff you can persuade to give up their salary on that basis, and if it's more than 50%, I'll conceed that you're right.
they probably do, but they can't account for non-immediate hardship.
You could be completely financially responsible. You could build up a surplus to maintain to present lifestyle for 6 months without earning a wage. You could be called for jury service for a major case, you say to the judge "yes, I can afford to sit on a 4-month trial". The trial might go over by a few months, taking 6 in total - you've expended your entire surplus, but that's ok because you're going back to work. You're in an at-will state, your job disappears a week after you return, you no longer have a surplus to life off because you spent it on living while serving on a jury. You fall behind with your mortgage and lose your home.
In a lot of cases serving on a jury is a pretty unpleasant experience, given the people and evidence with which you have to deal. Surely that's enough to ask of people serving society, without asking them to bear more than their share of the financial costs as well, even if they can immediately afford it.
if it was a due collected of EVERYONE, then it would be fair(-ish). If everyone did 2 days Jury Service per year, averaged over every 5 year period (numbers plucked from the air for argument purposes), that would be fair. However much you earn, you lose 2 days productivity per year, not unlike an in-kind tax. The current system of randomly selecting people to bear a substantial burden because the burden needs to be borne is, to my mind, not unlike the government in a 100,000 person town trying to plug a $1,000,000 hole in the budget by selecting 1000 people at random and sending them a demand for $1000 each.
if the US simply turns a blind eye as China and India reverse engineer every American invention and sell it at a fraction of the cost, the US is farked.
And what when the west is sufficiently entrenched in this system, of us inventing stuff and the east paying us to be allowed to make said stuff, will we do when they just stop paying? Economies should be founded on the production of actual goods with some level of actual scarcity. We should not be encouraging our economies to become reliant on producing intellectual goods which only have value so long as we retain the goodwill of other nations to pay for them. Far from tightening protection of intellectual property, we should loosen it and leave those who would try to make it their sole source of income acutely aware of how little retailable value ideas actually have. Perhaps that would encourage them to continue making real goods.
1) not everyone has a contract 2) not all contract terms are enforceable - ones which allow the employer to damage the employees personal property at will may fall into that category (IANAL).
Risk to the company. To the employee/ex-employee the risk of losing their photos far outweighs the risk to your sensitive data because your data means nothing to them. Of course, that being as it is, it really ought to boil down to who the phone belongs to. Judging by a lot of comments on this, an awful lot of companies think they can swap that around by merely informing the owner of a phone that the company intends to treat it as its own.
A lot of this conflict could be resolved if people used this rule of thumb: treat other people's stuff (including data) twice as carefully as you treat your own, because it's not yours to lose\break\destroy.
What do you do to protect your employees interests in not having their own data annihilated by accident?
Also, are you expecting employees to take work with them, using their own devices; or is the company willing to bare the costs of either providing a device or the work not being done?
It would seem most unusual to me for an employer to require their employees to provide expensive equipment for company use, and with the agreement that the company may treat it as its own.
yes, more mess. Since we won't get a definitive answer (that anyone will believe) as to whether the get-out clause applies until it gets to Strasbourg, all the human rights act does is put 5 or 6 layers of British courts between this chap and that definitive answer.
I'm fairly sure that the whole point at issue is that it was clearly absurd and therefore not a bomb threat. I did a back-of-the envelope calculation last night: Knowing that the runway is 2.88km long and 60m wide, assuming that it's 0.5m deep, and has a density about equal to that of concrete, and assuming 'sky-high' means the cruising altitude of a 747.
You would need the energy equivalaent of nearly 5000 tons of TNT just to overcome gravity in blowing just the runway 'sky-high'.
I doubt even the armed forces could pull that much explosive together in a week, let alone place it under an airport.
In conclusion, the 'threat' is absurd, and therefore isn't actually a threat. Or do we only read it literally and out of context when it's to the advantage of the prosecution?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I have to throw this in: "Mr. Congressman, boxers or briefs?"
"I'm not answering that question". You don't have to answer - you just can't lie if you do.
How will a suipreme court precedent stop prosecutors from bringing cases anyway if 20% (say) will plead out to avoid the expense of fighting it, 40% will fight the first round, lose, and not be able to afford to assert the precedent in an appeal, and the remaining 40% will come out of the legal process largely unscathed (but $1000s poorer) with no meaningful recourse against the prosecutor?
Absolutely. A daily log of which cameras are malfunctioning should be kept. At the end of each day, that log should be handed over to a 3rd party for safe keeping.
It should then be assumed that every camera not in that log was functioning, and that if it SHOULD have caught evidence then it did, and that the evidence has been destroyed. If footage of an incident is 'missing' it should be assumed that the party in posession of it destroyed it because it was unfavourable to them (and so make any chance of a conviction where they should be video of the incident, but isn't, as good as impossible). A handful of genuinely guilty people may go free by claiming that footage from genuinely malfunctioning cameras would have exonerated them (when it wouldn't), but that should stop it pretty-much dead.
It may be a little more tricky to balance it for allowing a person who claims to have been abused by the police to try and use absence of the video as evidence in a civil claim against the police. That would probably require a complete overhaul of the system - if a conviction for an offence related to the reason for the arrest cannot be obtained (because footage is 'missing', or otherwise), the prosecution should be assumed to be malicious, and the initial arrest false. A doctor's report documenting the injuries, and the presumption that they were inflicted in the course of a false arrest ought then to be able to establish a claim for damages. But the substantial additional burden that would place on the public purse would probably be politically difficult.
That's a lie! I've just manufactured a study here which says it's only 67.2%
People can then get grades to show they have an aptitude in using a computer and universities can properly weight the qualification.
As I remember, from a friend who was head of a computer science department (but is now deceased, so I can't check), they read "A-level Computing" as "great, we're going to have to try and unteach this person everything they think they know"
Dr Srangelove was released in 1964, over 25 years before the fall of the Soviet Union. It was also base[sic] on a book called Red Alert, which was earlier again.
and, of course, your appeal team have much less to work with, if your first team weren't competent enough to 'preserve' issues for appeal, or if you live in some screwed-up place where items of 'fact' are not up for challenge after the conclusion of the original trial, even if they can be proved to be objectively wrong.
I'm not sure about the second part, but the first bit is absolutely spot on. Protecting justice against a corrupt establishment is exactly what juries are for. This seems to have been forgotten
I agree, but the whole system is set up to try and stop any of those advantages of using juries from actually influencing the outcome of the trial.
but you can turn that around. You ask the judge "what's an ottoman?", and he can tell you that it's the BDSM thing, because he wants to see the defendant found guilty. This is the risk of allowing a single person to be the final arbiter of 'truth'. Yes, I know that the defence could appeal the decision to give that as a definition, and even work their way all the way up through the courts, but that's still only about 20 people, at most. If the judges at the very top are as corrupt as, or in collusion with, the judge at the bottom, 'truth' can simply be redefined, and the jury left making a decision in ignorance.
The Courts need to ensure that jurors do not rely on prejudicial sources of information in making their decision as to guilt.
and they do this by forcing them to rely upon incomplete information sources. Or worse, information sources which the court can manipulate in a prejudicial fashion. If the only definition of a word that you can use is the one the judge gives you, then he can give you a false one, and you won't know any better.
The whole purpose of juries is to bring in people from outside, who can think for themselves, and are less likely to be involved in some closed system of corruption.
I was thinking about this WRT Assange, and this bizarre 'remand' system we have in the UK. The government convinces a judge that a person needs to be detained to ensure their appearance for trial, so they just get shoved in with the general prison population as if that's the only possible facility to keep people in.
Far better to have secure remand hostel facilities where people have individual rooms (rather than cells), privacy, general liberty within the walls (no 'lights out' time, for instance), unlimited access to TV, DVDs, exercise, etc., (limited) access to the internet, visitors, conjugal visits. Basically, everything except the freedom to leave or obvious means to influence their case. This would, of course, be horrendously expensive - perhaps that would encourage judges to avoid holding people on remand.
Infact, there is presently no real deterrent to holding people on remand, as, while remand counts as imprisonment for the purposes of 'time served' if the accused is convicted, it doesn't count as imprisonment for the purposes of paying compensation if the accused is not convicted.
If you have concerns about facts or presented evidence, you raise them with the judge who will ask the prosecutors or lawyers for further information relating to that.
I suggest you watch Yes Minister, especially the last episode of Series 1. "I know there's something I don't know, but I can't find the question to ask you what it is because I don't know!" (paraphrased)
Juror's should only be able to convict or free someone based on information presented in the court room.
While I agree that only presented evidence should be used to convict so as to maintain a proper deterrent to (for instance) illegal evidence gathering. Jurors should be able to acquit on any basis they please. Sometimes it's just not in the interests of justice that a person should be convicted, even if the law as written would make the case absolutely watertight - it is for those cases that juries exist.
d'oh
(that's how it's engraved on Lisa's saxophone)
Fair point! Tell you what, you wander down to your local court house and see what proportion of the judges & other court staff you can persuade to give up their salary on that basis, and if it's more than 50%, I'll conceed that you're right.
"Legal aid. Cookie?"
they probably do, but they can't account for non-immediate hardship.
You could be completely financially responsible. You could build up a surplus to maintain to present lifestyle for 6 months without earning a wage.
You could be called for jury service for a major case, you say to the judge "yes, I can afford to sit on a 4-month trial".
The trial might go over by a few months, taking 6 in total - you've expended your entire surplus, but that's ok because you're going back to work.
You're in an at-will state, your job disappears a week after you return, you no longer have a surplus to life off because you spent it on living while serving on a jury. You fall behind with your mortgage and lose your home.
In a lot of cases serving on a jury is a pretty unpleasant experience, given the people and evidence with which you have to deal. Surely that's enough to ask of people serving society, without asking them to bear more than their share of the financial costs as well, even if they can immediately afford it.
if it was a due collected of EVERYONE, then it would be fair(-ish). If everyone did 2 days Jury Service per year, averaged over every 5 year period (numbers plucked from the air for argument purposes), that would be fair. However much you earn, you lose 2 days productivity per year, not unlike an in-kind tax.
The current system of randomly selecting people to bear a substantial burden because the burden needs to be borne is, to my mind, not unlike the government in a 100,000 person town trying to plug a $1,000,000 hole in the budget by selecting 1000 people at random and sending them a demand for $1000 each.
if the US simply turns a blind eye as China and India reverse engineer every American invention and sell it at a fraction of the cost, the US is farked.
And what when the west is sufficiently entrenched in this system, of us inventing stuff and the east paying us to be allowed to make said stuff, will we do when they just stop paying?
Economies should be founded on the production of actual goods with some level of actual scarcity. We should not be encouraging our economies to become reliant on producing intellectual goods which only have value so long as we retain the goodwill of other nations to pay for them.
Far from tightening protection of intellectual property, we should loosen it and leave those who would try to make it their sole source of income acutely aware of how little retailable value ideas actually have. Perhaps that would encourage them to continue making real goods.
1) not everyone has a contract 2) not all contract terms are enforceable - ones which allow the employer to damage the employees personal property at will may fall into that category (IANAL).
Risk to the company. To the employee/ex-employee the risk of losing their photos far outweighs the risk to your sensitive data because your data means nothing to them.
Of course, that being as it is, it really ought to boil down to who the phone belongs to. Judging by a lot of comments on this, an awful lot of companies think they can swap that around by merely informing the owner of a phone that the company intends to treat it as its own.
A lot of this conflict could be resolved if people used this rule of thumb: treat other people's stuff (including data) twice as carefully as you treat your own, because it's not yours to lose\break\destroy.
What do you do to protect your employees interests in not having their own data annihilated by accident?
Also, are you expecting employees to take work with them, using their own devices; or is the company willing to bare the costs of either providing a device or the work not being done?
It would seem most unusual to me for an employer to require their employees to provide expensive equipment for company use, and with the agreement that the company may treat it as its own.
how does "never had a credit card" look compared to "had a credit card, didn't spend much, but always paid it off in full"?
yes, more mess. Since we won't get a definitive answer (that anyone will believe) as to whether the get-out clause applies until it gets to Strasbourg, all the human rights act does is put 5 or 6 layers of British courts between this chap and that definitive answer.
I'm fairly sure that the whole point at issue is that it was clearly absurd and therefore not a bomb threat.
I did a back-of-the envelope calculation last night:
Knowing that the runway is 2.88km long and 60m wide,
assuming that it's 0.5m deep, and has a density about equal to that of concrete,
and assuming 'sky-high' means the cruising altitude of a 747.
You would need the energy equivalaent of nearly 5000 tons of TNT just to overcome gravity in blowing just the runway 'sky-high'.
I doubt even the armed forces could pull that much explosive together in a week, let alone place it under an airport.
In conclusion, the 'threat' is absurd, and therefore isn't actually a threat. Or do we only read it literally and out of context when it's to the advantage of the prosecution?