Here in the UK, you are despised for an extradition agreement which allows you to successfully have someone sent over for prosecution who has committed no crime under UK law and never even entered the US.
Why are you despising the US for an agreement that your own government freely entered into, and enforces against you and your fellow citizens?
All it would take is an act of parliament to guarantee no one shall be extradited on the grounds of an accusation of acts which were committed while the person was inside the UK. Your vulnerability to foreign prosecution in a foreign land is entirely your own government's fault.
i fail to see how twin-lens polarized 3D could be any different than a regular digital 2D screening.
let me remedy that:
Your eyes perceive 3d not merely by parallax and stereoscopic imaging, but also based on the focal length required to bring the object into focus. When focused on a nearby object the background is blury, when focusing far away, then nearby objects are blury. Trying to adjust focus is required for real life vision.
However in a 3d movie theatre if an effect looks like it is 10 inches from your face, the image is still projected exactly at the distance of the screen and your eyes need to focus on the screen, this is contrary to how your brain normally processes visual information and different from 2D viewing.
And private businesses have the right to refuse to sell to anyone for any reason. That doesn't make the Apple employee any less of an asshole, but it's certainly not illegal to be an asshole (which has kept many of you, I'm sure, from doing serious jail time over the years).
You have a right to refuse to do business, but you don't have a right to publically offer to do business for terms X, and then refuse to do business for terms X when someone actually accepts the offer.
A business that makes the offer to provide goods or services in exchange for a stipulated price, via advertising or other means, creates a contractual obligation to actually provide said goods and services when someone agrees and meets the terms stated. If the terms are vague, there is still an obligation to at least negotiate in good faith.
But yes you are right. If you never did anything to lead the potential customer into thinking you were looking to do a deal, then you 're not obligated to make any steps to do a deal.
Apple wasn't in the wrong here as the potential customer apparently stated they intended to commit a crime with the product. Apple has a duty not to assist in the commission of a crime.
That's her choice. No one has any business "protecting her for her own good." She may be linked to Iran, but the philosophy of the US is freedom. People are free to screw with their lives if they want.
Actually you are wrong. You have a legal obligation not to knowingly assist another person in committing a crime. Whether you want them to break the law or not, if you know they will break the law by virtue of your assistance, and then you assist them you are guilty of being an accessory.
If you try to hail a cab and tell the drive you just robbed a bank and you need them to drive you away from the scene, the cab driver must refuse.
If you try to hail a cab and tell them to take you to the bank so you can rob it, the cab driver must refuse.
Yes, you are free to screw up your life if you want. But there are limits on how far other people are legally permitted to go to assist you in screwing up your life.
Once someone tells you they want something from you in order to commit a crime, you are NOT ALLOWED to to give/sell/lend the item to them.
The exchange of money doesn't wash your moral culpability away from the act of providing assistance.
Alice, Bob, and Charlie are working together in a Corporation, ACME. Now, ACME is not a person, so someone has to own all the assets that would otherwise belong communally to ACME, and the three decide that Alice should be the person of record for ownership of materials.
That is not necessary. All three can own the materials jointly. Just as all 3 could own ACME jointly. But lets say Alice owns it all, to fit with your hypothetical.
Now, someone has to run the company and be on the line for any legal messes, and the three decide that Bob shall do the actual operations of the company, and direct Charlie in his work, while Alice just sits at home, and collects a paycheck just for not walking away with the money and property.
As owner of property Alice is the one who decides everything. And she is effectively the employer. Bob is not paying her a paycheck, but rather she is paying Bob a paycheck. On the other hand if all 3 co-owned the assets then they would be partners and none of them are employees.
The burden of proving who is responsible for Charlie dumping toxic waste does not shift depending on whether he works for a corporation or a non-corporation.
Derick sues and throws Charlie into bankruptcy with the tort finding, while Alice continues to maintain all the company assets that have not been touched,
By your scenario, Alice OWNS the toxic chemicals. Ultimately she is responsible for ensuring they are disposed of safely. She can't avoid liability simply by giving Bob the responsibility and then Bob hiring Charlie to dump it illegally.
Also by your scenario Charlie and Bob were in effect 1/3 owner of the assets and those assets are not protected simply by signing over ownership to Alice while Bob and Charlie continue to use them. Any transfer of ownership that is done merely for the sake of protecting property from being properly forfeited to the victims of a wrongdoing does not have that effect. The transaction can be deemed by the courts to have been invalid under law.
You can walk away, which is the equivalent. It's already happened, the damage has been done. Here in Canada, (and I've seen several in the US as well) there have been quite a few cases of openly gay high school students committing suicide after being verbally bullied for many years. It's not that easy to turn it off in real life, or on-line without cutting yourself off from society at large. Most of the "nerds" that I know put up with pretty much the same thing in school. I'm quite surprised that people here on SlashDot are having a hard time grasping the concept.
I think it's because when we were kids being cyberbullied, the only people who were bullying us were other nerds and the only people who knew about it were other nerds. And we could get back at them by hacking into their BBS and deleting their warez. Revenge is a dish best served cold and all that.
Not that I would ever do that. I'm speaking completely hypothetically.
What the hell, what does the developer of a site has to do with how its owners operate it? That's like making employees criminally responsible if their company does something unethical.
If you know your employment duties are to assist in breaking the the law, you have a legal obligation to refuse to work. "I was just doing my job" is not an excuse.
Pretty sure it isn't illegal to pretend interest in buying someone's house.
It isn't a crime, but it is a tort. If you waste my time under the false pretense that you might actually accept an offer I am making, but you really have no intention whatsoever of accepting it then you have harmed me. You can be sued for damages. But how much money are we talking about?
I think the record labels felt that the few hundred dollars of damages one might get for having an hour of their time wasted under false pretenses was an acceptable cost.
In this case the "harm" was the only fact that the PI was not going to buy the home. It isn't illegal as far as I know, to take pictures of someone's home that they have invited you inside. For that matter, when I've gone apartment hunting often landlords have invited me to take pictures. The PI could have even asked "May I take some pictures?"
which can be frozen the same as sperm, however they still need most of a fully functioning human female reproductive system for implantation. no woman, no baby. been true for hundreds of thousands of years, still true today and for foreseeable future.
or an artificial womb as the original post clearly stated.
strange revelation for you, o mama's basement dwelling virgin, growing a human can only be done inside a creature known as a "willing female". She might be willing to take a "test tube baby", or spread her legs for the unsterilized "test tube", but your idea has no legs. Specifically, no long sexy legs with a vagina and uterus between them.....
Since when did a female need to be willing to get pregnant? oh wait.. I guess because you put quotes around the phrase "willing female" you were implying that all fertile females are presumptively willing.
By that definition, all evolution comes from mistakes. Except for man-made evolution. That is to say, when men deliberately splice genomes, say in corn for example, to improve a life form, that is not a mistake.
This begs the question then, is it evolution when men deliberately evolve life around them?
It doesn't really beg the question at all, since you've turned the entire discussion into a semantic one over which almost nobody except a linguist would care about.
It's a mistake because an error was made in the process of transcribing genes between DNA strands. The mechanism failed in its task, no matter whether that mechanism itself was designed or evolved
To claim that the mechanism has a task presupposes that the mechanism is intending to behave a certain way to achieve a certain end. The mechanism merely follows the laws of physics, and whatever it happens to do is a success from that stand point. There is no foresight or end-goal in evolution. If the mechanism was designed, then you could say the designer made a mistake, but it isn't the mechanism which can make a mistake.
The word "mistake" implies judgement and comprehension. It is completely improper to use that word for machines or chemicals.
The only thing Darwin missed was a method of heredibility. That is a flaw, no doubt, but as Stephen R. Gould wrote, the overarching theory still works. The Modern Synthesis is just Darwinian selection married to genetics. In other words, both complement the other.
He didn't claim to have found the actual method of inheritability. He didn't miss it, he had no evidence upon which to build a hypothesis and he pointed this out. The word "flaw" is inappropriate. Recognizing the gaps in knowledge that remain after drawing all the conclusions that the evidence suggests, and leaving suggestions to others for future investigation is one of the beauties of science. It is not a flaw.
Interesting ad hominem attack. I don't suppose you have any actual arguments that would clarify why anything I said was crap? And exactly where do you get "pretentious" out of speculation based on a logical extrapolations?
It isn't an ad hominem attack. It is ridicule directed both at self proclaimed agnostics and at the claim, independently.
And yes I have arguments. And when someone makes an argument to justify popular agnosticism that isn't obvious crap, then I might respond.
But to keep it short, your godlike alien scenario is utterly irrelevant to the issue, hence:crap.
Thinking "taking a crap is a virtue" is pretentious.
Always nice to see the militant atheists attacking people for having views that don't conform to their closed minded world view.
you have a very cool way of redefining the word "attack" and "militant" and "close minded". keep up God's work. He needs you to help spread the good news.
you don't understand the law or what happened here.
in this case the evidence obtained by the warrantless tap was PERMITTED at trial. The police were following the law, and acting in good faith, and their actions were in the public good, and it would not bring the administration of justice into disrepute to allow the evidence.
The court found that the provisions allowing warrantless tapping in those limited emergency situations were CONSTITUTIONALLY VALID. i.e. Warrantless wiretapping is OK in limited emergency circumstances where it would be impossible to get a warrant fast enough.
However the court found the law to be defective because the government made no provision for any kind of supervision of these wiretaps. No reporting to anybody. No oversight by anybody. The wiretaps just take place and then nobody knows.
The court said the law should have provisions for reporting and oversight on such wiretaps, so that the subject of the wiretap can challenge them and the public can be confident they are not being abused. The court voided the law but suspended the ruling for 12 MONTHS, so that the government could fix the law.
the current law essentially allows SECRET warrantless wiretaps. that is unconstitutional.
The court never ruled that warrantless wiretaps themselves are never justified, merely that the government can't go around doing it without oversight and reporting.
"authorize" is a verb performed by the owner. nothing in the statute says a TOS document can perform this task. So the court can't simply assume it. It is criminal law.
So the issue is whether the owner authorized something. And it is pretty clear that if the owner put a computer up for people from the public to use, then the owner authorized them to use it. or else authorized them to authorize themselves. He can't authorize a computer to authorize anyone, nor a TOS.
Under contract law there could be a TOS with binding terms, and you can agree to that and you can deauthorize yourself as far as the contract itself goes, but criminal law is far more explicit and does not depend on private parties to define arbitrary terms to describe what is a criminal act.
In the criminal statute the term "authorize" does not gain its meaning from the TOS because the statute does not say so.
I don't think anyone actually seriously believes congress intended to make TOS terms the criminal law anyway. the prosecutors are being dweebs.
The law could theoretically give the power of making things illegal to a corporation. but probably such a law would need to be written in such a way that it was clear that the corporation has that power, and which corporation it was, and how that corporation performs this task. So that way it is not vague as to whether or not any particular action was illegal.
even if facebook happened to have clearly written TOS that themselves are not vague. that doesn't guarantee that the statute isn't also enforcing crappy or non-existant TOS terms written by other corporations or private agreements. The danger of simply interpreting criminal sanctions where congress wasn't clear on its intent.
And if the TOS itself is law,then doesn't that mean the TOS could compel acts which are criminal acts? (i.e. all members of the ACME crime family, may only access their mob-book account if they are up to date on their criminal syndicate support payments --- therefore, give us our cut or not only will we break your knee caps, but the government will throw you in jail for unauthorized access to a computer system.) Wouldn't congress want to say exactly what kinds of requirements a TOS actually may possess?
I think this court made the right decision. If congress really wants TOS terms to be the law, then congress should have been a lot more explicit about this.
Slashdot Mirror
"If other OEMs follow suit, MS could find itself as the only vendor selling ARM-based W8 tablets."
Everybody else's tablets/notebooks: $1000
Microsoft's + Apple's: $600
Ballmer knows he can't outfox Apple, but HP? All too easy.
I payed $399 for my 64gig Acer Iconia Tablet
Here in the UK, you are despised for an extradition agreement which allows you to successfully have someone sent over for prosecution who has committed no crime under UK law and never even entered the US.
Why are you despising the US for an agreement that your own government freely entered into, and enforces against you and your fellow citizens?
All it would take is an act of parliament to guarantee no one shall be extradited on the grounds of an accusation of acts which were committed while the person was inside the UK. Your vulnerability to foreign prosecution in a foreign land is entirely your own government's fault.
I think that is what he was doing.
i fail to see how twin-lens polarized 3D could be any different than a regular digital 2D screening.
let me remedy that:
Your eyes perceive 3d not merely by parallax and stereoscopic imaging, but also based on the focal length required to bring the object into focus. When focused on a nearby object the background is blury, when focusing far away, then nearby objects are blury. Trying to adjust focus is required for real life vision.
However in a 3d movie theatre if an effect looks like it is 10 inches from your face, the image is still projected exactly at the distance of the screen and your eyes need to focus on the screen, this is contrary to how your brain normally processes visual information and different from 2D viewing.
And private businesses have the right to refuse to sell to anyone for any reason. That doesn't make the Apple employee any less of an asshole, but it's certainly not illegal to be an asshole (which has kept many of you, I'm sure, from doing serious jail time over the years).
You have a right to refuse to do business, but you don't have a right to publically offer to do business for terms X, and then refuse to do business for terms X when someone actually accepts the offer.
A business that makes the offer to provide goods or services in exchange for a stipulated price, via advertising or other means, creates a contractual obligation to actually provide said goods and services when someone agrees and meets the terms stated. If the terms are vague, there is still an obligation to at least negotiate in good faith.
But yes you are right. If you never did anything to lead the potential customer into thinking you were looking to do a deal, then you 're not obligated to make any steps to do a deal.
Apple wasn't in the wrong here as the potential customer apparently stated they intended to commit a crime with the product. Apple has a duty not to assist in the commission of a crime.
That's her choice. No one has any business "protecting her for her own good." She may be linked to Iran, but the philosophy of the US is freedom. People are free to screw with their lives if they want.
Actually you are wrong. You have a legal obligation not to knowingly assist another person in committing a crime. Whether you want them to break the law or not, if you know they will break the law by virtue of your assistance, and then you assist them you are guilty of being an accessory.
If you try to hail a cab and tell the drive you just robbed a bank and you need them to drive you away from the scene, the cab driver must refuse.
If you try to hail a cab and tell them to take you to the bank so you can rob it, the cab driver must refuse.
Yes, you are free to screw up your life if you want. But there are limits on how far other people are legally permitted to go to assist you in screwing up your life.
Once someone tells you they want something from you in order to commit a crime, you are NOT ALLOWED to to give/sell/lend the item to them.
The exchange of money doesn't wash your moral culpability away from the act of providing assistance.
Alice, Bob, and Charlie are working together in a Corporation, ACME. Now, ACME is not a person, so someone has to own all the assets that would otherwise belong communally to ACME, and the three decide that Alice should be the person of record for ownership of materials.
That is not necessary. All three can own the materials jointly. Just as all 3 could own ACME jointly. But lets say Alice owns it all, to fit with your hypothetical.
Now, someone has to run the company and be on the line for any legal messes, and the three decide that Bob shall do the actual operations of the company, and direct Charlie in his work, while Alice just sits at home, and collects a paycheck just for not walking away with the money and property.
As owner of property Alice is the one who decides everything. And she is effectively the employer. Bob is not paying her a paycheck, but rather she is paying Bob a paycheck. On the other hand if all 3 co-owned the assets then they would be partners and none of them are employees.
The burden of proving who is responsible for Charlie dumping toxic waste does not shift depending on whether he works for a corporation or a non-corporation.
Derick sues and throws Charlie into bankruptcy with the tort finding, while Alice continues to maintain all the company assets that have not been touched,
By your scenario, Alice OWNS the toxic chemicals. Ultimately she is responsible for ensuring they are disposed of safely. She can't avoid liability simply by giving Bob the responsibility and then Bob hiring Charlie to dump it illegally.
Also by your scenario Charlie and Bob were in effect 1/3 owner of the assets and those assets are not protected simply by signing over ownership to Alice while Bob and Charlie continue to use them. Any transfer of ownership that is done merely for the sake of protecting property from being properly forfeited to the victims of a wrongdoing does not have that effect. The transaction can be deemed by the courts to have been invalid under law.
You can walk away, which is the equivalent. It's already happened, the damage has been done. Here in Canada, (and I've seen several in the US as well) there have been quite a few cases of openly gay high school students committing suicide after being verbally bullied for many years. It's not that easy to turn it off in real life, or on-line without cutting yourself off from society at large. Most of the "nerds" that I know put up with pretty much the same thing in school. I'm quite surprised that people here on SlashDot are having a hard time grasping the concept.
I think it's because when we were kids being cyberbullied, the only people who were bullying us were other nerds and the only people who knew about it were other nerds. And we could get back at them by hacking into their BBS and deleting their warez. Revenge is a dish best served cold and all that.
Not that I would ever do that. I'm speaking completely hypothetically.
What the hell, what does the developer of a site has to do with how its owners operate it? That's like making employees criminally responsible if their company does something unethical.
If you know your employment duties are to assist in breaking the the law, you have a legal obligation to refuse to work. "I was just doing my job" is not an excuse.
I guess even police work and evidence collection is getting outsourced these days....
On a serious note, what right does the MPAA have to place 'undercover' agents?
The same rights that you have. There is no law that says MPAA employees or agents have to identify themselves on demand.
Pretty sure it isn't illegal to pretend interest in buying someone's house.
It isn't a crime, but it is a tort. If you waste my time under the false pretense that you might actually accept an offer I am making, but you really have no intention whatsoever of accepting it then you have harmed me. You can be sued for damages. But how much money are we talking about?
I think the record labels felt that the few hundred dollars of damages one might get for having an hour of their time wasted under false pretenses was an acceptable cost.
In this case the "harm" was the only fact that the PI was not going to buy the home. It isn't illegal as far as I know, to take pictures of someone's home that they have invited you inside. For that matter, when I've gone apartment hunting often landlords have invited me to take pictures. The PI could have even asked "May I take some pictures?"
We have judges protecting a monopoly and frankly I don't understand it.
That's actually the point of intellectual property law. Judges are not supposed to undermine the law.
They should make it look like the Millenium Falcon. The whole ship could spin like a flying saucer to create gravity.
which can be frozen the same as sperm, however they still need most of a fully functioning human female reproductive system for implantation. no woman, no baby. been true for hundreds of thousands of years, still true today and for foreseeable future.
or an artificial womb as the original post clearly stated.
strange revelation for you, o mama's basement dwelling virgin, growing a human can only be done inside a creature known as a "willing female". She might be willing to take a "test tube baby", or spread her legs for the unsterilized "test tube", but your idea has no legs. Specifically, no long sexy legs with a vagina and uterus between them.....
Since when did a female need to be willing to get pregnant? oh wait.. I guess because you put quotes around the phrase "willing female" you were implying that all fertile females are presumptively willing.
Good to know.
By that definition, all evolution comes from mistakes. Except for man-made evolution. That is to say, when men deliberately splice genomes, say in corn for example, to improve a life form, that is not a mistake.
This begs the question then, is it evolution when men deliberately evolve life around them?
It doesn't really beg the question at all, since you've turned the entire discussion into a semantic one over which almost nobody except a linguist would care about.
It's a mistake because an error was made in the process of transcribing genes between DNA strands. The mechanism failed in its task, no matter whether that mechanism itself was designed or evolved
To claim that the mechanism has a task presupposes that the mechanism is intending to behave a certain way to achieve a certain end. The mechanism merely follows the laws of physics, and whatever it happens to do is a success from that stand point. There is no foresight or end-goal in evolution. If the mechanism was designed, then you could say the designer made a mistake, but it isn't the mechanism which can make a mistake.
The word "mistake" implies judgement and comprehension. It is completely improper to use that word for machines or chemicals.
The only thing Darwin missed was a method of heredibility. That is a flaw, no doubt, but as Stephen R. Gould wrote, the overarching theory still works. The Modern Synthesis is just Darwinian selection married to genetics. In other words, both complement the other.
He didn't claim to have found the actual method of inheritability. He didn't miss it, he had no evidence upon which to build a hypothesis and he pointed this out. The word "flaw" is inappropriate. Recognizing the gaps in knowledge that remain after drawing all the conclusions that the evidence suggests, and leaving suggestions to others for future investigation is one of the beauties of science. It is not a flaw.
Interesting ad hominem attack. I don't suppose you have any actual arguments that would clarify why anything I said was crap? And exactly where do you get "pretentious" out of speculation based on a logical extrapolations?
It isn't an ad hominem attack. It is ridicule directed both at self proclaimed agnostics and at the claim, independently.
And yes I have arguments. And when someone makes an argument to justify popular agnosticism that isn't obvious crap, then I might respond.
But to keep it short, your godlike alien scenario is utterly irrelevant to the issue, hence :crap.
Thinking "taking a crap is a virtue" is pretentious.
Always nice to see the militant atheists attacking people for having views that don't conform to their closed minded world view.
you have a very cool way of redefining the word "attack" and "militant" and "close minded". keep up God's work. He needs you to help spread the good news.
My God isn't a murderous psychopath instituting insane and arbitrary laws and demanding adoration under threat of violence.
Happy now?
He said READ your bible front to back before coming back and saying that. Try again.
Depends on what you think might be godlike.
Are self-proclaimed agnostics the only people pretentious enough to spew crap like that and think it sounds intelligent?
you don't understand the law or what happened here.
in this case the evidence obtained by the warrantless tap was PERMITTED at trial. The police were following the law, and acting in good faith, and their actions were in the public good, and it would not bring the administration of justice into disrepute to allow the evidence.
The court found that the provisions allowing warrantless tapping in those limited emergency situations were CONSTITUTIONALLY VALID. i.e. Warrantless wiretapping is OK in limited emergency circumstances where it would be impossible to get a warrant fast enough.
However the court found the law to be defective because the government made no provision for any kind of supervision of these wiretaps. No reporting to anybody. No oversight by anybody. The wiretaps just take place and then nobody knows.
The court said the law should have provisions for reporting and oversight on such wiretaps, so that the subject of the wiretap can challenge them and the public can be confident they are not being abused. The court voided the law but suspended the ruling for 12 MONTHS, so that the government could fix the law.
the current law essentially allows SECRET warrantless wiretaps. that is unconstitutional.
The court never ruled that warrantless wiretaps themselves are never justified, merely that the government can't go around doing it without oversight and reporting.
"authorize" is a verb performed by the owner. nothing in the statute says a TOS document can perform this task. So the court can't simply assume it. It is criminal law.
So the issue is whether the owner authorized something. And it is pretty clear that if the owner put a computer up for people from the public to use, then the owner authorized them to use it. or else authorized them to authorize themselves. He can't authorize a computer to authorize anyone, nor a TOS.
Under contract law there could be a TOS with binding terms, and you can agree to that and you can deauthorize yourself as far as the contract itself goes, but criminal law is far more explicit and does not depend on private parties to define arbitrary terms to describe what is a criminal act.
In the criminal statute the term "authorize" does not gain its meaning from the TOS because the statute does not say so.
I don't think anyone actually seriously believes congress intended to make TOS terms the criminal law anyway. the prosecutors are being dweebs.
The law could theoretically give the power of making things illegal to a corporation. but probably such a law would need to be written in such a way that it was clear that the corporation has that power, and which corporation it was, and how that corporation performs this task. So that way it is not vague as to whether or not any particular action was illegal.
even if facebook happened to have clearly written TOS that themselves are not vague. that doesn't guarantee that the statute isn't also enforcing crappy or non-existant TOS terms written by other corporations or private agreements. The danger of simply interpreting criminal sanctions where congress wasn't clear on its intent.
And if the TOS itself is law,then doesn't that mean the TOS could compel acts which are criminal acts? (i.e. all members of the ACME crime family, may only access their mob-book account if they are up to date on their criminal syndicate support payments --- therefore, give us our cut or not only will we break your knee caps, but the government will throw you in jail for unauthorized access to a computer system.) Wouldn't congress want to say exactly what kinds of requirements a TOS actually may possess?
I think this court made the right decision. If congress really wants TOS terms to be the law, then congress should have been a lot more explicit about this.