I beg to differ here... Did it really shrink that much? I am talking absolute terms, not relative terms. In relative terms absolutely it shrank on a massive scale, but I wonder on an absolute scale????
You are arguing against a position without even knowing whether or not you are wrong?
My concern is the overwhelming willingness to be treated unlawfully so as to avoid the consequences, and yet so little consideration is given to the consequences of allowing society as a whole to be consistently treated unlawfully.
The way these things are best challenged is usually after-the-fact in court. If you want to ignore that and challenge police while they're doing your duty, you'd better have a really good reason.
The fact that an order was unlawfully given is a really good reason to disobey. The fact that you are engaged in capturing a photographic record of events that will otherwise be lost forever, is another one.
The moment an officer attempts to exceed their authority they are no longer doing their duties. The only problem is that in almost every jurisdiction, your sincere belief that the order is unlawful is not good enough justification to disobey. The order must ALSO actually be unlawful. The officer is not under an obligation to convince you that the order is lawful (although sometimes they are required to say certain special words). If it is a lawful order, you must obey whether you understand why.
unless you have a really good reason to risk being in the wrong, you might want to just comply to be on the safe side.
maybe that is what you intended to say?
However.. I'm going to pretty much assume any cop who destroys video evidence on purpose without a judges order was not acting lawfully. destroying video evidence goes against their training and standard procedures.
The good news is that, in a court, if one party destroys evidence, the court is required to assume that the evidence is favorable to the other party. I.e. if the cops destroy a video, then the court assumes that it would be in favor of the defendant.
the court is not required to assume anything. It is just another piece of evidence that the court must consider in totality with all the other evidence when deciding how reliable a particular witness is. It isn't as cut n dry as you make it.
No, what I'm saying is that it is possible for police to issue a lawful dispersal order to a group or area (not passing judgement on whether or not this one was, since I don't have all of the information), and you're not exempt because you happen to have a camera in your hand.
even if such an order was given, and even when it is lawful (which is short of a potential riot or other special circumstance probably isn't), police still don't have any right to destroy the video. The video is private property.
Further, it's the submitter's OPINION that this person was being arrested "illegally". That's something the courts will now decide. The troubling part is that the video would probably be the key evidence in such a case, I agree.
Of course, it's pretty clear that he disobeyed a direct (and likely lawful) order to disperse, and whatever happens after that I sort of lose interest in.:-/
Obviously it depends upon the jurisdiction, but in most places police do not have the authority to order people to disperse except under certain special circumstances.
If we're talking about an officer who would actually DELETE THE VIDEO then I seriously doubt the order to disperse was lawful because it is that video which would prove in court that the order to disperse was lawful. The act of deleting the video reasonably implies that the motive behind the order to disperse was simply to prevent the video from being made. In most places, destroying evidence is not a valid justification to interfere with a persons liberty and order them to disperse and consequently the order itself was without a valid purpose and was thus unlawful.
police have no right to destroy other peoples private property at their own discretion.
The reason working societies mostly make acting within the law the only accepted determination of "good" and "evil" are that these things can be relative.
Actually it is only the Law which makes the Law the only accepted determination of good and evil. And this has much more to do with the fact that the ruling class that writes the laws does not care about good or evil but only cares about what is going to continue to benefit them. This can be codified in law, and therefore this is exactly what happens.
Nonetheless it is moot.
If a working society wants to punish a good deed merely because it is against the law, then that society's laws are immoral and they should be disobeyed.
The fact that there are people who advocate disobedience and have the courage to disobey, is the only thing that is keeping the laws from becoming infinitely oppressive.
Why would we want a monoculture? Just invites a failure mode to tear down the whole thing.
If you end up spending most of your own planet's wealth on starting a civilisation that soon has no relationship with you, what exactly is the point?
If you define purpose only in terms of how it benefits yourself, you might as well just kill yourself now. In the end you die, and by that "purpose" nothing you do will avail you in the long run.
If you define purpose in terms of how you can benefit the propogation of life itself, then the justification for seeding the stars is obvious.
a couple of years of GDP in 1970s value is not most of the planets wealth. It might be most of the planet product for a while, but then again with such a vast undertaking, the planets production will drastically increase. Its not like we would be tearing down our cities and roads for raw materials and leaving the earth a barren wasteland.
The point is to spread life to the stars. That seems far more meaningful to me than any other purpose philosophers or priests have dreamed up so far.
So selling medicine must be really bad. Profiting when people get sick.
And what about funeral directors? In the incentive to murder people in order to make a buck stakes.
I disagree.
Selling medicine for your usual price is not exploiting a misfortune. The customer might be only slightly ill, or might be deathly ill. It does not normally have any bearing on the price. a generic drug sold to a person who is dying could cost 50 cents. Whereas totally elective procedures such as laser hair removal cost thousands of dollars.
If the supplier took note of the fact that you're going to die if you don't get your medicine right now and jacked up the dispensing fee to exploit your vulnerability then yes, this would be EVIL.
Raising the price of medicine to exploit a disaster or local outbreak would be bad (and in particular where there is no actual shortage, but you are simply withholding the supply for more money). In fact it would be illegal in many areas.
However, yes, to a certain extent many people do consider the for profit selling of medicine to be immoral, and they do see a moral hazard, and that is why those people support socialized universal healthcare.
funeral directors who raise their prices in response to the the degree which the death was unexpected would be exploiting misfortune. Funeral directors who charge their usual fixed rates at the normal market rates, are simply providing a service. Someone has to do it.
The price of Whitney's music didn't increase because of a shortage of bandwidth. There was no actual market justification for it. It was an attempt to exploit the free advertising caused by her death. It is exploiting her misfortune for personal gain.
By the time that happened, the country is already having a major crisis and is probably on the brink or already engaged in a civil war. It would take a lot more than a petition by a few concerned citizens.
They sell her music in order to make a profit, that's a given. There's likely going to be increased interest in that music for a short time.
They could raise the price in expectation that people will pay a little more in the short term. They could lower the price in the expectation that the increased exposure will be generating more potential customers who might buy it if it's cheap enough. They could leave it the same and just bank the increased demand at the current price.
How are any of those options more "evil" than any others? It's all about making money - that's why they sell the music in the first place. Sleazy isn't a symonym for evil and hence isn't a factor.
Sure they could also make it free for a week as a tribute. That would be a nice thing to do. But surely not doing that isn't evil?
I would say that trying to profit off the pain and suffering of others is evil. It creates a moral hazard. Record labels will be incentivized to murder their artists to boost profit.
You can't vote a government out, you can only vote another government in...
Not true in Canada. Citizens can petition to have the government thrown out... plus the opposition can have a vote of non confidence. The second almost happened; the first would have happened except for the fact that Canadians had no viable option to Harper that looked like they could do better.
Theoretically the citizens can petition for anything they want to and the government can simply ignore it. The opposition can't succeed in a vote of non-confidence unless they get a majority of MPs in parliament to agree, which they wont, since the majority is already in power.
so if the first happened it would achieve nothing. And the 2nd will not happen in a majority government unless the PM loses the confidence of his own party. The confidence of the opposition is moot.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee traveled to a courtroom in East Texas to give his testimony on how, if upheld, the Eolas Technologies & University of California patent on Web Interactivity could prove to be a major threat to the Internet as it's known today.
That's very nice, but is it actually relevant to the case? I'd have thought the case would be decided on its own merits, rather that the consequences.
The validity of a patent may depend on ones interpretation of the law.
One might be arguing that congress or the constitution never intended to give a private party the power to wreak havoc on the entire telecommunications and thus any interpretation of law which ends in that effect must be erroneous somehow. Perhaps you are demonstrating the possible harm that an over liberal interpretation of "non-obvious" could cause.
you might also be going for jury nullification.
In any case the opposing side has the right to object to the introduction of this evidence, if they believed it was irrelevant. The burden of establishing relevance is on the side wishing to introduce it. The court is responsible to ensure the trial proceeds efficiently and the judge would also question the introduction of any seemingly irrelevant evidence, even if the opposing side didn't. Occasionally testimony is given, only to be excluded AFTER THE FACT due to non relevance as well, because sometimes it is impossible to gauge the relevance until after the evidence is actually heard.
It took The Federation some time to figure out how to defeat The Borg. In fact, they were only able to do it when the writers got stupid and decided The Borg needed a centralized Queen, for a wonderfully convenient single point of failure.
People who were convicted of "crimes" we now understand should never have been crimes in the first place should not be given "pardons" they should be given APOLOGIES.
An Apology should fully strike the conviction and even the indictment from the criminal record and furthermore should open the door for a lawsuit for reparations.
Size of Estonia: 17500 square miles Size of Canada: 3855103 square miles
When you have 200 times as much space, laying cable is expensive.
It is irrelevant how many square miles exist: the question is the distance of the customer from the nearest point of presence of the ISP and how many customers are served from each POP.
the Greater Toronto Area alone, has over 3 times the population of all of estonia concentrated in an area about 1/7th the size.
When you add in the population of the immediate vicinities of the largest cities in Canada Toronto 5.5 Million Montreal 3.9 million Ottawa, 1.1 million Edmonton 1 million Calgary 1 million Vancouver 2.4 million Quebec City 750 thousand
you have over 50% of the population of the entire county living in cities with large populations larger than 50% of the entire country of Estonia. And much denser than Estonia's average population density.
GPL - my stuff must remain free for everyone to use, modify and distribute AND all your stuff that has touched my stuff is now part of my stuff and must remain free for everyone to use, modify and distribute.
That's exactly how copyright is designed to work. If you copy someone's stuff, then they have partial or perhaps even total ownership of your copy.
If they're transcribing source code then they've absolutely within the bounds of derivative work and will fall foul of copyright law.
There's a well known method of avoidance of this issue. What you do is set up two teams. One team looks at the original source code and writes a detailed spec based on that code. The second team never sees a single line of code from the original project. They use the detailed spec to recreate the program "from scratch" but such as to perform exactly or nearly exactly the same as the original program.
This method has two safeguards. For one, your "blind" team will most likely write code quite different from the original project. Secondly, you have a clear paper trail of this process so that when the lawyers come a-knockin' you have a stack of documents to show that you did it in a legit fashion.
Why do you figure this legit? If A is a derivative of B and B infringes on the copyright of C, then guess what: A is an infringing derivative of C.
If you write "detailed spec based on that code" that accurately captures exactly the nature of the code, then the spec itself becomes a derivative work and is a copyright violation. The source code produced from that spec is a derivative of the spec and is thus also a copyright violation.
And I'm quite sure the GPL doesn't require them to tell anyone it's GPL licensed before they sell it.
The GPL does not require anybody to do anything - IT IS A LICENSE - NOT A CONTRACT. However the GPL does not grant you the right to claim to be the author of something you did not write.
GPL forces others to share if they do certain actions.
GPL does not force you to do anything.
Making and distributing copies or derivative works of material that is still under copyright and without authorization from the copyright holder is prohibited by copyright law. The GPL is a method for obtaining authorization.
The GPL is a license. No one forces you to accept the terms of the license. You can simply obtain a license directly from the copyright holder just like any proprietary software, and privately work out whatever terms you find agreeable.
Except that in the real world today, vendors typically do fix it and take a hit, even if the fault is entirely that of the customer. Reason being simple - the desire to avoid bad publicity, or lose repeat business.
what vendors do for good publicity is part of their marketing and it is a business decision. No one is FORCING them to do it, and it isnt grounds for expecting consumers to relinquish their property rights in the merchandise after sale.
In any case a vendor that spends a dollar helping a customer out of a bind is quite likely to then spend 3 dollars telling the world how they go out of their way to help a customer out of a bind.
How about the death penalty? How about the invasion of Iraq? People who live in glass houses... Before you try to take the speck out of your brother's eye, remove the plank from your own.
Sorry I don't know what you're trying to say. Apparently your parables are either nonsense or else fallacious.
First: the Invasion of Iraq and the death penalty did not cause of female genital mutilation or honor killings so who cares? (And I'm against them, not that it has any relevance whatsoever to my claim that barbarism must be stopped regardless who practices it)
Second: People who support or tolerate female genital mutilation and honor killings or enable them with your irrational & immoral post-modern cultural relativism meme are not my brothers.
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I beg to differ here... Did it really shrink that much? I am talking absolute terms, not relative terms. In relative terms absolutely it shrank on a massive scale, but I wonder on an absolute scale????
You are arguing against a position without even knowing whether or not you are wrong?
(PS: you are wrong).
My concern is the overwhelming willingness to be treated unlawfully so as to avoid the consequences, and yet so little consideration is given to the consequences of allowing society as a whole to be consistently treated unlawfully.
It's called 'cowardess' for a reason.
The way these things are best challenged is usually after-the-fact in court. If you want to ignore that and challenge police while they're doing your duty, you'd better have a really good reason.
The fact that an order was unlawfully given is a really good reason to disobey. The fact that you are engaged in capturing a photographic record of events that will otherwise be lost forever, is another one.
The moment an officer attempts to exceed their authority they are no longer doing their duties. The only problem is that in almost every jurisdiction, your sincere belief that the order is unlawful is not good enough justification to disobey. The order must ALSO actually be unlawful. The officer is not under an obligation to convince you that the order is lawful (although sometimes they are required to say certain special words). If it is a lawful order, you must obey whether you understand why.
unless you have a really good reason to risk being in the wrong, you might want to just comply to be on the safe side.
maybe that is what you intended to say?
However.. I'm going to pretty much assume any cop who destroys video evidence on purpose without a judges order was not acting lawfully. destroying video evidence goes against their training and standard procedures.
The good news is that, in a court, if one party destroys evidence, the court is required to assume that the evidence is favorable to the other party. I.e. if the cops destroy a video, then the court assumes that it would be in favor of the defendant.
the court is not required to assume anything. It is just another piece of evidence that the court must consider in totality with all the other evidence when deciding how reliable a particular witness is. It isn't as cut n dry as you make it.
No, what I'm saying is that it is possible for police to issue a lawful dispersal order to a group or area (not passing judgement on whether or not this one was, since I don't have all of the information), and you're not exempt because you happen to have a camera in your hand.
even if such an order was given, and even when it is lawful (which is short of a potential riot or other special circumstance probably isn't), police still don't have any right to destroy the video. The video is private property.
Further, it's the submitter's OPINION that this person was being arrested "illegally". That's something the courts will now decide. The troubling part is that the video would probably be the key evidence in such a case, I agree.
Of course, it's pretty clear that he disobeyed a direct (and likely lawful) order to disperse, and whatever happens after that I sort of lose interest in. :-/
Obviously it depends upon the jurisdiction, but in most places police do not have the authority to order people to disperse except under certain special circumstances.
If we're talking about an officer who would actually DELETE THE VIDEO then I seriously doubt the order to disperse was lawful because it is that video which would prove in court that the order to disperse was lawful. The act of deleting the video reasonably implies that the motive behind the order to disperse was simply to prevent the video from being made. In most places, destroying evidence is not a valid justification to interfere with a persons liberty and order them to disperse and consequently the order itself was without a valid purpose and was thus unlawful.
police have no right to destroy other peoples private property at their own discretion.
The reason working societies mostly make acting within the law the only accepted determination of "good" and "evil" are that these things can be relative.
Actually it is only the Law which makes the Law the only accepted determination of good and evil. And this has much more to do with the fact that the ruling class that writes the laws does not care about good or evil but only cares about what is going to continue to benefit them. This can be codified in law, and therefore this is exactly what happens.
Nonetheless it is moot.
If a working society wants to punish a good deed merely because it is against the law, then that society's laws are immoral and they should be disobeyed.
The fact that there are people who advocate disobedience and have the courage to disobey, is the only thing that is keeping the laws from becoming infinitely oppressive.
Why would we want a monoculture? Just invites a failure mode to tear down the whole thing.
If you end up spending most of your own planet's wealth on starting a civilisation that soon has no relationship with you, what exactly is the point?
If you define purpose only in terms of how it benefits yourself, you might as well just kill yourself now. In the end you die, and by that "purpose" nothing you do will avail you in the long run.
If you define purpose in terms of how you can benefit the propogation of life itself, then the justification for seeding the stars is obvious.
a couple of years of GDP in 1970s value is not most of the planets wealth. It might be most of the planet product for a while, but then again with such a vast undertaking, the planets production will drastically increase. Its not like we would be tearing down our cities and roads for raw materials and leaving the earth a barren wasteland.
The point is to spread life to the stars. That seems far more meaningful to me than any other purpose philosophers or priests have dreamed up so far.
So selling medicine must be really bad. Profiting when people get sick.
And what about funeral directors? In the incentive to murder people in order to make a buck stakes.
I disagree.
Selling medicine for your usual price is not exploiting a misfortune. The customer might be only slightly ill, or might be deathly ill. It does not normally have any bearing on the price. a generic drug sold to a person who is dying could cost 50 cents. Whereas totally elective procedures such as laser hair removal cost thousands of dollars.
If the supplier took note of the fact that you're going to die if you don't get your medicine right now and jacked up the dispensing fee to exploit your vulnerability then yes, this would be EVIL.
Raising the price of medicine to exploit a disaster or local outbreak would be bad (and in particular where there is no actual shortage, but you are simply withholding the supply for more money). In fact it would be illegal in many areas.
However, yes, to a certain extent many people do consider the for profit selling of medicine to be immoral, and they do see a moral hazard, and that is why those people support socialized universal healthcare.
funeral directors who raise their prices in response to the the degree which the death was unexpected would be exploiting misfortune. Funeral directors who charge their usual fixed rates at the normal market rates, are simply providing a service. Someone has to do it.
The price of Whitney's music didn't increase because of a shortage of bandwidth. There was no actual market justification for it. It was an attempt to exploit the free advertising caused by her death. It is exploiting her misfortune for personal gain.
By the time that happened, the country is already having a major crisis and is probably on the brink or already engaged in a civil war. It would take a lot more than a petition by a few concerned citizens.
But yes you are right.
Again, how is that evil?
They sell her music in order to make a profit, that's a given. There's likely going to be increased interest in that music for a short time.
They could raise the price in expectation that people will pay a little more in the short term. They could lower the price in the expectation that the increased exposure will be generating more potential customers who might buy it if it's cheap enough. They could leave it the same and just bank the increased demand at the current price.
How are any of those options more "evil" than any others? It's all about making money - that's why they sell the music in the first place. Sleazy isn't a symonym for evil and hence isn't a factor.
Sure they could also make it free for a week as a tribute. That would be a nice thing to do. But surely not doing that isn't evil?
I would say that trying to profit off the pain and suffering of others is evil. It creates a moral hazard. Record labels will be incentivized to murder their artists to boost profit.
You can't vote a government out, you can only vote another government in...
Not true in Canada. Citizens can petition to have the government thrown out... plus the opposition can have a vote of non confidence. The second almost happened; the first would have happened except for the fact that Canadians had no viable option to Harper that looked like they could do better.
Theoretically the citizens can petition for anything they want to and the government can simply ignore it. The opposition can't succeed in a vote of non-confidence unless they get a majority of MPs in parliament to agree, which they wont, since the majority is already in power.
so if the first happened it would achieve nothing. And the 2nd will not happen in a majority government unless the PM loses the confidence of his own party. The confidence of the opposition is moot.
That's very nice, but is it actually relevant to the case? I'd have thought the case would be decided on its own merits, rather that the consequences.
The validity of a patent may depend on ones interpretation of the law.
One might be arguing that congress or the constitution never intended to give a private party the power to wreak havoc on the entire telecommunications and thus any interpretation of law which ends in that effect must be erroneous somehow. Perhaps you are demonstrating the possible harm that an over liberal interpretation of "non-obvious" could cause.
you might also be going for jury nullification.
In any case the opposing side has the right to object to the introduction of this evidence, if they believed it was irrelevant. The burden of establishing relevance is on the side wishing to introduce it. The court is responsible to ensure the trial proceeds efficiently and the judge would also question the introduction of any seemingly irrelevant evidence, even if the opposing side didn't. Occasionally testimony is given, only to be excluded AFTER THE FACT due to non relevance as well, because sometimes it is impossible to gauge the relevance until after the evidence is actually heard.
It took The Federation some time to figure out how to defeat The Borg. In fact, they were only able to do it when the writers got stupid and decided The Borg needed a centralized Queen, for a wonderfully convenient single point of failure.
thank you for ruining the Borg for me.
People who were convicted of "crimes" we now understand should never have been crimes in the first place should not be given "pardons" they should be given APOLOGIES.
An Apology should fully strike the conviction and even the indictment from the criminal record and furthermore should open the door for a lawsuit for reparations.
Then why call him God?
Because nobody knows how the tides work!
Size of Estonia: 17500 square miles
Size of Canada: 3855103 square miles
When you have 200 times as much space, laying cable is expensive.
It is irrelevant how many square miles exist: the question is the distance of the customer from the nearest point of presence of the ISP and how many customers are served from each POP.
the Greater Toronto Area alone, has over 3 times the population of all of estonia concentrated in an area about 1/7th the size.
When you add in the population of the immediate vicinities of the largest cities in Canada
Toronto 5.5 Million
Montreal 3.9 million
Ottawa, 1.1 million
Edmonton 1 million
Calgary 1 million
Vancouver 2.4 million
Quebec City 750 thousand
you have over 50% of the population of the entire county living in cities with large populations larger than 50% of the entire country of Estonia. And much denser than Estonia's average population density.
I believe it was Andrew Jackson who was most famous for simply ignoring the Supreme Court's decisions.
I think he's also famous for being the target of the first assassination attempt against a US President.
GPL - my stuff must remain free for everyone to use, modify and distribute AND all your stuff that has touched my stuff is now part of my stuff and must remain free for everyone to use, modify and distribute.
That's exactly how copyright is designed to work. If you copy someone's stuff, then they have partial or perhaps even total ownership of your copy.
If they're transcribing source code then they've absolutely within the bounds of derivative work and will fall foul of copyright law.
There's a well known method of avoidance of this issue. What you do is set up two teams. One team looks at the original source code and writes a detailed spec based on that code. The second team never sees a single line of code from the original project. They use the detailed spec to recreate the program "from scratch" but such as to perform exactly or nearly exactly the same as the original program.
This method has two safeguards. For one, your "blind" team will most likely write code quite different from the original project. Secondly, you have a clear paper trail of this process so that when the lawyers come a-knockin' you have a stack of documents to show that you did it in a legit fashion.
Why do you figure this legit? If A is a derivative of B and B infringes on the copyright of C, then guess what: A is an infringing derivative of C.
If you write "detailed spec based on that code" that accurately captures exactly the nature of the code, then the spec itself becomes a derivative work and is a copyright violation. The source code produced from that spec is a derivative of the spec and is thus also a copyright violation.
And I'm quite sure the GPL doesn't require them to tell anyone it's GPL licensed before they sell it.
The GPL does not require anybody to do anything - IT IS A LICENSE - NOT A CONTRACT. However the GPL does not grant you the right to claim to be the author of something you did not write.
GPL forces others to share if they do certain actions.
GPL does not force you to do anything.
Making and distributing copies or derivative works of material that is still under copyright and without authorization from the copyright holder is prohibited by copyright law. The GPL is a method for obtaining authorization.
The GPL is a license. No one forces you to accept the terms of the license. You can simply obtain a license directly from the copyright holder just like any proprietary software, and privately work out whatever terms you find agreeable.
Except that in the real world today, vendors typically do fix it and take a hit, even if the fault is entirely that of the customer. Reason being simple - the desire to avoid bad publicity, or lose repeat business.
what vendors do for good publicity is part of their marketing and it is a business decision. No one is FORCING them to do it, and it isnt grounds for expecting consumers to relinquish their property rights in the merchandise after sale.
In any case a vendor that spends a dollar helping a customer out of a bind is quite likely to then spend 3 dollars telling the world how they go out of their way to help a customer out of a bind.
How about the death penalty? How about the invasion of Iraq? People who live in glass houses... Before you try to take the speck out of your brother's eye, remove the plank from your own.
Sorry I don't know what you're trying to say. Apparently your parables are either nonsense or else fallacious.
First: the Invasion of Iraq and the death penalty did not cause of female genital mutilation or honor killings so who cares?
(And I'm against them, not that it has any relevance whatsoever to my claim that barbarism must be stopped regardless who practices it)
Second: People who support or tolerate female genital mutilation and honor killings or enable them with your irrational & immoral post-modern cultural relativism meme are not my brothers.
Leave it to an Anonymous Coward to put a post up here in favor of genital mutilation, and honor killings.