According to IRS figures, about 47% of the Federal income tax returns (it varies by year -- I think the 47% number is a bit old) show no tax liability and some of these result in "negative" tax because of being eligible for refundable tax credits.
Of course, some people don't even file a return because they don't have any traceable income that requires them to (and either are not eligible for a refundable credit or don't know they are). On the other hand, some returns reflect two people who are married and filing jointly. So the number of "returns filed" is not the same as the number of "people".
This does not include, of course, state and local taxes (such as property tax or sales tax or state income tax or business taxes) or federal taxes such as the tax on gasoline and diesel or payroll taxes (for Social Security and Medicare) which many of these "47%" do pay.
And, the claim that these 47% "never paid taxes before" is likely wrong -- some people pay federal income taxes some years and not other years. In particular, retired people who are largely or entirely living on their Social Security may not owe any Federal income taxes but may have paid Federal income taxes for many decades of their working lives.
Research and development expenses: $7,690 million
Cost of Sales: $9,648 million (Note this has nothing to do with sales in the marketing sense, this is what it costs to make/buy what they sell)
Selling, informational and administrative expenses: $14,809 million (Note this includes most non-production and non-R&D costs including insurance, rent, shipping and handling, IT, executive compensation, property taxes, legal expenses, et al.)
So, by the traditional sense, the "marketing budget" (which is some fraction of SG&A) isn't an "order of magnitude" greater than R&D expenses since, in common usage, the term "order of magnitude" implies a power of ten - i.e., at least 10x. It's well less than a factor of two.
If someone goes on a rampage killing CxOs when the CxOs are following the law, of course those rampaging people should be put in prison for the rest of their lives or, if the state has the death penalty, executed -- just as if they killed you because they didn't like you. Do you support people who kill abortion doctors just because they perform legal abortions but the killers just don't like that?
It's shocking to hear someone hoping for innocent people to be killed. Have you considered ISIS as a career?
Of course I'm defending "those people" from jail time. They haven't broken any laws. Just as I would defend you from jail time because you exercise your First Amendment rights to speak out against them. Of course, I would not defend your right to incite people to riot and kill -- something you are edging up against -- as that is not protected First Amendment speech.
Nope, that is you projecting your belief that everything can be done better by government.
Governments work very quickly, although not economically efficiently, in times of major crisis (partially because they are so [in current times] so massive and have so many spare resources laying around, partially because they can and do spend money they don't have, partially because they are not driven by an explicit profit motive [assuming you don't count politicians' desires to be reelected as "profit motive"], partially because they can change the rules and/or use force without consequences as needed, and partially because they have little exposure to liability). The response to natural and man-made disasters like Katrina come to mind. The government could buy tens of thousands of toxic trailers without proper review -- and no one felt accountable. But, because of having more Coast Guard resources than they need, they could divert lots of crews/helicopters to picking people off of roof-tops.
Governments generally work excruciatingly slowly and inefficiently in most other times. They tend to have inefficient, antiquated, cumbersome, and bureaucratic processes -- but they don't care much because the voters don't, each, have enough of a stake individually in the hundreds of thousands of such wasteful processes to notice and no single politician is accountable. In businesses, there is an accountable person - always the CEO and on down. In government, the blame gets distributed (for example, anything that goes wrong is blamed on Bush or the Republican Congress by liberals and on Obama by conservatives).
For big infrastructure projects, government can take on risks that no private business would take on because when the project is over budget, government just keeps pouring money into it and few voters really care as the next generation will end up paying the bill. The only option for a private company in the same boat is to cancel the project or, perhaps, go bankrupt -- so it's hard for them to justify such projects. Sometimes these systems result in a the government pouring money down a sinkhole for many many decades -- for example, many mass transit systems lose money on every rider (in some cases, hiring a private cab for each rider would have saved money). Sometimes (perhaps the Big Dig is an example) the projects turn out okay on an operational basis but never could have been cost justified had the construction costs been known more accurately up front.
Remember, the government was responsible for Flint water, the Vietnam war, numerous very expensive and completely failed IT projects, Freddie and Fannie, the Challenger, Columbia, and Apollo 1,...
If you want efficiency and accountability, government is unlikely to be the good place to look. If you want something high risk and/or done quickly without regard for cost, government is a great place to look.
They would be "replaced" and drug development (which are pursued, which are not) would then be decided by risk adverse bureaucrats and special interest politicians (some famous person has rare disease X and that results in, irrationally, calls and "online petitions" to spend a lot of money on drugs to treat X -- thereby reducing spending on development of treatments for much more common diseases).
This stifles innovation and, after 15 years or so, it will be obvious to all that the rate of improvements in medicine have slowed to a crawl and then it will take (at least) 15 more years to reverse this trend (by, again, allowing private enterprise to profit for a short time as the market will bear from their development efforts - perhaps via a Constitutional Amendment to give investors the confidence that the government won't come back and screw it up again).
Remember, government and "conventional wisdom" are not always correct, often private businesses do a better job given the freedom to do so.
Sure, but should the government does that, thinking people will realize that it will be the end of new drug development in the US. The government would have to take over the manufacturing of drugs - mostly stealing IP from other countries. Over time, drug development (and of course production, but that's already often the case) would all be overseas covered by foreign patents. When the US started ignoring patents, a trade war would ensue with other countries imposing a tariff on US imports to compensate the foreign drug companies for the IP that the US stole from them (as they should).
Mob rule really doesn't work out that well in spite of what progressives believe as private property rights are pretty important to motivating innovation.
The difference is, the US market is pretty much the last place they can actually make a profit when taking into account R&D costs of the successful drugs and the ones that never make it to market (or make it to market and result in lawsuits/settlements) so I would expect them to defend this last moat vigorously.
Of course, maybe they figure that if the US consumer stops subsidizing other countries, they can just raise prices in other countries using the same strategy I expect they would be using now with Medicaid in the US.
Why would Mylan agree to such terms for Medicaid? If Mylan just says "This is the price, buy it, don't buy it, develop an alternative, approve an alternative -- we don't care. If you don't commit to buying some number of units, we may not be able to meet your demands so you will have to buy them at inflated prices on the secondary market. Let us know by next Tuesday.", then Medicaid needs to pay for it or declare that it's not a covered medication for those on Medicaid.
Presumably Medicaid could institute a training program to teach injection without "autoinjectors" to everyone (patients, caregivers, responders in schools etc) who might need to use the "low-tech" solution. However, that would probably be much more expensive than paying list price.
It seems that pharma, if they played their cards right, would discover that the government actually has little negotiating power since Medicare (especially) and Medicaid patients will go to their Congresscritters to complain if a drug isn't covered and their representatives would, for political rather than strictly medical or economic reasons, insist that the drug be available regardless of cost. For an example of how political forces result in bizarre outcomes, consider that Medicare covers late stage renal failure for those under 65 for some reason, but almost no other chronic and expensive conditions are covered for those under 65.
So, most of the people screaming on the coaster now will be what we are used to (mostly teenagers on a date -- been there, done that). However, there will also be one 60 year old guy at the back of each car who really has a good reason to scream. I'm betting he doesn't buy his picture from the "buy your picture here" guy at the end of the ride because who would want to be reminded of that?
How about forbidding using the words "Allah" and "jihad" on the internet? After all, some sites that encourage terrorism and actually publish instructions to make bombs use such terms.
Better to be safe than sorry in a corner case - it's just the First (and, in this case, the Second) Amendment. That's a very small part of the United States Constitution so such limitations are nothing to be concerned about.
What is wrong with that? Surely you don't expect every politician to, without help, personally draft every word of legislation that they propose? No politician can be an expert on the details of computer security, warfare, welfare, medicine, nuclear power, geology, oil drilling, education, global finance, genetics, food safety, space exploration, micro economics, the penal system, economics of healthcare, religion, etc... Of course they seek the assistance of others in crafting the details.
However, at the end of the day, they have to vote for/against legislation and they are accountable to the voters there -- what's the problem?
Why the disclosure? If Plan B makes more sense than Plan A, let those voting for Plan B explain why they did so to those they represent or risk recall or losing in the next election.
The source of an idea doesn't make any difference -- the idea is what matters. When code reviewing code for correctness, style, etc, why do you care who wrote it?
This is why peer reviews of articles are ideally blind - the reviewer doesn't know who wrote the paper so the authorship can't influence them, just the technical details of the paper (of course, even then, reviewers can often make a pretty good guess at the primary authors just based on content and direction).
What is illegal about proposing and drafting legislation and asking a politician to carry it forward?
When you call your councilperson's office and say "People are driving too fast through my neighborhood and putting our kids at risk. Please get the law changed so we can get speed bumps installed on the 300 through 600 blocks of Oak St", what are you doing?
The summary (of course I didn't RTFAs) doesn't suggest bribery or anything of that nature.
Perhaps he wanted to make sure it worked. It's kind of a bummer to walk around the rest of your life with only half your brain blown out through the front of your head, it's best to make sure you got it all.
The 18th Amendment was legal authority -- just as much if the Postal Clause had originally been omitted from Article I Section 8 and a later Amendment gave Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads". Just because a portion of the Constitution (which includes all the ratified Amendments) is "political" doesn't preclude it from being legal authority. Virtually every phrase in the Constitution can be viewed as "political policy".
Should that happen, the voters of the state can change their state's constitution to limit the control the state has -- or, just vote in state level politicians that will eliminate laws that the state's voters find undesirable.
Just as we could amend the United States Constitution to grant Congress the ability to enact laws that implement Social Security or Medicare or to ban people from taking medications that improve their health or save their life. Perhaps some day we will do so.
Remember the quaint old days when a Constitutional Amendment was thought necessary to ban manufacturing, sale, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages? Now the FDA could just probably just declare it a controlled substance and ban not only its manufacturing, sale, importation, and transportation but it's possession and use as well.
Yes, but had he lived to be 105 he would have taken out far more than he put in. Social Security is really a forced purchase of an inflation adjusted life annuity with a strong politically progressive component baked in.
The politically progressive part is that those who contribute the least get back more benefit per dollar contributed than those that contribute the most. The first dollar (and all the dollars put in by by low paid workers or those who work only a few years) result in a benefit payment SIX TIMES higher than the last dollar put in just before hitting the cap for highly paid workers who approach the cap for most of their career. And all contributions past the "highest 35 years of earnings" returns NOTHING in benefits.
The requirement for a cell phone w/text service is an absurd requirement. It may be a fine default, but there should be alternatives (other than VOIP based text services with their inherent security problems).
Some people live in areas where they have broadband (at least DSL) but, due to the terrain, there is no cell coverage at a significant percentage of the homes. To use the SSA's online service, these people are likely to end up at their local coffee house using the public WiFi to access their SSA account -- not a great idea.
That would depend on state law. In some states it would be illegal, in others perhaps not.
However, in no case would would what you describe be a Federal Fourth Amendment case (assuming, of course, that you are not either a government actor or acting at their direction).
Stressman v. American Blackhawk Broadcasting is not relevant to this case. Stressman was a finding by a state (not Federal) court on a civil (not criminal) case between two private parties (not the government and a private party). It had absolutely nothing to do with law enforcement violating a defendant's rights enumerated in the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
In the San Mateo case, the opinion makes it clear that the defendants (as well as participants in other completely unrelated conversations that were recorded by the microphones) consciously were trying to keep their conversations private as evidenced by speaking in hushed tones, stopping talking when another party approached, etc. As there were no other people close enough to hear the defendant's conversations, they had an expectation of privacy -- an expectation which the microphones violated.
I don't know how this will go on appeal (if there is one), but Stressman won't be cited by either party in such appeals.
Note, for example, that the Supreme Court has held (Kyllo v. United States) that the police's use of FLIR from a public vantage point to "peer" through walls of a private home to determine if "grow lights" were being used inside constituted a "search" and that, without a warrant, it was a violation of the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. Note, however, that Kyllo, in no way prohibits me from standing on the sidewalk in front of my neighbor's house and using FLIR to figure out what is going on inside (some state laws may do so however).
The lineup in Kyllo was somewhat interesting. It was 5-4 with Scalia, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer finding the search violated the Fourth Amendment while Stevens, Rehnquist, O'Connor and Kennedy dissented. The common belief that the conservative members of the court are "anti-defendant" was once again dispelled in this case.
This was a finding in a US District Court, not a US Court of Appeals or US Supreme Court so it has little, if any, precedential value. Any court (and even this same judge) is free to ignore this ruling in analyzing other cases.
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According to IRS figures, about 47% of the Federal income tax returns (it varies by year -- I think the 47% number is a bit old) show no tax liability and some of these result in "negative" tax because of being eligible for refundable tax credits.
Of course, some people don't even file a return because they don't have any traceable income that requires them to (and either are not eligible for a refundable credit or don't know they are). On the other hand, some returns reflect two people who are married and filing jointly. So the number of "returns filed" is not the same as the number of "people".
This does not include, of course, state and local taxes (such as property tax or sales tax or state income tax or business taxes) or federal taxes such as the tax on gasoline and diesel or payroll taxes (for Social Security and Medicare) which many of these "47%" do pay.
And, the claim that these 47% "never paid taxes before" is likely wrong -- some people pay federal income taxes some years and not other years. In particular, retired people who are largely or entirely living on their Social Security may not owe any Federal income taxes but may have paid Federal income taxes for many decades of their working lives.
Okay, lets just take Pfizer as an example. From their 2015 financial report...
Research and development expenses: $7,690 million
Cost of Sales: $9,648 million (Note this has nothing to do with sales in the marketing sense, this is what it costs to make/buy what they sell)
Selling, informational and administrative expenses: $14,809 million (Note this includes most non-production and non-R&D costs including insurance, rent, shipping and handling, IT, executive compensation, property taxes, legal expenses, et al.)
So, by the traditional sense, the "marketing budget" (which is some fraction of SG&A) isn't an "order of magnitude" greater than R&D expenses since, in common usage, the term "order of magnitude" implies a power of ten - i.e., at least 10x. It's well less than a factor of two.
If someone goes on a rampage killing CxOs when the CxOs are following the law, of course those rampaging people should be put in prison for the rest of their lives or, if the state has the death penalty, executed -- just as if they killed you because they didn't like you. Do you support people who kill abortion doctors just because they perform legal abortions but the killers just don't like that?
It's shocking to hear someone hoping for innocent people to be killed. Have you considered ISIS as a career?
Of course I'm defending "those people" from jail time. They haven't broken any laws. Just as I would defend you from jail time because you exercise your First Amendment rights to speak out against them. Of course, I would not defend your right to incite people to riot and kill -- something you are edging up against -- as that is not protected First Amendment speech.
Nope, that is you projecting your belief that everything can be done better by government.
Governments work very quickly, although not economically efficiently, in times of major crisis (partially because they are so [in current times] so massive and have so many spare resources laying around, partially because they can and do spend money they don't have, partially because they are not driven by an explicit profit motive [assuming you don't count politicians' desires to be reelected as "profit motive"], partially because they can change the rules and/or use force without consequences as needed, and partially because they have little exposure to liability). The response to natural and man-made disasters like Katrina come to mind. The government could buy tens of thousands of toxic trailers without proper review -- and no one felt accountable. But, because of having more Coast Guard resources than they need, they could divert lots of crews/helicopters to picking people off of roof-tops.
Governments generally work excruciatingly slowly and inefficiently in most other times. They tend to have inefficient, antiquated, cumbersome, and bureaucratic processes -- but they don't care much because the voters don't, each, have enough of a stake individually in the hundreds of thousands of such wasteful processes to notice and no single politician is accountable. In businesses, there is an accountable person - always the CEO and on down. In government, the blame gets distributed (for example, anything that goes wrong is blamed on Bush or the Republican Congress by liberals and on Obama by conservatives).
For big infrastructure projects, government can take on risks that no private business would take on because when the project is over budget, government just keeps pouring money into it and few voters really care as the next generation will end up paying the bill. The only option for a private company in the same boat is to cancel the project or, perhaps, go bankrupt -- so it's hard for them to justify such projects. Sometimes these systems result in a the government pouring money down a sinkhole for many many decades -- for example, many mass transit systems lose money on every rider (in some cases, hiring a private cab for each rider would have saved money). Sometimes (perhaps the Big Dig is an example) the projects turn out okay on an operational basis but never could have been cost justified had the construction costs been known more accurately up front.
Remember, the government was responsible for Flint water, the Vietnam war, numerous very expensive and completely failed IT projects, Freddie and Fannie, the Challenger, Columbia, and Apollo 1, ...
If you want efficiency and accountability, government is unlikely to be the good place to look. If you want something high risk and/or done quickly without regard for cost, government is a great place to look.
They would be "replaced" and drug development (which are pursued, which are not) would then be decided by risk adverse bureaucrats and special interest politicians (some famous person has rare disease X and that results in, irrationally, calls and "online petitions" to spend a lot of money on drugs to treat X -- thereby reducing spending on development of treatments for much more common diseases).
This stifles innovation and, after 15 years or so, it will be obvious to all that the rate of improvements in medicine have slowed to a crawl and then it will take (at least) 15 more years to reverse this trend (by, again, allowing private enterprise to profit for a short time as the market will bear from their development efforts - perhaps via a Constitutional Amendment to give investors the confidence that the government won't come back and screw it up again).
Remember, government and "conventional wisdom" are not always correct, often private businesses do a better job given the freedom to do so.
Sure, but should the government does that, thinking people will realize that it will be the end of new drug development in the US. The government would have to take over the manufacturing of drugs - mostly stealing IP from other countries. Over time, drug development (and of course production, but that's already often the case) would all be overseas covered by foreign patents. When the US started ignoring patents, a trade war would ensue with other countries imposing a tariff on US imports to compensate the foreign drug companies for the IP that the US stole from them (as they should).
Mob rule really doesn't work out that well in spite of what progressives believe as private property rights are pretty important to motivating innovation.
The difference is, the US market is pretty much the last place they can actually make a profit when taking into account R&D costs of the successful drugs and the ones that never make it to market (or make it to market and result in lawsuits/settlements) so I would expect them to defend this last moat vigorously.
Of course, maybe they figure that if the US consumer stops subsidizing other countries, they can just raise prices in other countries using the same strategy I expect they would be using now with Medicaid in the US.
Why would Mylan agree to such terms for Medicaid? If Mylan just says "This is the price, buy it, don't buy it, develop an alternative, approve an alternative -- we don't care. If you don't commit to buying some number of units, we may not be able to meet your demands so you will have to buy them at inflated prices on the secondary market. Let us know by next Tuesday.", then Medicaid needs to pay for it or declare that it's not a covered medication for those on Medicaid.
Presumably Medicaid could institute a training program to teach injection without "autoinjectors" to everyone (patients, caregivers, responders in schools etc) who might need to use the "low-tech" solution. However, that would probably be much more expensive than paying list price.
It seems that pharma, if they played their cards right, would discover that the government actually has little negotiating power since Medicare (especially) and Medicaid patients will go to their Congresscritters to complain if a drug isn't covered and their representatives would, for political rather than strictly medical or economic reasons, insist that the drug be available regardless of cost. For an example of how political forces result in bizarre outcomes, consider that Medicare covers late stage renal failure for those under 65 for some reason, but almost no other chronic and expensive conditions are covered for those under 65.
So, most of the people screaming on the coaster now will be what we are used to (mostly teenagers on a date -- been there, done that). However, there will also be one 60 year old guy at the back of each car who really has a good reason to scream. I'm betting he doesn't buy his picture from the "buy your picture here" guy at the end of the ride because who would want to be reminded of that?
H2O at STP boils at less than 150 degrees Celsius.
(My statement is true. However it has little if any relevance to the story or even a comment thread that digressed - why would I post it here?)
Yes, but not within the country. The post was about communication of 3D gun plans within the country as I understand it.
How about forbidding using the words "Allah" and "jihad" on the internet? After all, some sites that encourage terrorism and actually publish instructions to make bombs use such terms.
Better to be safe than sorry in a corner case - it's just the First (and, in this case, the Second) Amendment. That's a very small part of the United States Constitution so such limitations are nothing to be concerned about.
What is wrong with that? Surely you don't expect every politician to, without help, personally draft every word of legislation that they propose? No politician can be an expert on the details of computer security, warfare, welfare, medicine, nuclear power, geology, oil drilling, education, global finance, genetics, food safety, space exploration, micro economics, the penal system, economics of healthcare, religion, etc... Of course they seek the assistance of others in crafting the details.
However, at the end of the day, they have to vote for/against legislation and they are accountable to the voters there -- what's the problem?
Why the disclosure? If Plan B makes more sense than Plan A, let those voting for Plan B explain why they did so to those they represent or risk recall or losing in the next election.
The source of an idea doesn't make any difference -- the idea is what matters. When code reviewing code for correctness, style, etc, why do you care who wrote it?
This is why peer reviews of articles are ideally blind - the reviewer doesn't know who wrote the paper so the authorship can't influence them, just the technical details of the paper (of course, even then, reviewers can often make a pretty good guess at the primary authors just based on content and direction).
What is illegal about proposing and drafting legislation and asking a politician to carry it forward?
When you call your councilperson's office and say "People are driving too fast through my neighborhood and putting our kids at risk. Please get the law changed so we can get speed bumps installed on the 300 through 600 blocks of Oak St", what are you doing?
The summary (of course I didn't RTFAs) doesn't suggest bribery or anything of that nature.
I would imagine the Brexit supporters are loving this.
Sincerely Yours,
Birds, Bats, and Spiders.
Perhaps he wanted to make sure it worked. It's kind of a bummer to walk around the rest of your life with only half your brain blown out through the front of your head, it's best to make sure you got it all.
The 18th Amendment was legal authority -- just as much if the Postal Clause had originally been omitted from Article I Section 8 and a later Amendment gave Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads". Just because a portion of the Constitution (which includes all the ratified Amendments) is "political" doesn't preclude it from being legal authority. Virtually every phrase in the Constitution can be viewed as "political policy".
It's possible that dealing with the Clintons might just drive some people to suicide.
Should that happen, the voters of the state can change their state's constitution to limit the control the state has -- or, just vote in state level politicians that will eliminate laws that the state's voters find undesirable.
Just as we could amend the United States Constitution to grant Congress the ability to enact laws that implement Social Security or Medicare or to ban people from taking medications that improve their health or save their life. Perhaps some day we will do so.
Remember the quaint old days when a Constitutional Amendment was thought necessary to ban manufacturing, sale, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages? Now the FDA could just probably just declare it a controlled substance and ban not only its manufacturing, sale, importation, and transportation but it's possession and use as well.
Yes, but had he lived to be 105 he would have taken out far more than he put in. Social Security is really a forced purchase of an inflation adjusted life annuity with a strong politically progressive component baked in.
The politically progressive part is that those who contribute the least get back more benefit per dollar contributed than those that contribute the most. The first dollar (and all the dollars put in by by low paid workers or those who work only a few years) result in a benefit payment SIX TIMES higher than the last dollar put in just before hitting the cap for highly paid workers who approach the cap for most of their career. And all contributions past the "highest 35 years of earnings" returns NOTHING in benefits.
The requirement for a cell phone w/text service is an absurd requirement. It may be a fine default, but there should be alternatives (other than VOIP based text services with their inherent security problems).
Some people live in areas where they have broadband (at least DSL) but, due to the terrain, there is no cell coverage at a significant percentage of the homes. To use the SSA's online service, these people are likely to end up at their local coffee house using the public WiFi to access their SSA account -- not a great idea.
That would depend on state law. In some states it would be illegal, in others perhaps not.
However, in no case would would what you describe be a Federal Fourth Amendment case (assuming, of course, that you are not either a government actor or acting at their direction).
Stressman v. American Blackhawk Broadcasting is not relevant to this case. Stressman was a finding by a state (not Federal) court on a civil (not criminal) case between two private parties (not the government and a private party). It had absolutely nothing to do with law enforcement violating a defendant's rights enumerated in the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
In the San Mateo case, the opinion makes it clear that the defendants (as well as participants in other completely unrelated conversations that were recorded by the microphones) consciously were trying to keep their conversations private as evidenced by speaking in hushed tones, stopping talking when another party approached, etc. As there were no other people close enough to hear the defendant's conversations, they had an expectation of privacy -- an expectation which the microphones violated.
I don't know how this will go on appeal (if there is one), but Stressman won't be cited by either party in such appeals.
Note, for example, that the Supreme Court has held (Kyllo v. United States) that the police's use of FLIR from a public vantage point to "peer" through walls of a private home to determine if "grow lights" were being used inside constituted a "search" and that, without a warrant, it was a violation of the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. Note, however, that Kyllo, in no way prohibits me from standing on the sidewalk in front of my neighbor's house and using FLIR to figure out what is going on inside (some state laws may do so however).
The lineup in Kyllo was somewhat interesting. It was 5-4 with Scalia, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer finding the search violated the Fourth Amendment while Stevens, Rehnquist, O'Connor and Kennedy dissented. The common belief that the conservative members of the court are "anti-defendant" was once again dispelled in this case.
This was a finding in a US District Court, not a US Court of Appeals or US Supreme Court so it has little, if any, precedential value. Any court (and even this same judge) is free to ignore this ruling in analyzing other cases.