To be fair, I did attend a college with one of the few remaining Substance Dualists in academia (Selmer Bringsjord), though most times that I heard him talk about anything, I facepalmed pretty heavily.
The government, private industry, and even individuals. Have private things that they want to keep private.
The government is answerable to the people. Private industry is answerable to government. The people are supposed to (for the most part) be free and able to live their lives without interference or constant investigation. This is supposed to be the cornerstone of American ideas of liberty.
By law, everyone's privacy is protected. When documents that are supposed to be private are "stolen" that is espionage and theft. How would you guys like it if the content of your hard drives was stolen and then posted on the internet? How would you like it if they did it under the guise of keeping you honest? I am sure all would agree that even under this "explanation" you would still feel like and have the rights under the law that information was stolen.
We do not need to justify ourselves to the government. The government needs to justify itself to us.
Yes I understand that our government has to be transparent. There are however, methods to get information in the properway. Using the law, one can subpena the governemet, private industry, and individuals. Using legal ways information can be forced to be released.
The government then claims "state secrets" and you get no information. Meanwhile, the NSA and CIA are this very second have a database of over a trillion calls made since 2002 and are tapped into internet backbones collecting every piece of traffic, all without warrants or effective oversight. And you can't sue over it, since they won't admit to any evidence and claim that even having it go to trial would damage national security. And you can't sue the companies that allowed it, since the government gave them immunity after the fact.
So what is my point? Basically, the protections must be in place to protect everyone, lest they be excluded whimsically.
Protect all humans who aren't doing official government business. Otherwise, fair game.
Much like our right to free speech. Everyone, has the right to free speech in the US. Even people that speak with hate.
Sure, but we limit that right in regard to state actors.
In philosophy a bunch of people agree that some one was/is a great philosopher and so they give more value to a statement from such person. The credibility flows from the speaker to the statement.
This is what always drove me up the wall in my philosophy classes. I remember reading Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and thinking "Ok, sure, the arguments that I could be misled about existence are decent, and sure, I have to exist, but everything past his second meditation is refutable". Maybe it's a matter of not having been born in an age where god is taken for granted (or at least those with opposing viewpoints aren't killed/tortured/ridiculed), but the arguments are just plain weak.
I hate to break it to the entitlement-crowd, but those corporations built those networks with their own money, and own it outright, and as such, they get to be the supreme authority on what data traverses those networks, who pays how much to connect to any part of that network (as an end-user, a peer, or as a content-provider).
Heavily subsidized. Even if we discount that, we can compare to telephone communication. It's illegal for telephone companies to discriminate traffic, even if they own the lines. If you want supreme authority over your lines, don't have customers. Otherwise, be prepared to accept that there are regulations.
If you want to say "The government gives the network providers all sorts of tax-breaks and subsidies, so we get to have a say in how it's run", you fail, because your lawmakers didn't tie those sorts of conditions into those subsidies and tax-breaks, and you don't get to play Darth Vader and "alter the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" down the road.
That'd be great if the ISPs had spent it on anything other than executive bonuses. If I give you $1000 to upgrade the windows on my house, even if I don't put in any other conditions, I still get to expect that you actually put new windows in.
And even if that were not the case, there are still plenty of rules of commerce on everything. For a damn good reason. Meat factories don't get to deny inspectors entry just because they're private property. Airlines can't deny black people tickets. Car companies can't tell you that you can only drive your car under 40 miles an hour on Sundays. ISPs can have limits too.
If you don't like your ISP's business practices, find a new one.
There's two in my area (a decently sized metropolitan area). Verizon and Cox. Verizon isn't too bad to me, so I can't complain about them, but I don't have many options if they turn nasty.
If there isn't another, and you think there's like-minded folks out there, find yourself some investors, and build your own ISP. It's actually somewhat trivial to do.
Doesn't help if you can't get right of way access for your cables. And the barrier to entry is pretty high anyway.
If your local municipality has locked out competition via a "Franchise Agreement", well, now is an excellent time to vote those bastards out of office, or start getting involved in local politics.
Doesn't help if those bastards sign multiyear contracts as their terms expire.
The problem isn't that "ISPs are filtering/packet-shaping/blocking traffic", it's that your local governments have been propping up a monopoly. Voting against "net neutrality" is voting for the rights of property holders to do what they want with the property they have paid good money for.
Those same ISPs that have government support to violate my property rights to put up their cables regardless of what I want? That take my tax dollars (by bribing my representatives)? The ones that advertise saying I get X Mbps connection to the internet, then tack on restrictions in size.0002 font saying that I really get X/100 connection and they can alter their agreement without my knowledge or consent?
There's plenty of shit I can't do on my own property, for a damn good reason. I can't pour used motor oil into a stream, I can't burn tires, I can't run a meth lab, etc. We accept that there are limits to property rights because we weigh the benefit to society as a whole of restricting some individual rights. Yes, there are times where the government goes over the line (oh so many times), but it does not cross the line to prevent a corporate entity from infringing on our ability to transmit ideas and information freely across what might be the most important communications medium yet created.
Government doesn't exist to protect the rights of citizens who are consuming over those who are producing.
But why is so hell bent on protecting the rights (to profit) of those who don't produce anything besides hot air?
I know the corporations are the 'bad' guys, but you don't want government playing favorites. Maybe it will make you feel better to know that pension funds, which keep a great many of our elderly working class and middle class housed and fed, are among the largest owners of those corporations.
Pension funds? What are those? Pension funds don't exist for most people under 50. Now we're forced to play the 401k roulette, and hope we don't get raped by insider trading and a couple Wall Street executives, and if we lose 20-30% of our retirement fund from a stock market crash, we're shit outta luck. Social Security will probably be purposefully driven to insolvency by lack of action (but millionaires right now need tax cuts!), so it's not like anyone in their 20s can expect that to last.
Because your first step is less likely to happen than a bill that strongly supports net neutrality and your second step requires more than 3 or 4 companies to prevent collusion.
Current popular versions of P2P (Such as Bittorent) are parasites. They consume as much bandwidth as they can, and it is very difficult to control that traffic, especially after encryption became popular for the clients.
If I'm paying for a 10 Mbps line, what does it matter if I'm pulling down content through Bittorrent, ftp, or http? If the cable company is giving me extra bandwidth above and beyond what I paid for if the rest of the neighborhood is dormant, then ok, that's there prerogative to give and take as they please, but cutting me off to some level below what they agreed to is not.
Seriously unless the company is a public utility or a government mandated monopoly (such as your favorite cable company) then you should be able to apply the rules of he capitalism and vote with your wallet.
I'm lucky enough to have two options for high speed internet, but that's not even close to a free market. You can't bring out the "Capitalism solves all problems!" meme when telecoms have strangled out all but a handful of competitors (who "compete" as little as possible). There aren't that many places (at least in America) with many choices.
Besides, what does it matter if every choice involves a contract where the ISP says "the advertised speed may not be applicable, we reserve the right to downgrade your connection at any time and still charge you full price"? Outside of an actual problem (snow storms breaking a cable, hurricane flooding a data center, etc), I'm not a parasite for wanting to use what I pay for.
Read the summary. Temp workers were brought in. Incompetent temp workers, who haven't been working there long and don't have the institutional knowledge of how to run things. Leading to exactly the problem described.
Why is the ISP selling you a 10 Mbps line when it can only reliably deliver 512 kbps? If your ISP can't deliver what it promises, then it shouldn't be promising it. Sure, you can get pissed at that kid running torrents all day, but what happens when your whole neighborhood is getting their TVs/movies/etc off the internet at high resolution (saturating their pipes to do so)? Who's fault is it then that you can't watch your video? What if you've got a neighbor who's pissed at all the people streaming their video making it impossible for him to be able to download his latest Linux iso off Bittorrent? Or someone else trying to download WoW updates? Or whatever.
I would have less of a problem with traffic shaping if it didn't just seem like a way for Telcos to put off upgrading their infrastructure for a few more quarters (till the current batch of empty suit executives can leave on golden parachutes and dump it on the next guys lap).
If I legally buy a watch, it's my property. It doesn't matter if I bought it in Paraguay, Guam, Thailand, America, or a cruise ship in international waters. My property is my property. I can use, sell, lend, or destroy things that are my property. Except that according to this decision, it's not fully my property if I buy it in a foreign country. Because of a tiny logo (and the desire of transnational corporations to wring every last cent of profit they can, and damn the free market).
What if I buy some cheap rum in the Caribbean then bring it back to the US? What's stopping Bacardi from coming after me? Rinse and repeat with any product bought by anyone who travels outside the US.
The subtle point that was argued is that importing anything to the US (even your personal property) may be prevented by the whim of a copyright holder. It's a small step from there to argue that copyright holders should get more power. Do you really see it as that far off until a court upholds some EULA that tears apart the first sale doctrine? We wouldn't want a copyright gap!
They do the machine gun edits to hide how bad most CGI really is. If you can see something for more than a few seconds you start to actually study it, and CGI today doesn't usually stand up to careful scrutiny. I blame the insistence on completely sterile looking CGI, like everything has had a fresh coat of dirt repelling wax put on it.
Nothing in subsections b., c. and d. of N.J.S.2C:39-5 shall be construed to prevent a person keeping or carrying about his place of business, residence, premises or other land owned or possessed by him, any firearm, or from carrying the same, in the manner specified in subsection g. of this section, from any place of purchase to his residence or place of business, between his dwelling and his place of business, between one place of business or residence and another when moving, or between his dwelling or place of business and place where such firearms are repaired, for the purpose of repair. For the purposes of this section, a place of business shall be deemed to be a fixed location.
-N.J.S.2C:39-6.e
That's the exception that would be applied. It's not like it's tax law, it reads pretty damn plainly. Took about 5 minutes to look up on Google.
They are drafted in a technical way, and they rely on rules of interpretation that aren't included in the statute itself and may not be included in any statute at all.
If our laws are so complicated that only a lawyer can understand them, than how can the judicial system justify their position that "ignorance of the law is no excuse"? By your own admission, any non-specialist (and even specialists who are outside their area of narrow focus) can't correctly interpret the arcane language that may punish them, so what should people do? Spend 30 years of their life reading law books just to catch up on what already exists, then try to keep up on every law for every jurisdiction they will ever be in (at federal, state, county, and municipality level)?
How can you support two contradictory notions: that the man on the street knows legal from illegal and that the man on the street cannot understand the laws as written?
I don't agree with social engineering via directed tax credits/loopholes any more than you do, but they've been around for a long time and are unlikely to go away (though if the Supreme Court ends up agreeing with this judge, I'll gladly stand up next to you and fight to repeal all the other tax credits).
The government also penalizes not getting married (even for gays who can't get married), not having kids, renting instead of having a mortgage, etc, etc, etc. Government social engineering through taxation is nothing new, but you won't hear the people with their little fucking ankle biters complain about child tax credits, will you? Then again, I do think the clause is bullshit, mostly because it does pressure people into buying from a bunch of for profit vampires who will gladly take your money for as long as you're not sick. If we had a real public option (or gasp, even single payer, like every other civilized nation), we'd be a lot better off.
VHS quality is 2 Mb/s. DVD quality video is 8 Mb/s. HDTV is 27 Mb/s. I don't know about you, but I'd like to be able to stream 1080p to my computer at some point reasonable soon (well, I am lucky enough to have FiOS).
You may not want to put the pedal to the metal all the time, but when you do, do you want to spend time waiting for your car to respond?
This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,
And God it woot, that it is litel wonder;
Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.
For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle
How that a frere ravyshed was to helle
In spirit ones by a visioun;
And as an angel ladde hym up and doun,
To shewen hym the peynes that the were,
In al the place saugh he nat a frere;
Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo.
Unto this angel spak the frere tho:
Now, sire, quod he, han freres swich a grace
That noon of hem shal come to this place?
Yis, quod this aungel, many a millioun!
And unto sathanas he ladde hym doun.
--And now hath sathanas,--seith he,--a tayl
Brodder than of a carryk is the sayl.
Hold up thy tayl, thou sathanas!--quod he;
--shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se
Where is the nest of freres in this place!--
And er that half a furlong wey of space,
Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve,
Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve
Twenty thousand freres on a route,
And thurghout helle swarmed al aboute,
And comen agayn as faste as they may gon,
And in his ers they crepten everychon.
He clapte his tayl agayn and lay ful stille.
So the real question is why American broadband was redefined to a low number like 4 Mbit/s? Shouldn't we be reaching higher? Oh wait, we'd see that maybe 1% of our population actually reaches 20 Mbit/s and might actually want to do something about it (like make the telecom companies actually build instead of sitting on fat local monopolies).
According to US intelligence, there's 100 members of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. At some point when do we get to say "hey, having a few hundred thousand troops to fight at most a few hundred people doesn't make any sense"?
It's great that they finally figured out that letting employees write secret data to a storage device is a security risk, but are they also auditing outbound communication? Will they notice if an employee emails the data to his Gmail account? Or deposits it on some hacked server somewhere? Will they notice it if he uses steganography to hide it in other data?
SIPRnet machines aren't connected to the internet, precisely to prevent this.
Or maybe he'll use a program that converts the data to visible data that can be recorded by a camera (sure sure, cameras are against regulations, but stealing data is against regulations too...if he's a determined data thief, cameras can be hidden in all sorts of objects and body cavities). For example, a QR code can hold 4KB of alphanumeric data. If someone writes a program that displays 15 frames/second of QR encoded data and records it with a camera, that's 200MB of data every hour.
Having a camera in a secure area is a good way to get security personnel mad at you and probably get arrested.
If he's patient, he can record it as a 2400 baud data stream and record it on his MP3 player - he can steal around 10MB/hour using this method.
Of course, you'd have to explain why you've got your mp3 player hooked up to the audio out jack of a computer.
Or maybe he can record it as a bit patter on a laser printer - if he can write at 100dpi reliably, thats around 100KB per piece of paper. If that can be stretched to 500dpi he'll get around 2MB per piece of paper, and will look like a grey piece of paper to the naked eye so security won't pay any attention "Oh that, it's scrap paper I'm taking home to my kids".
Classified areas do not work that way. Even if you get the paper out, people will ask why the hell you were printing out those grey sheets of paper. Then someone will look closer and figure out it's data. Then you get arrested.
How will he get such a data theft program onto the computer? Simple -- if he can't download it off the internet (perhaps a "gif" that just needs the first 128 bytes stripped off to make it an executable),
Can't get on the internet from a classified machine.
he can plug in a USB keyboard dongle that acts as a keyboard and then let it type in the program for him.
It'd be awfully suspicious unless you've got some alone time. And decent security shouldn't be letting you bring in personal drives to a secure area (that Bradley Manning was able to shows more that the security was doing something wrong).
How secure *is* our secret data? Hopefully banning USB drives is just one layer and they are taking greater steps to securing who has access to such data.
They'll probably compartmentalize more. That a PFC could get their hands on the sheer volume of documents that he did is rather nuts.
Asking the judge didn't help for the jury in Brian Aitken's case. A judge wouldn't even allow the jury to read the New Jersey statute showing the moving exemption for having a gun in the car (New Jersey gun laws being insane, guns are only allowed by exceptions, so you have to prove your innocence), claiming that there was no evidence that Brian was moving from one residence to the other (despite testimony from others that he was moving, and the presence of boxes of dishes and clothing in the car).
There were plenty of other fucked up things in that case, but at least if the jury had information access they could have looked up the law rather than be dependent on the word of a judge.
I get something like 100 hours of vacation accrual per year (which accrues up to 2.5 years worth) and another 100 hours or so in discretionary time off (have to use within the year), which covers holidays (so July 4th, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc come out of there, if you take the time for them), sick days, personal days, doctor visits, etc. We've also got flex time, so as long as I work the 80 hours in the two week pay period, it doesn't count against vacation (though we don't get overtime hours back, unfortunately, but I haven't had many of those). All in all it works out fairly well, and I took the discretionary time and used it for a week long cruise without anyone caring.
I did turn it off. It doesn't stop other pointless applications from showing up in my feed though. I shouldn't have to play whack a mole with every new fad trying to worm it's way into my head.
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To be fair, I did attend a college with one of the few remaining Substance Dualists in academia (Selmer Bringsjord), though most times that I heard him talk about anything, I facepalmed pretty heavily.
The government, private industry, and even individuals. Have private things that they want to keep private.
The government is answerable to the people. Private industry is answerable to government. The people are supposed to (for the most part) be free and able to live their lives without interference or constant investigation. This is supposed to be the cornerstone of American ideas of liberty.
By law, everyone's privacy is protected. When documents that are supposed to be private are "stolen" that is espionage and theft. How would you guys like it if the content of your hard drives was stolen and then posted on the internet? How would you like it if they did it under the guise of keeping you honest? I am sure all would agree that even under this "explanation" you would still feel like and have the rights under the law that information was stolen.
We do not need to justify ourselves to the government. The government needs to justify itself to us.
Yes I understand that our government has to be transparent. There are however, methods to get information in the properway. Using the law, one can subpena the governemet, private industry, and individuals. Using legal ways information can be forced to be released.
The government then claims "state secrets" and you get no information. Meanwhile, the NSA and CIA are this very second have a database of over a trillion calls made since 2002 and are tapped into internet backbones collecting every piece of traffic, all without warrants or effective oversight. And you can't sue over it, since they won't admit to any evidence and claim that even having it go to trial would damage national security. And you can't sue the companies that allowed it, since the government gave them immunity after the fact.
So what is my point? Basically, the protections must be in place to protect everyone, lest they be excluded whimsically.
Protect all humans who aren't doing official government business. Otherwise, fair game.
Much like our right to free speech. Everyone, has the right to free speech in the US. Even people that speak with hate.
Sure, but we limit that right in regard to state actors.
In philosophy a bunch of people agree that some one was/is a great philosopher and so they give more value to a statement from such person. The credibility flows from the speaker to the statement.
This is what always drove me up the wall in my philosophy classes. I remember reading Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and thinking "Ok, sure, the arguments that I could be misled about existence are decent, and sure, I have to exist, but everything past his second meditation is refutable". Maybe it's a matter of not having been born in an age where god is taken for granted (or at least those with opposing viewpoints aren't killed/tortured/ridiculed), but the arguments are just plain weak.
I hate to break it to the entitlement-crowd, but those corporations built those networks with their own money, and own it outright, and as such, they get to be the supreme authority on what data traverses those networks, who pays how much to connect to any part of that network (as an end-user, a peer, or as a content-provider).
Heavily subsidized. Even if we discount that, we can compare to telephone communication. It's illegal for telephone companies to discriminate traffic, even if they own the lines. If you want supreme authority over your lines, don't have customers. Otherwise, be prepared to accept that there are regulations.
If you want to say "The government gives the network providers all sorts of tax-breaks and subsidies, so we get to have a say in how it's run", you fail, because your lawmakers didn't tie those sorts of conditions into those subsidies and tax-breaks, and you don't get to play Darth Vader and "alter the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" down the road.
That'd be great if the ISPs had spent it on anything other than executive bonuses. If I give you $1000 to upgrade the windows on my house, even if I don't put in any other conditions, I still get to expect that you actually put new windows in.
And even if that were not the case, there are still plenty of rules of commerce on everything. For a damn good reason. Meat factories don't get to deny inspectors entry just because they're private property. Airlines can't deny black people tickets. Car companies can't tell you that you can only drive your car under 40 miles an hour on Sundays. ISPs can have limits too.
If you don't like your ISP's business practices, find a new one.
There's two in my area (a decently sized metropolitan area). Verizon and Cox. Verizon isn't too bad to me, so I can't complain about them, but I don't have many options if they turn nasty.
If there isn't another, and you think there's like-minded folks out there, find yourself some investors, and build your own ISP. It's actually somewhat trivial to do.
Doesn't help if you can't get right of way access for your cables. And the barrier to entry is pretty high anyway.
If your local municipality has locked out competition via a "Franchise Agreement", well, now is an excellent time to vote those bastards out of office, or start getting involved in local politics.
Doesn't help if those bastards sign multiyear contracts as their terms expire.
The problem isn't that "ISPs are filtering/packet-shaping/blocking traffic", it's that your local governments have been propping up a monopoly. Voting against "net neutrality" is voting for the rights of property holders to do what they want with the property they have paid good money for.
Those same ISPs that have government support to violate my property rights to put up their cables regardless of what I want? That take my tax dollars (by bribing my representatives)? The ones that advertise saying I get X Mbps connection to the internet, then tack on restrictions in size .0002 font saying that I really get X/100 connection and they can alter their agreement without my knowledge or consent?
There's plenty of shit I can't do on my own property, for a damn good reason. I can't pour used motor oil into a stream, I can't burn tires, I can't run a meth lab, etc. We accept that there are limits to property rights because we weigh the benefit to society as a whole of restricting some individual rights. Yes, there are times where the government goes over the line (oh so many times), but it does not cross the line to prevent a corporate entity from infringing on our ability to transmit ideas and information freely across what might be the most important communications medium yet created.
Government doesn't exist to protect the rights of citizens who are consuming over those who are producing.
But why is so hell bent on protecting the rights (to profit) of those who don't produce anything besides hot air?
I know the corporations are the 'bad' guys, but you don't want government playing favorites. Maybe it will make you feel better to know that pension funds, which keep a great many of our elderly working class and middle class housed and fed, are among the largest owners of those corporations.
Pension funds? What are those? Pension funds don't exist for most people under 50. Now we're forced to play the 401k roulette, and hope we don't get raped by insider trading and a couple Wall Street executives, and if we lose 20-30% of our retirement fund from a stock market crash, we're shit outta luck. Social Security will probably be purposefully driven to insolvency by lack of action (but millionaires right now need tax cuts!), so it's not like anyone in their 20s can expect that to last.
Because your first step is less likely to happen than a bill that strongly supports net neutrality and your second step requires more than 3 or 4 companies to prevent collusion.
Current popular versions of P2P (Such as Bittorent) are parasites. They consume as much bandwidth as they can, and it is very difficult to control that traffic, especially after encryption became popular for the clients.
If I'm paying for a 10 Mbps line, what does it matter if I'm pulling down content through Bittorrent, ftp, or http? If the cable company is giving me extra bandwidth above and beyond what I paid for if the rest of the neighborhood is dormant, then ok, that's there prerogative to give and take as they please, but cutting me off to some level below what they agreed to is not.
Seriously unless the company is a public utility or a government mandated monopoly (such as your favorite cable company) then you should be able to apply the rules of he capitalism and vote with your wallet.
I'm lucky enough to have two options for high speed internet, but that's not even close to a free market. You can't bring out the "Capitalism solves all problems!" meme when telecoms have strangled out all but a handful of competitors (who "compete" as little as possible). There aren't that many places (at least in America) with many choices.
Besides, what does it matter if every choice involves a contract where the ISP says "the advertised speed may not be applicable, we reserve the right to downgrade your connection at any time and still charge you full price"? Outside of an actual problem (snow storms breaking a cable, hurricane flooding a data center, etc), I'm not a parasite for wanting to use what I pay for.
Whom by definition is not there during a lockout.
Read the summary. Temp workers were brought in. Incompetent temp workers, who haven't been working there long and don't have the institutional knowledge of how to run things. Leading to exactly the problem described.
Of course, that's difficult if one side doesn't want you to know that there's a story at all.
Why is the ISP selling you a 10 Mbps line when it can only reliably deliver 512 kbps? If your ISP can't deliver what it promises, then it shouldn't be promising it. Sure, you can get pissed at that kid running torrents all day, but what happens when your whole neighborhood is getting their TVs/movies/etc off the internet at high resolution (saturating their pipes to do so)? Who's fault is it then that you can't watch your video? What if you've got a neighbor who's pissed at all the people streaming their video making it impossible for him to be able to download his latest Linux iso off Bittorrent? Or someone else trying to download WoW updates? Or whatever.
I would have less of a problem with traffic shaping if it didn't just seem like a way for Telcos to put off upgrading their infrastructure for a few more quarters (till the current batch of empty suit executives can leave on golden parachutes and dump it on the next guys lap).
4. If you want to think of the children, you could like - give away free child-control software or something? Yes? No? Maybe?
WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE POOR COMPANIES HARMED BY GIVING AWAY SOFTWARE?
/sarcasm
If I legally buy a watch, it's my property. It doesn't matter if I bought it in Paraguay, Guam, Thailand, America, or a cruise ship in international waters. My property is my property. I can use, sell, lend, or destroy things that are my property. Except that according to this decision, it's not fully my property if I buy it in a foreign country. Because of a tiny logo (and the desire of transnational corporations to wring every last cent of profit they can, and damn the free market).
What if I buy some cheap rum in the Caribbean then bring it back to the US? What's stopping Bacardi from coming after me? Rinse and repeat with any product bought by anyone who travels outside the US.
The subtle point that was argued is that importing anything to the US (even your personal property) may be prevented by the whim of a copyright holder. It's a small step from there to argue that copyright holders should get more power. Do you really see it as that far off until a court upholds some EULA that tears apart the first sale doctrine? We wouldn't want a copyright gap!
They do the machine gun edits to hide how bad most CGI really is. If you can see something for more than a few seconds you start to actually study it, and CGI today doesn't usually stand up to careful scrutiny. I blame the insistence on completely sterile looking CGI, like everything has had a fresh coat of dirt repelling wax put on it.
Nothing in subsections b., c. and d. of N.J.S.2C:39-5 shall be construed to prevent a person keeping or carrying about his place of business, residence, premises or other land owned or possessed by him, any firearm, or from carrying the same, in the manner specified in subsection g. of this section, from any place of purchase to his residence or place of business, between his dwelling and his place of business, between one place of business or residence and another when moving, or between his dwelling or place of business and place where such firearms are repaired, for the purpose of repair. For the purposes of this section, a place of business shall be deemed to be a fixed location.
-N.J.S.2C:39-6.e
That's the exception that would be applied. It's not like it's tax law, it reads pretty damn plainly. Took about 5 minutes to look up on Google.
They are drafted in a technical way, and they rely on rules of interpretation that aren't included in the statute itself and may not be included in any statute at all.
If our laws are so complicated that only a lawyer can understand them, than how can the judicial system justify their position that "ignorance of the law is no excuse"? By your own admission, any non-specialist (and even specialists who are outside their area of narrow focus) can't correctly interpret the arcane language that may punish them, so what should people do? Spend 30 years of their life reading law books just to catch up on what already exists, then try to keep up on every law for every jurisdiction they will ever be in (at federal, state, county, and municipality level)?
How can you support two contradictory notions: that the man on the street knows legal from illegal and that the man on the street cannot understand the laws as written?
I don't agree with social engineering via directed tax credits/loopholes any more than you do, but they've been around for a long time and are unlikely to go away (though if the Supreme Court ends up agreeing with this judge, I'll gladly stand up next to you and fight to repeal all the other tax credits).
The government also penalizes not getting married (even for gays who can't get married), not having kids, renting instead of having a mortgage, etc, etc, etc. Government social engineering through taxation is nothing new, but you won't hear the people with their little fucking ankle biters complain about child tax credits, will you? Then again, I do think the clause is bullshit, mostly because it does pressure people into buying from a bunch of for profit vampires who will gladly take your money for as long as you're not sick. If we had a real public option (or gasp, even single payer, like every other civilized nation), we'd be a lot better off.
VHS quality is 2 Mb/s. DVD quality video is 8 Mb/s. HDTV is 27 Mb/s. I don't know about you, but I'd like to be able to stream 1080p to my computer at some point reasonable soon (well, I am lucky enough to have FiOS).
You may not want to put the pedal to the metal all the time, but when you do, do you want to spend time waiting for your car to respond?
This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle, And God it woot, that it is litel wonder; Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder. For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle How that a frere ravyshed was to helle In spirit ones by a visioun; And as an angel ladde hym up and doun, To shewen hym the peynes that the were, In al the place saugh he nat a frere; Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo. Unto this angel spak the frere tho: Now, sire, quod he, han freres swich a grace That noon of hem shal come to this place? Yis, quod this aungel, many a millioun! And unto sathanas he ladde hym doun. --And now hath sathanas,--seith he,--a tayl Brodder than of a carryk is the sayl. Hold up thy tayl, thou sathanas!--quod he; --shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se Where is the nest of freres in this place!-- And er that half a furlong wey of space, Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve, Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve Twenty thousand freres on a route, And thurghout helle swarmed al aboute, And comen agayn as faste as they may gon, And in his ers they crepten everychon. He clapte his tayl agayn and lay ful stille.
So the real question is why American broadband was redefined to a low number like 4 Mbit/s? Shouldn't we be reaching higher? Oh wait, we'd see that maybe 1% of our population actually reaches 20 Mbit/s and might actually want to do something about it (like make the telecom companies actually build instead of sitting on fat local monopolies).
According to US intelligence, there's 100 members of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. At some point when do we get to say "hey, having a few hundred thousand troops to fight at most a few hundred people doesn't make any sense"?
It's great that they finally figured out that letting employees write secret data to a storage device is a security risk, but are they also auditing outbound communication? Will they notice if an employee emails the data to his Gmail account? Or deposits it on some hacked server somewhere? Will they notice it if he uses steganography to hide it in other data?
SIPRnet machines aren't connected to the internet, precisely to prevent this.
Or maybe he'll use a program that converts the data to visible data that can be recorded by a camera (sure sure, cameras are against regulations, but stealing data is against regulations too...if he's a determined data thief, cameras can be hidden in all sorts of objects and body cavities). For example, a QR code can hold 4KB of alphanumeric data. If someone writes a program that displays 15 frames/second of QR encoded data and records it with a camera, that's 200MB of data every hour.
Having a camera in a secure area is a good way to get security personnel mad at you and probably get arrested.
If he's patient, he can record it as a 2400 baud data stream and record it on his MP3 player - he can steal around 10MB/hour using this method.
Of course, you'd have to explain why you've got your mp3 player hooked up to the audio out jack of a computer.
Or maybe he can record it as a bit patter on a laser printer - if he can write at 100dpi reliably, thats around 100KB per piece of paper. If that can be stretched to 500dpi he'll get around 2MB per piece of paper, and will look like a grey piece of paper to the naked eye so security won't pay any attention "Oh that, it's scrap paper I'm taking home to my kids".
Classified areas do not work that way. Even if you get the paper out, people will ask why the hell you were printing out those grey sheets of paper. Then someone will look closer and figure out it's data. Then you get arrested.
How will he get such a data theft program onto the computer? Simple -- if he can't download it off the internet (perhaps a "gif" that just needs the first 128 bytes stripped off to make it an executable),
Can't get on the internet from a classified machine.
he can plug in a USB keyboard dongle that acts as a keyboard and then let it type in the program for him.
It'd be awfully suspicious unless you've got some alone time. And decent security shouldn't be letting you bring in personal drives to a secure area (that Bradley Manning was able to shows more that the security was doing something wrong).
How secure *is* our secret data? Hopefully banning USB drives is just one layer and they are taking greater steps to securing who has access to such data.
They'll probably compartmentalize more. That a PFC could get their hands on the sheer volume of documents that he did is rather nuts.
Asking the judge didn't help for the jury in Brian Aitken's case. A judge wouldn't even allow the jury to read the New Jersey statute showing the moving exemption for having a gun in the car (New Jersey gun laws being insane, guns are only allowed by exceptions, so you have to prove your innocence), claiming that there was no evidence that Brian was moving from one residence to the other (despite testimony from others that he was moving, and the presence of boxes of dishes and clothing in the car).
There were plenty of other fucked up things in that case, but at least if the jury had information access they could have looked up the law rather than be dependent on the word of a judge.
I get something like 100 hours of vacation accrual per year (which accrues up to 2.5 years worth) and another 100 hours or so in discretionary time off (have to use within the year), which covers holidays (so July 4th, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc come out of there, if you take the time for them), sick days, personal days, doctor visits, etc. We've also got flex time, so as long as I work the 80 hours in the two week pay period, it doesn't count against vacation (though we don't get overtime hours back, unfortunately, but I haven't had many of those). All in all it works out fairly well, and I took the discretionary time and used it for a week long cruise without anyone caring.
I did turn it off. It doesn't stop other pointless applications from showing up in my feed though. I shouldn't have to play whack a mole with every new fad trying to worm it's way into my head.