While I hate to admit it, the DoJ might have circled so far around crazy that they ended up back in sane, sorta. Screaming 'child porn' has become the Goodwin of law enforcement, BUT megaupload did indeed have quite a bit of the stuff, though not nearly as much as some of the other lockers since many people who were posting it wanted to make a buck and thus used ones that were heavier handed in their 'upgrade to pay' pattern and shared revenue with the poster. Oddly enough those sites are still up... so we start circling back from sane into crazy again.
I don't know.. listening to the GoP/Tea Party rhetoric lately it sounds like they are making a go at that boogie man again. I have actually started hearing people singing the praises of McCarthy again and believe that he is being 'slandered in liberal history classes'.
At least this didn't happen up in Boston. If it had the police would be claiming the students wanted it to look like a bomb, claim it was a 'hoax device', and say how grateful they should be that the police did not gun them down on the spot.
Actually it was part of the ruling, that if guards showed 'judgement' in deciding who got searched and who did not the security would break down, thus even if it was apparent that this particular person was harmless the security needed to be followed.
Well, for starters there were some judges actually caught doing just that....
But in general, the people who run the prisions make political contributions, and politicians are the ones that drive departmental policy. Even if the judges and police are being completely honest, they are in a situation where their quotas and policies are being set by people who get lobby money from other people who benefit from such strict policies. No need for conspiracy, just standard game theory and lobby oriented politics.
I actually knew a guy a while back who's wife stabbed him. The police came and arrested the victim.. why? Because they figured that if she was upset enough to stab him he must have done something to deserve it or been intimidating her physically.
Though to be fair to police, most modern cases they will listen and take things a bit more seriously. There is still a strong cultural assumption going on, but departmental policies are starting to catch up.
*nods* lesbians face a whole interesting set of additional challenges. One of the early halmarks of the lesbian community was 'getting away from abusive males', so esp for 'political lesbians' it was really important to keep abuse within the community hidden.... thus victimes, if they spoke up, were 'hurting the movement' and were ostracized. It lead to really high abuse rates (I think a stat I saw indicated it was about double that of the general population) and almost no support network.
Things are improving, but mostly among younger (gay as opposed to political) lesbians.
Which is reactive rather then active. The point of the ruling was that all prisoners need to be searched every time otherwise security collapses, but guards are only searched part of the time at the discretion of management. So no universal with one vector, 'with reason' with the other vector, thus the model collapses.
You just found the loophole. It is an old police tactic for roughing up people who have done nothing wrong. The law is written in such a way that you can be arrested and released without charge and nothing happens to the officer, but pointing out that you did nothing illegal is, in and of itself, an arrest-able offense that will stand.
So yes, if you are standing around doing nothing a police officer can come up and say ' you are under arrest' and bring you in... they can then not charge you with anything which means you can go. If you say 'I am not doing anything, what am I being arrested for' you can then be arrested for resisting arrest and even though there is no original charge you can be charged for the resistance, which pretty much comes down to 'didn't show officer respect they felt they deserved'.
It is because of patterns like this that the police in the US are generally best avoided unless you are the one who called them. Too unpredictable, too many ways around the laws, and too many people willing to protect them against non-police.
What made this case messy (or challengeable) was the nature of the offense. There was a bureaucratic glitch that said he had an unpaid parking fine. He was carrying documentation saying that it was indeed paid, but during a routine traffic stop (where he was a passenger) they decided the documentation was not good enough, handcuffed and arrested the guy on the spot, and dumped him in the general prison system for 6 days (including two strip searches with cavity search).
So you had someone who was obeying the law, had documentation saying they were obeying the law, and even if the documentation was incorrect his crime was an unpaid ticket.... yet resulted in the type of personal invasion that one would expect violent criminals to receive.
Part of the problem is that right now there is an economic incentive to get as many people into the general prisions as possible (since they are privately run, and usually have kickbacks to the public workers at some level) so people are getting the 'full' treatment that the general population would not expect or believe is appropriate. I don't know about you, but in my mind 'overdue parking ticket that was taken care of' should not automatically result in 'stripped naked multiple times in front of people and have fingers shoved up my ass then 6 days in a mass prison'. Even if I did forget to pay a fine, I would not expect such a result until I at least went in front of a judge and was warned that if I didn't pay up I might go to jail. Usually they just slap a penalty on the charge.
Of course the problem with the security system is that they do not strip search the guards, who are one of the primary vectors for materials getting in and out of prison. Thus their security measure is not really addressing the stated problem anyway. What they do not want to go over is that the reason behind these searches is attempting to humiliate and break prisoners so they are easier to manage (which fails) and to demonstrate to the guards how powerful they are (which succeeds, in a way)... so it is really less about keeping contraband out and more about keeping guards in the 'right' mindset. If the guards see prisoners as people then the psychology breaks down pretty quickly.
Right now American culture idealizes the uneducated self starter, the charismatic salesman who becomes and executive or the untrained (or better yet, rejected) garage inventor who outsmarts all the eggheads....
Improving one's life through education is seen as the 'looser' way of getting a good life, the path that lesser people take.
*nods* a lot of it flows into sports and other such activities yeah. Transportation is another big issue since our districts are significantly more distributed then ones in Europe. We have very spread out populations and operating that fleet of busses is really damned expensive.
True, there is that varient. Perhaps I should have been more specific.. females stalking males who are currently capable (as in not already attached) of returning their interest. Females trying to break up another relationship which they feel entitled too... though even then, outside extreme cases, I encounter the attitude that he must have done something insensitive to her like ditching her (under the idea that women are fragile emotional beings not responsible for their own lives, thus if she is that upset he MUST have done something to injure her). So bullshit all around ^_^
We are just barely entering the erra when male abuse victims are taken seriously by police.... stalking? we are still a while off there both legally and socially.
A while back I had a female stalker, mostly I got laughed at or got outright nasty looks. A lot of guys picture stalking as this wonderful thing they would love to have happen and see other guys who are not enjoying the experience as not being grateful.
And the girls just had this 'but you are guy, it is different' dismissive attitude. Even worse some took her side with the idea that it was wrong of me to reject her, that it just was not acceptable for guys to not accept a girl's advances.
It will depend on scheduling. I imagine they will look into what it takes to implement, but this is the type of feature that really has to be 'on' at release so unless they plan on releasing their console a significant time after Sony (quite possible) then they will not really be able to wait and see.
Though if Sony does go this route, they could make their lack of crippling a selling point... go for the 'see, we are not asshats like Sony, you can play your legally purchanced used games on OUR systems'.
It is indeed not illegal to sell used games (doctrine of first sale), BUT it is not legally required either, so hardware manufacturers are free to build their devices in such a way that they tie first usage to a particular user. And of course they can use DMCA to ensure that people are not legally allowed to modify the consoles in order to play used games.
Now all they need to do is get rid of daylight saving time and they will REALLY make the US look silly... come on fed, the Canadians are making us look like idiots here.... THEY can get rid of pennies....
Slashdot Mirror
While I hate to admit it, the DoJ might have circled so far around crazy that they ended up back in sane, sorta. Screaming 'child porn' has become the Goodwin of law enforcement, BUT megaupload did indeed have quite a bit of the stuff, though not nearly as much as some of the other lockers since many people who were posting it wanted to make a buck and thus used ones that were heavier handed in their 'upgrade to pay' pattern and shared revenue with the poster. Oddly enough those sites are still up... so we start circling back from sane into crazy again.
I don't know.. listening to the GoP/Tea Party rhetoric lately it sounds like they are making a go at that boogie man again. I have actually started hearing people singing the praises of McCarthy again and believe that he is being 'slandered in liberal history classes'.
At least this didn't happen up in Boston. If it had the police would be claiming the students wanted it to look like a bomb, claim it was a 'hoax device', and say how grateful they should be that the police did not gun them down on the spot.
Oops, good catch. I guess I read a bad summary at some point and got 'parking fine' stuck in my head.
Actually it was part of the ruling, that if guards showed 'judgement' in deciding who got searched and who did not the security would break down, thus even if it was apparent that this particular person was harmless the security needed to be followed.
Well, for starters there were some judges actually caught doing just that....
But in general, the people who run the prisions make political contributions, and politicians are the ones that drive departmental policy. Even if the judges and police are being completely honest, they are in a situation where their quotas and policies are being set by people who get lobby money from other people who benefit from such strict policies. No need for conspiracy, just standard game theory and lobby oriented politics.
I actually knew a guy a while back who's wife stabbed him. The police came and arrested the victim.. why? Because they figured that if she was upset enough to stab him he must have done something to deserve it or been intimidating her physically.
Though to be fair to police, most modern cases they will listen and take things a bit more seriously. There is still a strong cultural assumption going on, but departmental policies are starting to catch up.
*nods* lesbians face a whole interesting set of additional challenges. One of the early halmarks of the lesbian community was 'getting away from abusive males', so esp for 'political lesbians' it was really important to keep abuse within the community hidden.... thus victimes, if they spoke up, were 'hurting the movement' and were ostracized. It lead to really high abuse rates (I think a stat I saw indicated it was about double that of the general population) and almost no support network.
Things are improving, but mostly among younger (gay as opposed to political) lesbians.
Which is reactive rather then active. The point of the ruling was that all prisoners need to be searched every time otherwise security collapses, but guards are only searched part of the time at the discretion of management. So no universal with one vector, 'with reason' with the other vector, thus the model collapses.
The key word is 'suspected', meaning it is not a procedure that all guards go through every day.
You just found the loophole. It is an old police tactic for roughing up people who have done nothing wrong. The law is written in such a way that you can be arrested and released without charge and nothing happens to the officer, but pointing out that you did nothing illegal is, in and of itself, an arrest-able offense that will stand.
So yes, if you are standing around doing nothing a police officer can come up and say ' you are under arrest' and bring you in... they can then not charge you with anything which means you can go. If you say 'I am not doing anything, what am I being arrested for' you can then be arrested for resisting arrest and even though there is no original charge you can be charged for the resistance, which pretty much comes down to 'didn't show officer respect they felt they deserved'.
It is because of patterns like this that the police in the US are generally best avoided unless you are the one who called them. Too unpredictable, too many ways around the laws, and too many people willing to protect them against non-police.
Same result though, since this ruling also means that pretty much anything can be a prison offense.
What made this case messy (or challengeable) was the nature of the offense. There was a bureaucratic glitch that said he had an unpaid parking fine. He was carrying documentation saying that it was indeed paid, but during a routine traffic stop (where he was a passenger) they decided the documentation was not good enough, handcuffed and arrested the guy on the spot, and dumped him in the general prison system for 6 days (including two strip searches with cavity search).
So you had someone who was obeying the law, had documentation saying they were obeying the law, and even if the documentation was incorrect his crime was an unpaid ticket.... yet resulted in the type of personal invasion that one would expect violent criminals to receive.
Part of the problem is that right now there is an economic incentive to get as many people into the general prisions as possible (since they are privately run, and usually have kickbacks to the public workers at some level) so people are getting the 'full' treatment that the general population would not expect or believe is appropriate. I don't know about you, but in my mind 'overdue parking ticket that was taken care of' should not automatically result in 'stripped naked multiple times in front of people and have fingers shoved up my ass then 6 days in a mass prison'. Even if I did forget to pay a fine, I would not expect such a result until I at least went in front of a judge and was warned that if I didn't pay up I might go to jail. Usually they just slap a penalty on the charge.
Of course the problem with the security system is that they do not strip search the guards, who are one of the primary vectors for materials getting in and out of prison. Thus their security measure is not really addressing the stated problem anyway. What they do not want to go over is that the reason behind these searches is attempting to humiliate and break prisoners so they are easier to manage (which fails) and to demonstrate to the guards how powerful they are (which succeeds, in a way)... so it is really less about keeping contraband out and more about keeping guards in the 'right' mindset. If the guards see prisoners as people then the psychology breaks down pretty quickly.
Pretty much.
Right now American culture idealizes the uneducated self starter, the charismatic salesman who becomes and executive or the untrained (or better yet, rejected) garage inventor who outsmarts all the eggheads....
Improving one's life through education is seen as the 'looser' way of getting a good life, the path that lesser people take.
*nods* a lot of it flows into sports and other such activities yeah. Transportation is another big issue since our districts are significantly more distributed then ones in Europe. We have very spread out populations and operating that fleet of busses is really damned expensive.
True, there is that varient. Perhaps I should have been more specific.. females stalking males who are currently capable (as in not already attached) of returning their interest. Females trying to break up another relationship which they feel entitled too... though even then, outside extreme cases, I encounter the attitude that he must have done something insensitive to her like ditching her (under the idea that women are fragile emotional beings not responsible for their own lives, thus if she is that upset he MUST have done something to injure her). So bullshit all around ^_^
We are just barely entering the erra when male abuse victims are taken seriously by police.... stalking? we are still a while off there both legally and socially.
A while back I had a female stalker, mostly I got laughed at or got outright nasty looks. A lot of guys picture stalking as this wonderful thing they would love to have happen and see other guys who are not enjoying the experience as not being grateful.
And the girls just had this 'but you are guy, it is different' dismissive attitude. Even worse some took her side with the idea that it was wrong of me to reject her, that it just was not acceptable for guys to not accept a girl's advances.
It will depend on scheduling. I imagine they will look into what it takes to implement, but this is the type of feature that really has to be 'on' at release so unless they plan on releasing their console a significant time after Sony (quite possible) then they will not really be able to wait and see.
Though if Sony does go this route, they could make their lack of crippling a selling point... go for the 'see, we are not asshats like Sony, you can play your legally purchanced used games on OUR systems'.
It is indeed not illegal to sell used games (doctrine of first sale), BUT it is not legally required either, so hardware manufacturers are free to build their devices in such a way that they tie first usage to a particular user. And of course they can use DMCA to ensure that people are not legally allowed to modify the consoles in order to play used games.
So the law is kinda on Sony's side in this case.
Well, that is IF they actually do this, right now it is just a rumor. Until then consoles have a pretty solid used market going on.
Oops, linking did not work. : http://www.usmint.gov/pressroom/?action=press_release&ID=724
Looks like the US mint also says it is illegal: United States Mint Moves to Limit Exportation & Melting of Coins
Yep. Though it is also illegal to melt down pennies for their metals anyway.
Now all they need to do is get rid of daylight saving time and they will REALLY make the US look silly... come on fed, the Canadians are making us look like idiots here.... THEY can get rid of pennies....