Castle Doctrine doesn't necessarily apply in your state (some have codified a duty to retreat), doesn't necessarily apply to someone on your property, versus unlawfully entering your home, and:
In general, one (sometimes more) of a variety of conditions must be met before a person can legally use the Castle Doctrine: [ . . . ] The intruder must be acting illegally—e.g. the Castle Doctrine does not give the right to attack officers of the law acting in the course of their legal duties
I'm basing this off of numbers available from self-publishing / publish-on-demand services, and conversations with a girl I dated for a while who worked as an editor for a fairly large publishing company that does much of its business in paperbacks.
Most of the small offset printing services seem to run somewhere around $3/unit for runs of ~2000 units; Price-per-unit declines as the volume of the run goes up, and it's trivially obvious that a large publishing company will have high-volume arrangements with printers, further reducing their costs.
Many of these mass-market paperbacks sell for $10-15, making the physical printing costs approach ~10-20% of the total unit cost (actual numbers could even be lower for some books & publishing companies). And yet there's this assumption that eliminating printing from the process, but nothing else, should reduce the price of the book by 50-75%.
Now if that is the price I am willing to pay for PAPER versions, then I feel that e-books, which are nearly pure profit for the publisher, are way overpriced. I think $3-5 is a reasonable price for an E-Book . Of course I would pay more for a technical book, but I would still expect that an E-Book should be 30-50% of the cost of it's paper cousin TOPS.
You realize that the cost or printing & distributing the paper book is a fairly small fraction of the cost of publishing it, right? Most of the cost of creating the book has nothing to do with the mechanics of putting ink on paper - proofing, layout, art, editing, author royalties - all of this is still a part of the process, regardless of the form the final product takes.
Looking at Barnes & Noble's web site, a quick scan of paperback books indicates that many of them are priced in the $12-$15 US range, versus $9.99 for an ebook version. The difference between an ebook and a paperback book is - of course - that the publisher doesn't incur printing, distribution, and warehousing costs, but that could very well be covered by the discount of $3-5 per copy. Why would you expect the price of an ebook to be so much lower than the cost of a paperback, given that printing, distribution, and warehousing are the only parts of the publication process that they eliminate (or have a chance to save significantly on - server infrastructure & distribution still costs them *something*, just much less than shipping bricks of paper around.)
I don't understand this argument that somehow because something is in digital form, it should "be almost free" - if you value the content, the value, and much of the cost, is *in the content* not in physical medium the content is distributed on/in. Why is $9 a vastly unreasonable price for an ebook, given all of the effort from numerous people that must go into producing that book, and where printing & distribution are some of the smallest parts of the cost?
Times 24 hours in a day, times how many millions of public venues you might be interested in collecting this data at, times how many people you need to hire to review this data on an ongoing basis, times how long do you need to retain the data for?
Yes, it sounds impractical to me. As in, cost- and manpower-prohibitive.
Android is geared towards business?! How come every person with a corporate phone that I've ever met has a Blackberry?
I think Android & iOS are pretty direct competitors in the consumer handset space, and both would love to make inroads in business, but they have to beat RIM at that game.
None of which changes the idiocy of the point that the GP is trying to make; there's no 'sweet spot' between iOS and Android.
But the reasonability of a government action is related to how you'd feel if a private citizen did it. If they have extra powers, they should be clear and justified.
Of *course* they have extra powers. It's not a case of "if" but a case of "which." So, by your own standard, we need clear definition of the extra powers ("the FBI may place a tracking device on your car without your knowledge or consent" - pretty clear) and justification ("The FBI needs this authority during the course of a criminal investigation in order to track the movements of suspected criminals and their associates, and if you force them to notify the person being investigated - i.e., 'you must get their consent or even just notify them' - you have severely hampered the ability of the investigators to do their job.") I don't see why you're getting so hung up on this.
I plainly stated that someone can leave something on your property without a verbal contract.
Also known as littering, which I clearly addressed in my previous post. Try reading it - specifically, the part where I said: "If I decline your offer of a verbal agreement, and you leave the item on my property, I can either return it to you, or, once again, if I'm a litigious prick, probably have charges pressed against you for littering on my property." If it is *valuable* and you have no reason to believe that it has been left there purposefully (i.e. - a gift, or littering), it should be treated like a 'found object'.
You haven't answered anything about the law.
Then you are simply not reading in your haste to opine that law enforcement is really just "another person entering into a verbal contract". Your analogy sucks, I've pointed out the NUMEROUS flaws with it, and explained how the law DOES view the situation. You've responded with the textual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "I can't hear you, lalalalalalalalalala."
Your failure at reading comprehension is not my problem. If you ever find a device like this on your car, good luck defending your decision to smash it, trash it, or otherwise destroy it, and then claim it was a "gift," or that a "found object" may be disposed of as you see fit.
As someone with minor noise-induced hearing loss (my sainted speech pathologist mother always warned me that I'd damage my hearing with all that rock music), I can see where something like this would be helpful - background noise is a killer for me.
I suspect the difficult part for something like a hearing aid would be getting a big enough array of sensitive microphones into a wearable package to make this feasible... "325 microphones embedded in a carbon fiber disc with a camera" sounds pretty bulky, but I suppose you could do rough signal boosting even with a half dozen microphones. Then, you need some sort of range finder & way of figuring out what you're focusing on for proper calculations... perhaps some sort of eye-tracking like they use with computer screen usability tests + range finder + microphones, all embedded in the frame of a pair of glasses? No help for people who don't wear glasses, unless they're hip to the look, but I'd imagine along the top frame you could space mics out, and embed the eye-tracking and a small range finder connected to the eye tracker.
Offload the signal processing to a device in your pocket wirelessly (bluetooth?), then feed it into your hearing aid with the enhanced sound... "dead man's switch" to let the hearing aid work normally if no bluetooth signal is received, or all the components aren't there? Of course, you'd also have to deal with latency and interference among these devices (over wireless), and the fact that to be portable / wearable, you're talking pretty significant miniaturization...
50 megabytes / second = ~175 gigabytes per hour = ~4.2 terabytes per day = ~ 1.5 petabytes per year.
For every microphone dish you deploy.
Now, assume you can perform flawless speech-to-text on everything in that data stream. How many terabytes of meaningless, contextless text will you end up with? How will you tie specific things said to specific peoiple in the crowd, and how will you even know who they are? You have to keep the audio (and some way of determining who was at every point in the arena over the course of the event, for thousands of people) to be able to make any use of this.
You're talking about impractical amounts of data just for a SINGLE stadium. Now multiply that by every shop, stadium, office, and other location where people congregate, and you rapidly see that the retention requirements for you "not that big of a deal, 50 MB/s" will overwhelm any attempt to systemetically deploy something like this.
If I was Canadian, I would happily say that I was from America, and let people interpret it however they like.
I sort of enjoy calling Macs PCs and then watching the inevitable rage or confusion that follows.
So you value pedantic correctness over effective communication with your fellow humans? That says volumes about you, and very little of it positive.
But the term "American", when referring to people, is quite exclusively reserved for referring to people from the USA. At least that's my understanding of it.
It is exclusively reserved for referring to people from the USA only by informal convention & long-standing usage, not from some inflexible rule of language. Just like "Macs" are "Macintosh PCs" and "PCs" are "Windows PCs," in long-standing usage and informal convention. This is mindless semantic argument, made solely for the sake of argument. What is the point? You know what's meant, I know what's meant, and everybody else reading knows what's meant by the "Mac" vs. "PC" distinction.
So if you attach your iPhone to the underside of my car, I'm responsible when it falls off and is broken?
No, because: a) you weren't aware of the device being placed; b) I'm not law enforcement with the authority to compel you to do things; c) my iPhone is not government property; and all three of the above presume that d) you have not 'found the device attached, taken it off, deliberately destroyed it, and then claimed that it must have fallen off.'
Or if, when doing maintenance on my car, I find a piece of equipment that shouldn't be there, I have some kind of duty to store it in case someone comes asking?
You have two choices if you want to consider the property found: Store it, and make a reasonable effort to find the owner, or turn it in to police and absolve yourself of all responsibility for it. If you fail to find the owner yourself, then you are STILL obligated to turn it in to the police under the law.
Or, extrapolating this a little, if I find an electronic device on my lawn, I am obliged to store it rather than just throw it away, because whoever littered might be coming to ask for it?
Yes, actually, if the device is worth more than a set dollar amount (if memory serves, greater than $100 value), you ARE obligated to either hold it and attempt to find the owner, or turn it in to the police. Those are your options, any other option you choose is a violation of the law in California, and you should be prepared for the consequences.
This is not about "finder's keepers", this is about my right to dispose of garbage.
Really? Because it sounds a lot like 'finder's keepers' when you state that you get to do whatever you want with an object of value that you find, because finding that object gives you the right to dispose of it as you see fit, including disassembly for 'thorough analysis,' followed by 'losing it' on a highway.
Unfortunately for you and your point, the law very clearly disagrees with you. Your options, under the law, are to either hold the device and make an attempt to find the rightful owner, and THEN turn it in to police, OR to turn it in to police right away and absolve yourself of all responsibility for the item.
There is no third option where you get to smash, disassemble, throw away, or otherwise dispose of the item, if you don't want to run afoul of the law. If you don't mind breaking the law, then great - lose it, smash it, disassemble it, throw it in a dumpster, throw it in a lake... just be ready for when the FBI comes around and wants to know what happened to their device.
What they may do is irrelevant to what you may do. And, of course, that's the obvious reason I was trying to avoid "FBI" in the analogy. But it seems like you've made up your mind and refuse to even explore what would happen in similar situations that don't involve law enforcement.
Because the FBI *is NOT* another private citizen. They have the authority under law to compel you to do a lot of things. They don't need your permission or your consent to arrest you. They don't need your permission or your consent to tap your phone, place a tracking device, subpoena your financial records, or perform a host of other investigative actions. The ONLY person they - SOMETIMES - must inform of their actions is a judge, when they are required to request a warrant. They're not always required to even do that, again - BY LAW.
Why you keep insisting that this analogy of "two private individuals entering into a mutually agreeable contract" is somehow applicable here, I don't understand. This is not two private citizens, this is a citizen, and a law enforcement agency.
I'm not "purposefully twisting the analogy" in any sense - I'm saying the analogy sucks, and doesn't apply, because it's not a verbal contract, and there's no requirement that law enforcement get your consent.
Again - you may not LIKE this, but that's the way the law works today.
Please go present that case to a judge. I look forward to seeing this logic torn to shreds by the paralegals in court.
The police do not need your informed consent to investigate you. They never HAVE. And here's a pro tip: There will NEVER be a requirement for the police to do this.
Well then, you 'meant' something that is completely irrelevant.
If they have crossed some line by doing this, it is an imaginary one in your head.
If it is *legal* for them to do this, and you simply don't like it, then you support legislators who will change the law and close that loophole. (Hint: It always *has* been legal for them to 'secretly' place a device on your vehicle to track you. Some places haven't even needed warrants to do so, long before the advent of the recent decision.)
If it is *illegal* for them to do this, you will be vindicated in a court of law.
If it is *illegal* and they are still doing it, and no court will stop them, then the rule of law is broken. We have not yet approached this "line" you seem to think they have crossed. They have always been able to attach these devices - the court's ruling simply decided that they don't need a warrant from a judge in order to do so. The act of placing a surveillance device on your vehicle has *always* been secret, warrant or not. They don't ask your permission, they don't give you notification, they are not required to get your consent.
This is not "doing whatever they want to you," this is "exercising the authorities that courts & legislature have granted to them" in a constitutional and legal manner.
If they could do 'whatever they wanted' to you, there'd be no need for a tracking device, they'd simply 'disappear' you to the nearest interrogation facility where a confession would be extracted from you via whatever means were necessary. Why bother with all the hassle of tracking you, when hot pliers and ball peen hammers will get you to tell them what you've been up to?
You use the word intent, but then you try to weasel your way out of the fact that the device is IN NO WAY intended to be a "gift" for you when it is placed - you're trying to defend a point of view which is indefensible. You could, in fact, argue that the effort they take to HIDE the device from the owner of the car demonstrate an intent to make certain the the owner of the car does NOT take possession of their device, so it's clearly not a gift. Nor is it lost, because the owner of the device knows exactly where it is, and exactly why it was placed there.
Fortunately for law enforcement, there are more than two categories that an item can belong to, the world is not as simple as: "EITHER gift OR lost item". At least one more category exists, which is special because of the authority granted to the people to whom the item belongs: government property.
This third category means that, as someone who is "not the government," the item is neither yours to destroy, nor yours to appropriate. In addition, neither your consent nor your knowledge is required for them to place a tracking device on your vehicle, and then use that device to track your movements.
Law enforcement by definition has the authority to force you to comply with their lawful orders. This extends to placing a tracking device on your vehicle by force (without your agreement or knowledge), and using that information during an investigation of your activities. If you remove that device, and destroy it, or do anything else with it, you have destroyed (or misappropriated) government property, and are then subject to the legal consequences of doing so.
They've always had the right to place a tracker on your car, and place you under surveillance - this is nothing new. The only thing new is that a court has ruled that the police *do not need a warrant* to place the tracker. There are numerous legal opinions and precedents that feed into this decision - I'd strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with them, in fact - but to state that this has turned us into some sort of fascist police state is overdoing it a bit.
Inflamed rhetoric makes for nice bumper stickers, and it also makes for horrible legal opinions.
I was responding to his assertion that "being legally right is moot", fuckwit. And no, GGP is NOT "correct." The ONLY thing that matters is the legality of the action.
There is no obligation for the police to inform you that you're under surveillance, nor is there any need for them to run the warrant by you "just to see if it's okay". They can, and regularly DO, keep things "secret" from the people they are investigating and surveilling. If they are doing it and do not have the legal authority to do so, demonstrating that in front of a court is how you get them to stop. If they are doing it, and they do have the legal authority, then you really have no legal leg to stand on to prevent them from surveilling you.
I don't understand why this doesn't seem to compute. You *cannot* have it both ways - it cannot be a "lost item" and a "malicious device planted on my car by some shadowy third party who is out to do me harm." Either somebody misplaced it, or somebody knows *exactly* where it is and why it's there, and then the only question is whether or not they have the legal authority to place it there -if they do, then you're just destroying government property and extending the list of crimes you're under investigation for; if they don't, then the role of the police is to protect you from these violations, and so you should be putting them to work doing exactly that.
If you want to consider it "lost" property, you must treat it as such - which means you can't destroy it, or do whatever else you want with it, without facing legal consequences. I'll say it one more time: "FINDERS KEEPERS" IS NOT THE LAW, and never has been.
If you want to consider it a "malicious device," then you call the police and report what you've found, and turn the device over for them to investigate what the device is, what its purpose is, and who attached it to your car.
As a third option, only to be chosen if you want to continue to be a complete blithering idiot, keep claiming it's "lost property," and that its status as "found" property somehow allows you to dispose of it as you see fit, or destroy it if you feel like it. This option is completely indefensible from a legal standpoint, but it seems to be oddly comforting to a lot of armchair lawyers here.
You state they are separate, then fail to explore that. If I drop past you house and drop off a plant and tell you I'll be back sometime to get it, what are your rights and responsibilities?
The same rights anybody else has when offered a voluntary contract: accept, or decline. If I accept, and then I throw the plant out the window, my friend would likely have a civil case against me for breaking a verbal agreement to feed & water his plant, if we were both litigious pricks. If he never came back for it, and indicated he had no intent of recovering his plant from me, then it would become my property to dispose of as I wish.
If I decline your offer of a verbal agreement, and you leave the item on my property, I can either return it to you, or, once again, if I'm a litigious prick, probably have charges pressed against you for littering on my property.
The situation you're describing is an offer of a verbal contract. You can agree, or decline - nobody may force you to care for a plant against your will, and so you would have legal recourse if your friend tried to force you to.
Now, comparing this with the FBI scenario, the difference is quite clear: this is not a voluntary agreement you are entering into, and the courts have ruled that law enforcement agents may use force - i.e., attach the tracker without your knowledge or consent. As law enforcement, they are granted this authority.
As I mentioned elsewhere, you may not LIKE that they can attach the device without a warrant, and you may object to it, but the laws say (and the courts have upheld) that they may. So either support candidates for the legislature that will change that law to require warrants, or take your lumps when you discover a device, destroy it, and end up facing legal consequences for that.
It's also worth noting that, even if these devices *required* warrants to be placed, the FBI would still have the authority to place one without your knowledge or consent, provided *a judge* has agreed that there was a probable cause for using the device to collect information about you as part of an investigation. You would *still* not have the right to tamper with or destroy the tracker if it was placed legally, though you'd have a hell of a case against somebody if you found one and they didn't have a warrant.
Yup. And when attaching trackers to someone's car becomes legal, it's your cue to go "oh shit".
It's been legal for the police to attach a tracker to someone's car for as long as there have been trackers. The question at hand is whether or not the FBI needs to subject itself to judicial oversight by getting a *warrant* (demonstrating probable cause and laying out the exact methods & expected data they will capture) to attach the tracker to your car.
Nowhere in that chain of oversight are they required to notify you, or ask you for your permission to track your movements, or inform you that they intend to track your movements. So even if they needed a warrant, you would still have no notice that the device was attached unless you found it by chance.
See, the thing is, court decisions - even those of the supreme court - aren't the law.
I never said or implied that they were, which is why I said that you should get out there and either become, or support, legislative candidates who will close this loophole. The FBI asserts it has this authority; Someone challenged it in court, and the court agreed with the FBI, that the laws and constitution did NOT conflict with the FBI having this authority. So, the only thing to do is keep appealing all the way to the Supreme Court (and probably hear the same response at every step of the way), or get the legislature to change the law to specifically require warrants when placing a tracking device on someone's car.
And attaching tracking devides to people's cars seems to be in direct violation of any reasonable reading of the Fourth Amemdnment.
This is just another form of surveillance, and the prohibition against unreasonable search & seizure does not prohibit other forms of surveillance. It states that a *warrant* is required, and that is the possible constitutional issue at hand - whether or not they can attach the tracker to your car *without a warrant*.
Really, if I found a surveillance device in my car, it would be tragically "lost" on a highway somewhere and run over by a truck, after a thorough analysis of course.
I say again:
"As with the iPhone case, there is no such thing as "Finders Keepers" under the law. Any attempt to justify selling, destroying, or 'losing' a found item is on shaky legal ground, and will probably put you in hot water, legally speaking."
Sure, you CAN do whatever you want with the item. The *ability* to do whatever you wish with/to the device does not, however, absolve you of the legal (at least civil, and perhaps criminal) consequences of your actions.
A piece of detritus stuck to your car - gum, a stick, a flyer from the carwash up the street - does not have a value that would cause the law to take an interest - I believe in California, an item must be of a value greater than $100 to be considered a found item and be subject to the full extent of the laws. An iPhone prototype, and a GPS tracking device, both exceed those values to reasonable person casually examining the device.
Furthermore, a piece of detritus stuck to your car is also likely either not an item of property "belonging to" another person, or it got stuck to your car after it was expressly abandoned by the person who owned it. Neither of these is true of a GPS tracking device. As I said in another post, the *intent* of attaching the device to your car matters a great deal. The intent was never to abandon or "gift" it, it was to track your movement as part of a police investigation.
This device was placed with the knowledge and consent of the owner at that time.
This is a ridiculous argument, as the intent of placing the item in/on your car is absolutely in question here.
If I leave a CD in your car, and say, "You keep this," then it is a gift.
If I place a GPS tracking device on your car and say, "Now we can see where he goes during the day," then it is not a gift, it is a surveillance tool which has been deployed to support an ongoing investigation. The government still has a very real interest in not losing that property - enough so that it has a fucking GPS hooked up to a transmitter, so that you always know where the device is.
I've never understood why so many Slashdotters spend so much time trying to justify how their naive black-and-white view of the world is correct, instead of understanding that the intent of an action, and not just the *effect* of an action, changes the *character* of an action quite a bit. Here's an example: If I lose control of my vehicle and run over a couple kids in the street, I may be charged with manslaughter; if I *intended* to run them down, and got in my car and drove into them with the express purpose of running down those kids, I may be charged with first degree murder. If I am attempting to flee a group of young people with guns who are chasing me and trying to kill me, and accidentally run one down, I may even be acquitted because my action was in self defense. These are all VERY different in the eyes of the law, and the *difference* is strictly in the *intent* of the action that caused someone to die.
You may not consider them different, who knows. Fortunately, our legal system draws a distinction based on the intent of the action, and so all your arguing about whether or not they "gifted" it to you by leaving it attached to your car has absolutely no basis or support in the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Castle Doctrine doesn't necessarily apply in your state (some have codified a duty to retreat), doesn't necessarily apply to someone on your property, versus unlawfully entering your home, and:
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine)
Better be careful with that hair trigger, cowboy.
I'm basing this off of numbers available from self-publishing / publish-on-demand services, and conversations with a girl I dated for a while who worked as an editor for a fairly large publishing company that does much of its business in paperbacks.
Most of the small offset printing services seem to run somewhere around $3/unit for runs of ~2000 units; Price-per-unit declines as the volume of the run goes up, and it's trivially obvious that a large publishing company will have high-volume arrangements with printers, further reducing their costs.
Many of these mass-market paperbacks sell for $10-15, making the physical printing costs approach ~10-20% of the total unit cost (actual numbers could even be lower for some books & publishing companies). And yet there's this assumption that eliminating printing from the process, but nothing else, should reduce the price of the book by 50-75%.
You realize that the cost or printing & distributing the paper book is a fairly small fraction of the cost of publishing it, right? Most of the cost of creating the book has nothing to do with the mechanics of putting ink on paper - proofing, layout, art, editing, author royalties - all of this is still a part of the process, regardless of the form the final product takes.
Looking at Barnes & Noble's web site, a quick scan of paperback books indicates that many of them are priced in the $12-$15 US range, versus $9.99 for an ebook version. The difference between an ebook and a paperback book is - of course - that the publisher doesn't incur printing, distribution, and warehousing costs, but that could very well be covered by the discount of $3-5 per copy. Why would you expect the price of an ebook to be so much lower than the cost of a paperback, given that printing, distribution, and warehousing are the only parts of the publication process that they eliminate (or have a chance to save significantly on - server infrastructure & distribution still costs them *something*, just much less than shipping bricks of paper around.)
I don't understand this argument that somehow because something is in digital form, it should "be almost free" - if you value the content, the value, and much of the cost, is *in the content* not in physical medium the content is distributed on/in. Why is $9 a vastly unreasonable price for an ebook, given all of the effort from numerous people that must go into producing that book, and where printing & distribution are some of the smallest parts of the cost?
In what way have I confused the two?
And how much data was passing through the Intelsat system in 1967?
Oh yeah... right. It's impractical.
Times 24 hours in a day, times how many millions of public venues you might be interested in collecting this data at, times how many people you need to hire to review this data on an ongoing basis, times how long do you need to retain the data for?
Yes, it sounds impractical to me. As in, cost- and manpower-prohibitive.
Android is geared towards business?! How come every person with a corporate phone that I've ever met has a Blackberry?
I think Android & iOS are pretty direct competitors in the consumer handset space, and both would love to make inroads in business, but they have to beat RIM at that game.
None of which changes the idiocy of the point that the GP is trying to make; there's no 'sweet spot' between iOS and Android.
Of *course* they have extra powers. It's not a case of "if" but a case of "which." So, by your own standard, we need clear definition of the extra powers ("the FBI may place a tracking device on your car without your knowledge or consent" - pretty clear) and justification ("The FBI needs this authority during the course of a criminal investigation in order to track the movements of suspected criminals and their associates, and if you force them to notify the person being investigated - i.e., 'you must get their consent or even just notify them' - you have severely hampered the ability of the investigators to do their job.") I don't see why you're getting so hung up on this.
Also known as littering, which I clearly addressed in my previous post. Try reading it - specifically, the part where I said: "If I decline your offer of a verbal agreement, and you leave the item on my property, I can either return it to you, or, once again, if I'm a litigious prick, probably have charges pressed against you for littering on my property." If it is *valuable* and you have no reason to believe that it has been left there purposefully (i.e. - a gift, or littering), it should be treated like a 'found object'.
Then you are simply not reading in your haste to opine that law enforcement is really just "another person entering into a verbal contract". Your analogy sucks, I've pointed out the NUMEROUS flaws with it, and explained how the law DOES view the situation. You've responded with the textual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "I can't hear you, lalalalalalalalalala."
Your failure at reading comprehension is not my problem. If you ever find a device like this on your car, good luck defending your decision to smash it, trash it, or otherwise destroy it, and then claim it was a "gift," or that a "found object" may be disposed of as you see fit.
As someone with minor noise-induced hearing loss (my sainted speech pathologist mother always warned me that I'd damage my hearing with all that rock music), I can see where something like this would be helpful - background noise is a killer for me.
I suspect the difficult part for something like a hearing aid would be getting a big enough array of sensitive microphones into a wearable package to make this feasible... "325 microphones embedded in a carbon fiber disc with a camera" sounds pretty bulky, but I suppose you could do rough signal boosting even with a half dozen microphones. Then, you need some sort of range finder & way of figuring out what you're focusing on for proper calculations... perhaps some sort of eye-tracking like they use with computer screen usability tests + range finder + microphones, all embedded in the frame of a pair of glasses? No help for people who don't wear glasses, unless they're hip to the look, but I'd imagine along the top frame you could space mics out, and embed the eye-tracking and a small range finder connected to the eye tracker.
Offload the signal processing to a device in your pocket wirelessly (bluetooth?), then feed it into your hearing aid with the enhanced sound... "dead man's switch" to let the hearing aid work normally if no bluetooth signal is received, or all the components aren't there? Of course, you'd also have to deal with latency and interference among these devices (over wireless), and the fact that to be portable / wearable, you're talking pretty significant miniaturization...
50 megabytes / second = ~175 gigabytes per hour = ~4.2 terabytes per day = ~ 1.5 petabytes per year.
For every microphone dish you deploy.
Now, assume you can perform flawless speech-to-text on everything in that data stream. How many terabytes of meaningless, contextless text will you end up with? How will you tie specific things said to specific peoiple in the crowd, and how will you even know who they are? You have to keep the audio (and some way of determining who was at every point in the arena over the course of the event, for thousands of people) to be able to make any use of this.
You're talking about impractical amounts of data just for a SINGLE stadium. Now multiply that by every shop, stadium, office, and other location where people congregate, and you rapidly see that the retention requirements for you "not that big of a deal, 50 MB/s" will overwhelm any attempt to systemetically deploy something like this.
Loosen the tinfoil a bit, folks.
So you value pedantic correctness over effective communication with your fellow humans? That says volumes about you, and very little of it positive.
It is exclusively reserved for referring to people from the USA only by informal convention & long-standing usage, not from some inflexible rule of language. Just like "Macs" are "Macintosh PCs" and "PCs" are "Windows PCs," in long-standing usage and informal convention. This is mindless semantic argument, made solely for the sake of argument. What is the point? You know what's meant, I know what's meant, and everybody else reading knows what's meant by the "Mac" vs. "PC" distinction.
Just play a little faster, jeez. :)
No, because: a) you weren't aware of the device being placed; b) I'm not law enforcement with the authority to compel you to do things; c) my iPhone is not government property; and all three of the above presume that d) you have not 'found the device attached, taken it off, deliberately destroyed it, and then claimed that it must have fallen off.'
You have two choices if you want to consider the property found: Store it, and make a reasonable effort to find the owner, or turn it in to police and absolve yourself of all responsibility for it. If you fail to find the owner yourself, then you are STILL obligated to turn it in to the police under the law.
Yes, actually, if the device is worth more than a set dollar amount (if memory serves, greater than $100 value), you ARE obligated to either hold it and attempt to find the owner, or turn it in to the police. Those are your options, any other option you choose is a violation of the law in California, and you should be prepared for the consequences.
Really? Because it sounds a lot like 'finder's keepers' when you state that you get to do whatever you want with an object of value that you find, because finding that object gives you the right to dispose of it as you see fit, including disassembly for 'thorough analysis,' followed by 'losing it' on a highway.
Unfortunately for you and your point, the law very clearly disagrees with you. Your options, under the law, are to either hold the device and make an attempt to find the rightful owner, and THEN turn it in to police, OR to turn it in to police right away and absolve yourself of all responsibility for the item.
There is no third option where you get to smash, disassemble, throw away, or otherwise dispose of the item, if you don't want to run afoul of the law. If you don't mind breaking the law, then great - lose it, smash it, disassemble it, throw it in a dumpster, throw it in a lake... just be ready for when the FBI comes around and wants to know what happened to their device.
Because the FBI *is NOT* another private citizen. They have the authority under law to compel you to do a lot of things. They don't need your permission or your consent to arrest you. They don't need your permission or your consent to tap your phone, place a tracking device, subpoena your financial records, or perform a host of other investigative actions. The ONLY person they - SOMETIMES - must inform of their actions is a judge, when they are required to request a warrant. They're not always required to even do that, again - BY LAW.
Why you keep insisting that this analogy of "two private individuals entering into a mutually agreeable contract" is somehow applicable here, I don't understand. This is not two private citizens, this is a citizen, and a law enforcement agency.
I'm not "purposefully twisting the analogy" in any sense - I'm saying the analogy sucks, and doesn't apply, because it's not a verbal contract, and there's no requirement that law enforcement get your consent.
Again - you may not LIKE this, but that's the way the law works today.
Please go present that case to a judge. I look forward to seeing this logic torn to shreds by the paralegals in court.
The police do not need your informed consent to investigate you. They never HAVE. And here's a pro tip: There will NEVER be a requirement for the police to do this.
Well then, you 'meant' something that is completely irrelevant.
If they have crossed some line by doing this, it is an imaginary one in your head.
If it is *legal* for them to do this, and you simply don't like it, then you support legislators who will change the law and close that loophole. (Hint: It always *has* been legal for them to 'secretly' place a device on your vehicle to track you. Some places haven't even needed warrants to do so, long before the advent of the recent decision.)
If it is *illegal* for them to do this, you will be vindicated in a court of law.
If it is *illegal* and they are still doing it, and no court will stop them, then the rule of law is broken. We have not yet approached this "line" you seem to think they have crossed. They have always been able to attach these devices - the court's ruling simply decided that they don't need a warrant from a judge in order to do so. The act of placing a surveillance device on your vehicle has *always* been secret, warrant or not. They don't ask your permission, they don't give you notification, they are not required to get your consent.
This is not "doing whatever they want to you," this is "exercising the authorities that courts & legislature have granted to them" in a constitutional and legal manner.
If they could do 'whatever they wanted' to you, there'd be no need for a tracking device, they'd simply 'disappear' you to the nearest interrogation facility where a confession would be extracted from you via whatever means were necessary. Why bother with all the hassle of tracking you, when hot pliers and ball peen hammers will get you to tell them what you've been up to?
You use the word intent, but then you try to weasel your way out of the fact that the device is IN NO WAY intended to be a "gift" for you when it is placed - you're trying to defend a point of view which is indefensible. You could, in fact, argue that the effort they take to HIDE the device from the owner of the car demonstrate an intent to make certain the the owner of the car does NOT take possession of their device, so it's clearly not a gift. Nor is it lost, because the owner of the device knows exactly where it is, and exactly why it was placed there.
Fortunately for law enforcement, there are more than two categories that an item can belong to, the world is not as simple as: "EITHER gift OR lost item". At least one more category exists, which is special because of the authority granted to the people to whom the item belongs: government property.
This third category means that, as someone who is "not the government," the item is neither yours to destroy, nor yours to appropriate. In addition, neither your consent nor your knowledge is required for them to place a tracking device on your vehicle, and then use that device to track your movements.
Law enforcement by definition has the authority to force you to comply with their lawful orders. This extends to placing a tracking device on your vehicle by force (without your agreement or knowledge), and using that information during an investigation of your activities. If you remove that device, and destroy it, or do anything else with it, you have destroyed (or misappropriated) government property, and are then subject to the legal consequences of doing so.
Let's be clear here:
They've always had the right to place a tracker on your car, and place you under surveillance - this is nothing new. The only thing new is that a court has ruled that the police *do not need a warrant* to place the tracker. There are numerous legal opinions and precedents that feed into this decision - I'd strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with them, in fact - but to state that this has turned us into some sort of fascist police state is overdoing it a bit.
Inflamed rhetoric makes for nice bumper stickers, and it also makes for horrible legal opinions.
I was responding to his assertion that "being legally right is moot", fuckwit. And no, GGP is NOT "correct." The ONLY thing that matters is the legality of the action.
There is no obligation for the police to inform you that you're under surveillance, nor is there any need for them to run the warrant by you "just to see if it's okay". They can, and regularly DO, keep things "secret" from the people they are investigating and surveilling. If they are doing it and do not have the legal authority to do so, demonstrating that in front of a court is how you get them to stop. If they are doing it, and they do have the legal authority, then you really have no legal leg to stand on to prevent them from surveilling you.
I don't understand why this doesn't seem to compute. You *cannot* have it both ways - it cannot be a "lost item" and a "malicious device planted on my car by some shadowy third party who is out to do me harm." Either somebody misplaced it, or somebody knows *exactly* where it is and why it's there, and then the only question is whether or not they have the legal authority to place it there -if they do, then you're just destroying government property and extending the list of crimes you're under investigation for; if they don't, then the role of the police is to protect you from these violations, and so you should be putting them to work doing exactly that.
If you want to consider it "lost" property, you must treat it as such - which means you can't destroy it, or do whatever else you want with it, without facing legal consequences. I'll say it one more time: "FINDERS KEEPERS" IS NOT THE LAW, and never has been.
If you want to consider it a "malicious device," then you call the police and report what you've found, and turn the device over for them to investigate what the device is, what its purpose is, and who attached it to your car.
As a third option, only to be chosen if you want to continue to be a complete blithering idiot, keep claiming it's "lost property," and that its status as "found" property somehow allows you to dispose of it as you see fit, or destroy it if you feel like it. This option is completely indefensible from a legal standpoint, but it seems to be oddly comforting to a lot of armchair lawyers here.
The same rights anybody else has when offered a voluntary contract: accept, or decline. If I accept, and then I throw the plant out the window, my friend would likely have a civil case against me for breaking a verbal agreement to feed & water his plant, if we were both litigious pricks. If he never came back for it, and indicated he had no intent of recovering his plant from me, then it would become my property to dispose of as I wish.
If I decline your offer of a verbal agreement, and you leave the item on my property, I can either return it to you, or, once again, if I'm a litigious prick, probably have charges pressed against you for littering on my property.
The situation you're describing is an offer of a verbal contract. You can agree, or decline - nobody may force you to care for a plant against your will, and so you would have legal recourse if your friend tried to force you to.
Now, comparing this with the FBI scenario, the difference is quite clear: this is not a voluntary agreement you are entering into, and the courts have ruled that law enforcement agents may use force - i.e., attach the tracker without your knowledge or consent. As law enforcement, they are granted this authority.
As I mentioned elsewhere, you may not LIKE that they can attach the device without a warrant, and you may object to it, but the laws say (and the courts have upheld) that they may. So either support candidates for the legislature that will change that law to require warrants, or take your lumps when you discover a device, destroy it, and end up facing legal consequences for that.
It's also worth noting that, even if these devices *required* warrants to be placed, the FBI would still have the authority to place one without your knowledge or consent, provided *a judge* has agreed that there was a probable cause for using the device to collect information about you as part of an investigation. You would *still* not have the right to tamper with or destroy the tracker if it was placed legally, though you'd have a hell of a case against somebody if you found one and they didn't have a warrant.
It's been legal for the police to attach a tracker to someone's car for as long as there have been trackers. The question at hand is whether or not the FBI needs to subject itself to judicial oversight by getting a *warrant* (demonstrating probable cause and laying out the exact methods & expected data they will capture) to attach the tracker to your car.
Nowhere in that chain of oversight are they required to notify you, or ask you for your permission to track your movements, or inform you that they intend to track your movements. So even if they needed a warrant, you would still have no notice that the device was attached unless you found it by chance.
I never said or implied that they were, which is why I said that you should get out there and either become, or support, legislative candidates who will close this loophole. The FBI asserts it has this authority; Someone challenged it in court, and the court agreed with the FBI, that the laws and constitution did NOT conflict with the FBI having this authority. So, the only thing to do is keep appealing all the way to the Supreme Court (and probably hear the same response at every step of the way), or get the legislature to change the law to specifically require warrants when placing a tracking device on someone's car.
This is just another form of surveillance, and the prohibition against unreasonable search & seizure does not prohibit other forms of surveillance. It states that a *warrant* is required, and that is the possible constitutional issue at hand - whether or not they can attach the tracker to your car *without a warrant*.
First, go understand the difference that intent makes.
*THEN* you may try to be a clever /. lawyer type.
I say again:
"As with the iPhone case, there is no such thing as "Finders Keepers" under the law. Any attempt to justify selling, destroying, or 'losing' a found item is on shaky legal ground, and will probably put you in hot water, legally speaking."
Sure, you CAN do whatever you want with the item. The *ability* to do whatever you wish with/to the device does not, however, absolve you of the legal (at least civil, and perhaps criminal) consequences of your actions.
A piece of detritus stuck to your car - gum, a stick, a flyer from the carwash up the street - does not have a value that would cause the law to take an interest - I believe in California, an item must be of a value greater than $100 to be considered a found item and be subject to the full extent of the laws. An iPhone prototype, and a GPS tracking device, both exceed those values to reasonable person casually examining the device.
Furthermore, a piece of detritus stuck to your car is also likely either not an item of property "belonging to" another person, or it got stuck to your car after it was expressly abandoned by the person who owned it. Neither of these is true of a GPS tracking device. As I said in another post, the *intent* of attaching the device to your car matters a great deal. The intent was never to abandon or "gift" it, it was to track your movement as part of a police investigation.
This is a ridiculous argument, as the intent of placing the item in/on your car is absolutely in question here.
If I leave a CD in your car, and say, "You keep this," then it is a gift.
If I place a GPS tracking device on your car and say, "Now we can see where he goes during the day," then it is not a gift, it is a surveillance tool which has been deployed to support an ongoing investigation. The government still has a very real interest in not losing that property - enough so that it has a fucking GPS hooked up to a transmitter, so that you always know where the device is.
I've never understood why so many Slashdotters spend so much time trying to justify how their naive black-and-white view of the world is correct, instead of understanding that the intent of an action, and not just the *effect* of an action, changes the *character* of an action quite a bit. Here's an example: If I lose control of my vehicle and run over a couple kids in the street, I may be charged with manslaughter; if I *intended* to run them down, and got in my car and drove into them with the express purpose of running down those kids, I may be charged with first degree murder. If I am attempting to flee a group of young people with guns who are chasing me and trying to kill me, and accidentally run one down, I may even be acquitted because my action was in self defense. These are all VERY different in the eyes of the law, and the *difference* is strictly in the *intent* of the action that caused someone to die.
You may not consider them different, who knows. Fortunately, our legal system draws a distinction based on the intent of the action, and so all your arguing about whether or not they "gifted" it to you by leaving it attached to your car has absolutely no basis or support in the law.