The whole idea of trying to force someone to testify againsts oneself just makes no sense to me. The only reason one would ever admit to a crime would be if the penalty for not doing so is greater than the penalty for doing so. In that case, from the suspect's perspective the question isn't really 'Did you do the crime?' it is 'Do you think you are going to be convicted?'. If you are innocent but things are going bad for you suddenly you are in a position where it is best to give up and admit to a crime you didn't commit. Likewise, if you are guilty, it still makes no sense to admit to it if you think you can get away with it. If they can't convict you of the crime how are they going to convict you of lying about it?
The author states many times that people tell him the right to not self-imcriminate is important because otherwise police could just beat a confesion out of people. His rebuttal is that is already ilegal for them to do anyway.
But.. he also mentions that he understands why ilegaly obtained evidence can't be used in court. That rule takes away the incentive which police might otherwise have to break and enter people's homes without a warrant. That is also ilegal for them to do and yet we still need a separate rule that evidence obtained that way can't be used.
I don't understand the disconnect. If we need such a rule to protect our belongings from over-zealous police don't we need the same to protect our persons?
I disagree with the author's take on the "I never liked the guy" example.
I am not a police officer but if I was interviewing a suspect and they gave me that same paragraph "I never liked the guy" is exactly what I would take out of it too! It's not mis-representing the suspect's words, it's the one and only sure thing that can be taken from them. All that other "I am innocent" stuff may very well be true. But.. a guilty person would say the same thing! "I never liked the guy"... that's a pretty dumb thing to say in such a situation and I really doubt anyone would say it if it weren't true. So... yeah, it's the only important part of what the suspect said.
Don't get me wrong, I still believe that is a long way from a confesion and should not be taken as proof of guilt. It is a little hint that you might be on the right path so keep considering this guy as a suspect.
How about all of these tablets and phones out there these days. Why are their bootloaders locked so that we can't install our own software on them? We have always been able to do that with PCs! Even in the early days of pocket sized devices we could do that. Ever see a Toshiba Libretto?
Why is there no side-loading allowed on iOS? Does Windows Phone/Tablet allow side loading? I've read both that it does and does not.
No, Have you ever heard anyone complain that a Windows 8 tablet or phone felt too much like a desktop? If anything the complaint is that their desktop now is too much like a tablet. Microsoft's real problem is that they were way too late to market. It's just like when Microsoft was late to recognize the internet is important. Give them time and they will probably bounce back, they have done it before.
Besides, what is iOS but OSX with a striped down ui and a whole bunch of rights removed from the user?
Maybe not by 11 but I'm pretty sure that by 15 I would take any vaccination I could get as that is plenty old enough to understand that a moment's needle prick is much better than getting sick. Actually, I may have gone for it at 11 even. Maybe I wasn't a very normal child though...
Of course iOS and MacOS will converge. Mac is too open. Apple would like to have all it's customers locked into the market place where they receive both money and power as they have 100% say of what 'apps' will and will not ever see the light of day.
Microsoft will do the same with the Windows platform if they can ever even get their phone market off the ground. Otherwise they will just fade away into irrelevance.
Meanwhile with even desktops getting locked bootloaders it will be harder and harder to put Linux or any other non Apple/Microsoft OS on any piece of hardware, desk/laptop, tablet or phone.
Google however doesn't even seem to be interested in any sort of 'desk/laptop' OS. Sure, there is Chrome but if you really want to write something that requires some power are you going to get it from HTML5?
Even if you like one or both of Mac/Windows without any competition they will have no reason to innovate. Will they compete with one another? I doubt it, they haven't for most of the past. Instead one dominates while allowing the other to survive in order to avoid antitrust problems. We are going to see innovation slow down to what it was in the 80s and short of getting hired by Apple or Microsoft none of us will have a chance to contribute ourselves.
I want a government that gives people the liberty to fuck up their own lives however they want. It's their choice.
I want a government that protects us from someone else fucking up our lives.
That includes protecting kids from fuck-up parents. (hey, nobody choses their own parents why should they be punished for them?)
But.. I also want a government that lets me raise my kids as I see fit. (the state should not be our mother of father)
Are my wants that different from anyone else's? I doubt it. But I'm pretty sure it's impossible to strike a balance that fills them all in every situation.
Ideally no but here in the US if you are voting third party your choices are either really far left or really far right mixing church and state. Libertarian is the closest thing to a middle ground that there is in our third parties.
As someone with a pretty bad smoke allergy I really apreciate that in Ohio and Michigan I can go to bars and restaurants without getting sick now. I do support people's right to put things in their bodies. (tobacco, marijuana, etc... I really don't care) I just don't want to be forced to chose between being a shut-in or having people put their smoke in MY body. Somehow that just doesn't seem like liberty to me.
They can do it at home, in there cars, outside(Not in front of the door where we all have to walk through it).
As far as I can tell the Libertarians want to change things back to how they were, giving people the liberty to make others sick against their will again.
I would agree with that sentiment except that I have actually looked to see what third parties are available to vote for. Most of them are nuts!!! The Libertarians who you mentioned are probably the most voteworthy of the bunch (IMHO), maybe even better than the big two but personally I still disagree with them on some matters to the point I don't want to vote for them. The rest of the US third parties are just off the deep end either far right, far left or trying to build a religious state.
My point is that unethical and unlawful are two very different things. Did the lawyers involved go against what a judge told them to do? Certainly. Should there be reprecusions? Yes, the legal system would not function if it's rules were not enforced. Is it unethical?
I would argue that the non-disclosure agreement is unethical in the first place. The only possible value I can see in such an agreement is to facilitate price fixing and shutting out competition. In the end consumers lose out as prices are driven up and newcomers cannot bring their inovations to market. Where is the positive side of this? Is it so a greedy few may make a larger profit? Is that what the people built a legal system to do?
I could understand a hands-off approach.. it's companies own busniess if they want to inform others of their deals or keep them secret... let them enforce it themselves. If a partner company leaks your secrets stop dealing with them.
Or.. I could understand a pro-active, pro-consumer approach that would outlaw such agreements altogether and go after them as a form of price fixing. Keep the playing field level so that anyone may make a product and everyone may compete. Keep the innovations moving and the prices reasonable so that everyone may benefit.
I cannot accept that the courts enforcing these things are acting ethically. Thus when one goes against it I don't think they are acting unethically. Maybe they are acting uninteligently.. as you pointed out the lawyers will probably never practice law again. But... maybe they were secretly paid enough to retire?
So my question.. how was Samsung unethical (in this specific case)?
What if someone assumed it was the USSR before those involved even had a chance to admit to it. Missles could have been launched! WWIII might have actually started!
I don't intend to defend Samsung as being good or evil (all I really know about them in terms of cellphones is that my Samsung Stratosphere really sucks!)
But.. how does THIS event make them corrupt or evil? Because they broke a law? Because they broke the terms of someone else's contract? How is it morally wrong to know what someone else paid for the same 'product'? Isn't that how we all shop for anything which doesn't already have a price tag on it? Do you buy a house without looking at comps? If you go to an open market and you hear someone else haggling for one of something you want is it wrong to then offer the vendor the same deal? Or are you supposed to pretend you heard nothing and start the haggling from scratch?
Why should our legal system be helping to enforce these secrecy clauses on contracts? How is it in the people's intrest to enforce them? All I can see it being used for is to jack up the price of goods as well as to keep new and smaller players out of markets.
I understand why they would want to track such an investment, especially after handing them out to a bunch of kids but I don't want my kid carrying around an iPad which is sending her location to some school board!
For that reason I MIGHT support or even help her crack it but.. I don't want her to be in a position to have to make the decision to crack, risking some sort of consequence from the school or be tracked. They shouldn't be putting kids or parents in that position.
As for the filtering software.. well.. I can understand why schools would do that to. They don't want to be giving the kids a shiny new porn portal do they? But that doesn't mean that I want the local school board or whatever official being the one to decide what my kid gets access to or doesn't. That is MY job!
So... including tablets in their education... probably a good idea because they are such a large part of the modern world. But.. let us provide our own. Also.. enough with the iOS stuff. Is the school system trying to help build a new monopoly? Support 'bring your own device' and do support Android. Preferably support both iOS and Android but if that isn't practical at least chose Android over iOS since more than one company can compete for our money.
Saddly, I see what the trend is and when she reaches that age there will probably be iPads involved. Actually, her pre-school is already trying to get them for the teachers!
Prove that we didn't elect them. Prove that the elections are all rigged. Then I would support, even join such a move.
Until then baring arms against elected officials would just be a subversion of democracy. Who would take their place? Those who fight against the people's will by removing their chosen leaders? That would lead to tyrany for sure.
Until then all there is to do is try to vote for the best lizards we can with lots of facepalms over who our felow citizens keep chosing.
No, I think we are just happy to see Brazil is angry about it because we percieve our government as being more likely to listen to foreign diplomats than it us, it's own people. There might actually be some kind of consequence to pissing off enough UN member nations. What will the citizens do? Vote for the other lizard?
If your trackpad has no middle-click then why do you want to see the feature removed for those with real mice? It doesn't even affect you. Sour grapes?
Yup, it is kind of confusing that middle-click doesn't use the same clipboard as other options. I kind of like it that way though. Middle click is good for fast copy/pasting because it doesn't require me to press any keys. Copying to that clipboard only requires highlighting something. I can do the whole thing, copy and paste with my hand on the mouse and without even changing the position of my hand. The Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V clipboard on the other hand is more powerful. I use KDE and have a app in the taskbar that lets me see the clipboard history. I can Ctrl-C a smany times as I want and then go pick the lines I want to paste before I hit Ctrl-V.
I use both in different situations and am happy to have them separate.
That's one of the features I really like about a *nix environment. Between this and the ambiguity of how remoting support will work (or not work) in Wayland it is really begining to feel like the Linux desktop is under attack. It's all good as long as we still have choices, I switched away from Gnome years ago because to me it seems to tend towards copying those 'features' of Windows which I dislike. (hiding too deeply or removing customization options, dumping everything in a registry, etc...) With Ubuntu getting so much attention all the time though.. I worry our choices will fade away.
I get it that they want to make it easy for new users but what is the value if the result is just to copy the user interface and functionality of the competition? Where is the unique value? Why not just shift development away from *nix and go work on ReactOS?
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The whole idea of trying to force someone to testify againsts oneself just makes no sense to me. The only reason one would ever admit to a crime would be if the penalty for not doing so is greater than the penalty for doing so. In that case, from the suspect's perspective the question isn't really 'Did you do the crime?' it is 'Do you think you are going to be convicted?'. If you are innocent but things are going bad for you suddenly you are in a position where it is best to give up and admit to a crime you didn't commit. Likewise, if you are guilty, it still makes no sense to admit to it if you think you can get away with it. If they can't convict you of the crime how are they going to convict you of lying about it?
Ok, I just read the first article.
The author states many times that people tell him the right to not self-imcriminate is important because otherwise police could just beat a confesion out of people. His rebuttal is that is already ilegal for them to do anyway.
But.. he also mentions that he understands why ilegaly obtained evidence can't be used in court. That rule takes away the incentive which police might otherwise have to break and enter people's homes without a warrant. That is also ilegal for them to do and yet we still need a separate rule that evidence obtained that way can't be used.
I don't understand the disconnect. If we need such a rule to protect our belongings from over-zealous police don't we need the same to protect our persons?
I disagree with the author's take on the "I never liked the guy" example.
I am not a police officer but if I was interviewing a suspect and they gave me that same paragraph "I never liked the guy" is exactly what I would take out of it too! It's not mis-representing the suspect's words, it's the one and only sure thing that can be taken from them. All that other "I am innocent" stuff may very well be true. But.. a guilty person would say the same thing! "I never liked the guy"... that's a pretty dumb thing to say in such a situation and I really doubt anyone would say it if it weren't true. So... yeah, it's the only important part of what the suspect said.
Don't get me wrong, I still believe that is a long way from a confesion and should not be taken as proof of guilt. It is a little hint that you might be on the right path so keep considering this guy as a suspect.
I worked for a place like that. It went out of business when all the employees got fed up, found new jobs and left.
If he saw it coming then Snowden would have had an unfortunate accident.
Really? Ever hear of UFI and UEFI Boot?
How about all of these tablets and phones out there these days. Why are their bootloaders locked so that we can't install our own software on them? We have always been able to do that with PCs! Even in the early days of pocket sized devices we could do that. Ever see a Toshiba Libretto?
Why is there no side-loading allowed on iOS? Does Windows Phone/Tablet allow side loading? I've read both that it does and does not.
No, Have you ever heard anyone complain that a Windows 8 tablet or phone felt too much like a desktop? If anything the complaint is that their desktop now is too much like a tablet. Microsoft's real problem is that they were way too late to market. It's just like when Microsoft was late to recognize the internet is important. Give them time and they will probably bounce back, they have done it before.
Besides, what is iOS but OSX with a striped down ui and a whole bunch of rights removed from the user?
Many of them never visit other countries.
Even if they are doing the same themselves?
Define appropriate
Maybe not by 11 but I'm pretty sure that by 15 I would take any vaccination I could get as that is plenty old enough to understand that a moment's needle prick is much better than getting sick. Actually, I may have gone for it at 11 even. Maybe I wasn't a very normal child though...
Of course iOS and MacOS will converge. Mac is too open. Apple would like to have all it's customers locked into the market place where they receive both money and power as they have 100% say of what 'apps' will and will not ever see the light of day.
Microsoft will do the same with the Windows platform if they can ever even get their phone market off the ground. Otherwise they will just fade away into irrelevance.
Meanwhile with even desktops getting locked bootloaders it will be harder and harder to put Linux or any other non Apple/Microsoft OS on any piece of hardware, desk/laptop, tablet or phone.
Google however doesn't even seem to be interested in any sort of 'desk/laptop' OS. Sure, there is Chrome but if you really want to write something that requires some power are you going to get it from HTML5?
Even if you like one or both of Mac/Windows without any competition they will have no reason to innovate. Will they compete with one another? I doubt it, they haven't for most of the past. Instead one dominates while allowing the other to survive in order to avoid antitrust problems. We are going to see innovation slow down to what it was in the 80s and short of getting hired by Apple or Microsoft none of us will have a chance to contribute ourselves.
We should be very afraid for the future.
I want a government that gives people the liberty to fuck up their own lives however they want. It's their choice.
I want a government that protects us from someone else fucking up our lives.
That includes protecting kids from fuck-up parents. (hey, nobody choses their own parents why should they be punished for them?)
But.. I also want a government that lets me raise my kids as I see fit. (the state should not be our mother of father)
Are my wants that different from anyone else's? I doubt it. But I'm pretty sure it's impossible to strike a balance that fills them all in every situation.
Ideally no but here in the US if you are voting third party your choices are either really far left or really far right mixing church and state. Libertarian is the closest thing to a middle ground that there is in our third parties.
As someone with a pretty bad smoke allergy I really apreciate that in Ohio and Michigan I can go to bars and restaurants without getting sick now. I do support people's right to put things in their bodies. (tobacco, marijuana, etc... I really don't care) I just don't want to be forced to chose between being a shut-in or having people put their smoke in MY body. Somehow that just doesn't seem like liberty to me.
They can do it at home, in there cars, outside(Not in front of the door where we all have to walk through it).
As far as I can tell the Libertarians want to change things back to how they were, giving people the liberty to make others sick against their will again.
I would agree with that sentiment except that I have actually looked to see what third parties are available to vote for. Most of them are nuts!!! The Libertarians who you mentioned are probably the most voteworthy of the bunch (IMHO), maybe even better than the big two but personally I still disagree with them on some matters to the point I don't want to vote for them. The rest of the US third parties are just off the deep end either far right, far left or trying to build a religious state.
Spoken like a true lawyer.
My point is that unethical and unlawful are two very different things. Did the lawyers involved go against what a judge told them to do? Certainly. Should there be reprecusions? Yes, the legal system would not function if it's rules were not enforced. Is it unethical?
I would argue that the non-disclosure agreement is unethical in the first place. The only possible value I can see in such an agreement is to facilitate price fixing and shutting out competition. In the end consumers lose out as prices are driven up and newcomers cannot bring their inovations to market. Where is the positive side of this? Is it so a greedy few may make a larger profit? Is that what the people built a legal system to do?
I could understand a hands-off approach.. it's companies own busniess if they want to inform others of their deals or keep them secret... let them enforce it themselves. If a partner company leaks your secrets stop dealing with them.
Or.. I could understand a pro-active, pro-consumer approach that would outlaw such agreements altogether and go after them as a form of price fixing. Keep the playing field level so that anyone may make a product and everyone may compete. Keep the innovations moving and the prices reasonable so that everyone may benefit.
I cannot accept that the courts enforcing these things are acting ethically. Thus when one goes against it I don't think they are acting unethically. Maybe they are acting uninteligently.. as you pointed out the lawyers will probably never practice law again. But... maybe they were secretly paid enough to retire?
So my question.. how was Samsung unethical (in this specific case)?
What if someone assumed it was the USSR before those involved even had a chance to admit to it. Missles could have been launched! WWIII might have actually started!
I don't intend to defend Samsung as being good or evil (all I really know about them in terms of cellphones is that my Samsung Stratosphere really sucks!)
But.. how does THIS event make them corrupt or evil? Because they broke a law? Because they broke the terms of someone else's contract? How is it morally wrong to know what someone else paid for the same 'product'? Isn't that how we all shop for anything which doesn't already have a price tag on it? Do you buy a house without looking at comps? If you go to an open market and you hear someone else haggling for one of something you want is it wrong to then offer the vendor the same deal? Or are you supposed to pretend you heard nothing and start the haggling from scratch?
Why should our legal system be helping to enforce these secrecy clauses on contracts? How is it in the people's intrest to enforce them? All I can see it being used for is to jack up the price of goods as well as to keep new and smaller players out of markets.
I understand why they would want to track such an investment, especially after handing them out to a bunch of kids but I don't want my kid carrying around an iPad which is sending her location to some school board!
For that reason I MIGHT support or even help her crack it but.. I don't want her to be in a position to have to make the decision to crack, risking some sort of consequence from the school or be tracked. They shouldn't be putting kids or parents in that position.
As for the filtering software.. well.. I can understand why schools would do that to. They don't want to be giving the kids a shiny new porn portal do they? But that doesn't mean that I want the local school board or whatever official being the one to decide what my kid gets access to or doesn't. That is MY job!
So... including tablets in their education... probably a good idea because they are such a large part of the modern world. But.. let us provide our own. Also.. enough with the iOS stuff. Is the school system trying to help build a new monopoly? Support 'bring your own device' and do support Android. Preferably support both iOS and Android but if that isn't practical at least chose Android over iOS since more than one company can compete for our money.
Saddly, I see what the trend is and when she reaches that age there will probably be iPads involved. Actually, her pre-school is already trying to get them for the teachers!
Prove that we didn't elect them. Prove that the elections are all rigged. Then I would support, even join such a move.
Until then baring arms against elected officials would just be a subversion of democracy. Who would take their place? Those who fight against the people's will by removing their chosen leaders? That would lead to tyrany for sure.
Until then all there is to do is try to vote for the best lizards we can with lots of facepalms over who our felow citizens keep chosing.
I don't think the Texas school board is motivated by ALL religions. I'd even venture to say they are only motivated by one religion.
No, I think we are just happy to see Brazil is angry about it because we percieve our government as being more likely to listen to foreign diplomats than it us, it's own people. There might actually be some kind of consequence to pissing off enough UN member nations. What will the citizens do? Vote for the other lizard?
If your trackpad has no middle-click then why do you want to see the feature removed for those with real mice? It doesn't even affect you. Sour grapes?
Yup, it is kind of confusing that middle-click doesn't use the same clipboard as other options. I kind of like it that way though. Middle click is good for fast copy/pasting because it doesn't require me to press any keys. Copying to that clipboard only requires highlighting something. I can do the whole thing, copy and paste with my hand on the mouse and without even changing the position of my hand. The Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V clipboard on the other hand is more powerful. I use KDE and have a app in the taskbar that lets me see the clipboard history. I can Ctrl-C a smany times as I want and then go pick the lines I want to paste before I hit Ctrl-V.
I use both in different situations and am happy to have them separate.
That's one of the features I really like about a *nix environment. Between this and the ambiguity of how remoting support will work (or not work) in Wayland it is really begining to feel like the Linux desktop is under attack. It's all good as long as we still have choices, I switched away from Gnome years ago because to me it seems to tend towards copying those 'features' of Windows which I dislike. (hiding too deeply or removing customization options, dumping everything in a registry, etc...) With Ubuntu getting so much attention all the time though.. I worry our choices will fade away.
I get it that they want to make it easy for new users but what is the value if the result is just to copy the user interface and functionality of the competition? Where is the unique value? Why not just shift development away from *nix and go work on ReactOS?