You are *completely* wrong!!!
I can give you an example of a call that is very memorable to me. About 3 weeks before the ban I was flying from San Francisco to Seattle. The flight happened to pass over my hometown in Oregon. I was able to look out the right side window and identify my parents' property. I called my mother on the cell phone and told her to go outside and look for a plane in the sky to the west. She was able to see the plane I was flying on. That call was made at cruising altitude, and as I said above, there was no problem whatsoever with the call. The only point I can award you is that yes, the call was only 2-3 minutes long. I didn't have a 30 minute conversation, but kept it short was because I didn't want to annoy the person sitting next to me. I certainly didn't hang up because the call dropped.
Don't think that you can use theory to debunk actual experience.
Whenever this topic comes up there's always someone who tries to tell us that you can't connect to cell towers from planes. I've even seen the claim being made by someone asserting his superior knowledge as an engineer. I can tell you it is absolute nonsense.
Yes, you can connect to cell towers without any difficulty whatsoever while in airplanes.
The rule banning cell phones in the air was put in place in 1993. Before the ban went into effect I was able to use my cell phone while on commercial aircraft. Such calls did not appear to me, or the person on the other end to be any different than any other cell phone call.
And by the way, there were no dropped calls so long as we were near any cities or major highways.
Irving Espinosa-Rodrigue should look into whether Simon Glik is available to represent him. Glik happens to be a criminal defense lawyer himself, and obviously has uniquely personal experience with this type of case.
Wally:
You are conflating plagiarism with copyright infringement. They are not the same issue. Plagiarism of public domain works continues to be unacceptable, even though it is legal.
Copyright isn't primarily concerned with plagiarism. It is simply a publishing monopoly.
Plagiarism, on the other hand, is a reputation and trust issue, not a monopoly issue. The ability to get grants as a professional is very much about trust. If you have caused people to mistrust you by committing plagiarism, then those who evaluate grants will have doubt about whether they should trust you with the money they are dispensing.
Copyright isn't even the best way to protect against plagiarism. The best way to protect against plagiarism is to have easy access to the original for side by side comparison. If plagiarism is obvious, then you don't need the law to protect you as an author, the market will do it for you. If you don't think so, consider if you found two books named Treasure Island which appeared to be identical in every respect except for the name of the author, one has Robert Lewis Stevenson and the other has my name as the author. Which one would you buy to read to your 10 year old son? I am quite certain you would choose the version with the correct author attribution, even though my version would be just as entertaining to him, and it would not be illegal to for me to do this.
"Ask veterans if that was not offensive or indecent. I dare you to find one.
I think you are mistaken that veterans would consider this protester's act to be anti-veteran.
It's much more likely to be anti-war, and many veterans, including myself would recognize that.
I'm sure you realize there are more than a few veterans who oppose war.
UK Law Enforcement public comment addresses - Kent
For those who would like to do something more than just rant in the comment section of a US based blog:
-----------------------------------------------
"...government officials constantly overstepping their constitutional boundaries and stomping on the rights of the citizens
... use protocol as an excuse for limiting freedom"
I agree with your general criticism of using failure to conform to policy as a justification for ruining peoples lives. Civil liberties are very important to all of us
That said, I've been in the military and am aware of some things which most civilians are not.
Many of the constitutional rights afforded to civilians are NOT granted to military service members. For example your commanding officer can indeed restrain your free speech. If you tried to exert a constitutional right to express yourself under such conditions then your disobedience of a direct order would land you in a heap of trouble. Presumably these SEALS have been reprimanded under principles similar to this, in which they had been instructed not to speak about classified matters.
I'll not get into lengthy discussion of why the military is allowed to disregard the civil liberties of its members, but needless to say the military does need to have the power to force people to do things which other free citizens wouldn't choose to do -- such as risk their life.
For those who don't understand the military point of view, you may want to read an article about the SEALS' interaction with the media in this week's Daily Beast/Newsweek. Although it was written before the announcement of the EA video game event, it addresses these very issues.
If you value your freedom, please remember as we come up on Veterans Days that there are people serving you who are willing to give up their own freedom for a period of time in order to protect yours.
AC:
Thanks for trying to provide some perspective here. I still have to chide you about the anarchism issue however.
Yes libertarians use terms like anarcho-capitalism, but if you read you will see that almost no one is advocating actual anarchy. The number of libertarians who believe that anarchy is a practical alternative is certainly not any greater than the number of liberals who think communism is a practical alternative. In other words, in some utopian ideal world it might be possible but not in the real world.
Libertarians are not looking to abolish the government. They are looking to limit the size of government.
The founders of the US did do something new. There had been republics, but these were not democratic (Rome for example). There had been democracy, but not in republican form (Athens for example).
The United States was the first democratic republic. It also is the first democracy to achieve lasting success. All other democracies had succumbed to civil war within 2-3 generations. (When Lincoln observed at Gettysburg that the Civil War was "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure", he was not merely making a grand sounding speech. The US then stood at almost the same point in its history as Athens had been when the Peloponnesian War effectively destroyed Athenian democracy.)
The American founder's "new experiment" consisted of combining the 3 main types of government which had tried previously and setting the forces of each against one another in order to limit potential for tyranny.
"You can believe in justice, the commons, and liberty without looking for the pot of gold at the end of Ayn Rand's shitty rainbow."
Ayn Rand's Objectivism is not synonymous with libertarian philosophy. It is a vocal subset of libertarianism, but a subset nonetheless. A more influential thought process (arguably the most influential for libertarians in the United States) is Classical Liberalism.
American liberals and conservatives both tend to disparage libertarian views without actually bothering to learn much about them.
Your posts are a good example of that.
" ...fences or 'No Trespassing' signs do not effectively bar the public from viewing open fields"
The focus of this quote from the previous opinion is that the public can readily view an open field. There is a very clear difference between simply viewing an empty field and trespassing a property to install surveillance equipment. Certainly no court would consider it lawful for a member of the general public to trespass for the purpose of installing surveillance equipment.
This current decision therefore has serious logical weakness and a successful appeal would seem quite possible.
Let's also not forget that the chief issue here is not whether the surveillance itself was a problem, but whether this surveillance can be done without a warrant. The mere presence of an illegal plant should have been adequate to establish probable cause, and therefore a warrant should have been easily obtainable. Why was it not sought?
Perhaps someone in law enforcement can explain to all of us why the use of a warrant is so undesirable, and what is the motivation is to skirt the clear and simple words of the 4th Amendment.
It would be easy for an outside observer to guess that the reasons are either 1) sheer laziness and paperwork dodging or 2) avoidance of a documentation trail which could allow other wrongful activity to be revealed.
Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but if so, I'd like to hear why.
... consumers say to themselves "Oh, how could Company X let Company Y use their name so immorally?"
They do?
I can't think of an instance where I would think that way.
Can you provide one plausible example where it would appear that consumers have punished one company because of another company's misuse of their brand.
Much more plausible is IP lawyers and marketing firms selling fear and doubt so that they can sell services to corporate customers.
We know that for some time now online retailers, as well as the travel industry will offer different prices depending on the data they find stored on your computer.
Unless you take active measures to block them, third party marketing companies analyze almost everything you do on your computer. Knowledge about you is sold to vendors, and the price some vendors offer may be influenced by whether your browser indicates you have seen higher prices when you visited their competitors' websites, your income category, education level, how long you have been shopping, etc. It has even been reported that your choice of device to access their website, for example from an iPhone vs a desktop computer can influence prices.
So, perhaps it was a bug, or perhaps it was a clumsy implementation of flexible pricing based on what the marketers call "consumer web data and analytics".
"...was not a true download, as you never instructed the mail server to delete the pending message"
Exactly where has the term "true download" been defined? Can I claim I never downloaded a file if I didn't send a request to a website to delete it after they send it to me?
Sorry, but if you request and receive a file, whether it happens to contain an email message for you or not, then you downloaded it.
Hmm. How long will it take to dust off the old method of transferring media files as text the way MIME was sent in the early days of the Internet.
I seems governments never tire of Whack-a-Mole.
"Printing things on a piece of paper, wrapping it in some more paper, sticking it in a metal box, and having low paid workers move it around the place... Yep, sounds real secure to me!"
The law as written, and subsequently interpreted by courts gives legal protections to paper letters that haven't been afforded to email.
It has been completely unhelpful that in the past some IT security people have compared email to a postcard and have stated that you shouldn't expect privacy with email. If such a comparison was really valid, then why do we bother with passwords on our email accounts.
Yes, it is true that unencrypted email isn't secure, but as you observe above, old fashioned letters aren't secure either. Someone can easily steam open a sealed letter, read it and reseal it.
A sealed letter has an expectation of privacy that is acknowledged in law. People do have an expectation of privacy with their password-protected email accounts as well, but the law hasn't yet caught up with reality (most probably because law enforcement likes the status quo).
Over the years too many in both the IT and legal professions have confused privacy with security. Secure encryption can bring privacy, but it should not be required for an expectation of privacy to exist under the law.
On the post: FCC Boss Tired Of Having To Put His iPad Away For Takeoff, Tells FAA To Fix It
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I can give you an example of a call that is very memorable to me. About 3 weeks before the ban I was flying from San Francisco to Seattle. The flight happened to pass over my hometown in Oregon. I was able to look out the right side window and identify my parents' property. I called my mother on the cell phone and told her to go outside and look for a plane in the sky to the west. She was able to see the plane I was flying on. That call was made at cruising altitude, and as I said above, there was no problem whatsoever with the call. The only point I can award you is that yes, the call was only 2-3 minutes long. I didn't have a 30 minute conversation, but kept it short was because I didn't want to annoy the person sitting next to me. I certainly didn't hang up because the call dropped.
Don't think that you can use theory to debunk actual experience.
On the post: FCC Boss Tired Of Having To Put His iPad Away For Takeoff, Tells FAA To Fix It
Re: Re:
Yes, you can connect to cell towers without any difficulty whatsoever while in airplanes.
The rule banning cell phones in the air was put in place in 1993. Before the ban went into effect I was able to use my cell phone while on commercial aircraft. Such calls did not appear to me, or the person on the other end to be any different than any other cell phone call.
And by the way, there were no dropped calls so long as we were near any cities or major highways.
On the post: Massachusetts Man Charged Criminally For Videotaping Cop... Despite Earlier Lawsuit Rejecting Such Claims
Glik, Esq
On the post: Members Of The Republican Study Committee Do Twitter Q&A, Ignore Every Single Question About Fixing Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
You are conflating plagiarism with copyright infringement. They are not the same issue. Plagiarism of public domain works continues to be unacceptable, even though it is legal.
Copyright isn't primarily concerned with plagiarism. It is simply a publishing monopoly.
Plagiarism, on the other hand, is a reputation and trust issue, not a monopoly issue. The ability to get grants as a professional is very much about trust. If you have caused people to mistrust you by committing plagiarism, then those who evaluate grants will have doubt about whether they should trust you with the money they are dispensing.
Copyright isn't even the best way to protect against plagiarism. The best way to protect against plagiarism is to have easy access to the original for side by side comparison. If plagiarism is obvious, then you don't need the law to protect you as an author, the market will do it for you. If you don't think so, consider if you found two books named Treasure Island which appeared to be identical in every respect except for the name of the author, one has Robert Lewis Stevenson and the other has my name as the author. Which one would you buy to read to your 10 year old son? I am quite certain you would choose the version with the correct author attribution, even though my version would be just as entertaining to him, and it would not be illegal to for me to do this.
On the post: UK Looking To Cement Its New Anti-Free Speech Reputation By Arresting Man For Posting Photo Of A Burning Poppy
Re:
It's much more likely to be anti-war, and many veterans, including myself would recognize that.
I'm sure you realize there are more than a few veterans who oppose war.
On the post: UK Looking To Cement Its New Anti-Free Speech Reputation By Arresting Man For Posting Photo Of A Burning Poppy
UK Law Enforcement public comment addresses - Kent
-----------------------------------------------
From the Kent Police website:
Email: professional.standards@kent.pnn.police.uk
Twitter: @kent_police
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kent-Police/213289350160?ref=ts
------------------------------------ -----------
From the Crown Prosecutor Service, Southeast website:
Email: Southeast.Complaints@cps.gsi.gov.uk
On the post: Microsoft Patents TV That Watches Back, Counts Heads, Charges Admission
Re: Re:
1) Unbox
2) Plug in/connect
3) Cover that little lens with black electrical tape [matches the TV trim]
On the post: Navy SEALs Lose Their Military Careers By Consulting With EA On Videogame
Re: Re: Re: I have to disagree
That said, I've been in the military and am aware of some things which most civilians are not.
Many of the constitutional rights afforded to civilians are NOT granted to military service members. For example your commanding officer can indeed restrain your free speech. If you tried to exert a constitutional right to express yourself under such conditions then your disobedience of a direct order would land you in a heap of trouble. Presumably these SEALS have been reprimanded under principles similar to this, in which they had been instructed not to speak about classified matters.
I'll not get into lengthy discussion of why the military is allowed to disregard the civil liberties of its members, but needless to say the military does need to have the power to force people to do things which other free citizens wouldn't choose to do -- such as risk their life.
For those who don't understand the military point of view, you may want to read an article about the SEALS' interaction with the media in this week's Daily Beast/Newsweek. Although it was written before the announcement of the EA video game event, it addresses these very issues.
If you value your freedom, please remember as we come up on Veterans Days that there are people serving you who are willing to give up their own freedom for a period of time in order to protect yours.
On the post: Why Do Both Major Parties Suck So Badly On Civil Liberties?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Thanks for trying to provide some perspective here. I still have to chide you about the anarchism issue however.
Yes libertarians use terms like anarcho-capitalism, but if you read you will see that almost no one is advocating actual anarchy. The number of libertarians who believe that anarchy is a practical alternative is certainly not any greater than the number of liberals who think communism is a practical alternative. In other words, in some utopian ideal world it might be possible but not in the real world.
Libertarians are not looking to abolish the government. They are looking to limit the size of government.
On the post: Why Do Both Major Parties Suck So Badly On Civil Liberties?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The United States was the first democratic republic. It also is the first democracy to achieve lasting success. All other democracies had succumbed to civil war within 2-3 generations. (When Lincoln observed at Gettysburg that the Civil War was "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure", he was not merely making a grand sounding speech. The US then stood at almost the same point in its history as Athens had been when the Peloponnesian War effectively destroyed Athenian democracy.)
The American founder's "new experiment" consisted of combining the 3 main types of government which had tried previously and setting the forces of each against one another in order to limit potential for tyranny.
On the post: Why Do Both Major Parties Suck So Badly On Civil Liberties?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
American liberals and conservatives both tend to disparage libertarian views without actually bothering to learn much about them.
Your posts are a good example of that.
On the post: Court Says Police Can Install Cameras On Your Property Without Warrant If Your Property Is A 'Field'
Re: Re: Re: Doesn't matter if it's a trespass.
This current decision therefore has serious logical weakness and a successful appeal would seem quite possible.
Let's also not forget that the chief issue here is not whether the surveillance itself was a problem, but whether this surveillance can be done without a warrant. The mere presence of an illegal plant should have been adequate to establish probable cause, and therefore a warrant should have been easily obtainable. Why was it not sought?
Perhaps someone in law enforcement can explain to all of us why the use of a warrant is so undesirable, and what is the motivation is to skirt the clear and simple words of the 4th Amendment.
It would be easy for an outside observer to guess that the reasons are either 1) sheer laziness and paperwork dodging or 2) avoidance of a documentation trail which could allow other wrongful activity to be revealed.
Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but if so, I'd like to hear why.
On the post: Why The Theory Of 'Tarnishment' Doesn't Make Sense For Trademark Law
Re: Tarnish
I can't think of an instance where I would think that way.
Can you provide one plausible example where it would appear that consumers have punished one company because of another company's misuse of their brand.
Much more plausible is IP lawyers and marketing firms selling fear and doubt so that they can sell services to corporate customers.
On the post: Bug In Kobo's Online Store Offers Up Random eBook Prices [Update]
Bug vs "Feature"
Unless you take active measures to block them, third party marketing companies analyze almost everything you do on your computer. Knowledge about you is sold to vendors, and the price some vendors offer may be influenced by whether your browser indicates you have seen higher prices when you visited their competitors' websites, your income category, education level, how long you have been shopping, etc. It has even been reported that your choice of device to access their website, for example from an iPhone vs a desktop computer can influence prices.
So, perhaps it was a bug, or perhaps it was a clumsy implementation of flexible pricing based on what the marketers call "consumer web data and analytics".
On the post: Why Regulations Aimed At Technology Almost Always Suck: Or Why Reading Someone's Gmail Isn't Reading 'Stored Communications'
Re: Re: Re:
Sorry, but if you request and receive a file, whether it happens to contain an email message for you or not, then you downloaded it.
On the post: Iran's Latest Aggressive Censorship Plan: Block All Audio & Video Files
Re: Work arounds will be found
On the post: Iran's Latest Aggressive Censorship Plan: Block All Audio & Video Files
Work arounds will be found
I seems governments never tire of Whack-a-Mole.
On the post: Gangnam Style Shows What Can Happen When You Don't Lean On Copyright
Re: Re: Uh... say what?
The most viewed version on YouTube has had over 350 million views.
On the post: DHS Boss, In Charge Of Cybersecurity, Doesn't Use Email Or Any Online Services
Re: Uh... yeah...
It has been completely unhelpful that in the past some IT security people have compared email to a postcard and have stated that you shouldn't expect privacy with email. If such a comparison was really valid, then why do we bother with passwords on our email accounts.
Yes, it is true that unencrypted email isn't secure, but as you observe above, old fashioned letters aren't secure either. Someone can easily steam open a sealed letter, read it and reseal it.
A sealed letter has an expectation of privacy that is acknowledged in law. People do have an expectation of privacy with their password-protected email accounts as well, but the law hasn't yet caught up with reality (most probably because law enforcement likes the status quo).
Over the years too many in both the IT and legal professions have confused privacy with security. Secure encryption can bring privacy, but it should not be required for an expectation of privacy to exist under the law.
On the post: What Public Domain? Why A Letter Written In 1755 Is Still Covered By US Copyright Law
Re: The avreage joe (not our not so average joe)