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Comment Re:"Good News" is Relative (Score 1) 85

Property rights do extend to the airspace immediately above the land. For example, hovering a helicopter ten feet above somebody else's house would still constitute trespass. If the GP was complaining about a buzzing drone, this test would also be relevant:

An entry above the surface of the earth, in the air space in the possession of another, by a person who is traveling in an aircraft, is privileged if the flight is conducted... at such a height as not to interfere unreasonably with the possessor’s enjoyment of the surface of the earth and the air space above it

from here. Of course, this is specifically about occupied aircraft.

There are plenty of established cases in the linked article dealing with trespass in the air above the property of others. There is also established case law regarding destruction of non-human trespassers. There's nothing specific to drones, but it's not exactly alien terrain.

Comment Re:Conspiracies (Score 1) 53

Am I the only one who thinks "the government" is actually made up of lots of independent minds, each with their own idealism and morality? A functional conspiracy to secretly undermine a project like Tor would need to involve a significant portion of the American population.

Your description applies to any organization of any size. The organization that you work for may have taken actions that you don't agree with, despite you possessing your own idealism and morality. You may have even actively participated in these activities, knowingly or not. In many (most?) large organizations, a few people make the big decisions and the ranks below them make those happen.

It's almost as if the idealism and morality of any organization is largely irrelevant to the actual actions of that organization. Even further, in a highly compartmentalized organization like the military or the intelligence agencies (or any random large company), the individual workers may not be fully aware of the big picture goals of their day's work. No grand conspiracy needed.

Comment Re:People are correctly annoyed by this (Score 1) 338

So how did Chrome work prior to last October? Why not just take advantage of TSYNC if the kernel supports it and do without it if it doesn't? At least until distributions have had a chance to properly adopt the new kernels.

A hard dependency on a few month old feature is a little insane. No other application operates like this.

Comment Re: People are correctly annoyed by this (Score 1) 338

It only hit the kernel a few months ago, don't be surprised if every single process on Linux is using it.

Any other applications that adopt it will likely do so in a much more sane manner, though: use it if it is present and function without it if it isn't. Having a hard dependency on an optional feature that's only a few months old is kind of an insane approach. Who programs like that?

Comment Re:Is this a good thing??? (Score 2) 208

Yeah, functionally, blue eyes kind of suck. Sunny summer or snowy winter, I can't leave home without sunglasses. I remember the first time I went skiing with a guy from Korea and he found out that we don't just wear sunglasses to look "styling".

Comment Re:With unencrypted passwords? :) (Score 1) 167

3) Use the OS or DE-provided password storage features.

And this is almost always the correct approach, with fallback to 1 or 2 on unsupported platforms. Between Windows, Mac, KDE, and Gnome's managed keystores, you've covered over 90% of all users. Every browser reinventing the wheel, poorly, is not the best solution.

Comment Re:Uh ...wat? (Score 1) 467

I feel like you're missing the forest for the trees here. The reason people engage in vigilante activities is because there isn't a legal remedy available to them. Do you disagree with that?

The practical details of budgeting issues, qualifications for police employment, and prioritization of investigations of course plays a role in why there is no legal remedy available. Those details, however, have no bearing on why people choose vigilante justice over no justice.

Our choices, as a society, are to provide some sort of legal venue to pursue justice whenever people feel wronged or accept that those people will find another way to right the wrong. Of course, the third option is to provide no legal means to pursue justice, but crack down hard on anyone who tried to handle it on their own. There are long-term consequences to that approach as well.

Comment Re:IANAL, but my answer would be no (Score 1) 340

I agree with the AC here. The defendant is at an extreme disadvantage when up against the state and shouldn't be compelled to cooperate in his conviction.

This applies doubly during police interrogation, where there is no time to consider how your statements may be used against you and the police are certainly not sharing their facts and theories with you. Admitting to anything prior to discovery could build a case against yourself, even if your intent was to prove your innocence.

Comment Re:Obstruction is a wild overstatement (Score 1) 340

Given that we are left to guess due to the lack of details, I would conclude that as he was returning from the Dominican Republic and that they were after his phone, he was likely suspected of having sex with minors and being in the possession of child porn. However, without any real details, this is only speculation.

Which is an example of why hard cases make bad law. Jurisprudence shouldn't be tossed out the window just because the subject matter is revolting or sympathetic.

A case which absolutely requires the cooperation of the defendant is what is commonly known as a flimsy case. Doubling down on coercing the defendant to enable access to evidence against himself isn't the proper way forward.

Comment Re:Right to remain silent where? (Score 2) 340

For example, the police caution used in England and Wales since 1994 includes "it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court", a concept of guilt by omission that doesn't apply in the States.

Which seems like a pretty dangerous exemption to me, when you're faced with police who can add/drop charges as they like. You shouldn't need to cooperate with your prosecution at such an early stage in the case and where you are at such an extreme disadvantage. They're not sharing all of their evidence with the accused during the interrogation, so why should the accused be compelled to spill everything out of court?

Comment Re:Pandora's Box (Score 1) 467

All of what you are saying is true, but the existence of vigilantism doesn't depend on lofty ideals and solid foundations. If a society refuses to uniformly and fairly allocate justice, people will take it into their own hands. It's inevitable. If society wants to reliably keep people from handling their own justice, it must work together to fix the state's apparatus or expect vigilante actions to continue. A wronged party with no legal remedy isn't just going to let it drop.

In other words, it's not just the wronged person's responsibility to single-handedly "change the system". It's your responsibility, too. By allowing the system to remain broken, you are culpable for the existence of vigilante justice, too. Expecting every wronged person to change the system in order to get their justice is just condoning vigilantism, while still claiming the moral high ground.

Comment Re:What I find unbelievable... (Score 3, Informative) 129

So they're going to destroy your reputation at a moments notice, by disclosing that they illegally spied on you and open themselves up to law suits.

Sounds great. I could do with a few million to retire on.

Please NSA, disclose who I send text messages to.

You will never get evidence to use against them.

Comment Re:Uh ...wat? (Score 1) 467

And yet, if you asked people how best to allocate police resources, do you think "sitting in speed traps" would be at the top of anyone's list? There are certainly understandable explanations for why police seem to be useless unless someone is murdered or a big corporation has an extremely urgent minor complaint, but that doesn't in any way invalidate my point.

People only turn to vigilante justice because the alternative is no justice. As a society, we either need to address the crimes that concern people or accept that they will address them by themselves.

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