I love lawyers. They are so busy looking at the trees that they can never find the fucking forest.

For example, as a civilian my locker at work is my space. Nobody can open it except me. If my manager thought somebody on-premises was smoking weed she couldn't just have the security guy snap all the locks off, and then detain whomever had weed in the break room until the cops came. A cop walking in and saying "hey these guys really look like potheads," couldn't get a warrant. !Either my boss of the cop could search a specific locker, but going through all 100 or so would be no. In the military your Sergeant can orders a full inspection of every locker at any time. He can then order you detained if you have weed.

To a lawyer the fact that he ordered you "detained," and then had to get paperwork to call it an "arrest," means your Constitutional rights were the same as a civilians. To any sane human being, who lives in the actual real world, the whole line of argument you're making is a distinction without a difference. Everybody got searched with no warrant, and then Bill got arrested, also with no warrant.

The JAG System, etc. has some relevance when talking about searches in service member's homes, or even their cars, but even there it's limited because it's all in the military. Let's say we're talking about an Air Base commanded by a guy named Colonel Kerpinski. Who commands the Security Force cops? Colonel Kerpinski. Who commands the JAGs? Kerpinski. The suspect? Kerpinski. There's a reason "Command Influence" is a really good defense at military trials.

I think the core of our disagreement rests on your conception that it is legal for countries to ban hostile agents. This is not the case. Even the US, which is notoriously arrogant in international criminal law; doesn't have a law on the books based on being an agent of a hostile power. We require foreign agents of all powers, even Canada, to register with the authorities, so they can be charged for not registering, but this law is only used very rarely, and then it's applied to US Citizens or to foreign agents who get freed as a deal before trial. You will note the latter is exactly what I was expecting Cuba to do for Gross. But if we banned agents of a "hostile power" we'd be de facto banning other countries from being hostile powers, which even we acknowledge can't be done.

The logical extension of this is you can't convict foreign agents to multi-year jail terms simply for being part of a plan to oppose your government. The remedy for such plans in international law isn't that the agent gets nabbed, it's that the attacked country gets lots of sympathy for it's retaliation against the attacker's government.

As for our talk of ending the embargo, Obama was easing up on it. There was chatter about ending it. Given our form of government, which requires Congressional action for lifting an embargo, and the power of the Anti-Castro Lobby that's all you'll see in the first months of the administration of a President who actually ends the damn embargo. The only way to find out whether Obama is serious/Congress would let him get away with it/etc. is to let the process play out. And by sentencing Gross to years in prison they lost an opportunity to let the process play out. It's likely they won't get another one until the next President takes office. And he's much less likely to try because ending the embargo doesn't actually help the US, and the Cubans have a history of being very passive and easy to get along with until you ease up on the embargo. Then they blow a plane out of the sky or sentence one of your guys to 15 years hard labor, or whatever.

As for our attempt to impose the DMCA on Russians, you will note it failed miserably. And we actually had a somewhat decent chance of success, given that some Americans were using the tool in a way that was arguably illegal. You'll also note that we got our asses handed to us in Court.

Spoken like a true lawyer. True on every factual point, but still completely misleading.

None of that comes from the Constitution proper. It comes from statutes. And the rights granted under the statute are much more limited. For example, an Officer commanding a base can both authorize investigations of his base's personnel AND sign the warrant. The same goes for an arrest.

The Check that keeps this power from being abused isn't that some third party with unique legal knowledge (ie: the Courts) safeguards the people's rights, it's that there's a paper trail and any officer who has a habit of arresting people for no damn good reason is gonna have to explain himself to his superiors.

But you should be clear there isn't a universal requirement for warrants to search civilians even for civilian police. There are a number of exceptions in fact.

This is true as well. If the police reasonably believe you are hiding something from them then the search they do on you is not "unreasonable," and they don't need a warrant because the Fourth only applies to "unreasonable searches." This particular fact is rife for abuse, because as far as the Courts are concerned it's very hard to be unsuspicious and black at the same time.

Google "hide itunes." The first result is instructions in getting U2's album to go away from your purchased screen. The only place it will remain is a list of shit you've hidden, accessible from your account screen.

You could also simply download it, and then delete it from your iTunes music list.

Note: this worked even before Apple implemented it's workaround. Apparently music geeks are capable of copious, and creative, bitching on the internet but totally incapable of figuring out the feature-set of a program they claim to love so much that the addition of one album destroyed their lives

Google "hide itunes."

Google "delete itunes."

Getting this album to a place where you can't see it is trivial. If you actually use iTunes enough to know what the feature set is.

Then don't download it.

If it downloads automatically because you specifically told iTunes to download things automatically, hit the "delete" key. This is on your keyboard.

If it didn't download automatically, and you don't like it in your purchases window hit the little 'x' button that appears when you hover your mouse over it to hide it.

But lets be honest here. If you actually used an Apple products you would have known about the delete button. You don't. You're basing your entire case on music geeks bitching about an album they don't like, and when music geeks bitch about albums they don't like they do it artistically. This is a fancy way of saying they exaggerate, ignore all the positives ("I don't care that he's got a great voice, she's not authentic, and no I can't define that word for you;" "Artist X's work is clearly a sensitive tribute to Artist Y, but Artist Z is derivative trash of Artist Y, and no I don't have a rigorous definition of any of those terms, including 'artist;'"), and basically turn bitching and moaning into an elaborate art performance.

So you have a 500 MB data limit on your device, you're using a service that sells 500 MB+ files, and you've got auto-download over your cell phone network enabled? That's not a very smart choice. Your Mom could send a present. You could buy a movie yourself on your Mac or PC, which then auto-downloads to your phone because you're a moron who has auto-download turned on despite his data cap, etc.

It's very hard for me to seriously believe that anyone whose got his settings fucked up that badly is interested enough in technology to have a slashdot account.

It's even harder for me to believe, given the sheer amount of posts describing the album as crap/shit/etc. that the vast majority of complainers would be complaining if Apple had sent them a copy of a new album by their favorite band.

Read the post I was responding to.

That guy is not claiming to be grandma with a computer her favoritist grandson set up for her. He's claiming to be the guy in charge of maintaining a network of Mac Minis. As in he's claiming someone pays him to support a specific computing platform: the Mac Mini, He's also claiming that his networked machines had so little free space that 109 MB made a difference in their stability. That is ridiculous BS.

Which means one of two things is true: his network's stability sucked ass, and he's just blaming U2 for it because his boss hates Bono, or he's making the whole thing up.

Keep in mind that the OP isn't claiming to be a grandma with no clue, he's claiming that a) he has a network of Mac Minis, and b) it is his job to fix them when something goes wrong. Knowing you need more then 109 MB of swap space is something my everyone who uses Macs seriously for work finds out, because when OS X doesn't have GB after GB of swap space stability collapses.

Dude,

This dumbass isn't claiming he's some end-user who is not familiar with how his computer works. He's claiming he's got a fucking network full of Mac Minis and fixing them is his job. If true, and if his Minis truly have so little swap space that 109.8 MB will fuck them up, they are already fucked up.

Seriously. I have had startup disks with 5-6 GB in free space, and it caused serious stability issues. That's how I found out you need lots of free space.

Not just statutory. Constitutional.

Investigating his fellow Navy personnel he doesn't need warrants, because the Military can detain it's members without a warrant ("I order you to sit right there"), and extensive powers to search without a warrant ("Show me the contents of your locker Private"). These are covered by the Commander-in-Chief clause, and therefore the Fourth Amendment is irrelevant, which is probably why a Navy cop apparently had no idea why he'd need a warrant.

But the Commander-in-Chief clause does not apply to civilians, so he damn well needed a warrant. If he'd had a somewhat less bullshitty explanation of why he was searching all of Washington state he probably would have been fine -- there's actually a legal doctrine that if the government agent thinks he's within his rights to search you, the evidence doesn't get thrown out just because the agent was wrong -- but "Of course I can do that, I;'m a Federal Agent" won't cut it.

Well, we're talking to you, so clearly we don't mind putting up with ridonkulous BS excreted by a jackass.

You poor baby, you'll have to scroll past an album you don't like. You no longer can tell your little music-obssessed-U2-hating-because-only-peons-like-U2 friends you have no U2 songs. You have to go into a long story about how Evil Apple put music-other-people-like-on-your-computer.

Let's be honest here. If you're this worked up about downloading a single album you don't like, then you're probably actually enjoying being this worked up about downloading an album you don't like. You and your little hobbyist buddies will get more pleasure from complaining about the Evil Apple/U2 conspiracy then you possibly could from anything as trivial as an actual album.

You're incompetent or lying.

To download the album your Mac Minis would have to a) have iTunes running, and b) have end-users tell iTunes to download the songs. Unlike an iPhone, there is no auto-download setting on a Mac. Hell, I can't even get the "check for Available Downloads" menu option to download new episodes for my season passes to TV shows, I have to load the iTunes store, go to "purchased," and then manually select the TV season/album/whatever I want to download.

More importantly everybody knows Mac OS X needs multiple gigabytes free as memory swap space on it's startup disk. The general recommendation is 15% of the drive. Which means even if you're using the very first, circa 2005, PPC version, of the Mac Mini you should have 6 GB free. The entire U2 album is only 109 MB.

A couple points:

1) My contention has always been that Cuba acted unusually aggressively in sentencing Gross to 15 years. You disagree, and claim that the 15-year jail sentence is only a "minor deterrent." By disagreeing with my point at all you are (by definition, again), implicitly arguing that there response was not unusually aggressive. Moreover, by using the phrase "minor deterrent" you said flat-out that he should have expected a lot more.

It's pretty fucking dishonest to claim Cuba was only "minorly deterring" foreign agents with a 15-year sentence and then argue he has never implied "a 15-year sentence is not only typical, but minimal."

2) You have repeatedly said Gross was convicted of "attempting to smuggle illegal contraband (after successfully smuggling more in earlier trips), with the goal of overthrowing the Cuban government, financed by a foreign (and openly hostile) country." You have accused gross of multiple separate crimes under Cuban law, and implied that are all perfectly within Cuba's jurisdiction. These crimes are a) being an agent of a hostile power, b) having a goal of overthrowing the Cuban government, and c) smuggling communications equipment. If Cuba could ban a), then the US could legally execute the entire Cuban bureaucracy because they are all agents of a power that is hostile to us. Since we can't do that to them, then any Cuban charges based on Gross's being a CIA contractor are clearly ridiculous BS. The same applies to b). Ukraine clearly can't charge all the Russian soldiers invading it with crimes in Criminal Court, therefore Cuba does not have the right to charge US CIA contractors for plotting it's demise.

Which leaves you with c).

3) The whole problem with your argument is you refuse to think what you are saying. For example this quote:
"What I did claim was that Cuba's sovereignty implies that they have no obligation to carve any exceptions in how they treat their prisoners just because of the passport that the criminal happens to be holding."
Words like "obligation" don't really mean much in relation to a) international law, or b) my argument. Under international law literally no country is ever obligated to do anything. There is no Starfleet sitting in orbit waiting to zap people for non-compliance. The way you zap people for non-compliance is you get pissed at them and ratchet up tensions. Most of the time this fails to get them to change their ways, but it's all we can do until we actually have One World Government with a Starfleet.

In this case, as I have proven, most of what Cuba charged Gross with are things it has no legal right to charge him with. They did it anyway. The remaining charge, smuggling computer equipment (the only thing he did on their soil), is the kind of thing that never results in a prison sentence. The US response to that has to be a cooling of relations, which (in Cuba's case) means and end to embargo-ending talk.

Which means either Cuba is full of people who are dumber then me, or they wanted to eliminate all talk of ending the embargo.