That still assumes the violation is noticed and acted upon.

Seriously, how likely do you think it will be for a former employer to keep track of their ex-employees so closely that this would be a serious issue?

Contesting it in court assumes it becomes an issue.

Far easier to simply ignore it, not reveal it to a future employer and assume Amazon never finds out that a someone in the bowels of their company ended up in the bowels of another company.

I want to double down upon what you are saying as you know far better than the parent what is going on.

Just today I had sub-sub contractors from Comcast trying to fix the cable from the box across the street to my home for an issue I first reported the issue in mid-December but after a few months of nonsense things finally got worked out.

After first having a visit from a person who appeared to be a Comcast employee declaring the connection between my home and the distribution box across the street bad (I was seeing .1 mbs upload(should have been closer to 10mbs) yet semi-normal downloads), he wrote it up for replacement... and so began a multi-month process.

A week later received a note from a sub-contractor of Comcast (though with the Comcast letterhead on the door hanger and the sub-contractors name in the fine print) which said my cable needed to be replaced. Over the next couple of months I'd call them to check on the status with the work order # on the tag as things slowly worked their way through the Comcast and local city bureaucracies.

Eventually they told me that the work had been issued to a 'sub-contractor' (really a sub-sub-contractor) who took about a month to get things worked out as well between the city and them (which included two paintings of the paths of various utility lines under and around the street (much to the annoyance of the neighbors who didn't like the paint on their property)).

Finally the day of repair arrived (today) and they did their digging... alas they hit a rock when tunneling under the driveway of the neighbor in front of me (and right next to the distribution box) so they had to fill in most of what they did (amazingly professional in this way) and say that another team from the same company would have to come out in a week with a different boring machine to complete the work.

The pathetic thing about this whole process was that as far as Comcast is concerned, my issue has been resolved months ago by virtue of it being sent to an outside vendor... in the close out email even citing the fact that my signal strength had returned to normal (hint: it hadn't fully).

There is a part of me that is considering dropping Comcast service once this whole repair effort is complete (costing them $5-10k)... however they (unfortunately) provide the fastest internet for the price... when it works.

Businesses, however, are not people

Why so few people have read and/or understood the I will never understand as it says in part:

the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;

Not really, you'd still get your name checked off on the voter rolls when you get your ballot and someone latter aggregates the whole thing. Biggest difference is that it would make it slightly less harder to vote for someone else (to prevent their vote) as you might end up being the second person to ask... Vs knowing ahead of time who isn't likely.

Not only did you not read the article I had mentioned previously which pointed to people ending up in jail (even if for brief periods) due to debts, but you didn't even read the one you linked to!

However, there are a few situations when you might face jail time in connection with a debt.

The funny thing is that it even goes on to name some of them! See that first one... about violating a court order? That normally is referred to a contempt, and getting locked up for a day or 90 is one of the possible punishments.

I'm still waiting for someone to cite something which calls what I'm saying bullshit... odd that? Oh right... /.

Getting a contempt order is by no means an automatic thing... you first have to go back to the judge and inform them of the violation, maybe even give a chance to the violator an opportunity to respond... it's then up to the judge if and how they will proceed... in fact this is the same process under which (then) President Bill Clinton was held in contempt. Judicial notices can be fun.

Same goes for a writ of mandamus... once you have a judges order in hand against a civil servant who is refusing to do their job things tend to get moving as a contempt order is always a risk.

Citation?

I love it when I challenge someone for a citation and the first response is someone demanding a citation from me (without any of their own).

You can't be held in contempt for not showing up to a civil hearing, you just lose by default.

While there should have been an or in there... and failure to appear is a valid cause to be arrested in some states... such as Minnesota: http://www.startribune.com/inv...

I've a friend in California whose ex was issued a bench warrant for failing to show up to a child support hearing (there had been a long series of them and he missed two in a row).

And you won't go to jail for not paying a judgement,

You clearly don't know how much power a judge has.

Don't believe me? Try this:

1. You give me your email address
2. I send you an email, in response you send me a signed and notarized document promising to pay me $50,000 within 30 days as a thanks for the email.
3. Fail to pay me within 30 days.
4. After multiple attempts by me to collect on this debt, I go to court and get a judgment against you to pay me the full amount of debt within 30 days (I'll skip the interest in this case).
5. Fail to pay me within the next 30 days.
6. I return to the judge and tell them that you still have not complied with their order.
7. They give you one last chance to comply within the next 7 days.
8. 7 days elapse without payment
9. Judge holds you in contempt.

See how easy that was?

if you fail to repay $1000 the debt collectors come for you, your credit history is wiped and you could even go to jail.

Citation?

The debt collectors actions are civil, not criminal and have no power of their own to have you arrested or jailed.

Now, if the debt collector sues you in court, you fail to appear or fail to pay when the judge has ordered you to repay promptly and do not... then you can get hit with a contempt of court charge which could result in jail time... though this is not unique to debt collections, any engagement with a judge can have the same outcome.

but doing this yourself seems to be a lot cheaper.

Oh? Have you factored in the cost of ensuring that you always have an offsite and fully up to date copy, not to mention secondary and tertiary copies for transit time in case your primary datacenter/server happens to kick the bucket/get stolen/evaporate?

It's easy to compare the cost of an offered service to what you can pick up seeming similar equipment for from Amazon or Newegg... the realities though are far more complex.

and cannot put anything confidential there (unless you are not bothered by various TLAs searching through it).

There are ways to manage even that, see this brief bit of Wikipedia for a start.

I don't know if there are any other commercial or enterprise products out there that do it, but I know this one stores all of it's data in the cloud (with a local cache) but does all of the encryption on site. Only if you choose does the encryption key leave your site and then only in a way you choose making it rather problematic for a TLA or Microsoft to get to your data.

It is an interesting world when you are dealing with data you cannot legally delete for a period of time and simply want to rid yourself of the burden of having to store it locally. Suing Google or Amazon because their cold storage failed is a far better option than having your IT guy tell you that the HD they stored the crucial data to doesn't spin up anymore... and that the backup disk ended up in the secretary desktop.

A Snowden trial could... however as I recall, under evidence rules in the US his ability to showcase potentially illegal acts that only came to light due to his own classified leaks is not permitted.

On the other side, no group that I am aware of has sued and won over the various Snowden revelations so as to establish a precedent which a Snowden defense could be based.

So... Snowden 'allegedly' violated the law because he's not yet been convicted... but the "illegal acts that were being covered up" are in fact... illegal acts? Have said acts also been adjudicated as illegal?

I could be mistaken... but at last check more courts have non-overturned rulings finding that the administration was engaged in an illegal amnesty program than have found that the information revealed by Snowden to be of illegal actions.

You really should look into the history of why that facility was established where it was, I'd start with an understanding of the Eisentrager case first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

I think the fact that the USAG won't guarantee his constitutional right to a fair trial

How exactly is the AG doing that?