Meanwhile, a formal ban is pending at Versailles palace and Centre Pompidou in France, and visitors are now being told to stow their sticks by guards at the Louvre.
Yeah, if someone brings one of those stupid things to my house I'll help them "stow their sticks" where the sun don't shine.
there is no evidence it was replaced prior to aircraft going missing
And it seems even less likely that they were replaced after the aircraft went missing. Unless someone was able to get ahold of one of those liion batteries in the cargo hold and replace it.
Then it's time to update the laws to require them to give out their full names. In most places in the US police officers are legally required to give out their full name when asked. Anything less than that invariably leads to arbitrary rule.
Now, this is where the bullshit starts: Netflix passes the cost for the Comcast toll on to both you and ME, even though I'm not a Comcast customer, and this toll did nothing to increase MY speed. In fact, I already had to pay extra to my ISP to get my speed fixed.
As a Comcast customer, it's also bullshit. I'm *already* paying them for my internet service, so if part of my Netflix bill is going to pay protection money to Comcast (and, that's what this is: a protection racket) I'm paying Comcast twice. I fundamentally have a problem with that.
It's amazing to read articles like this and nobody on the government side is named, just agencies and some "spokesperson". Name them. Somebody arrested this guy, and somebody is trying to prosecute him. Everybody involved in this needs to be named and publicly shamed. They need to be in a situation where they go home at night and their wife says "hey, why is everybody we know calling and asking why you're prosecuting some guy for not turning over a password? Is that even illegal? Why is this so important?"
Quit letting scum bags hide behind anonymity.
And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.
Let me guess - you're also against coal because global warming. Am I right?
Yeah, not only is the civil settlement (not criminal - nobody's going to jail) ludicrous in size, it's also ludicrous that they act like it takes a multi-year investigation to figure out who's making the calls. It's not difficult, you use their service and then find out who did what. Given normal police detective work it should take up to a week tops to shut one of these operations down.
I love how they're still talking about taking Rachel from cardholder services down a couple of years ago. How stupid can these people be? I still get calls from Rachel as well as her sister Bridgette. Hell, she even has a brother.
Their needs to be a way to take these people's assets and throw them in jail. It's sad that we can steal a Mexican guy's cash at the side of the road because he might be a drug dealer (not that we can prove it or that we need to prove it) but get caught running an illegal business - exactly, by the way, exactly what asset forfeiture laws were created for - and you get a civil settlement of $500,000. No investigation into how much money was actually made.
You know this guy is still doubled over in his mansion laughing at the schmucks at the FTC who were stupid enough to settle for half a million.
Mod this guy up.
People love to talk about the free market as if it were a genie.
The law of capitalism means that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a regulation to raise the price of anything - all it can do is reduce the profit a corporation takes.
Wow. Look up the dairy market for a good counterexample. I'll stop there even though I don't need to.
Congress might fund NIH, if they could agree on anything, including whether to have Coke or Pepsi in the Senate Dining Room.
the immediate beneficiaries would be medical insurance companies, but the short-term is all they think about. if they say NO! now, they don't have to say NO! a thousand times, ten thousand times, when somebody is rotting out from infection by the minute and a doctor tries to prescribe a new $10,000 antibiotic.
if we had single-payer insurance, and ponied up along with the other developed nations, all of which are single-payer, a share of the prize, we might get someplace. I like the idea, but not its chances.
So, um, quick question: Why are all of those other developed nations with single-payer not "getting someplace" on this? I mean, surely they're not (again) waiting for the US to do it, right?
Right?
You're missing something really obvious, but the issue is that a word is missing in the phrase to which you respond. "Blinding weapons" should be "Permanently blinding weapons". The Russians have now multiple times used lasers against American helicopter pilots with the intent to blind them permanently - that's what we want to outlaw. Weapons that temporarily blind people are very useful and I see no more ethical problems with those than we would with other weapons of war.
Yep. The point is that "bad forensics" isn't the problem. The problem is that prosecutors (along with the rest of the criminal justice system) have no incentive to actually solve crimes - they have an incentive to put someone in jail for a crime. Bad forensics goes away on its own if we disincentivize locking up the wrong guy. Put another way - when the prosecutor has a little skin in the game he'll make damned sure he's prosecuting the criminal before he bothers to prosecute.
There was a great quora question about prosecution and a guy who prosecuted someone in a rather dubious manner responded with a well-written piece. Long story short the criminal had taken an airsoft gun into an arcade, cops were called, arrested him, and the prosecutor tried to prosecute under a law that had to do with carrying a deadly weapon there. But it wasn't a deadly weapon and there were no victims (he hadn't tried to rob or shoot anybody), so the statute clearly didn't apply. The prosecutor talked as if it were no big deal to try to apply that law to put the guy in prison. Ultimately the judge didn't buy it and the guy walked, but he had to shell out for an attorney, time off work, time in jail - it's a big deal for him.
It was fascinating to see how flippantly the prosecutor treated it - like, "oh well, didn't work, whatever".
One other thing that I forgot is the biggy - if people are found to be factually innocent then the DA's office needs to be forced to pay for their defense. Yes - specifically the DA's office. And it wouldn't matter what the defense cost. If that means the DA is bankrupted then so be it. The point, again, is to make it expensive to prosecute some poor guy because he can't afford a lawyer. If he can prove innocence then a good lawyer would take the case on so he could later just make the government pay for it, anyway. Suddenly, poor people who are innocent have less to worry about.
The main answer to this is multi-faceted:
1. Removed absolute immunity from civil and criminal liability from all players in the criminal justice system. Yes, that means you can sue the judge who screwed up your trial. Suddenly a lot of people who are judges now will find another line of work as the liability isn't worth it for them.
2. Hone qualified immunity back to such a tiny nub that nobody sees it as a reliable fallback. Right now, if a police officer arrests you for, say, photographing them (yes, this happens often) the judge will look and say "well, it's not well established that someone can photograph a cop, so the arrest is still legal because the cop might have no known. Hence, he gets qualified immunity" This needs to be turned on its head. The judge needs to say "it's not well-established that someone can be arrested for photographing a cop, so the arrest is illegal and qualified immunity therefore cannot apply". See the difference? Again, cops would think twice before doing something.
3. Statutorily define that when an actor in the justice system does something wrong that he/she personally is responsible for a certain percentage of any settlements or judgements with such debt being ineligible to be lessened or removed through bankruptcy.
4. Remove the statute of limitations for any crimes committed by any actor in the justice system. Right now, innocent people who have been in prison for years can't sue people who harmed them because of the statute of limitations which typically runs out during their sentence. See John Burge in Chicago for a prime example, or Louis Scarcella in New York. Malicious prosecutors love the whole statute of limitations because they get to play both sides: "Hey, we want to prosecute this criminal but, darn the luck, looks like it's too late".
5. Force actual scientific method on all forensic methodologies. If a drug dog alerts on a car, for instance, that car should be parked in a lot and a different officer should take a dog around the lot and see if the dog alerts on any of the cars. If the second officer can't figure out which car it is, then the alert was false and excluded. Take that to every kind of forensic test out there.
6. Forensics should have nothing to do with the prosecution and independent (not state owned) crime labs should work for the court itself. The idea is to remove all incentives to "find a match". Crime labs should have no idea about what crime a particular piece of evidence is from or anything like that.
7. If somebody is found to be factually innocent then everybody involved in the case who didn't initially object to that person's prosecution should be removed from the criminal justice system. I know that's harsh, but prosecutors need to be in a position where they say "I don't know if this guy did it or not so, for the sake of my family, house, car, etc. I'm going to decline prosecution".
8. Prosecution's files should be not just "open" but literally unhidable from the defense. Any evidence that shows up later should be an automatic felony charge for the DA with harsh minimum sentences.
The point is that we need to treat a false prosecution with the same seriousness as we treat a kidnapping, because that's what it is. Mike Nifong should not only be in a maximum security prison for the rest of his life, his possessions should have been sold and all proceeds given to his victims (the ones we know of). All his past cases should have been scrutinized with perhaps time given off his sentence if he confessed and helped bring true justice in those cases.
And he's just one guy.
So, suddenly when the government is on the line the Constitution is useful for something more than toilet paper? Got it.
It's amazing how so many judges lack sound judgement, which, by definition, should be a basic requirement for the job....
Is Lois Lerner working in Scotland now?
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson
