It looks like a fax seldom has much more legal protection than other electronic communications. See for example: http://www.adamsdrafting.com/f...

A scanned seignature would generally still stand up as binding. It looks like an "e-signature" is actually MORE binding than a faxed one:

"Fax signatures are probably the primary way contracts are signed today, and broadly speaking, basic contract law recognizes a large variety of signature types where a mark or sign is made with an intent to subscribe to the terms of an agreement. Thus the question posed is the right one—not are fax signatures and pdf signature pages valid to indicate assent to the term of a contract—they generally are—but are they enforceable. More specifically, the question is whether they satisfy the Statute of Frauds, which provides that in order to be enforceable, certain types of agreements must be evidenced by a writing signed by the party to be charged.

Over the years, courts have concluded that telegrams, telexes, telecopies, facsimiles, and e-mails are writings satisfying the Statute of Frauds. But to eliminate any uncertainty, a majority of states have gone further and explicitly adopted legislation allowing the introduction of fax signatures into evidence for disputes involving routine business transactions. However, not all have taken this extra step. The federal government and the UETA have actually gone further in the case of electronic signatures, deeming most electronic signatures meeting their provisions equivalent to written signatures."

I don't think that a fax of an ink signature has any more "magic legal sauce" than a printed scan of the same ink signature - neither of them is the orignal signature. The fact that some people treat the fax diferent than the printed scan is purely one of mindset.

Often I have been in situations where someone wanted a fax of the document (so they could start work) but needed the orignial mailed or couriered to them "for legal purposes". In cases like that, the scan/email type of thing would be functionally identical.

I don't understand that last sentence. It is like my brain can make no sense of it at all.

Those might be useful stats. What would constitute a "BS parole violation"? I do not doubt that parole restrictions can be strict, but aren't they better than the alternative of being in jail?

Maybe that should be "We don't know, and we are not particularly interested in finding out" - there are lots of examples of things that are more effective at rehabilitation both within and without the USA borders. We just do not have great enough interest in implementing any of them, and there are enough individuals and groups with incentives to keep the system as-is that it is challenging to build any such interest.

You are supposed to put a little "smiley" thing when you intentionally misstate someone's posting. :-)

Being able to repair small cracks to keep water out would go a long way to minimize the freeze/thaw damage that makes small cracks into big cracks. Even without the same strength as uncracked concrete, concrete with some small filled cracks will perform much better and last much longer than concrete with growing numbers of growing sized cracks.

One does need to factor in the number of hours/distance driven. I would not be too suprised if their per mile or per hour accident rate was much lower than the average. Of course, small numbers of vehicles will tend to give larger variance - this 6 month period might just be a statistical outlyer.

I think that there is a pretty strong correlation between a "culture of honor" and interpersonal violence. The social norms that insist on retribution and payback for transgressions, outside the pervue of established law inforcement can also contribute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If you were interested in designing and/or implementing public policies to reduce crime, drug abuse, etc, then understanding the root causes is probably pretty important. If your only interest is in minimizing your personal exposure to risk, then understanding the actual statisctical underpinings of your fears might also be of use. Is your actual risk actually changed if you avoid ALL blacks? Should you be looking at relative risk changes or absolute risk changes? Are the risks worth worrying about in any case given your current risk parctices in terms of driving, eating, smoking or other potentially dangerous activits. Worring about 5 murders per 100,000 population might not be as important to worry about when you compare it to more than twice that rate in automobile deaths for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Assuming that you can find the poster, and that the poster is in fact a PSS member who might possibly have some sort of obligation to keep the secrets, how would the complainants ever hope to establish that these were the actual secrets if they have never been documented? Wouldn't they need to have testomony from the people who shared the rituals with "Jane Doe", and wouldn't that testomony have to go into the public record during the trial?

I suppose the judge might order the trail records sealed like is sometimes done when a vunerable minor dis involved with the courts, but it doesn't seem likely the courts would care much about such things in this type of case. Is there a "Greek Friendly" court in Washington somewhere like the "patent friendly" on in Texas?

John Oliver bit on patents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I think "The doges are used in away to abuse the 'suspects'." was closer to what was meant, rather than that the dogs were being mistreated. There are numerous studdies to suggest that the potential for abuse exists:

http://nevergetbusted.com/neve...
http://www.informationliberati...
http://www.wayne-county-forfei...

" handler's ", or perhaps " handlers' " but that is less likely as the final "handler" is not plural.

Really? A quick look at Wikipedia seems to support your statement, but surely this type of obvious loophole is easily plugged by putting some minimums or maximums into the tax code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Can I really gather in all of my cap gains tax free by just making sure that year I have a low enough salaried income? So every decade or so I get my employeer to give me a $1 salary and make sure that in that year I liquidate all of my holdings and then reinvest them, and have thus avoided any tax on my millions of Cap Gains?

Of course, I actually do not have millions in unrealized gains to take advantage of this type of thing...

No online system is fast enough to brute force an account even if they did allow you to try new passwords ad-infinitum - each attempt would take a second or two and that's just too slow for effective "cracking" I would think.

I believe that the concern is for when there has been a data breach of some sort, and the "bad guys" have gotten the username/password file. The data in this file has been run through some sort of a one way function and thus you cannot just read the usernames and passwords out of it, but since the attacker knows what the one-way function is, they can test to see if any username or password that they want to know about is in the file, and they can do this with all the computing power at their disposal. "Rainbow" tables are pre-calculated results of this one-way function for common usernames and passwords.

The data in the file can be "salted" adding an extra bit of information to the password before running it through the one-way function - even if the "salt" is known by the attacker, this prevents rainbow tables from being useful. There are probably also ways of combining unique salt values, usernames, and passwords so that even "insecure" passwords are difficult to recover from the file, but of course the longest passwords drawn from the largest possible set of characters will always be hardest to "crack".