All these exemptions to the constitution were instituted as exceptions to aid the war on drugs. The real enemy is the war on drugs and prohibition 2.0 should be abolished.

Unfortunately because communities have abused these programs a valuable tool is being lost. When FHWA instituted the red-light running campaign it was to reduce the number of fatalities due to running red lights. Red-light running is now the biggest generator of fatalities and it's an increasingly serious problem. I support the program because it's intent is to reduce accidents, but the problem is the states and companies involved have completely abused the intent.

Reducing yellow time is contrary to every design guideline there is. In fact I'd wager that were you in an accident as a result of reduced yellow times you could win substantial lawsuits against the city and company involved. In fact I'd actively encourage people to sue cities, counties, muni's and states that reduce yellow time to drive up revenue.

Unfortunately because the systems been so heavily abused I don't think cameras will be a useable tool in the future, which is unfortunate.

That all depends on the game. And he's right about the taste, commercial feed turns a lot of meat to shit. Though you can buy a lot of game meats these days the prices are just silly and the meat is often trash compared to animals living in their natural habitat.

Fish are terrible when farmed, fish that live in the wild and eat bugs taste far better than fish fed fish pellets. Fish are generally a great example of this because most lakes are stocked by fisheries and you can tell just by taste how long the fish has been in a lake.

A tried and true false equivalency argument. Afterall, if the world isn't perfect we can't think some things are bad and deserved to be punished. But why are you worried about those silly little Justice department issues when there are so many other important issues? See, false equivalency can get you too, until world peace exists and everyone lives in a mansion there are far bigger problems than tackling the real crime we can prosecute today.

Apple cost the American book buying public Billions in increased prices. They weren't trying to break an Amazon monopoly, they were trying to fix prices to make their own entry into the market more profitable. Everyone in this country and probably world that purchased an eBook after Apple entered the market paid almost double what they would have under market pricing. Those billions could have been put to charity and social welfare and instead they were put into the coffers of Apple. Apple's market manipulation very well could have cause starvation. See I can make false equivalency arguments just like you.

Apple and the publishers illegally colluded, unlike Apple the publishers were smart enough to see this was very illegal and immediately settled with the government and as a result got to keep most of their ill gotten gains. Apple will fight and lose, and hopefully it costs them much much more. Personally I think people should be in jail for what they did. You don't deserve a slap on the wrist when you steal billions through collusion.

Price fixing does not require a monopoly to be illegal. The FTC routinely targets price fixing in the DRAM market and there is no monopoly in that highly competitive market. In fact there have been at least 3 lawsuits by the FTC that I'm aware of that targeted price fixing in the DRAM market.

All your other arguments are meaningless against that one simple fact. Price fixing in collusion with others to force set prices in a market is illegal and has been for a very long time. Stop being a bloody fanboi, Apple colluded with the publishers and as a result eBook prices went up significantly. It's Apple's collusion that caused eBook prices to rise above the pricing for dead tree versions. If you had purchased eBook's before Apple's illegal market manipulation you would know that you could routinely purchase eBooks for less than half the paper price and after the manipulation paper was often cheaper. That's the height of market manipulation, This market manipulation cost the American book purchasers Billions. Apple shouldn't just have to pay money, the people behind it should be given prison terms.

Up to the GWB administration wire tapping was a case by case basis, after 911 the Bush administration asked for direct links to all the telecom operators. ATT, Verizon and all the others provided direct fiber optic connections to their networks and funneled copies of everything going across their network directly to the government. This is the reason Congress was forced to give them immunity because if they didn't the class action suits would have sunk the phone companies. The need for immunity alone should point to just how serious of an expansion in wire taping occurred under the Bush administration.

In fact as the previous poster said, it was those very links that caused the creation of the Data Center in Utah. I live in Utah and I can tell you that Data Center was already planned and sited in 2008 when Obama took office. The formerly 2-lane highway leading up to Camp Williams (where the data center is) was upgraded in 2008 in anticipation, new power lines were installed at the same time (the data center uses more power than the entire salt lake city valley). Though Obama has done nothing to stop this massive expansion of federal power it most certainly did start under Bush. And though I agree that the government's been spying on people for a long time, the passive acceptance of full monitoring of every single communication didn't start till after 9/11/2001. You are arguing that tapping a few phones here and there is no different than recording every single phone call/text/internet traffic going across the network. And there is a very big difference.

Good comparison. That's like refusing to by insurance because it doesn't have asteroid coverage. International purchases are a miniscule portion of internet purchases. Your argument is a red herring, irrelevant to the discussion of businesses like Amazon that are using the non-collection of sales tax to put local competition out of business.

They are doing so on the backs of local communities that are laying off cops and firefighters because people aren't paying a legitimate tax. If you want lower sales tax, petition your government to reduce it, but expect to pay the same amount through a different channel (those states without sales tax tend to have HUGE property taxes to make up for it).

Don't bring up some silly argument about international sales that probably account for less than 0.5% of e-commerce. US businesses should be collecting and remitting sales tax from their customers. It's trivial to know and charge the correct sales tax these days unlike the catalog sales days when the intra-state exemption was enacted.

50 Years ago it would have happened, the only difference would have been the press would have willingly refused to report on it. There was no golden age in politics and only idiots think there ever was. Half the names we call dirty politicians are the names of former politicians from a hundred years ago that pioneered the dirty tactic named after him.

I get really tired of you kids believing that politics is any different than it has ever been.

Frankly sales tax is the one tax that everyone should pay without exception. There are very few states in the union where sales tax isn't directly funding your police, fire and local city directly. Most states pass that revenue on directly to your local cities. It's never been fair to ask local business to pay the tax and refuse to require it of internet businesses. In the days of the internet and software it's not at all difficult for these businesses to collect and remit the tax to the states.

This case was always a bad case because the farmer in question had an agreement with Monsanto. He was tainted by that agreement because it officially prohibited him from buying or growing RR-Soybeans without buying the from a Monsanto authorized seed elevator.

The point of Kagens statement at the end is to say that this case is a bad one to handle the "real" issues you claim it was about. Essentially saying what you think this case is about has no bearing on what law governs the case in front of them.

The real test of the Monsanto issue would be an organic grower that was contaminated by Monsanto Pollen and then was sued. I think you will find very few of these cases go very far because Monsanto doesn't want to test those waters.

All the data, even if acquired illegally is admissible in court as long as the IRS wasn't involved in the illegal action that collected the data. If a guy breaks into your house and steals your laptop and finds kiddy porn on it, he could turn you in and the prosecutor will give him amnesty and they will use the data to put you in prison. The data would only be inadmissible if the police had been involved in the theft, but if they're hands are clean and the illegal action was by another party they are free to use the information to prosecute you.

You'll lose the bet. The IRS is on a tear right now to crack down on Tax Evasion. in fact they're offering a partial amnesty for coming forward voluntarily (normal penalties for offshore tax evasion is an immediate forfeiture of 50% of the balance, and then you owe the taxes you should have paid, depending on the situation you could end up owing more than the entire account is worth) where they are dramatically reducing the penalties and close to 5000 people have come forward.

This is partially due to the prosecutions and other actions the IRS is taking against the banks hiding the money. The IRS has already put one of the oldest Swiss banks out of business and they are working on the others, they are generally offering significantly reduced fines to the banks if they provide the data to go after the evaders. It's open season on evaders right now and the IRS has had more traction in getting the banks to reveal the evaders in the last 3 years than they've had in more than 50 years.

The IRS loves whistle-blowers and others that have handed over data. They've offered amnesty to hackers and whistle-blowers in the past that provided bank records that reveal tax evaders. Tax evasion is IRS priority number one for the last several years. Lots of people are coming forward out of fear because it's not just the money, you can actually end up in jail for it as well. All they need is the proof you've done it and not declared the assets and you are toast.

Gentoo is a great OS for learning how crap works. For a day to day system it's a friggen pain in the ass. I discovered rather by accident that if you don't update for a long enough period that the packages you have installed are no longer referenced in Portage anymore the system is completely unable to determine how to upgrade and the emerge tool is completely unable to perform any future software upgrades.

After trying to manually force new package installations I finally just blew the system away and installed Debian stable. I can't be recompiling the entire OS every month to stay up to date enough to warrant using Gentoo.

They killed my parents. It was one of those hit and run trees too!

The best forums I ever encountered were the Gentoo forums. The OS is a pain in the ass if you don't want to update every couple weeks but the amount of help, howto's and other stuff available on the Gentoo forums frankly blows away every other forum I've ever encountered. And though Gentoo has a bad reputation for RTFM in fact I found their forums to be beyond helpful to total newbies (though I wasn't a newbie).

The corp doesn't do electricity. They do water. Dams, canals, dikes, etc. The information is likely sufficiency reports that include known weaknesses of the system, such as small foundation cracks in a dam that are a potential future issue that is being monitored but has not presented sufficient information to warrant repair.

Information such as that can be used to plan and execute attacks on system weaknesses. Another example would be ultimate capacity of a dam, which is the point at which an inflow would compromise the design of the spillway and result in dam failure. If you know the precise amount of inflow required to cause failure you can more precisely target with much higher success.

Many people don't realize how destructive these systems can be if unleashed. Destroying the Hoover dam would probably kill more than a million people in the subsequent flooding as much of the LA valley was washed into the ocean.

The other aspect is that much of this information will remain useful for decades to come. Inflow failure rates used in my previous example will likely remain constant as long as the dam stands. Many of these weaknesses will never be repaired because their risks will never out weigh the costs. So in theory even 50 years from now some of that information would still be valuable in an attack scenario.