He lost a test grade from pretty much the whole class (it makes a teacher look rather bad when the entire class fails, you understand), and he gained a bunch of students who were probably not going to try cheating again. It was a calculated trade.

Note, I didn’t say the court ordered 3rd party webhost to take down the posts: the court ordered the individual to take down the posts. Therefore the webhost is not in any way in contempt of court until said individual takes them to court over the matter; then 3rd party webhost might be ordered to either take it down, post a redaction, or make some other conciliatory action. But until the individual sues the webhost, they don’t legally really have to do anything.

I.e. individual has to go after webhost out-of-pocket to try to get the stuff taken down, which is somewhat necessary for they themselves to avoid being in contempt of court.

Language is confusing, I’ll grant you that. Several prefixes can mean multiple things, even contradictory things (for instance, in- may mean “not”, as in “indiscreet”, or it may mean “extremely”, as in “inflammable” – two entirely opposite meanings).

The prefix a- generally means “not” or “without”, but it can also mean “against” in a sense. And to fully confuse the issue, it can also mean to indicate that something is in the particular state indicated (i.e. aglow), or even the stronger concept that it is completely/fully so (i.e. abashed).

The word “atheist” means “not a theist” but in the sense that it is opposed to theism.

The word “agnostic” is formed from the same prefix (a-) with the word derived from the Greek “gnosis”, i.e. knowledge/enlightenment. And in the same sense that atheist meant “against theism”, agnostic means “against knowledge”: the belief that nobody has adequate knowledge or enlightenment to determine conclusively either one way or the other whether God exists.

I’d be willing to settle for having the original content updated in such a way to guarantee that anyone finding the defamatory content would also see the updated note stating that the content was deemed false and defamatory. Apparently the courts agreed, and apparently ripoffreports had done this, so it’s more or less remedied. In this case.

But my question still stands as posed, in general.

“Value” isn’t something that can be expressed in a fixed number of US dollars. The value of the US dollar changes.

You may, but your extension of the notion wasn’t any less silly as the original notion.

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ia-supreme-court/1312928.html:
“The specter of prosecution for the destruction of marital property through unintentional acts such as house cleaning, we believe, does not provide a sufficient justification for excusing intentional destruction of property. Prosecution for an accidental act of property destruction should be no more likely than an assault prosecution arising out of an accidental physical injury to one’s spouse. Both types of criminal act require intent, and we rely on the good judgment of prosecutors and fact finders at trial to sort out the intentional cases from the unintentional ones.”

That’s fairly obvious, yes. And, at least in my opinion (or I wouldn’t have it), my definition of property is more valid than the one expressed in the law, so unless my opinion puts me at odds with the law (which would leave me at a decision whether to violate the law and possibly suffer consequences, or temporarily suspend my opinion to avoid that), I’ll continue to hold it.

A secret is a secret, and what isn’t is not; the entire business model based on selling the same information repeatedly to multiple people is thus fundamentally flawed. The claim that “I’ll tell you because you paid me, but I own this information and you can’t tell anyone else” is patently ridiculous. If you don’t trust them to keep it a secret, you don’t tell them.

Agnosticism is a bit more rounded out than you make it appear to be. It’s more than just fence-sitting, it’s the position that since nobody has proven that God exists or doesn’t exist, that fact alone is sufficient to prove that if he does exist, he’s irrelevant (if he were relevant, one ought to be able to prove he does exist) and if he doesn’t exist of course he’s irrelevant anyway.

So if you took the agnostic approach to Sagan’s Dragon, or anything else, unless it can be proven to exist it shouldn’t make any difference to you. Or, to borrow an analogy I saw someone use (can’t remember who) if you claim that invisible pink elephants live in your garage, that claim is adequate to prove that invisible pink elephants actually live in your garage: as long as those invisible pink elephants stay invisible and don’t affect anything in any real sense. If you define them in such a way that they’re completely irrelevant, it really doesn’t matter anymore whether you believe in them or not.

In other words, atheists believe God doesn’t exist, while agnostics simply believe God isn’t relevant (regardless of him existing or not). Functionally, they both act like God more or less doesn’t exist; the primary difference tends to be that atheists tend to be more evangelical about it, whereas agnostics tend to really not care what someone else believes as long as they’re not pushing it on people.

I know what thin blue line means, but I’ve not seen the sticker you’re referring to so I don’t know whether the sticker is advocating or opposing the concept.

WTOP: “it was 8:40 a.m. when she was walking her son to school along a path between houses.”
The Week: “a woman cutting through his yard with her son saw Williamson drinking coffee, naked, in his kitchen”
MyFoxDC, after his acquittal: “One of those women was taking a shortcut with her daughter through Williamson's yard”

What’s more, that report by MyFoxDC tells that in the trial, the information came to light that though the woman and police claimed she was ~25 feet from the door when she saw him, defense claims to have proven that she was more than 3 times that distance, 83 feet from the door.

Additionally, “By the time the jury found him not guilty, six months had passed and Williamson had been laid off, lost visitation rights with his young daughter and racked up $15,000 in legal bills.” One would hope that they made right, but that’s an awful lot of grief over drummed-up charges.

And perhaps most worrisome: “police testified that a broken window pane in Williamson's door gave them cause to enter. Williamson and his attorney say nothing was broken.” – as is all-too-typical, police fabricated cause to perform an illegal search without warrant. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain from this sort of behavior: They’re never punished for it if the jury decides the search was illegal, but if they can convince the jury to allow the evidence, they benefit.

Jeez, you’re awfully rude. Okay, I missed that. What should I write on the chalkboard?

I will not reply without carefully reading parent post.
I will not reply without carefully reading parent post.
I will not reply without carefully reading parent post.
I will not reply without carefully reading parent post. ...

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/atheist

Those were quoted directly from MW.

The fact of the matter was that she was apparently trespassing.

It’s not about her credibility. It’s about the credibility of the department when the public gets outraged over something stupid like this. Suddenly they’re rushing to cover their asses. If it were just a nobody, they’d have admitted it was stupid and the matter would have been dropped. But since it was a cop’s wife, they had to justify it.

Plus her story starts changing to make it sound more reasonable, which isn’t good for her credibility either... but that’s unrelated to her being a cop’s wife.

And when the defamers are convicted and ordered to take down the defamatory posts, which 3rd party webhost refuses to do?

A few more details:

Originally it was reported that the incident took place on Monday, Oct. 19, 2009 at FIVE THIRTY in the morning, and the guy appeared first through the window in the front door and then in a front window, and the woman was cutting through his front yard (i.e. trespassing).

In updates to the story, apparently the woman had changed her story... now it apparently happened at EIGHT THIRTY, she WASN’T trespassing in his yard, and he was standing OUTSIDE in his carport.

With respects to the time it occurred: He claimed it was dark. Sunrise for Arlington, VA (~6 mi. from Springfield, where this occurred) was at 7:22 AM on 10/19/2009. If he’s telling the truth about it being dark, there is no way it could have possibly happened at 8:30 in the morning.

From the updated news report by Fox 5 News, a police spokesperson said: “Because this was being spun into a national story, and the idea you can't be naked in your own house – we wanted to come forward and say in this case our officers believed there was probable cause the law had been violated”. I wonder why? Could it possibly have been because the woman who reported the incident turned out to be “a respected member of the community, and just happens to be the wife of a Fairfax County Police officer”?

Here you go.

http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/2009/10/22/2009-10-22_virginia_man_arrested_for_indecent_exposure_for_being_naked_in_his_own_home.html

I know. It’s rather fun, actually. He apparently really has nothing better to do than release/renew his IP address and hit F5 on my user page to reply to all my comments.