Unfortunately, while the DUE PROCESS Act contains many of the procedural reforms that The Heritage Foundation and a broad coalition of organizations have called for in our recent Meese Center report, “Arresting Your Property,” it does not tackle two of the most perverse aspects of forfeiture law: the financial incentives that underlie modern civil forfeiture practices and the profit-sharing programs known as “equitable sharing.”
Under federal law, 100 percent of the proceeds of successful forfeitures are retained by the federal law enforcement organization that executed the seizure. This money is available to be spent by these agencies without congressional oversight, meaning they can—and do—self-finance. This profiteering incentive is extended to state and local agencies through programs administered by the Justice and Treasury departments known as “equitable sharing,” which allow property seized at the state and local level to be transferred to federal authorities for forfeiture under federal law. The feds then return up to 80 percent of the resulting revenues to the originating agency.
Thus, federal law provides every law enforcement agency in the country with a direct financial incentive to seize cash and property—sometimes at the expense of investigating, arresting, and prosecuting actual criminals—and simultaneously encourages state and local agencies to circumvent state laws that are more protective of property rights or restrictive as to how forfeiture proceeds may be spent than the federal standard.
The simple fact is that civil forfeiture is already blatantly illegal, as per the plain words in the fifth amendment to the Constitution:
No person . .
.[shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
It is a horrible tragedy that so few people today respect these plain words.
But how exactly is this a violation of "standard Windows conventions"? Clicking a corner [X] button has always been an indication of the user's desire to dismiss the window being closed and take no further action
Exactly, the key words being "take no further action". In other words, don't change anything on my computer...
The 'x' is expected to mean "close this window and take no action".
Close, but most users expect clicking the 'x' to mean something closer to "close this window without doing/changing anything". I know it's a relatively subtle distinction, but most users are going to expect that, by clicking the 'x', they're canceling the planned update, and somebody at MS is exploiting that. At best, it's mere incompetence and the exploit was unintended - this particular dialog really shouldn't even have an 'x' but a pair of large buttons: "Upgrade to Win10" and "Keep using Win7". More likely this setup is deceitful by design.
Microsoft says they'll give "an additional opportunity for cancelling the upgrade"
And that helps anyone who was automagically updated (whether they they wanted it or not) how, exactly?
I'm pretty sure my supervisor would prefer going back to Win7, but with the various reports I'm seeing of rollbacks leading to BSOD/reinstall, the risk of data loss is probably significantly worse than just going forward with Win10. We may have upgraded anyway before the free period expires, but we were certainly planning of a full system image/backup first which we never got to do because the OS updated itself overnight without notice.
No, it's the fault of the lazy, thoughtless bastard who didn't change the default setting to "automatically install recommended updates". I assume that wasn't the son?
FTFY
God help those who do not help themselves. -- Wilson Mizner