171–180 of 336 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This depends on the actual prosecutor never attempting to participate in the case. Plus, I imagine that the penalty for getting caught defrauding a court is pretty steep.
So maybe you submit motion to dismiss request for a number of random cases. You become hidden among the others.
One has to wonder what legal frauds, asset grabs, and impersonations have transpired that were never discovered. Some perspective on this is the story of Alves dos Reis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis ) who in 1924 stole ~1% of Portugal's GDP in bank notes printed under forged orders. The scheme may have never been uncovered had Reis succeeded in maintaining a controlling interest in the Bank of Portug…
Having someone else do your prison time was fairly common. Now with more cooperation between organizations and improved biometrics it has dropped. Different people would be arrested, show up to court, or enter the prison. Impossible for organizations downstream to detect or assume a switch had happened.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In college there was a beer delivery service that would even deliver directly to the dorm if you gave that as your address. If you paid with your debit card over the phone, they wouldn't even card you since the beer was already bought and paid for. One time they did check, and my friend lied and said he didn't have his ID with him. Then the delivery guy who was probably only a couple years older than us just asked to…
> Then the delivery guy who was probably only a couple years older than us just asked to see his actual underage ID to prove he wasn't a cop and handed us the beer anyway. The liquor enforcement folks (usually not cops, AFAIK) could easily hire someone under 21 to attempt to purchase alcohol. In fact, I'm pretty sure that in some places they do exactly this.
I guess this brings up and interesting issue -- once someone knows the ins and outs of a system, sometimes there are very few barriers internally to check that an order/paperwork is legit. There was a story in WSJ like last week about how the Japanese red stamp / seal still survives and is a barrier to them adopting new technology for practical every day speeding up of tasks. And keeps things like faxes around unnece…
I used to work as a criminal defense attorney, and the job regularly required that I obtain subpoenas from the court in order to mandate a witness's appearance at court. My state courts have a template that subpoenas must follow, wherein you would include the case number, attorney name, witness name, and other basic details.
Once the template is completed, you take the original along with a certain number of copies to the court clerk for filing. All the clerks would do is make sure that the case number on the subpoena corresponds to a case that actually exists in the system, and that the names of the plaintiff(s)/defendant(s) are accurate.
The clerks never asked me any questions about my role in the case (e.g., whether I was a party to the case, an attorney, or a staff member of the law firm representing a party), nor did they ever ask me to provide any sort of identification. I just give the clerk the papers, they look at the papers, they stamp the original and copies, and then they return the copies to me (which are to be served on the witness and/or opposing counsel).
I don't think there's a ton of value someone could get out of obtaining a fake subpoena (other than perhaps issuing your own self a subpoena as an excuse to get out of work, or maybe just to screw with someone), but it was always pretty astonishing to me that anyone off the street can just dump some papers in front of a court clerk and receive a legal order mandating someone's appearance in court--no questions asked.
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> Eventually all regions that pretend to care about their citizens freedom should adopt a GDPR like law. But unless they all adopt the same one, the requirements will all be different, which means they'd each have independent compliance costs, which means local news providers like this will still block everybody outside of their own jurisdiction so that they only have to pay one set of compliance costs instead of six…
There are lots of regulations governing all the stuff you use and consume. They are different between regions but often regions band together and synchronize their regulations. It's really not a big deal and yes if the tradeoff is that forcing the web monopolies into consumer friendly behaviour means that some tiny services are region limited (in name, not necessarily in practice due to vpns) then it's a net good.
This is, as a general rule, catastrophically worse. Because then the only parties with input into the rules are the largest organizations who can successfully lobby an inter-governmental body and they (unintentionally or on purpose) promote rules that work for the largest organizations and annihilate smaller ones.
It also tends to make the rules much more complicated, because each of the individual jurisdictions have their pet issues they want to graft onto the unified system, so now instead of having some obscure and poorly conceived rule only applying in Russia or Egypt, it ends up on page 641 of the unified rules.
Compare this to some kind of rational system where the rules that apply are those of the jurisdiction where the server is located and then if you don't like the rules in Iran or California, you use the services hosted somewhere else. And the services that really are targeted at your jurisdiction end up locally-hosted anyway for the efficiency advantage unless your jurisdictions rules are so oppressive that they overcome it, in which case "Chinese dissidents use servers in the US or South Korea" is a valuable release valve.
And if you're fine with people using a VPN to use services that don't comply with their own jurisdiction's rules anyway, you should be fine with that. Because the only difference is to deprive the majority of their agency if they can't figure out how to work a VPN.
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Just wear a hardhat and carry a clipboard.
I used to participate in a city-wide water pistol assassination tournament. Skipped the hard hat, got white coveralls from Home Depot, pinned my work id to it, carried a clipboard. Got in everywhere I needed to be, including a heliport and a private boat dock. I forget where I read it, but the phrase "just act like you're supposed to be there" has stuck with me a long time, and paid dividends.
When you kobayashi maru the legal system.
I gotta try that in my next interview.... For those of you who missed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Salesman
Original context:
The Kobayashi Maru refers to a no-win scenario given to the command-track students of Starfleet Academy. They aren't told it's a no-win situation, the goal is to make sure they can keep calm and see how they cope with the situation.
In the scenario, they're in command of a starship and have to rescue another ship, named the Kobayashi Maru, but in doing so they fall into a trap that results in both ships being destroyed and all crew killed.
TOS-era Captain Kirk was the first to win the no-win scenario. He did so by cheating: reprogramming the computer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having someone else do your prison time was fairly common. Now with more cooperation between organizations and improved biometrics it has dropped. Different people would be arrested, show up to court, or enter the prison. Impossible for organizations downstream to detect or assume a switch had happened.
This seems similar to the Catholic concept of buying indulgences as a carbon offset type concept against sins. Pay to play
Keeping the carbon offset analogy, an indulgence in the Catholic sense would be more akin to first making sure you are carbon neutral (all parties are at peace and forgiven/reconciled), then you spend %10 of your salary to go beyond that and offset the carbon credits of the person you wronged.
One has to wonder what legal frauds, asset grabs, and impersonations have transpired that were never discovered. Some perspective on this is the story of Alves dos Reis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis ) who in 1924 stole ~1% of Portugal's GDP in bank notes printed under forged orders. The scheme may have never been uncovered had Reis succeeded in maintaining a controlling interest in the Bank of Portug…
Here in Germany we had a few cases where persons worked as hospital doctors for a few years without a license or diploma or even any medical training. They usually submitted a fake license to the hospital. There was a spectacular case in the 1990s where a former postal employee named himself "Dr. med. Dr. phil. Clemens Bartholdy" and later worked as a senior physician in a psychiatric hospital, also giving lectures […