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U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

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Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#281

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

enraged_camel wrote: post #195
panarky wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not! It's much better to be ruled by sociopaths and megalomaniacs.

Versus the stupid and the ignorant?

You realise it's not either/or?

The US is a plutocracy. It's in no sense a working democracy. There's a public voting circus every couple of years, but policy - which is the only thing that really matters in politics - is largely defined by Wall St, the Fed, and by mil-ind corporate lobbying groups.

All of the above are politically unaccountable and legally untouchable. See for example the ridiculous excuses made to prevent the passage of:

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

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#282

Post by adrianratnapala »

studentrob wrote: post #271
mikelward wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia, which has IRV, it's not clear to me there's much difference. Candidates are still elected to single-member constituencies, and we still get a two-party system little different from the US. Do you think IRV alone helps? What exactly do you propose? Aside: in Australia, which has IRV, gay marriage is still not legal. Yay democracy. /s

> In Australia, which has IRV, it's not clear to me there's much difference. Candidates are still elected to single-member constituencies, and we still get a two-party system little different from the US. How long has Australia had IRV? I don't think it's a magic solution on its own. But I do think it allows voters to more clearly express their wishes without playing as many games wondering what the rest of the voter…

> How long has Australia had IRV? As long as I have been around -- 30 years or more.

IRV has nothing to do with reducing the strength of two main parties. It just reduces the weirdness in the case of moderately close races.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#283

Post by jessaustin »

clouddrover wrote: post #277
bmelton wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The framers of the constitution never meant for government to have so much power that lobbying it would be able to buy much influence. Beyond that, considering that the vote was restricted to landed elites and mercantile class, there's more credence to the idea that the framers never meant for the government to stifle the speech of anyone (whether corporations or not) than there is to suggest they had any idea on cor…

> never meant for government to have so much power that lobbying it would be able to buy much influence I don't think lobbying is a problem because the government has too much power, but rather because of the electoral system. When voting is voluntary elections are won by the party that is best able to get out the vote. In order to get out the vote huge sums of money must be spent on political advertising and organiz…

I don't see why political ads would decrease just because everybody had to vote.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#284

Post by ohitsdom »

lucb1e wrote: post #156
nickff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons that courts do not allow cases to continue when a party loses interest in the dispute (for whatever reason) is that the court can no longer trust that party to continue making a forceful case. You can end up with situations where the party refuses to spend money on making good arguments and finding evidence, then make very bad precedent because of it.

That's actually a good point, setting precedent by one side not being represented properly. Thinking further, one company could easily setup another and sue it for one thing or another. The set-up company presents a believable but purposefully flawed case and voilà: legal precedent.

> one company could easily setup another

This could happen in our current system. For example, if the DoJ in Apple had a side agreement that Apple would lose the encryption case. Obviously that's not what happened, but your conspiracy scenario isn't any more likely if courts forced a case to continue.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#285

Post by JBReefer »

chii wrote: post #274
roel_v wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please describe a plausible construct how your proposed concept could work.

have attorneys that are always state allocated to each side, not privately chosen.

That's ripe for abuse and incompetence, but we do it in some cases already.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#286

Post by JBReefer »

chii wrote: post #274
roel_v wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please describe a plausible construct how your proposed concept could work.

have attorneys that are always state allocated to each side, not privately chosen.

That's ripe for abuse and incompetence, but we do it in some cases already.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#287

Post by Ntrails »

roywiggins wrote: post #231
aaronharnly wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a famous story about the logician Kurt Gödel related to this.[1] In preparation for the US citizenship test, despite assurances from his friends Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern that the test was a mere formality, he studied assiduously all sorts of details about local and national government, including the US Constitution. He quite excitedly told Einstein and Morgenstern that he had found a weakness in…

The Constitution is pretty much only as strong as the institutions that interpret and enforce it. It's all sort of a collective hallucination that the Constitution has any power in and of itself. "Godelian" defects seem a lot less dangerous to me than plain-old human factors. The UK manages to be a Parliamentary democracy without having a single coherent constitution at all, let alone one free of logical defects- so…

Sometimes I think there's just as much, if not more, leeway in interpreting the "God Document" that is the constitution, than in not having one and relying on what is essentially "prior art".

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#288

Post by LoSboccacc »

mcphage wrote: post #62
downandout wrote: post #15

I would treat this claim with a great deal of skepticism. However, this is by far the smartest play for the government. Had they gone to court and lost (probably after an appeal), they would have set a precedent that would be very problematic for them going forward. By claiming this, falsely or otherwise, they hurt Apple's security reputation (most consumers will not understand or care that this happens to be an old…

Maybe, but they didn't actually accomplish any of their real goals—making it easy to force Apple to break their security. This particular phone is immaterial, and Apple can always talk big later about how they patched any of the security holes that the government used, to recover face.

Remember, Apple refused to unlock it because the FBI wanted their capability of doing so be publicly advertised: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/46k4ke/apple_ha...

There seems to be much more to this beyond the actual capabilty and it doesn't seem the spin 'apple fighting for our rights' which mainstream media loves is the most likely, so I wpuldn't say FBI hasn't accomplished its goal - especially if it was to cast doubt on Apple security, as they're now basically advertised they can do it no matter what. Unless FBI agreed to previous apple request and they did it togheter under cover.

Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone

#290

Post by CWuestefeld »

mchahn wrote: post #212
noelsusman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American government is not supposed to be a direct representation of the will of the people, but let's go through this anyway. On the PATRIOT Act, the link you provided shows that 63% of Americans either want to keep the entire thing or make minor changes. Citizens United came from the Supreme Court, an institution that is explicitly designed to be shielded from the will of the people as much as possible. The 200…

> Citizens United came from the Supreme Court, an institution that is explicitly designed to be shielded from the will of the people as much as possible. The people have nothing to do with that decision. It is just plain unconstitutional. The framers of the constitution never meant for personal rights to be applied to corporations.

Let's make sure we know what we're talking about here. The CU decision was over a bunch of people who made a movie that was critical of a political candidate, and aired that movie not long before the election.

Is it your contention that we really should prevent this kind of thing from happening? Because to me, it seems like the very cornerstone of the democratic system. The minute such activity is illegal, the people have lost and we've become an oligarchy, unable to provide information to our fellow citizens necessary to cast informed votes.

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