I think you may need to take a course in statistics. You're absolutely right that the article in question did not say whether the survey was valid (news articles rarely do because average Joes who read the paper don't know what the technical term "validity" means), and I could not determine from the information provided within the article whether the survey was published in any kind of professional journal. So at this point, we can probably consider our survey merely anecdotal. But you are very wrong about that "magic number" thing. Depending on the population size, in order to be valid, you have a receive a certain minimum number of responses in order for the survey to be considered "valid." This is called your "sample" and the larger your population, the smaller, proportionally, your sample size has to be. However, now we can determine that this particular survey was not valid because according to my table, a sample size of 100 survey respondents is representative of a population of only about 135 people - NOT the general traveling public. Surprisingly, for an accurate representation, you would need only 384 survey responses to represent about 1,000,000 travelers. That information comes right out of a statistical course package I received from my college instructor.

You were the one who quoted the 5th Amendment, not me:

So who's getting Constitutional Law wrong? One of the articles I posted showed how an Appeals Court has ruled in favor of allowing these searches and seizures, so obviously our court system does not see a 4th Amendment problem either.

FWIW, "indefinite" is not the same as "forever." And taking property for a public use is not the same as confiscating personal property as part of a crime investigation. They certainly can take property without compensation if you've used that property to commit a crime. For example, if you used your car to smuggle drugs, police can seize your car and keep it forever. They can later put it into serve as a police vehicle with absolutely no compensation to you, whatsoever. They can later sell it at auction and keep the proceeds for the purpose of funding department activities. You are not entitled to any of that money, even though it had been your car.

And on another note:

Well...that is one way to get rid of bad laws. You break them, get arrested for them, and then challenge them in court. Remember Rosa Parks?

How do you get them to arrest and charge you for it?

My laptop runs FreeBSD, but in order to watch DVDs that I legally purchased on my laptop that has a legally purchased DVD drive... I have to violate the DMCA.

The lovely DVD Forum does not provide a player to view DVDs on any open source platform such as Linux or BSD. In order to display the contents of the DVD on the screen, you have to run software that breaks the encryption (DeCSS) before it can play it on your screen.

In order to legally watch that DVD I would have to buy a copy of Microsoft Windows and install it on my laptop and use properly licensed software from the DVD Forum.

Legally, it would be better for me to download a copy of the movie over the Internet and watch it that way. Since I wouldn't be breaking any copy protection I wouldn't be in violation of that provision of the DMCA, I would just be liable for copyright infringement.

Gotta love it when the government sucks the wang of big businesses. That being said, no one has ever been arrested for having a laptop that can play movies... but things could change as long as bad laws like that are on the books.

Getting arrested by a municipality - as in Rosa Parks - is bad enough. Seriously, you don't want to get picked up by the border patrol.

A better way to get rid of this particular law would probably be to petition your legislators to get rid of it, and get your friends to do the same.

If you really want to get arrested for something like that, you generally have to make a big show of breaking the law, like many did during the '60s. Civil disobedience was often the order of the day, although it often didn't go as well as intended. Many peaceful protests ended in unintended violence. Just something to consider.

But DMCA is not quite on the same order as civil rights, which is why you would probably have better results working on your lawmakers.

My lawmakers don't care.

If they could get away with it, they would triple the length of copyrights and make it illegal to hum the tune to a song without paying a fee.

You DO understand why copyrights are a good thing, right?

You DO understand why the public domain is a good thing, right?

We went from short, to reasonable, to absurd copyright term lengths.



Corporate welfare, at its finest.

It is really sickening too when you have companies like Disney who have made so much money off of the public domain, turn around and try to take the public domain away.

That depends on how the surveys are distributed. Someone who felt violated would feel more inclined to respond whereas if my experience at the border involved the ICE officer giving me some crap about the empty pony keg I was bringing back from Canada as a souvenir, I probably wouldn't take the time out of my day.

And we're talking about a lot more than 1 million travelers. We're talking about everyone who crossed the border within the last couple years. That's a lot of people. 100 responses isn't good enough to make a general conclusion. Not even the paper says that 7% of travelers have their laptops confiscated, just that it has happened seven times that we know about.

It's a law school habit. In analyzing a Constitutional issue, it's good to bring up the close calls and tell why they aren't applicable or when they might be, but aren't yet.

The 9th Circuit. This is the most overturned appellate court in the United States at any level. Take what they say with a big 'ol grain of salt in most cases.

Here, I think they're right.

That doesn't mean that an argument can't be made either way. The ACLU and the EFF sure think so anyhow.

No, they're taking the property for the reasonable period of time it takes to search it. You need to understand what's going on here. I won't explain it a third time. Scroll back up and re-read if you care to

Yes, just as I explained in the side-discussions with Toad re: seizure and the DMCA.

This ain't Jim Crow.

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The method of survey distribution (such as the coercion you mention) has nothing to do with the survey sample. It does affect the validity of a survey, but a different aspect of it. Like I said, take a statistics course. It's very enlightening.

My point was not to say, "oh we have a million travelers, so we need 384 respondents," but to say that for a sample size of 100, you're only representing a population of 135, but for a sample size of 384, an addition of a mere 284 survey respondents, you're now representing a population of a million, a difference of 999,900. It doesn't require the response of EVERYONE who crossed the border in the past two years, just a proportionally representative number, which I have shown is a smaller actual number than one might think.

I think you deliberately misunderstand my point. I won't get into it again.

And you took this out of context since I was using the example to make the point you're trying to deliberately misunderstand, above. But hey...feel free.

Yes, and this was somewhat unrelated to the other comments, but if you'll notice, I said so in a later comment.

He meant the same thing. Jeez, I think you just say the opposite of anyone so you get to argue.