I like fakemailgenerator. They have multiple domains, and incoming emails are shown almost immediately (very fast email servers and push notifications). http://www.fakemailgenerator.com/
Trashmail has an API, so good for various scripts.
If I remember correctly you don't have an inbox, you just forward X messages to another email address, where X by default is 2. After that the email is deleted.
The thought process came to me many years ago when Microsoft was an example of a startup that built itself from scratch and was very current.
I've come around to broader thinking since then. And Microsoft has changed some too. But it has gotten harder to create companies from scratch due to restrictions on developer freedom. (Patents) There are other reasons that have made it easier, but those are tangential to RMS's topics.
I find wildly erratic punitive sentencing for accused offenders who choose to go to trial alarming.
But I'm not alarmed that the majority of offenders plea out.
Trials are enormously expensive, and, in a coldly rational statistical sense, most of the accused are in fact guilty --- the fact patterns in many of these cases and the evidence supporting them are very straightforward. That there would be some incentive for the accused to spare the system the expense of litigation doesn't bother me, especially because the more resources get freed up from pointless controversies, the more resources are available to handle meaningful ones.
So, I think we agree that there's a problem, but not what its causes are.
Either way: plea out or not, these cases don't get brought without "untainted" evidence. The problem is that the DOJ's definition of "untainted" is subtly broken. "Fruit of a poisonous tree" is a good Google search to follow up on this.
Whether it goes to trial or not, whether the evidence is untainted or not, the primary problem with the war on drugs is the extrajudicial punishment system that is seizure of property on mere suspicion. Giving the DEA tips is paramount to simply declaring that anybody you dislike is no longer part of American society - and there's very little recourse, just as with the no-fly list.
I'm still not sure how it has come to pass that Americans simply blithely accept all this.
This comment mixes up too many issues (the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, the DEA intelligence program from today, the no-fly list) for me to respond to. Some of these programs are much more problematic than others, and they're not actually all related.
If you wanted to find a quick way to synthesize a dispute where none needed to exist, taking a shotgun to the whole of American criminal justice would be one way to accomplish that.
Huh. I hadn't thought to be accused of manufacturing a dispute, and I note that you seem to have done just fine responding.
I suppose my point was that there is an underlying cause here, of encroaching authoritarianism in American jurisprudence that I find both alarming and surprising, but if you feel threatened by that, then by all means feel free not to take it as delivered to your address.
They're not related. For instance, the problem with civil asset forfeiture is financial incentives; the problem with the war on drugs was a single major public policy error, &c.
If 4 different terror operations were coming from Al Qaeda affiliated cells, we'd say they were all Al Qaeda related. If 4 different drug dealers were busted that were all being supplied by one source, we'd call it a drug ring.
All of the operations mentioned - the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, the DEA intelligence program from today, the TSA - are a ring of government operatives that are terrorizing, robbing and imprisoning Americans.
> in a coldly rational statistical sense, most of the accused are in fact guilty
Without a trial, how do we know that?
If I am accused of something terrible, of which I am innocent, but a plea bargain gets me back to my family in N years instead of Never (or 10*N), I'm likely to lie and plead guilty. We've seen that the government doesn't merely use plea bargaining as a cost reduction tool, but rather as a very large hammer with which to ensure that people get punished in extreme ways.
While there are good police and prosecutors, as a system they are driven to increase convictions rather than to find the _guilty_. Given the chance, they can find something to convict nearly anyone of, and guilty verdicts can be nearly guaranteed against even people who are innocent by heaping up enough charges that either defense is too expensive or the penalty of losing at trial too large.
In a coldly rational sense, the shape of the legal system contributes to the cultural context that informs the future actions of the courts and their apparatus.
True, if primary cause isn't challenged the legal system doesn't consider antecedents as evidence; but the courts only make decisions - they have no input into the consequences of those decisions, other than the making of them.
I am not advocating that people look at the entire justice system through a lens of cold rationalism, but projecting a single observation through that lens.
In many countries you cannot plea out. Everything has to reach court, and I as living in one of these countries think is a good think. This prevents extortion and bullying by prosecutors. Your sentence should not depend on your skills at negotiation and knowledge of judicial processes.
I know for sure Sweden but I think most civil law countries lack the concept of a plea bargain, which means most of world. For example France introduced limited plea bargains first in 2004.
Edit: Seems a bunch of civil law countries have introduce plea bargains the last 15 years, but before that almost none of them had it. This makes it a bit hard to find a concrete list of examples since almost all hits are about the countries introducing it with little discussion about why some countries do not do the same.
The DOJ's definition isn't "subtly" broken. It is completely a willful attempt to circumvent established law and precedent with a very convoluted trail of reasoning. Also not sure if this is really DOJ's definition, or certain branches of law enforcement.
"Unfortunately that's about the only resource I can think of when it comes to drug legalization/decriminalization in an actual real world environment."
Marijuana is effectively legal in the Netherlands. (Technically illegal, but "tolerated")
Due to a loophole, for a year you could legally buy psilocybin mushrooms in the UK, in "head shops," on market stalls, online, anywhere, with zero regulation. It was fine. The government eventually banned them out of embarrassment. The public information posters announcing the upcoming ban had a rainbow coloured fractal background. It was pretty funny.
"The parallel construction wouldn't work if the suspects were not actually committing crimes."
See "Three Felonies a Day"[1]
Also, note the following quote from the original article:
"most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial"
In fact, something like 90% or more of people accused of crimes in the US never get a trial, because they plead guilty. They plead guilty because prosecutors pile on so many charges that the defendants are afraid to risk life in jail if they happen to lose (in a judicial system that's usually stacked against them). Defending a case in Federal court is also incredibly expensive and traumatic. See the Aaron Swartz case for good examples of all of the above.
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
We rightly vilify the Third Reich, but the lesson of history is not that the Nazis were intrinsically evil; it's that any culture has the capacity to normalize and systematize its own unique brand of evil, via a thousand baby steps.
Just because America is not and never will be Nazi Germany, that's no reason to accept or ignore the American flavor of fascism that has been quietly brewing for decades.
The first thing the Nazis started doing when they got power was set up a secret investigative unit. Where they started creating detailed records of all of their enemy targets (starting w/ the communists and the competing political party). This intelligence was then used by the SS/SA to harass, round up and assassinate anyone who was a threat to their power.
The intelligence agencies were the foundation of Nazi fascism. The signs of power abuses were present in these agencies way before the Gestopo became publicly infamous for targeting Jews.
I've very much come to hate Godwin's Law. There are important lessons, perhaps the most important, to draw from that dark time of history, and we won't see them if we insist that the comparisons are only apt if every little thing is exactly the same, or as 100% evil as the Nazis. There should have been far more attention paid to the specific comparisons of the Patriot Act to pre-conditions of Nazi Germany, rather than getting distracted by "BUSH=HITLER LOL".
"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to
distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.
That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness
of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
-- Stewart Brand [1] - spoken at the first Hackers' Conference, and reprinted in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The quotation is an elaboration from his book,
The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.
Unfortunately, it's a much more systemic problem than can be solved by ousting a politician here or there.
I encourage everyone who cares about this to get politically involved at a level beyond merely voting for congress critters now and then.
There's a lot that you can do, from joining and supporting organizations like the EFF and the ACLU to getting involved in local politics, which is usually the level that can be most affected by relatively small numbers of individuals.
If anyone has any experience with any of these and could comment on how they compare to mailinator, that would be very useful.
[1] - http://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html
[2] - https://anonbox.net/
[3] - http://anonymouse.org/anonemail.html
[4] - http://trash-mail.com/
[5] - http://www.dispostable.com/
[6] - https://www.silentsender.com/