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I'm not a climatologist, but I once stayed in a Holiday Inn Express.... BUT, I have been alive long enough to identify BS when I see it. Singling out CO2 as the evil is BS. John Coleman, another "heretic" has a petition signed by roughly 5000 scientists that have doubts about the current view of global warming. (I didn't know there were that many climate scientists in the world!) Just remember Galileo, they called him a heretic, they almost excommunicated him, they forced him to retract. Sounds much the same like anyone who speaks out against Global Warming. Remember, the nay-sayer was right, the Sun was the center of the solar system. We all could learn a little from history.
http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/17977/Mars_Is_Warming_NASA_Scientists_Report.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legislative_issues/federal_issues/hot_issues_in_congress/energy/Al-Gore-Scours-for-Extraterrestrial-SUVs.htm

I may wrong. Apparently, the government has tried to bring "public nuisance" lawsuits against private parties, though the one in question was voluntarily dismissed by the state (in my mind, probably to avoid a precedent being set by the state's defeat.) This kind of lawsuit is a terrible idea for numerous reasons.

Is there case law proving intrastate traffic and/or transactions conducted via the Internet is/are interstate commerce?

If I buy something from a company the headquarters of which is in my state, but I bought it from its web site, is that interstate commerce?

I know you're probably not a lawyer, so I'm not expecting you to be able to pull out case numbers or such, but a link to some article on it would be nice.

I did a little bit of research and found something which might help:

"Simply stated, we decline to assume that Internet use automatically equates with a movement across state lines. With respect to such interstate movement, the government must introduce sufficient evidence to satisfy its burden of proof."

10th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerome A. Holmes in U.S. v. Schaefer, No. 06-3080 wrote that. I think it has some bearing here. This essay might have some bearing, too, but I don't have the time at the moment to read it in its entirety.

Civil statutes are limited in the ratio of damages to penalties. Criminal statues are far less limited.

http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legal_issues/legal_updates/us_supreme_court/punitive_damage_awards.htm

WTF are you trying to show? That you don't understand statistics and/or economics? How would looking at fortune 500 rankings in the manner you describe give a remotely accurate picture of, well, anything? Oh, that's right, IT WOULDN'T I suggest YOU "check your facts" (or rather, supply relevant and meaningful facts instead of data designed to look meaningful without actually being so), and that moderators try to think and understand before moderating up posts such as the parent simply because they _look_ like they're supplying information.

"A bi-partisan study by two of America's leading economists -- Dr. Robert Shapiro, former adviser to President Bill Clinton, and Dr. Kevin Hassett, adviser to Senator John McCain -- estimates the value of IP to the U.S. economy to be worth between $5 trillion and $5.5 trillion, or about 45% of U.S. GDP, and greater than the total GDP of any other nation."

http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/thailand.htm

That way you force people to make more energy-efficient decisions about all products, not just one particular type of light bulb. This is a case where economics can work for you, not against you.

Well said. Unfortunately there are two problems: many "environmentalists" are more interested in controlling people's lives than actually improving the environment, and most aren't fans of capitalism so any plan involving market forces rather than central planning is going to be a hard sell. Of course, complex regulations often cause more problems than they solve; for example SUVs arose because of CAFE standards. The Pigou Club has the right idea: tax the bad stuff directly and you get less of it.

April 5, 2003
"Nobody downloaded here. Those P2P losers, I think their repeated frequent lies are bringing them down very rapidly.... The business of sellings CDs is secure, is safe."

April 5, 2003
"They are not near our business model. Don't believe them.... They said they downloaded with... thousands of copies in the middle of our market demographic. They claim that they - I tell you, I... that this speech is too far from the reality. It is a part of this sickness of their plan. There is no an... - no any existence to the downloaders or for the downloaders in our business model at all."

April 6, 2003
"Whenever we attack, they retreat. When we pound them with fake copies and bogus servers, they retreat even deeper. But when we stopped poisoning their networks, they downloaded even more copies for propaganda purposes."

April 7, 2003
"The P2Pers are not there. They're not in our business model. There are no downloaders there. Never. They're not at all."

April 7, 2003
"The Pirate Bay learned a lesson last night they will never forget. We shut them down and will continue to shut them down."

April 7, 2003
"There is no presence of downloaders in our business model."

thanks to: http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_ our_opinion/baghdad_bob.htm

In 1924, a teenager in Charlottesville, Virginia, Carrie Buck, was chosen as the first person to be sterilized under the state's newly adopted eugenics law. Ms. Buck, whose mother resided in an asylum for the epileptic and feebleminded, was accused of having a child out of wedlock. She was diagnosed as promiscuous and the probable parent of "socially inadequate offspring."

A lawsuit challenging the sterilisation was filed on Ms. Buck's behalf. Harry Laughlin, having never met Ms. Buck, wrote a deposition condemning her and her 7-month old child, Vivian. Scientists from the ERO attended the trial to testify to Vivian's "backwardness." In the end, the judge ruled in the state's favor.

On appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Buck v. Bell (1927), ruled 8-1 to uphold the sterilisation of Ms. Buck on the grounds she was a "deficient" mother. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an adherent of eugenics, declared "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

According to University of Virginia historian Paul Lombardo, evidence was later revealed that supports the claim that Carrie Buck's child was not the result of promiscuity; Ms. Buck had been raped by the nephew of her foster parents. School records also indicate her daughter Vivian was a solid student and had made the honor roll at age 7. A year later, Vivian died of an intestinal illness.

Then, the zealots' hobbyhorse was eugenics. Today the politicians keep the people worked up by riding the hobbyhorses of "the war against terrorists" and "homosexual marriage". But Big Government has demonstrated time and time again that there are things with which it cannot be trusted. Our genetic codes are clearly one of those things that Government will eventually misuse. Our only defense is to prevent Government from getting it

I wish it was. However, facts point in the opposite direction. Take the 9/11 bombers for instance. They were anything but "desperate", living normal (in fact, better than normal) lives in U.S., the country which they bombed. Take Bin-Laden, born to one of the richest families in the world (!), born into every comfort and luxury in the world - yet decided to embark on a path of global religious war and murderous terror.

The desperation these people feel is that they can't fight back on equal terms. The Palestinians got AK-47, RPGs, bombs and Katyusha rockets. Israel has everything the Palestinians got plus a great deal of hi-tech weaponry (Airplanes, smart bombs, tanks, attack helicopters etc). The Palestinians who blow themselves up, see this act as the only way they can hit back "hard" on the enemy. I'm pretty sure that if you equiped the Jews and Palestinians with the same weapons, you wouldn't have seen suicide bombings.

As for Bin Laden. His current view of the world was pretty much shaped during the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, where he fought the occupying forces with weapons provided by the Americans. Read up on what happened after the war ended, and you know that there was a political and economic vacuum in Afghanistan after the war since everyone left the country on its own. This lead to civil war and an invasion of religious fanatics from neighbouring Pakistan. Learn from history, and you won't create another haven for terrorism.

Contrast that with many millions of people in Africa, compared to which even the poorest Palestinians are living like kings (how many Palestinians die of hunger or thirst annually? As the "inhumane" Olmert said a few days ago, 'we would not allow a single Palestinian child to die of hunger'). Yet you won't see those trully poor people commit mass-murder through systematic bombing of civilian population.

This is another form of desperation. What I was talking about is political/military desperation.

The current wave of terroristic mass-murder is fueled not by economic "desperation", but by extreme religious hate and idealogy condoning - nay, glorifying! - mass-murder. Most of the terrorists have an average (or not much below) quality of life.

So, things like this, isn't glorifying mass-murder?

Try to understand what I've written above. I'm not anti-American, or some terrorist loving tree hugger. I just try to see things beyond the propaganda from all sides of the story. What happened in New York on September 11 was a cowardice act, but it was an act of desperation.

Whoever you are, wherever you are... live in peace. Take care.

ZUCK: Sure. ACT is an IT industry trade association based in Washington, D.C. It represents mostly small- and medium-sized information technology companies and their interests in Washington. So, we lobby on their behalf to prevent over-regulation of the industry; we fight both here and abroad for intellectual property protection;

selectively chosen one format (Adobe's PDF) that has some IP associated with (it) and said, 'That's OK, but this one (Microsoft Office) isn't.'

Shall we devote our resources to stopping that ?

The answer is, of course not.

Energy waste is bad for one simple reason, it is wasteful.

Let's devote our energy to reducing energy waste. Let's tighten up the efficiency regulations of automobiles so that SUV's aren't a 'loop-hole' (http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/gu est_commentary/lynch-cafe-standard-insanity.htm) in the CAFE standards. Let's stop producing so much light pollution (url:httpwwwdarkskyorg>)that I can no longer make out the Milky Way from my back garden in a surburb of a small mid-western city . Let's insist that fuck-brains who choose to buy Harley Davidson motorcycles aren't buying them because they make A LOT OF NOISE (http://www.noisefree.org/motorcycles/loudpipes.ht ml), and really only want to look macho http://www.havasy.net/images/bike/chapsleather01_t humbnail.jpg!

That's okay as long as you don't advocate anything radical like "belong to a political party that is not Republican or Democrat", or support the second amendment. Excuse me if I think you're an ignorant, unamerican, commie ass licker, without an ounce of intelligence or principle. What piece of shit public school did you get your diploma from?

From the parent:
"FWIW, the Mexician government doesn't like its citizens coming up to the US any more than the US governemnt does; they are losing potiential workforce and it just looks bad for them."

Really?

Whole thing about stopped clocks being right twice a day and all that, I guess.

Of course you do. You're a liberal. Being smugly convinced of your own intellectual superiority, despite mounds of evidence to the contrary, is one of the signature traits of your ilk. Your idea of "thinking beyond the next tank of gas" is to freeze in the dark while telling yourself that you deserve it. Conservatives have a slightly more optimistic outlook.

Regarding the Senator from Massachusetts: in 2002 a company called Cape Wind Associates announced a plan to put 170 windmill towers in Nantucket Sound. These towers would be capable of generating approximately three-fourths of all electricity used in the Cape Island area. The twenty-year cost savings to ratepayers were estimated at $800 million. The windmills would also offset a million tons of "greenhouse gas" emissions annually. But that wasn't good enough for Ted, because the windmills would have been visible from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. A local yacht club also complained that they would threaten navigation for the annual Hyannis-to-Nantucket regatta. Kennedy went so far as to insert an amendment into an energy bill to give the Department of the Interior the same authority to regulate wind power at sea as it has today to regulate oil and gas drilling on land. Can you say "hypocrisy"?

I have never heard even the most fervent proponets of drilling in ANWR describe it as a panacea for this country's energy woes. Every deposit of anything (oil, coal, gold, bauxite...) is finite. Does that mean we leave it alone? No. If nothing else, the ANWR oil buys time to develop viable large-scale alternatives, none of which are in place right now. Plus, given a choice between getting our oil here at home, and buying it from the Arabs, I'd rather get it here. I'd think that you "no blood for oil" liberal types would agree.

Your comment about "the wall that we're about to hit head-on" has been the recurring bleat of hopelessness that has sounded through the decades for energy sources from whale oil to wood to coal. None of those disaster scenarios ever materialized. Remember when the Club of Rome announced in 1970 that world would run out of oil in 19 years? They ignored the inevitable advances in technology that would both make it possible to recover previously inaccessible oil deposits and to more efficiently use the oil that we have. Not to mention that alternatives have always come into being when the need for them has made it attractive and profitable for private enterprise to develop and market them.

As for the 2000-acre "lie," the web site you link in your comment states, "There is no requirement that oil development be contiguous." They do nothing to substantiate this bald assertion, but I will stipulate it for the sake of argument. ANWR encompases 19.6 million acres (over 30,000 square miles). Of that, 17.16 million acres are off-limits, protected by law. The only area proposed for drilling is the 1.5 million acre (just over 2300 square mile) coastal plain. Just for fun, let's assume that the drilling takes place in 200 10-acre plots, each connected by 10 miles of two-lane road, 30 feet wide. Adding the land area of the road to the 2000 acres of drilling sites still gives a total land usage of under 10,000 acres, which is 0.67% of the area of the coastal plain, and 0.05% of all of ANWR.

The caribou argument is a total con job. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have been collecting calving-area data for the Porcupine Caribou herd (the herd that lives in the ANWR area) since 1983. Not once in that time has the proposed drilling area been the site of high-density caribou calving. Not to mention the fact that the Central Arctic herd, which inhabits the re

http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legislative_issues/fede ral_issues/hot_issues_in_congress/legal_reform/tre vor_law_group.html

There is even a proposition on the ballot in CA this time around specifically written to prevent this kind of abuse from happening again.

• clear efforts by parties to litigation to influence the results of that litigation by controlling when new judges were confirmed (p. 3)
• confirmation hearings be scheduled around concerns over how a particular confirmation might affect an election in a particular state (South Carolina - p. 8-9)
• racial motivations (to develop a strategy for "dealing with conservative Latino Circuit Court nominees" (p. 14)
• and exactly how much Democrat Senators are focused on pleasing particular special interest organizations and constituencies

• clear efforts by parties to litigation to influence the results of that litigation by controlling when new judges were confirmed (p. 3)
• confirmation hearings be scheduled around concerns over how a particular confirmation might affect an election in a particular state (South Carolina - p. 8-9)
• racial motivations (to develop a strategy for "dealing with conservative Latino Circuit Court nominees" (p. 14)
• and exactly how much Democrat Senators are focused on pleasing particular special interest organizations and constituencies

Microsoft (Good):
"We have never had vulnerabilities exploited before the patch was known"

The similarities are just too scary.

Actually, it does. The US Supreme Court, as well as various state and federal courts, have repeatedly held that anonymity is an essential component of free speech. See here for a nice summary of some of these cases.

But I have to agree with you about the terrorist thing.

1. They're looking to go with .Net instead of Unix or another stable, secure system. Insert your own jokes here.

2. They're building a Unionized auto plant. Obviously, this guy has no idea why big automakers have constantly moved their plants from heavily-unionized northern states to right-to-work states in the sun belt. Notice what a great benefit being heavily unionized was for the steel industry...

3. He's starting a new business in California. This is the same California, mind you, where Gray Davis and the Democratic Legislature have been making it almost impossible for businesses to operate profitably in. If he was serious about lowering costs, he'd be opening his plant someplace like Nevada or Texas.

Here are few sources to read up on the current California economic crises:

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/investing/articles/ 0,15114,465792,00.html

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20030713- 9999_1n13workers.html

http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legislative_issues/fede ral_issues/hot_issues_in_congress/legal_reform/tre vor_law_group.html

http://www.americandaily.com/item/1853