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The whole idea of "expectation of privacy" is purely an invention of the supreme court from the 1960s. It is in no way implied by the 4th amendment.

You may want to rethink this belief. In 1890 Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published their now famous article in the Harvard Law Review, entitled simply: "The Right to Privacy". Also though I haven't relocated it yet a USSC ruling in the early 1800s said that the First Amendment's Freedom of Speech clause included the right to anonymous political speech.

The Bill of Rights is not an all-inclusive list. It just lists some of the specific rights that were felt, at the time, needed to be specifically enumerated due to recent experiences with the British Crown and its agents.

The Right to Privacy has been confirmed by SCOTUS as a fundamental right that is only to be violated with due process (meaning court-ordered warrants). Warren and Brandeis do a pretty good job of explaining it in this 1890 brief. While this largely applies to Right of Privacy from private interests, it applies also to the government. Never mind the fact that the US ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Article 17 of which states: "1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation."

Of course, the ICCP doesn't apply to US domestic law (only international law), exception are made in times of formally declared exigencies, and the US ratified with the disclaimer that Articles 1-26 are not self-executing.

However, ratification of this treaty serves to reaffirm the US's belief in the Right to Privacy as a fundamental humand right.

As you note, if the seller wishes to impose additional restrictions after the contract is entered, you may sue to enforce the original contract, but Valve is not the seller, and the store is not imposing restrictions, so your line of argument does not apply.

This point was the basis of the defense in MacPherson v. Buick, (217 N.Y. 382 (1916)) and Judge Cardozo's ruling introduced an exception in the case where the object sold was "a thing of danger" which was negligently manufactured, but since a CD is not inherently dangerous, you'd have a hard time applying this precedent there.

Your state may have a laws declaring an implied warranty of merchantability, in which case you may have rights beyond what your contract with the retailer provides, but if you're going to assert that you have rights which are not spelled out in the contract, you will have a hard time arguing that the law can't also give Valve such rights.

No, they're not about tariffs. They're about maintaining a historical privacy culture that someone like you would never be able to understand.

Try reading Warren and Brandeis' The Right to Privacy sometime, as a starting point in understanding the historical basis of privacy rights/culture. Try to understand what has been written. And don't forget to take notice the date of the article.

Here's a link to an article in the Harvard Law Review from 1890 that discusses the right to privacy.

Circa 1990, while in college at Lawrence University I ran RyBBS, written by Greg Ryan, from my dorm room (in Plantz Hall, the jock dorm) at night, from 7pm to 7am. The hardware was a Tandy IBM 8088 and a 2400 baud modem. Memories:

• Forgetting to turn it on, answewing a phone call, and hearing a shy female voice timidly ask "Um, is the BBS running?" I said "oops, I'll turn it on now," hung up, fired the BBS up, and proceeed to have a conversation with the caller.
• My friends complaining that when they would try to call me they would be greated with a shrieking sound.
• Whenever a converstation with the sysop (me) was requested, my printer would print out the request. (I don't recall why this was a good idea. Maybe something to do with multitasking.) One of my friends told this girl that would hang out in my room that I was running a speech recognition program and my computer was processing our conversations. She believed him.

Circa 1990, while in college at Lawrence University I ran RyBBS, written by Greg Ryan, from my dorm room (in Plantz Hall, the jock dorm) at night, from 7pm to 7am. The hardware was a Tandy IBM 8088 and a 2400 baud modem. Memories:

• Forgetting to turn it on, answewing a phone call, and hearing a shy female voice timidly ask "Um, is the BBS running?" I said "oops, I'll turn it on now," hung up, fired the BBS up, and proceeed to have a conversation with the caller.
• My friends complaining that when they would try to call me they would be greated with a shrieking sound.
• Whenever a converstation with the sysop (me) was requested, my printer would print out the request. (I don't recall why this was a good idea. Maybe something to do with multitasking.) One of my friends told this girl that would hang out in my room that I was running a speech recognition program and my computer was processing our conversations. She believed him.

"[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This `liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints . . . and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment." Poe v. Ullman, 367 U. S. 497, 543

This is cited in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, 505 U.S. 833, 848 (1992) and Justice Stewart's concurrence to Roe v. Wade.

Fourth Amendment.
See "The Right to Privacy"by some guys who were judges somewhere. Somewhere rather important IIRC

At my alma mater (which has a pretty good music school), the library has all sorts of recordings. Okay, for the music students, much of it's classical, but a bunch of it isn't. Like checking out books, you're allowed to make copies for scholarly reasons, but not personal reasons. The honor system was, I'm very sure, broken all the time, but it's one idea.

Oh wait... nobody uses that silly physical library anymore...

What you want to do is go to a law library and look up Vandermark v. Ford Motor Co. 61 Cal.2d 256 (1963).

Vandermark bought a new Ford in Los Angeles. Six weeks later, with 1500 miles on the odometer, the brakes failed, causing the car to wreck, seriously injuring the driver and passenger.

The Ford Dealership acknowledged that the crash was caused by defective brakes, but pointed to the warranty that read, "Dealer's obligation under this warranty is limited to replacement ... of such parts ... acknowledged by Dealer to be defective." In other words, neither the dealer nor Ford would assume responsibility for the damage to the car or the injuries to its occupants caused by the defective brakes.

One could argue that if Vandermark wanted a car with a warranty that would cover defective manufacture more comprehensibvely, he should have bought a car from a dealer that offered a better warranty, but no dealers offered warranties with significantly greater coverage. In 1964, the court ruled that the Ford dealership was strictly liable for product defects irrespective of what the warranty might say because

Retailers like manufacturers are engaged in the business of distributing goods to the public. They are an integral part of the overall producing and marketing enterprise that should bear the cost of injuries resulting from defective products.

If the nature of a thing is such that it is reasonably certain to place life and limb in peril when negligently made, it is a thing of danger. . . . If to the element of danger, there is added knowledge that the thing will be used by persons other than the purchaser, and used without new tests, then irrespective of contract, the manufacturer of this thing of danger is under a duty to make it carefully.

You may argue that it is a long way from automobiles whose manufacturing defects put consumers and bystanders in danger of life and limb to a defective cooling fan on a CPU, and you would be right. But if you complain in general that the state has no business interfering with product warranties, a century of case law disagrees with you.

In closing, I will point to one of the most egregious cases in this regard. In 1937, the Massengill Company put on the market an antibiotic elixer for children composed of the drug sulfanilamide dissolved in diethylene glycol and flavoured with raspberry extract. Massengill never tested the product for safety. Diethylene glycol being a very nasty poison, 107, mostly children, died shortly thereafter from liver failure caused by this medicine. Massengill could not be sued under the laws at the time because, as the President of the company said,

My chemists and I deeply regret the fatal results, but there was no error in manufacture of the product. We have been supplying legitimate professional demand, and not once could have forseen the unlooked for results. I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part.

"There is no right to privacy."

For US citizens, I refer you to the Warren & Brandeis paper, titled The Right to Privacy . And this page has some good summaries.

Whether or not the US Government respects privacy rights is another matter entirely, but to say we don't have them is incorrect.

B. Nullification as "Just Cause" for Dismissal

In the instant case, the judge identified a different form of bias as the primary ground for dismissing Juror No. 5--one arising not from an external event or from a relationship between a juror and a party, but rather, from a more general opposition to the application of the criminal narcotics laws to the defendants' conduct. In the court's view, Juror No. 5 believed that the defendants had "a right to deal drugs." Based on what the court described as the juror's "preconceived, fixed, cultural, economic, [or] social . . . reasons that are totally improper and impermissible," the court concluded that Juror No. 5 was unlikely to convict the defendants "no matter what the evidence was." Essentially, the judge found that Juror No. 5 intended to engage in a form of "nullification," a practice whereby a juror votes in purposeful disregard of the evidence, defying the court's instructions on the law.

We take this occasion to restate some basic principles regarding the character of our jury system. Nullification is, by definition, a violation of a juror's oath to apply the law as instructed by the court--in the words of the standard oath administered to jurors in the federal courts, to "render a true verdict according to the law and the evidence." Federal Judicial Center, Benchbook for U.S. District Court Judges 225 (4th ed. 1996) (emphasis supplied). We categorically reject the idea that, in a society committed to the rule of law, jury nullification is desirable or that courts may permit it to occur when it is within their authority to prevent. Accordingly, we conclude that a juror who intends to nullify the applicable law is no less subject to dismissal than is a juror who disregards the court's instructions due to an event or relationship that renders him biased or otherwise unable to render a fair and impartial verdict.

We are mindful that the term "nullification" can cover a number of distinct, though related, phenomena, encompassing in one word conduct that takes place for a variety of different reasons; jurors may nullify, for example, because of the identity of a party, a disapprobation of the particular prosecution at issue, or a more general opposition to the applicable criminal law or laws. We recognize, too, that nullification may at times manifest itself as a form of civil disobedience that some may regard as tolerable. The case of John Peter Zenger, the publisher of the New York Weekly Journal acquitted of criminal libel in 1735, and the nineteenth-century acquittals in prosecutions under the fugitive slave laws, are perhaps our country's most renowned examples of "benevolent" nullification. See United States v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, 1130 (D.C. Cir. 1972) (Leventhal, J.); see also David Farnham, Jury Nullification: History Proves It's Not a New Idea, Crim. Just., Winter 1997, at 4, 6-7.

More generally, the very institution of trial by jury in a criminal case, as Judge Learned Hand observed, "introduces a slack into the enforcement of law, tempering its rigor by the mollifying influence of current ethical conventions." U.S. ex rel. McCann v. Adams, 126 F.2d 774, 776 (2d Cir.), rev'd on other grounds, 317 U.S. 269 (1942). This is so because, as Judge Hand explained, "[t]he individual can forfeit his liberty--to say nothing of his life--only at the hands of those who, unlike any official, are in no wise accountable, directly or indirectly, for what they do, and who at once separate and melt anonymously in the community from which they came. . . . [S]ince if they acquit their verdict is final, no one is likely to suffer of whose conduct they do not morally disapprove . . . ." Id. at775-76.

As courts have long recognized, several features of our jury trial system act to protect the jury's power to acquit, regardless of the evidence, when the prosecution's case meets with the jury's "moral[] disapprov[al]." Since the famous opinion in Bushell's Case, 124 Eng. Rep. 1006 (C.P. 1670), freeing a member of the jury arrested for voting to acquit William Penn against the weight of the evidence, nullifying jurors have been protected from being called to account for their verdicts. Moreover, and in addition to the courts' duty to safeguard the secrecy of the jury deliberation room (discussed in greater detail below), the several rules protecting the unassailability of jury verdicts of acquittal--even where these verdicts are inconsistent with other verdicts rendered by the same jury in the same case, United States v. Carbone, 378 F.2d 420, 423 (2d Cir.) (Friendly, J.) (recognizing link between upholding inconsistent verdicts and protecting juries' power of lenity), cert. denied, 389 U.S. 914 (1967)--serve to "permit[] juries to acquit out of compassion or compromise or because of their assumption of a power which they had no right to exercise, but to which they were disposed through lenity." Standefer v. United States, 447 U.S. 10, 22 (1980) (internal quotation marks omitted).

But as the quotation from the Supreme Court's opinion in Standefer indicates, in language originally employed by Judge Learned Hand, the power of juries to "nullify" or exercise a power of lenity is just that--a power; it is by no means a right or something that a judge should encourage or permit if it is within his authority to prevent. Indeed, although nullification has a long history in the Anglo-American legal system, see Dougherty, 473 F.2d at 1130-33; Farnham, supra, at 4, and the federal courts have long noted the defacto power of a jury to render general verdicts "in the teeth of both law and facts," Horning v. District of Columbia, 254 U.S. 135, 138 (1920); see, e.g., United States v. Trujillo, 714 F.2d 102, 105-06 (11th Cir. 1983), courts have consistently recognized that jurors have no right to nullify. See, e.g., United States v. Kerley, 838 F.2d 932, 938 (7th Cir. 1988) ("[J]ury nullification is just a power, not also a right . . . ."); see also Sparf v. United States, 156 U.S. 51, 102 (1895) (holding that, while juries are finders of fact, "it is the duty of juries in criminal cases to take the law from the court and apply that law to the facts as they find them"). As a panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit--composed of Chief Judge Spottswood W. Robinson, III, Judge George E. MacKinnon, and then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg--explained:
A jury has no more "right" to find a "guilty" defendant "not guilty" than it has to find a "not guilty" defendant "guilty," and the fact that the former cannot be corrected by a court, while the latter can be, does not create a right out of the power to misapply the law. Such verdicts are lawless, a denial of due process and constitute an exercise of erroneously seized power.

United States v. Washington, 705 F.2d 489, 494 (D.C. Cir. 1983) (per curiam) (emphasis in original). Indeed, as we noted above, the exercise of this de facto power is a violation of a juror's sworn duty to "apply the law as interpreted by the court." United States v. Boardman, 419 F.2d 110, 116 (1st Cir. 1969), cert. denied, 397 U.S. 991 (1970).

Moreover, although the early history of our country includes the occasional Zenger trial or acquittals in fugitive slave cases, more recent history presents numerous and notorious examples of jurors nullifying--cases that reveal the destructive potential of a practice Professor Randall Kennedy of the Harvard Law School has rightly termed a "sabotage of justice." Randall Kennedy, The Angry Juror, Wall St. J., Sept. 30, 1994, at A12. Consider, for example, the two hung juries in the 1964 trials of Byron De La Beckwith in Mississippi for the murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, or the 1955 acquittal of J.W. Millam and Roy Bryant for the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, see David Halberstam, The Fifties 431-41 (1993); Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, at 38-57, 221-25 (1987)--shameful examples of how "nullification" has been used to sanction murder and lynching.

Inasmuch as no juror has a right to engage in nullification--and, on the contrary, it is a violation of a juror's sworn duty to follow the law as instructed by the court--trial courts have the duty to forestall or prevent such conduct, whether by firm instruction or admonition or, where permitted, by dismissal of an offending juror from the venire or the jury. If it is true that the jury's "prerogative of lenity," Dougherty, 473 F.2d at 1133, introduces "a slack into the enforcement of law, tempering its rigor by the mollifying influence of current ethical conventions," Adams, 126 F.2d at 776, then, as part and parcel of the system of checks and balances embedded in the very structure of the American criminal trial, there is a countervailing duty and authority of the judge to assure that jurors follow the law. Although nullification may sometimes succeed--because, inter alia, it does not come to the attention of a presiding judge before the completion of a jury's work, and jurors are not answerable for nullification after the verdict has been reached--it would be a dereliction of duty for a judge to remain indifferent to reports that a juror is intent on violating his oath. This is true regardless of the juror's motivation for "nullification," including race, ethnicity or similar considerations. A federal judge, whose own oath of office requires the judge to "faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon [the judge] . . . under the Constitution and laws of the United States," 28 U.S.C. 453 (1994), may not ignore colorable claims that a juror is acting on the basis of such improper considerations.

Accordingly, every day in courtrooms across the length and breadth of this country, jurors are dismissed from the venire "for cause" precisely because they are unwilling or unable to follow the applicable law. Indeed, one of the principal purposes of voir dire is to ensure that the jurors ultimately selected for service are unbiased and willing and able to apply the law as instructed by the court to the evidence presented by the parties.

So also, a presiding judge possesses both the responsibility and the authority to dismiss a juror whose refusal or unwillingness to follow the applicable law becomes known to the judge during the course of trial. Rule 24(c) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure provides for the substitution of alternates for "jurors who, prior to the time the jury retires to consider its verdict, become or are found to be unable or disqualified to perform their duties." Surely a juror is "unable or disqualified," for purposes of this rule, who is intent on nullifying the applicable law and thereby violating his oath to "render a true verdict according to the law and the evidence."

Similarly, we conclude that a juror who is determined to ignore his duty, who refuses to follow the court's instructions on the law and who thus threatens to "undermine[] the impartial determination of justice based on law," Krzyske, 836 F.2d at 1021, is subject to dismissal during the course of deliberations under Rule 23(b). This conclusion reinforces the court's inherent authority to conduct inquiries in response to reports of improper juror conduct and to determine whether a juror is unwilling to carry out his duties faithfully and impartially. The rule we adopt applies with equal force whether the juror's refusal to follow the court's instructions results from a desire to "nullify" the applicable law or, for example, as in the cases described above, see supra p. 17, from a perceived physical threat or from a relationship with one of the parties.

Our position in this respect is in accord with that of the Eleventh Circuit. See United States v. Geffrard, 87 F.3d 448, 450-52 (11th Cir.), cert. denied, 117 S. Ct. 442 (1996). In Geffrard, a juror submitted a letter to the court during the course of deliberations in which she stated that she adhered to the Christian teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Under Swedenborg's theology, the juror explained, she could not "`live with a verdict of guilty for any of the accused on any of the charges, as [she] believe[d] deep within [her] heart and soul and mind that [the defendants] were unjustly led into this so called transaction by a more intelligent and powerful figure.'" Id. at 451. The juror was convinced, assertedly as a result of her religious beliefs, that the defendants were the victims of governmental entrapment, notwithstanding the fact that the court had earlier instructed the jury that entrapment was not at issue in the case. Id. The juror in Geffrard thus was prepared purposefully to disregard or ignore--to "nullify"--the law as set forth in the court's instructions to the jury. The district court "saw in the letter an inability of the juror to follow the court's instructions on the law." Id. Accordingly, the court dismissed the juror pursuant to Rule 23(b), and the remaining eleven jurors convicted the defendants. The Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal, reasoning that the juror's letter "[made] it a certainty that this particular juror could not reach a verdict following the judge's instructions as applied to the facts." Id. at 452.

We agree that a juror's purposeful refusal to apply the law as set forth in a jury charge constitutes an appropriate basis for that juror's removal. Nor is this conclusion any less valid, in the instant case, in light of Juror No. 5's race. The rule authorizing dismissal of a juror who disregards the law does not include an exception for jurors who violate their sworn duty on the basis of racial or ethnic interests or affinities. Accordingly, the district court's finding that Juror No. 5 was unlikely to convict the defendants "no matter what the evidence" was a proper basis for the exercise of the court's dismissal authority, provided that the court had a sufficient evidentiary basis for this finding. As we explain below, however, the need to safeguard the secrecy of jury deliberations requires the use of a high evidentiary standard for the dismissal of a deliberating juror for purposeful disobedience of a court's instructions, a standard that the record in the instant case fails to meet.

Yes, some things are boring and dull, but many things don't have to be that way. I agree that science shouldn't be "candy" (it's not always so sweet), but you can have fireworks (it's the metal salts in fireworks that produce the colors).

I was involved in a chemistry show during college. Instead of the normal "look, this turns green and this turns red" kind of boring (and sorta pointless show), we took nifty demos that relate to real-life, incorporated them into skits, and performed for elementary- and middle-school kids. For example:

• The Muppet's Swedish Chef burbled (through a translator, of course) how bread rises using a reaction similar to vinegar + baking soda (generates CO2 gas, which expands as it's heated in the oven)
  
• Hanz und Franz (apologies to SNL) pump up the kiddies with ethanol as an alternative fuel to dirty gasoline (use piezo poppers to ignite a drop of ethanol)
  
• A newscast interviews eye-witnesses at the Hindenburg explosion, then demonstrates the difference between lighting a hydrogen balloon and a helium balloon with a spark
  

These experiements are pretty inexpensive, pretty simple, and can be impressive. It just gets the audience going. Chances are, the kiddies will remember something about hydrogen and helium exploding (or not) rather than what chemical turned the flask green.

Getting kids involved with something "real" (insert "tangible" or "active" if you like) is one of the best ways I've found to get them interested (as a student and an instructor). Here's some stuff I did while teaching at summer day camps at the Capital Children's Museum a couple of years ago:

• Baking muffins to learn why breads have holes, and figuring out why one recipe used baking soda and one used baking powder (kitchen chemistry, as well as some acid-base stuff);
  
• Figuring out whether normal, dried or soaked popcorn kernels pop best (including taste-testing), and freezing ice cream using baggies, rock salt and ice (solids/liquids/gases)
  
• Making three kinds of "slime" (or gak or flubber) and explaining what non-Newtonian fluids are (my second-graders showed up some adults!)
  

Try these sites to get some ideas:

• The JASON project was started by Dr. Robert Ballard (the guy who discovered the Titanic and other sunken ships)
  
• Local colleges and high schools often present chemistry shows (or physics/science shows). Here's a plug for my alma mater: Lawrence University). I swear the show is more entertaining than the description on that page.
  
• PBS is full of things, including a show called ZOOM!, the ever-popular Newton's Apple, and wacky Bill Nye the Science Guy.
  
• At the U of W Madison, Prof. Shakhashiri created THE definitive books of demonstrations (Caution: he's kind of dry, but the demos are great!)
  
• Science museums also often have some sort of hands-on stuff. Go ahead and "borrow" from them! Here's the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and the Science Museum of Minnesota
  

Good luck!

Right on!

Another prof has done this type of numerical comparison before. Check out Prof. David Harpp at McGill University.

I serve on an honor council, so I get to hear a bunch of these not-so-great situations. We've had some doozies, from zero citation on papers to using false excuses for extensions to using brute force to steal exams.

Plagiarism is not limited to copy/paste jobs; it also includes people who choose to not cite anything (essentially a copy/paste job). Give credit where credit's due.

I also attend a college on the quarter system (Lawrence University), and am working on a double major (studio art and chemistry, neither of which are easily compacted, like a Compiler Design course, I'd imagine).

If the quarter system were to blame for your school's cheating, then schools that have the block system (3.5 weeks of a single class, final, extended weekend break) would have nearly 100% cheaters in their student bodies.

It does sound like your professors have some strict grading policies. I'm sorry you've got such a load, but let me remind you, you picked the school! Go somewhere else for semesters!

I'm also a member of the L.U. Honor Council, which is an educational (and when need be, disciplinary) resource for academic integrity. Basically, we prosecute cases of cheating. We know we don't catch every case, but we think an honor system deters cheating to some extent. Perhaps your school should look into forming one.

I also attend a college on the quarter system (Lawrence University), and am working on a double major (studio art and chemistry, neither of which are easily compacted, like a Compiler Design course, I'd imagine).

If the quarter system were to blame for your school's cheating, then schools that have the block system (3.5 weeks of a single class, final, extended weekend break) would have nearly 100% cheaters in their student bodies.

It does sound like your professors have some strict grading policies. I'm sorry you've got such a load, but let me remind you, you picked the school! Go somewhere else for semesters!

I'm also a member of the L.U. Honor Council, which is an educational (and when need be, disciplinary) resource for academic integrity. Basically, we prosecute cases of cheating. We know we don't catch every case, but we think an honor system deters cheating to some extent. Perhaps your school should look into forming one.

...But the king said, "Theuth, my master of arts, to one man it is given to create the elements of an art, to another to judge the extent of harm and usefulness it will have for those who are going to employ it... The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, using the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves, rather than, from within, their own unaided powers to call things to mind.

Gee, that sounds ominous, doesn't it?

The New Urbanists are a set of architects and city planners who believe that America lost its soul when it moved to the auto-oriented suburbs, from Levittown right up to the Antelope Valley ... or Littleton. [There's the Katz connection!] When you insulate yourself from your neighbors, when you eat at Appleby's and shop at Target or the Gap, you're eliminating most of the sense of community that was important to people's lives just a generation ago.

New Urbanists believe that encouraging small, close-knit, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods with neo-traditional architecture is one of the keys toward restoring that social structure.

I'm not convinced, and if anything, Disney's experiment in Celebration shows that this ideal can have a dark side. Still, there are many other examples that are not run by The Mouse; in fact other communities often eschew the corporate influence that seems endemic here. That doesn't mean they don't (for instance) have a Starbucks -- but it may mean requiring a franchise operator to be a resident.

The school at Celebration has been one of the touchiest problems they've dealt with. Florida law didn't allow them to run a private school here, so they had to accomodate many state laws and found they couldn't do some innovative things they wanted. Say what you will about Disney; they do care about education. It's the parents, ironically, who've objected to the direction the school has taken.

This experiment still has much to teach us ...

Here's an article on Celebration, with several photos.

Here's a visitor's overview of Celebration.

Sources for a dissertation on Celebration.

New Urbanism and Celebration.

Well, when I was in college my friends and I did a performance art piece for open mic night where we smashed up a tv.

It began with some nice space music playing as we slowly danced around in ignorant bliss. Then a loud shriek occurred, indicating that we were suddenly aware of the annoying tv. We retrived some long wooden sticks. One guy ran at the TV and fairly easily smashed the picture tube with his stick.

We proceeded to pulverize the tv completely, smashing it up for about 5 minutes. End of show.

It was a shame that we didn't do such a good job sweeping up the glass and debris because some lamers came out next in barefoot to do a cover of a Depeche Mode song.

Take heed, all you pre-college slashheads out there. Contrast this wonderfully creative way of destoying a tv with the lame way the AC did in tech school. Liberal arts schools are the way to go.

Sing it, sister!!!

Big corps are being challenged and unless they are willing to mutate (quickly), the small furry critters running around at their feet are going to suck the juices right out of their eggs.

Hmm, the Internet as being analogous to the Chicxulub Mass Extinction Event? Yup.