Slashdot Mirror

Therefore, http://travel.state.gov is my preferred "data-BSE", although CNN is fine for less enterprise-class data requirements. For "data-BSE" metadata, I'd suggest you consult the USDA.

Don't forget, this could be used as a weapon. I actually like the idea of being able to attack with _almost_ total impunity.

I think this sort of space-based weapontry is banned under The ABM Treaty.
As this Website demonstrates.

Our missile defense program is also banned by That same Treaty.

Also, I think one day a men will all but destroy the world. It's in our nature.

Wow, that's ironic, seeing as in the United States, sex trafficking is now considered the third largest source of profits for organized crime, behind only drugs and guns, generating billions of dollars annually.

Go do a Google search on China and human rights abuses. Or go read the State Department's report on human rights violations.Go read about how they've jailed four university professors in the past three months, including three with US citizenship or residency, for no crime greater than spreading ideas against the state. They also jailed for a month the husband and 5 year old son of one of the academics, failing to inform the US that they had done so, even though both of these people are US Citizens! (This is a major violation of international law.)

Read about how they brutally suppress religions, including everything from Falun Gong to Christianity. Read about what they've done in Tibet. Not expansionist? Read about how they backed the establishments of Communist governments in Korea and Vietnam, and how they want to take back Taiwan after 50 years of independence.

Read about the silencing of free speach in Hong Kong, the crushing of student demonstrators in Tienanmen square, the censorship of the Internet throughout China, the control and manipulation of public opinion through their state news agencies.

Go read all that, and then tell me that you welcome China.

File a Freedom of Information Act request. See http://foia.state.gov .

Definitely not the same, but you can keep em on their toes.

well, since today (according to the learning kingdom) is the anniversary of the "Outer Space treaty" let me quote them: Nearly a decade after the USSR launched the first Sputnik into orbit around the earth and just two and a half years before the US landed the first men on the moon, the Outer Space Treaty was signed. Modeled on the Antarctic Treaty, it sought to set the terms for the exploration and exploitation of a newly opened territory. In addition to outlawing any exclusive national claims to extraterrestrial regions, it limited the use of the moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes. It prohibited placing nuclear or other mass-destruction weapons in orbit, on the moon or other celestial body, or on any sort of space station. The treaty also outlawed using the outer space environment for any form of weapons testing. Signed by the U.S., USSR, and Great Britain (which at that time still planned a space program), the Outer Space Treaty was a major step in arms control. After the treaty came into effect, the U.S. and the USSR began to collaborate in space enterprises, including jointly manned missions. History and full text of the Outer Space Treaty: link

There are several studies available that try to reduce this question to science; the best I've found are:

Freedom House (political rights and civil liberties): http://freedomhouse.org/ratings/index.htm.

Fraser Institute (economic focus): http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/publications/books/e con_free_2000/.

Also, the U.S. State Department does on on religious freedom: http://www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/irf/i rf_rpt/index.html.

There are several studies available that try to reduce this question to science; the best I've found are:

Freedom House (political rights and civil liberties): http://freedomhouse.org/ratings/index.htm.

Fraser Institute (economic focus): http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/publications/books/e con_free_2000/.

Also, the U.S. State Department does on on religious freedom: http://www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/irf/i rf_rpt/index.html.

There are several studies available that try to reduce this question to science; the best I've found are:

Freedom House (political rights and civil liberties): http://freedomhouse.org/ratings/index.htm.

Fraser Institute (economic focus): http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/publications/books/e con_free_2000/.

Also, the U.S. State Department does on on religious freedom: http://www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/irf/i rf_rpt/index.html.

I think it was a great idea: Unclassified but Sensitive information could be phoned back to the US without high level personel having to locate a STU (secure telephone unit). Bypass landlines and possible wiretaps, and you can call from anywhere. I believe conversations from the handset to the satellite were encrypted, so it was a great investment. Of course, the Iridium shut down around 6 months later and the phones were useless...

I think it was a great idea: Unclassified but Sensitive information could be phoned back to the US without high level personel having to locate a STU (secure telephone unit). Bypass landlines and possible wiretaps, and you can call from anywhere. I believe conversations from the handset to the satellite were encrypted, so it was a great investment. Of course, the Iridium shut down around 6 months later and the phones were useless...

One place to look is the US State Department. The Foreign Service there needs tech people, and you'd get the chance to move all over the world on their dime. The pay is not outrageous, but the benefits are great. Plus you get a place to live and a diplomatic passport. No Visa Hassles. Getting in can be a hassle though, it took me over a year for them to give me an answer. (of course, the security clearance can be a nightmare if you've lived overseas before, but it eventually comes through. Just be sure to have a clean credit record too)

Most important: find a foreigner-friendly company. If a company has the processes in place to support foreign workers, your life will be much easier. This usually means that they won't mind hiring you in the training period of the F-1, that they will offer to file the H-1B and later do the Labor Certification for a Green Card. CAVEAT: a *lot* of the foreigner-friendly companies out there are H-1B slave-shops that will dangle the LCA and the Green Card in front of you for as long as they can while they'll pay you a 1/2-1/3 of the average in your position. Be especially careful when they are located in places without a kick-ass job market...

There are ways around the H-1B and the LCA: multinational companies can hire you out of a European, say, subsidiary and bring you back in the country with an L-1 or even a visitor's visa. Some off-shore contracting firms can bring you to work in the US while paying you in the home country. In this case you are not stuck in the LCA process (which can be brutal, long (2-3 yrs) and during which you really can't leave your employer unless you start all over again) but you will be stuck with the lower salary anyway, and you are not gonna get that Green Card...

If you qualify (i.e. you are not from one of the high-immigration countries, namely India, China, etc), do the Visa Lottery. The odds are pretty good for Europeans in particular (that's how I got out of the H-1B hole) and the process will take much less time and money than the LCA (2 years max).

In any case, good luck!

US...? rest of the world...?? Please elucidate...

4:If this is true, then why didnt the soviets shoot down our spy satellites? Why dont the iraquis? why dont we shoot down the russians?clearly we have the capability.National territory only goes up so far, something like 160 km, since there will be a tower 50km of that way, there isnt too much room for movement, and even then, why would you want to do it?

National territory extends upwards indefinitely, to the limit of the ability of the nation in question to enforce it. We do _not_ have the ability to shoot down satellites, and even if we developed it, the Iraqis and Russians would still be a loong way from having that tech trickle down to them. Before Francis Gary Powers got shot down, the Soviet Union couldn't call U2 flights incursions into their territory. Later, the UN passed an Outer Space Treaty which placed some Antarctica-style limits on the uses of orbital and outer space. (Note that any variants of the Strategic Defense Initiative that involve orbiting ABM nukes violate this treaty as well as the 1972 ABM treaty, and in this case, the argument that the USSR has ceased to exist doesn't invalidate the treaty, since it's a U.N. agreement.)

Anyway, the original point about being allowed to shoot down anything within ten miles of your border is fatuous to begin with. At sea national boundaries extend twelve miles out, wnd then only when they don't conlict with anyone else's limit. On land and in the air, a border is a border.

Start here, at the MPAA's "Related Sites" page.

Look near the bottom of that page, and follow the link called "United States Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Business Affairs," which will lead you here.

Now, click that ugly ass purple "Business FAQ" button, which will lead you here

Scroll down until you find a link to "State and Local Government on the Net", in the answer to the fifth question from the bottom. That will lead you here.

Now, there's a big 'ol box on the left that lets you search Google! Type in "DeCSS", and find a mirror near you! So boys and girls, let me ask one little question:

Q - Who should go to jail?

A - The MPAA and the United States Government!

Ya know, I should be an attorney instead of an engineer... this is just too easy...

--

Start here, at the MPAA's "Related Sites" page.

Look near the bottom of that page, and follow the link called "United States Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Business Affairs," which will lead you here.

Now, click that ugly ass purple "Business FAQ" button, which will lead you here

Scroll down until you find a link to "State and Local Government on the Net", in the answer to the fifth question from the bottom. That will lead you here.

Now, there's a big 'ol box on the left that lets you search Google! Type in "DeCSS", and find a mirror near you! So boys and girls, let me ask one little question:

Q - Who should go to jail?

A - The MPAA and the United States Government!

Ya know, I should be an attorney instead of an engineer... this is just too easy...

--

From 1999 Country Reports on Economic Policy and Trade Practices:

India:

Labor Force (millions) 420.0

Unemployment Rate (pct)22.5

So compared to the US, things are all well and good... and that goes for the 1960s as well as now.

In the "new economy" India has an opportunity to cash in on the vast resource of mental power that their population provides, transforming the liability of overpopulation into the asset of a highly skilled work force.

Building nukes may help a little, going to the moon may help a lot, but either way, they have a long way to go before misery and the assault on human dignity ends in India.

And yes, that is even in comparison to the U.S., home of Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Simpson murders, and (the horror, the horror) Kiddieland in San Antonio, TX.

ZDNet story

1) This is not 'one of the few cases'! As far as straight (civil) libel goes, existing 'cyberlaw' goes back to the 80's, with mailing lists and BBSs and has definitely been upheld internationally. "international" is important, because you can be sued in jurisdiction where the 'damage' occurs or where the 'victim' resides. Here are some cases/sources:

• Here's a Richmond Law Review (Va.) article suggesting unified approaches to cyber-defamation.
• Here's a Harvard Law Review article on cyberlaw.
• Here's a Georgia State review article of Alabama cyber defamation law (for details and contrast with Utah)
• Blakeley v. Continental Airlines is a 1999 case involving a private company-only BBS
• Rindos v. Hardwick was a famous case where an American was successfully sued in Australian courts for defamation on a e-mail list. [Summary] [Judgement]
• A CyberLibel FAQ -- primarily non-US 'British tradition' (Australia, Canada) useful as a basis for further understanding.
• Here's a 1994 Australian review of Defamation laws in cyberspace.
• Here's a course reading list (with links to cases and other resources embedded in the course outline) for a comparison of in the US and Australia with references to other law (Roman, English, Dutch, etc.) It hits some very relevant points in vey few words.
• Here's a review of British cyber-defamation law (incl. BBS and e-mail)
• Similar US Criminal Libel cases against students have been reported widely in the media for years (names are not cited, because they are minors): [Colorado, 1997 (ACLU) and verdict, 1998]
• Nervous? maybe you should be Here's a (English language, published in Denmark) peer-reviewed law journal article on 'Defamation Havens' ('peer-review' is when articles are reviewed by experts before publication)

2) Do a websearch for "criminal libel" and you'll find that its primary use worldwide, historically and currently is against journalists . One of the 'Inciting Abuses' that contributed to the American Revolution was a (then British) court verdict that a newspaper was guilty of defaming the reputation of the Governer-General of New York by (accurately) revealing his corruption.

• Criminal Libel use.abuse is often cited in the annual US State Department Human Rights reports on each country. [Gabon, 1999]
• In Ireland, journalistic websites get away with a great deal that print journalism can't.

3) To address another of Katz's points, here are mini-case studies in dysfunctional human behaviour on the net

Katz was on my 'exclude list' for a few months, not because I dislike his writing, but because his loose use of facts and analogies leads to a sloppy, infuriating discussion. A profesional writer should investigate his facts and limit his speculation to what those facts support; If he doesn't, the readers will certainly go hogwild. This is the first Katz article I've read in a while. I am not pleased.

From Unfettered Press

In 1637, an English writer named William Prynn made the unfortunate mistake of writing a book that criticized the queen. Brought before a panel of judges, the hapless Prynn was found guilty of libel and ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison. As an added punishment, he had his ears lopped off before he was hauled off to jail.

Had Prynn been living in modern-day America rather than 17th-century England, he undoubtedly would have been free to write his book -- whether about the queen or a U.S. president -- without worrying about losing his ears or ending up in prison.

Libel is a legal term that describes a written form of defamation, which the dictionary defines as a "false or unjustified injury to someone's good reputation." Sometimes the word slander is used in the same breath as libel. The two terms mean the same thing, except that slander usually refers to defamatory statements about someone that are spoken to others rather than written in a newspaper, magazine article, or book. Today the legal differences between libel and slander have all but disappeared due largely to the dawning of the electronic age. American television networks, for example, are sometimes sued for libel even though news reporters and correspondents "speak" their words to a viewing and listening audience rather than to a reading audience.

For the United States, the laws that control libel and slander first began to take shape even before the colonies gained their independence from Britain. One of the most famous American cases involved New York publisher John Peter Zenger, who was imprisoned in 1734 for printing political attacks against the colonial governor of New York. Zenger's lawyer established a legal precedent by arguing successfully that truth is an absolute defense in libel cases. Up until then, it had never mattered much whether the allegedly libelous statements about someone were true or false. Since the Zenger case, however, someone can sue successfully for libel only if the defamatory information is proven to be false.

The Zenger case established another precedent that remains in place today. Libel cases, which are part of civil (rather than criminal) courtroom proceedings, may be heard by juries, and it is up to the jury to decide whether a publication has printed libelous information about someone. If so, it is also up to the jury to decide how much the libeled individual has suffered and what kind of monetary damages he or she is entitled to receive as compensation. In the United States today, about 90 percent of all libel trials are heard before juries.

The 18th-century framers of the U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press by writing that protection into the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Even so, the Supreme Court of the United States -- the highest court in America -- for years refused to protect the media from libel lawsuits by relying on the First Amendment. Instead, libel laws varied from state to state without a single coherent rule in the nation.

That all changed in 1964 when the Supreme Court issued a ruling that revolutionized libel law in the United States. The famous decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan once and for all created a national rule that squared more fully with the free press guarantees of the First Amendment. In its ruling, the Court decided that public officials no longer could sue successfully for libel unless reporters or editors were guilty of "actual malice" when publishing false statements about them.

And just what is malice when it comes to proving libel? Retired Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., who wrote the Sullivan decision, defined it as "knowledge that the [published information] was false" or that it was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." In other words, public officials no longer could sue for libel simply by proving that something that had been broadcast or printed about them was false. Now they would have to prove that a journalist had knowingly printed false information while making little, if any, attempt to distinguish truth from lies.

The Supreme Court later extended its so-called Sullivan rule to cover "public figures," meaning individuals who are not in public office but who are still newsworthy because of their prominence in the public eye. Over the years, American courts have ruled that this category includes celebrities in the entertainment field, well-known writers, athletes, and others who often attract attention in the media.

For purely private individuals, the test for proving libel is not as difficult. Although Supreme Court rulings such as the Sullivan decision apply everywhere in the United States, most states continue to have their own libel laws that cover private individuals. Usually those laws require that public figures who believe they have been libeled prove that a journalist has been negligent when publishing false information about them. Negligence, like malice, is a legal term that generally means carelessness on the part of a reporter or editor. Because private individuals have more reason than public officials to be left alone in the media, American libel laws recognize that they are entitled to more legal protection against false statements made about them.

Every year hundreds of libel lawsuits are filed against newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations in the United States. Typically, these cases are brought by current or former public officials, by entertainers, or by business executives who feel they have been damaged by critical media publicity -- usually accusing or suggesting that the person has engaged in unlawful, improper, or questionable activities.

In December 1990, for example, a judge on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court won a $6 million libel verdict against the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper because of a series of articles it carried in 1983 that suggested he was guilty of influence peddling. And in one of the largest libel verdicts ever reached against the media, a former district attorney from Texas named Victor Feazell was awarded $58 million in April 1991 after a Dallas television station accused him of accepting bribes to fix drunken driving cases. "This verdict sends a message to the rest of the media to get your facts straight," Feazell said after the jury announced its verdict.

Two months later, a state district court judge not only upheld the judgment but included a provision adding a 10 percent annual interest charge to the award if the station appealed the case and lost. A settlement was reached shortly afterwards.

A jury in Chicago, Illinois, awarded businessman Robert Crinkley $2.25 million in May 1991 because a Wall Street Journal article falsely linked him to bribery payments made to foreign officials. Crinkley said the newspaper story prevented him from being hired after he left his former employer. The jury agreed that he was a victim of libel even though the newspaper published a correction to its original story. The award was thrown out in September 1991 by circuit court judge Howard Miller. Miller ordered a new trial on damages after ruling that the evidence in the case was insufficient to support such a large award. Crinkley's lawyer began planning his appeal.

In these and other cases, the person bringing the libel suit has the burden of proving that he or she has been libeled. In other words, a public figure must prove that a reporter not only published false information but also did so recklessly and maliciously without attempting to determine whether it was true. Libel cases are not limited to disputes between the media and the people they cover. In July 1989, the American Express Company admitted to spreading false information about an international banker who controlled New York's Republic National Bank. When the banker's attorney threatened to sue for libel, American Express confessed to its role and agreed to donate $8 million to charities as a settlement in the case.

Besides making distinctions between public and private figures, American courts also have ruled that various kinds of published information are generally immune from libel charges. For example, it is almost impossible for a writer to be found guilty of libel if the writing deals with opinions rather than facts. "Under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea," the Supreme Court said in a 1974 libel ruling.

Not long ago, the owner of a restaurant in New Orleans sued a food critic for writing unflattering things about his eating establishment. Too bad, the Louisiana Supreme Court told the restaurant owner, before sending him back to his kitchen empty-handed.

More recently, Jerry Falwell, an American religious leader, sued a magazine after it published a biting satire of Falwell that mocked his piety. Indeed, a state of Virginia jury awarded Falwell $200,000 after concluding that the magazine had inflicted "emotional distress" on the well-known clergyman. But the U.S. Supreme Court later threw out the award by explaining that satire, no matter how scathing and upsetting to its target, was protected by the First Amendment.

Floyd Abrams, a New York lawyer who specializes in representing media organizations, estimates that individuals who sue for libel win about 75 percent of the cases that end up before a jury. But the media succeed in reversing jury verdicts most of the time after they appeal to higher courts. Abrams says the reason is that jurors often do not fully understand or apply the proper legal standards that cover libel cases. As a result, it is common for media organizations to carry libel cases to intermediate appellate courts if they lose at the first stage of a trial.

In recent years, a number of American courtrooms have turned into stormy legal battlegrounds because of widely publicized libel cases that have made headlines the world over. One such case started in 1976 when the tabloid National Enquirer printed a small item about Carol Burnett, a popular television actress. The newspaper falsely reported that Burnett had gotten into a nasty argument with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in a restaurant in Washington.

A jury in Los Angeles eventually awarded Burnett $1.6 million, concluding that the National Enquirer had never bothered to find out whether the item was true. An appellate court later reduced Burnett's libel award to $200,000, agreeing that she had been libeled but ruling that the Enquirer should not be so harshly punished for its errant behavior. Still, the actress was satisfied with the result. "If they had given me only one dollar plus carfare, I'd have been happy because it was the principle," Burnett said after the case was over.

In other cases, principles have all but disappeared under an avalanche of legal tactics that sometimes turn libel trials into expensive battles that leave no clear winners.

That happened after former U.S. Army General William Westmoreland sued the CBS television network for $120 million. Westmoreland was angry about a 1982 CBS news program that had accused him of exaggerating American military progress during the Vietnam war. After an 18-week jury trial in New York City, Westmoreland and CBS reached a private settlement that amounted to a surrender on both sides.

"In the end, the trial came to a termination as cloudy and unresolved as the Vietnam war itself," wrote Rodney Smolla, a libel expert and law professor at the College of William and Mary.

In the wake of Westmoreland's case, several legal experts have criticized the way libel matters are handled in the American legal system. Some of them blame media organizations for relying so strongly on the First Amendment's free press guarantees. Daniel Popeo, a lawyer in Washington, says that the First Amendment unfairly protects the media but not the "victims" of unfair media coverage.

Journalists respond with their own set of complaints about libel lawsuits. Yes, they say, the courts have made it difficult for most people to win libel cases. But the threat of being sued also causes many news organizations to shy away from publishing controversial stories. Large media outlets like CBS or the New York Times have the financial resources to battle expensive libel lawsuits. But smaller newspapers and television stations find it more difficult to afford such a costly burden.

The ongoing debate over libel has prompted at least one proposal for a new set of libel laws that would make it easier for public officials and others to prove their cases. The proposal -- drafted by a private committee of lawyers, law professors, and media representatives -- also would eliminate large financial awards that can be assessed against media groups found guilty of libel.

Over the past quarter of a century, the courts have favored the media in libel matters, "but such victories have been hard fought and costly, absorbing millions of dollars in attorney fees and thousands of hours in lawyers' offices and courtrooms," according to Roslyn Mazer, a media lawyer in Washington.

Bruce Fein, former general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, a U.S. government regulatory agency, is one of the lawyers who helped to draft the proposed set of libel laws. Fein says the ultimate goal is to ensure more accurate reporting by journalists so that members of the public are better informed about important public events. But he also thinks it is important that the media still have wide latitude in deciding what to publish. "In a democratic society," says Fein, "everyone has to take some lumps in the media."

Yes. We were also kind of sort of having a bit of a problem with Vietnam in the sixties. they now have most favored nation status. I can't comment on whether vietnam is any better in terms of human rights and protecting its citizens, but it doesn't look like they really are from where i'm standing, and at least Cuba has no nike sweatshops..

Cuba is probably not a shining example of how to fairly treat your citizens, but the way Cuba is treated by the U.S.-- trying to bully the entire world into barracading the country off-- is almost insane if you look at it in actual _context_ of how many other countries out there are so much worse than Cuba in terms of treatment of citizens and workers. I know almost nothing about the current state inside of Cuba, but i know at least to tell that our treatment of them is disproportionate when compared to how we treat the rest of the world. Even historic precedent is rediculous to point at; Castro, unlike North Vietnam, never actually tortured any americans, i don't think. The embargo is based on nothing more than hatred by political pressure groups in Miami.. if the embargo is based on any actual respect for human rights, then why don't we react the same way to, oh, say, Burma?

Over the past week the Motion Picture Association of America has intensified its efforts to bully and harass individual Internet users by sending out a new series of email threats. Using little more than bluff and bluster they've also managed in recent weeks to shut down countless websites, convince employers to fire employees, and get schools to take disciplinary actions against students for doing little more than taking part in an act of solidarity on their private homepages.

John Young, who maintains the Cryptome, is one of the hundreds of John Doe defendants in the California DVD case. In addition to a copy of DeCSS, Young published a copy of the now-infamous Hoy Declaration, in which the DVD Copy Control Association inadvertently included a copy of the very information they were trying to suppress in public court filings. He was among the first to bear the brunt of a wave of cease and desist letters for posting the source code to DeCSS. The letter reads in part:

The Superior Court of Santa Clara County, California also recently granted a preliminary Injunction against the Internet posting of DeCSS.

If you are bound by an injunction, maintaining the DeCSS utility on your system or network violates the above injunction[s] and risks court sanctions for contempt.

Over the past week, we have received numerous reports of this threatening letter being sent to web site owners worldwide. It appears the MPAA is simply going down the list of mirrored sites and sending a letter to everybody.

Geography and national sovereignty are clearly foreign concepts to this multinational corporation. The effects of globalization seem to have impaired their faculties more than previously thought. They proceeded to send similar letters to people all over the world. Tom Vogt, also named as a defendant in the California case, resides in Germany. The letter the MPAA sent him insisting that he comply with the California injunction, refers to the preliminary draft of an unratified convention. That's right, the best they could do was threaten him with an unsigned treaty.

Earlier this month Grant Bayley received a cease and desist letter for hosting DeCSS on his webpage for the Australian 2600 meeting. Both Bayley and the server are located in Australia. As expressed in the meeting guidelines, 2600 meetings are organized on their own, anyone can start one, and they are pretty much autonomous. According to an Australian journalist who spoke with the chief counsel for the MPAA, 2600 Australia is being singled out simply because of its name. Presumably this is also why they chose to go after A.Sleep, operator of the Connecticut 2600 meeting's webpage in his very own federal lawsuit. One can only imagine what the MPAA must be thinking.

In an age where anyone is capable of exercising free speech to mass audiences via the Internet, there is a disturbing trend that this freedom is limited not by the strength of one's convictions nor one's access to technology. Rather it is dependant on the will and resources of one's Internet Service Provider. It is common for ISPs to cancel accounts or remove content at the first hints of any controversy. It didn't take long for big business to figure this out and they've been exploiting lawsuit-fearing ISPs ever since. One can hardly blame the average ISP for bowing to such impressive cease and desist letters. Often they're barely breaking even as it is, and nuking one $10 a month webpage is a simple business decision when being threatened with a million dollar lawsuit.

What's far more troubling is the ease in which traditional safe havens for free expression, like universities and other academic institutions, are willing to sell out their students. Zach Karpinski stands out as one such victim. A student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Zach was summarily fired from his job of two and a half years at Student Technology Services, an organization he helped build. The letters he and his school received accusing him of using school servers for illegal activities were enough to trample this student's rights and reputation in favor of some perverse idea of political "damage control." They should be more concerned with controlling the damage done to their student's academic freedom and civil liberties than satisfying the whims of Jack Valenti and the MPAA. Sadly, Zach is not alone. A student from California State University at Fresno wrote in to report that he had to take down his school-hosted DeCSS mirror and that the MPAA requested that he be fired from his school employment. (Fortunately, he wasn't fired).

We first took a stand in the DVD battle back in November, when the first cease and desist letters were being sent out. We joined in the mirroring campaign to lend our support to those who had been subjected to hollow threats and harassment from the DVD industry, but were forced into compliance due to circumstances beyond their control. They knew they were right, they knew they could win, but they lacked the resources to stand up for their convictions. As evidenced above, that fight is ongoing. Our modest mirror list has grown substantially and continues to grow, despite mirrors being removed from time to time. The success of the DeCSS mirroring campaign demonstrates the futility of attempts to suppress free speech on the Internet. It is distributed hosting at its most basic and a proven defense from censorship. Make no mistake, DeCSS is out there, it can never be eradicated. Not only will DeCSS be preserved regardless of whether there are any mirrors, the tyrannical actions of the MPAA have ensured that it will live on forever in history, law books, and all the communities it has effected.

Official US Visa Site

If you are from a low-immigration country (i.e. from Western and Cenral Europe, Oceania, etc) you might be better off trying for the DV visas, i.e. lottery visas. That was my ticket to a Green Card. The odds for a European are actually good (one in 12 I think) and the maximum processing time (i.e. mail-in of the lottery entry to actual Green Card) is at most 24 months.

If you have the option to go for GC (Adjustment of Status) processing to your home country, go for it. Embassies usually have to deal with fewer applications and are easier to get a handle of than the INS. If you have a good chance to get the GC (most people do), you don't even have to worry about your current visa.

Check out misc.immigration.usa on Usenet. A great medium-traffic forum (hopefully it will still be after being mentioned here) with a lot of old-timer immigrants that already have been through most of the INS bureacracy.

As for the whiners: INS is by far the worst US government service. It's quite easy to suck this bad when the people you deal with have no political power whatsoever. Maybe we should get a PAC going ;-)...


engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

Ah, but your initial argument was the chance that an "exploiter" would exploit the "big, happy, family", not that two groups would attempt to exploit each other. That is a different case altogether. And besides, even within a group that wouldn't be considered diverse, people will still find ways to divide themselves into subgroups based on, for example, religious beliefs, political viewpoints, etc. Even Nazi Germany's concept of "Volk" only excluded people based on their heritage (yet they still purged German Communists).

Besides, I don't believe in dividing exploitation along "group" boundaries. Exploitation is exploitation regardless of the color of skin, religious beliefs, etc. of the person responsible for it.

Since more people, per capita were taken out by the Trotsky/Lennin/Stalin purges than were taken out of the nations participating in WW II, it is certainly reasonable to declare the Soviet Empire more destructive than Nazi Germany.

If the Nazi party were in power as long as the Soviets, I can guarantee you they would have purged more people per capita (ie. if they had stuck to ethnic cleansing instead of invading their neighbors, thus drawing the attention of the world).

You seem fairly preoccupied with how destructive the Soviet government was, but have you ever investigated the destruction the U.S government/multinational corporations are responsible for? To use examples from South America (an area of the world that doesn't seem to fall under the radar scope of the American media):

The involvement of the American government in the overthrow of democratically elected Brazilian president Salvador Allende, whose government was in turn replaced by the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A list of Pinochet's crimes can be found here. Documentation of the connection between the CIA and DINA (the Chilean secret police -- responsible for carrying out Pinochet's brutality) can be found here. There are literally hundreds of references on this...

The United States involvement (CIA, AID, MILGP) in the creation of military, police, and paramilitary agencies, which in turn were responsible for the torture and death of hundreds of thousands of people in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile (as mentioned above), and Bolivia. You can find large lists of MILGP (U.S. Military Group) officers still to this day in these and other countries.

I don't condone destruction of human life caused by anyone, but it is wrong to only selectively look at the sources of it.

GadZooki dun said: Child pornography is illegal to own, produce or sell just like narcotics. Except in your inane reply to your own banal post, my analogy works. The government doesn't need special censorship powers to remove such content, the same way it doesn't need new laws to get my crack rock. A legal warrant will do.

ObDisclaimer: I m'self don't like the idea of child porn, and strictly IMHO the government is probably in the right in banning it seeing as most child porn probably involves molesting kids in the process of making it. (Just to get that out of the way.)

As a minor aside--the definition of "child pornography" and/or "narcotics" can vary quite a bit from country to country. (Yes, I realise we're talking about the US and whether ISPs are to be considered common carriers or not. However, the Internet is an international forum, and hence anytime you talk about the Internet you are necessarily going to be talking about international agreements. :) For example, if memory serves some things which are considered kiddie-porn in the US (i.e. simulated pics of kids, teenagers, etc.) aren't illegal in parts of Scandinavia and (possibly) Japan; conversely, some stuff that is not considered illegal porn in the US (i.e. teens in bikinis, adult lesbians, etc.) IS considered illegal in other countries. Same goes for narcotics, too; qat (a common drug used in Middle Eastern countries) is illegal here in the US but actually sold on the streets legally in Ethiopia, and contrariwise most antihistamines and decongestant drugs are considered controlled substances in Japan (yes, you really CAN be busted for entering Japan with a package of Sudafed; pseudoephedrine is a controlled substance there and even the US State Department Travel Advisory for Japan warns about this).

For that matter, laws aren't all that uniform in the United States. Things which are perfectly legal in some states aren't in others; there was a very unfortunate case that proved this out several years ago (in which a postmaster general (?) in Tennessee got an adult BBS in California busted for violating Tennessee's obscenity laws with some of the piccies on the board). I'll also remind folks that the issue of "illegal sexual material" often doesn't have to do with kiddie porn at all; among other things, if a provider was held responsible for content prosecutors in Alabama could hold liable any site that sold dildos or most sexual material (yes, the sale or advertisement of marital aids is illegal in Alabama, and quite a few cities and counties in the Bible Belt have blue-laws that darn near make anything much racier than the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue illegal to sell in town; some of these are fairly large cities [Cincinatti has tried repeatedly to make ALL adult bookstores illegal as well as prohibit the sale of nearly all adult material--it ain't just Larry Flynt and Hustler they've gone to loggerheads with] at that. I won't even go into those states that still have sodomy laws on the books, because a few of those states also ban depictions of sodomy and/or "crimes against nature"...which can include literally everything from zoophilia, to oral/anal sex, to [in a few states] even consensual unmarried heterosexual sex in the missionary position...)

Personally, I think it's a damn good thing the courts ruled that a provider can't be held liable. Otherwise, a lot of ISPs and online services (cough cough ahem AOL cough ahem) would be in rather serious trouble and waiting for cops from the Fundamentalist Theocracy of Alabama to shut them down :P I'll also note, btw, that this does NOT give ISPs common carrier status...not yet, anyways. The only group that can formally do that is the FCC, who grants what services are and aren't common carriers (it is a specific status under the law which also has specific responsibilities--technically, under the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, if ISPs were declared common carriers they'd have to open up (for example) cable modem service and ADSL service to ALL ISPs at the same price and couldn't do sillybuggers like making one pay for two accounts--one with @Home and one with one's home ISP [as @Home is fond of doing] or making one pay MORE for ADSL service if one doesn't use bellsouth.net as one's ISP [which Bellsouth does, illegally I might add, in the Louisville area with its ADSL service--they actually make you pay MORE if you don't go with hellsouth.net--as if I actually needed another reason to pray to the gods of thunder that the headquarters would be hit by an F5 tornado :P]. They'd have to open it up to everyone.)

Now...what's needed now is some way to determine on a national basis where jurisdiction is when something that really IS illegal occurs. (Hell, internationally if possible, but I don't think that's happening in this lifetime :P) If someone runs a website in California which has adult material on it which is legal there--and someone in the Fundamentalist Theocracy of Alabama downloads that material--whose law applies? California's? Alabama's? (Kentucky is one of the very few states I know of that DOES list in its laws who has jurisdiction in computer crimes--it's basically [for example] if someone mailbombs you from another state the offense is supposed to have occured in that state and not Kentucky). For that matter, if I order beer from an online site (under a rather draconian law in Kentucky--meant mostly to prop up liquor warehouses and county sheriffs in dry counties--it is now illegal to mail-order ANY alcohol in Kentucky...this actually caused the famous Beer Camp at Oldenberg Brewery (in Covington, KY) to have to be cancelled last year, and arrangements made to have the beer from microbrews (some who mostly ship by mail order) to be shipped to a warehouse there...this is now literally the only way you can order beer, through a warehouse, because it's illegal to ship it :P) whose law trumps the other (especially if the online beer salesman is in a state where it's quite legal, and it'd be legal if I were driving there and shipping it across myself)? Can the other state tell Kentucky's Attorney-General to perform a auto-sexual act requiring DEX 25 when the Attorney-General decides to file a felony charge against the shipper and the company? (Yes, it's even illegal for UPS to ship--which is probably illegal, since UPS is a common carrier)

By a fine coincidence, I received an assignment to represent Ukraine at a model UN conference this March, so I began some basic research and found this odd snippet from the US Department of State:

http://www.state.go v/www/background_notes/ukraine_0697_bgn.html (Updated June 1997)

[Ukraine] has significant environmental problems resulting from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986 and from industrial pollution. Ukraine has announced that the Chornobyl Atomic Energy Station will be phased out and shut down by the year 2000; it has asked for financial help to achieve this goal and to provide alternative sources of energy for its population.

Reopening a Chornobyl reactor a month before year 2000 doesn't seem to indicate the plant will be shut down. I suppose the Ukrainian government had a change of heart within the past two years or the Department of State just doesn't know what it's talking about.

Err, except for the US http://travel.state.gov/travel_warning s.html

There is no mention of India in the CNN article. But the Slashdot blurb mentions India...
And the Y2K section on India @ http://travel.state.gov/india.html seems to be pretty tame...
Maybe Hemos just wanted add a few coutries of his own...

According to the Bureau of Consular Affairs web page (http://travel.state.gov), if you become a citizen of another country, you can probably keep your US citizenship.

From http://travel.state.gov/ocs_faq.html:

Q: If I become a dual citizen will it affect my U.S.citizenship?

A: The automatic acquisition or retention of a foreign nationality does not affect U.S. citizenship; however, under limited circumstances, the acquisition of a foreign nationality by application and certain other acts may cause loss of U.S. citizenship under Section 349 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In order for loss of nationality to occur under Section 349(a)(1), for example, it must be established that the naturalization was obtained voluntarily by a person eighteen years of age or older with the intention of relinquishing U.S. citizenship. Such an intention may be shown by the person's statements or conduct but in most cases it is assumed that Americans who are naturalized in other countries intend to keep their U.S. citizenship. As a result, they have both nationalities. While recognizing the existence of dual nationality and the fact that some Americans to have other nationalities, the U.S. Government does not endorse dual nationality. Claims of other countries upon dual-national U.S. citizens can place them in situations where their obligations to one country are in conflict with the laws of the other. In addition, their dual nationality may hamper U.S. efforts to provide diplomatic and consular protection to its citizens when they are abroad, especially in the country of their other nationality. For further advice, call the Office of Overseas Citizens Services at 202-647-5226.

According to the Bureau of Consular Affairs web page (http://travel.state.gov), if you become a citizen of another country, you can probably keep your US citizenship.

From http://travel.state.gov/ocs_faq.html:

Q: If I become a dual citizen will it affect my U.S.citizenship?

A: The automatic acquisition or retention of a foreign nationality does not affect U.S. citizenship; however, under limited circumstances, the acquisition of a foreign nationality by application and certain other acts may cause loss of U.S. citizenship under Section 349 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In order for loss of nationality to occur under Section 349(a)(1), for example, it must be established that the naturalization was obtained voluntarily by a person eighteen years of age or older with the intention of relinquishing U.S. citizenship. Such an intention may be shown by the person's statements or conduct but in most cases it is assumed that Americans who are naturalized in other countries intend to keep their U.S. citizenship. As a result, they have both nationalities. While recognizing the existence of dual nationality and the fact that some Americans to have other nationalities, the U.S. Government does not endorse dual nationality. Claims of other countries upon dual-national U.S. citizens can place them in situations where their obligations to one country are in conflict with the laws of the other. In addition, their dual nationality may hamper U.S. efforts to provide diplomatic and consular protection to its citizens when they are abroad, especially in the country of their other nationality. For further advice, call the Office of Overseas Citizens Services at 202-647-5226.

Actually, if you read that site, you'll find that in MOST cases you can NOT have dual citizenship. In certain individual cases the US Government will allow the recognition of dual-citizenship, but in the majority they do not.

The point of that site is saying as long as you're careful about it, it doesn't really matter. But its generally not a good idea to pass off a Canadian passport upon entry to the US if you're a US citizen, and vice versa. If you had true dual citizenship, you could use either citizenship at any time.

These paragraphs are nonsense.

`Dual Citizenship' is not some special status, nor is it something which countries generally have to `officially recognize'. It is the state of having citizenships in two countries. The US can't disallow you from having a citizenship in another country; all it could do is threaten to take your US citizenship away, and it can almost never do that except in cases of out-and out treason, because of extensive case law, US and international.

Yes, whenever a (for example) Canada-US dual citizen deals with US authorities, they'd have to show US papers, and Canadian papers to Canadians. But that's because all US citizens have to show US papers to US authorities, and all Canadians likewise. Being a `dual citizen' doesn't change that; why should it?

Pretending like one wasn't a citizen when one had responsibilities as a citizen -- i.e., paying duties, or taxes, or registering for selective service, or showing papers -- will always be illegal. Why do you believe it should be different for `true dual citizenship?'

maybe the US will let you keep dual citizenship (but I know a bunch of people who have been forced to choose

You *don't have to choose*, unless you're dealing with a nation like India which explicitly forbids multiple citizenships.