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Federal Judge Limits DHS Laptop Border Searches
Declan McCullogh is reporting at CNET that a federal district court judge has rebuked the Department of Homeland Security, "which had claimed it can seize a traveler's laptop and search it six months later without warrant." As described in the article, DHS policies have been stacked against travelers entering the US, including citizens returning from abroad: "There's no requirement that they be returned to their owners after even six months or a year has passed, though supervisory approval is required if they're held for more than 15 days. The complete contents of a hard drive or memory card can be perused at length for evidence of lawbreaking of any kind, even if it's underpaying taxes or not paying parking tickets." This ruling does not address immediate searches at the border, but says that DHS cannot hold computers for indefinite searching, as in the case to hand, concerning a US citizen returning from a trip to Korea, whose laptop was seized and held for months before a search was even conducted on it.
PortableApps.com = move your digital life onto removable media, able to run on any PC.
microSDHC = 1-16GB storage on a sub-fingernail-sized removable media.
Unless they're gonna go thru all the lint in everyone's pockets, they can have the notebook.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The great depression was extended for years due to to the action the government took to end it. Now we are doing the same thing again with the stimulus. Expect this recovery to last a while.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx
Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt's policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.
In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.
Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.
The truth shall set you free!
Centralized power of ANY kind, whether it is in a corporation or government, is dangerous to individual liberty.
In the absence of some outside restraining force, how do you avoid the inevitable natural concentration of power when everything is left to its own forces? Neither governments nor corporations appeared out of thin air; similar institutions have inevitably been created by people of civilizations that are very different otherwise. This seems to imply that the very nature of human society leads to them.
Government, in that sense, is an attempt to curb the threat of centralized power by trying to have a single entity, which is at least nominally controllable, and can all other such entities - corporations - in check. It is itself effectively a private corporation (for citizens only) with non-transferable shares. Without its regulative effects, you instead have a bunch of completely uncontrollable, powerful entities that fight each other by all means available. Worst-case scenario is that they form a cartel, and then you have a corporatist dictatorship. So what do you propose?
Why must decisions always be placed in someone else's hands? Why can't I make my OWN decisions of what I want to buy, or wish to work, or desire to live.
The other side of a coin is having more than one choice. Elections were commonplace in all communist states, and they're still held in e.g. North Korea. It's just that the list of candidates is such that choice is meaningless. But the same effect can also be achieved economically, through monopolistic collusion - when your choice is not "buy X or Y", but "buy X or don't buy at all" - and for some categories of goods (e.g. food), the latter simply isn't an option. And a similar scheme with an even greater potential for abuse is possible on the job market...