'Nuclear Free' Maryland City Grants Waiver For HP

dcblogs writes "The City of Takoma Park, Md. this week granted a waiver to its public library to allow it to use some new HP hardware, whose products are otherwise banned under its 'nuclear free zone' ordinance. That law, adopted in 1983 one month after the Cold War-era movie 'The Day After' was aired, prohibits the city from buying equipment from any company connected to U.S. nuclear weapons production. The library bought new Linux-based, x86 systems from a Canadian vendor and didn't realize the vendor was using HP hardware. The hardware arrived in April and was unused until the Takoma Park city council granted it a waiver this week. The city's list of banned contractors was developed in 2004 by a now inactive group, Nuclear Free America, and hasn't been updated since."

Comments

Re:Movies

[Immerman]

And before that from Africa, along with every other human on the planet. The term "native" has to have some cuttoff date or it's completely useless, usually a few (or few dozen) generations suffices. Or are we now classifying every single US citizen an "African American"?

Re:Movies

[Zordak]

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 14th Amendment was not part of the original Bill of Rights, which was only concerned with limiting the power of the federal government to infringe on people's rights. The states could do almost anything they wanted within the limits of their own state constitutions. The 13th (ending slavery), 14th (civil rights), and 15th (right to vote regardless of race) amendments were passed after the civil war, and the southern states were forced to ratify them as a condition of being re-admitted to the Union. Under the 14th Amendment, most of the Bill of Rights now applies to the individual states.

This law is almost certianly unconstitutional under the current 14th Amendment jurisprudence, but somebody would have to challenge it first. Since it's apparently not being enforced, it's not likely that anybody is going to bother with challenging it.