As for the drugs, no they should not be patentable either. So you have the cure for AIDS, but you have a patent on it, so what now *I* have to die because you are a greedy bastard?
No. You just have to pay your share of the development costs - just as you do when you buy anything, from a water supply, through food, to computers and vehicles. If you're very poor, the companies charge you less than your share (making some other sucker cover the difference by paying more for his dose of the same drug...)
No corperation should be able to profit off of someones terminal condition just because they happen to have a piece of paper saying they own the equation to make the drug that cures them. Such a thing is morally disgusting.
It's nothing to do with a "piece of paper". It's a case of "I spent $(large number) to develop this cure. I'll cure you, if you pay your share. If you can't afford that, I'll even make some other sucker pay more to cover part of your tab, too."
As for AIDS - there isn't a cure. There are some very expensive drugs which delay some of the problems, and there might be a cure one day. With a large percentage of cases caused by IV drug usage (note the dramatic difference in AIDS incidence per capita between cities which do or do not allow non-prescription needle purchase) I'm far more hostile towards that case than other conditions - I feel very strongly that it is "morally disgusting" to have public money forced into mitigating self-inflicted problems. Yes, there are other cases which aren't self-inflicted. They can get in line with cancer patients, kidney/liver/lung/heart failure patients, and the millions of others awaiting treatment. From what I can see, the system actually works extremely well: transplants and dialysis save huge numbers of lives, and even cancer can be delayed or even removed in many cases. Every day, another improvement in treatment, another few thousand lives saved which would have been lost a few years ago. Is it really so bad?
Incidentally, if you think the US system is bad, look at the UK. All prescription drugs are government controlled: they decide - based on cost - whether or not to permit the use of certain drugs. Unlike the US, you can't borrow money or approach charities to afford an expensive drug: you're just told "no" (often based on price). Would you really prefer that?
* - I know not everyone in the US has insurance, but that's another topic, not related to patents...
People impacted by the dividend tax reduction make over 150000 a year.
Or have pensions. Those who save money for their retirement do so by (indirectly) buying shares (and related assets, such as bonds) with that money. When they come to retire, those shares then provide their income in retirement.
Yours is a very common misconception, that somehow "shareholders" are a separate species. They aren't. Have a 401(k)? You're one of them. A non-government pension? Same. Even the money in a deposit account in a bank is invested in companies, via credit facilities. Basically, if you have money in any form other than cash under the bed, you are one of those corporate investors who will benefit!
I think the inherant inaccuracy in speedometer's will stop them setting it to 31 (although I've been done by a camera doing 36 in a 30).
That's the trouble: it doesn't stop them doing it, it just makes it unreasonable for them to do so. Before modern radar cameras, laser range-finders and automated summons issuing, doing so would have been extremely impractical: they couldn't do it even if they wanted to. Now? The only thing to stop this happening is that it would be unpopular! Already, we've seen cases (in California) of a contractor to the city setting ultra-strict timings on red-light cameras; the court overturned that particular practice, because the contractor was receiving a cut of the takings - but the UK already has this practice in place with police forces operating cameras and pocketing the revenue!
There is a legal principle, de minimis non curat lex, which allows a little leeway - but I'm not at all confident it would protect the public from that kind of over-zealous policing. In England, one half-mile stretch of road has eight cameras - that's one every hundred metres! Meanwhile, a few segments of the A1 (trunk road from England-Scotland) drop abruptly from a 70 limit to 50 - camera enforced - then revert. No traffic hazard or other excuse, just a nice revenue stream for the police department concerned...
So what stops someone from playing back the movie, capturing the data rather than actually playing it back, then recording the result onto a non-encrypted DVD?
Nothing. In fact, this is exactly what DeCSS does: decrypt the data as if for playback, but dump it to a file instead. Once decrypted, you can copy the resulting video files freely: it's just a big MPEG file. The only difference is that DeCSS contains its own copy of the decryption software, rather than linking against another application to do that job!
Its scary how accurate data mining can be. Taking a small scale example I have a loyalty card for my local supermarket. Every 3 months they send me some vouchers for money off on certain products. First time none of the vouchers really intrested me. However each time they have been getting more and more accurate until last time I actually used all of them on things I wanted.
I don't really see that as "scary" - think about it: the people you buy stuff from know what stuff they sell to you. This has been true of shopkeepers for as long as they have existed! It's only a recent anomaly that shops became so large and impersonal that you dealt with a different person each time; 50 years ago, you would buy your meat from a butcher, who would simply remember what meat you bought last time. Granted, the database has a better memory for detail, but it isn't doing anything new: it's doing the same old thing, slightly better than before.
I'm a little more concerned about the idea of the government harvesting and combining all this kind of data, of course. Might that pack of CDRs I bought last month one day be a purchase that would flag me "potential pirate"?
Having said that, I'm reminded of the law requiring London taxi drivers to carry a bale of hay with them at all times. The law was passed back when taxis were horse-drawn, to ensure the horse was always properly fed; when taxis became horseless, the law stopped being enforced. These days, it's increasingly easy to enforce laws thoroughly - look at speed cameras, anti-theft tags in stores, CCTV. Previously, law enforcement had some built-in "slack": the police wouldn't bother chasing and stopping a driver doing 31 in a 30 limit - but with an automated camera, what's to stop them setting the trigger speed at 31 and sending out automated fines?
Really, we'll need some "housekeeping" done on laws. (The "hay in taxis" one was repealed a few years ago, by the way.) Instead of the law setting strict limits on behavior - in the knowledge they cannot be enforced strictly -as written - laws will have to define and justify the prohibitions much more precisely and thoroughly.
Ideally, we'd see a constitutional amendment (or equivalent) of "no crime without victim" - out go all the silly laws, from the "hay in taxis" law to restrictions on consenting sexual acts (Texas!). How on earth can you justify making something a crime, when you cannot show that it harms anybody?
At some point, the DVD-R/DVD-RW technology will get to where it can make a verbatim copy of a still-protected DVD, and the game will be up for them, since people will just copy verbatim images of the CSS'ed DVD's themselves.
In fact, you could just send the raw DVD data over a network to a remote site *now*, and burn a copy, and to heck with the idea of CSS anyway: a bit-for-bit copy is identical: let your DVD player DeCSS the contents for you with legal chips.
Not with a "normal" DVD burner: they can't write the keys to the appropriate track, it seems. The CSS keys are stored in a special area, which cannot even be read with normal DVD drives directly: you have to go through a cryptographic dance with the hardware (css_auth) before you can read that track. Consumer-type DVD recorders cannot write to that track, and ISTR it's not writable on standard blanks either - you need a special "mastering" recorder and blank. Since those recorders are aimed at movie studios, and priced accordingly, with the blanks costing more than pre-recorded DVDs, that idea is pretty much a non-starter for piracy: it's cheaper to buy legit copies in a store!
Then...the region codes supposedly stop that from happening, given that most of the large scale piracy actually occurs in China, and no one would ever think to bring a Region 1 or a region-free DVD player into China, and none of those DVD's could ever make it back to the U.S., right?
Region coding does strike me as pretty dumb. Apart from the extra costs - instead of making one "English" version, to sell in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Ireland, you have to make and distribute "North America - English" (US/Canada), "Europe - English" (UK/Ireland), "Asia/Pacific - English" (NZ/Australia)...
(Thanks to national censorship, you have to make separate UK versions anyway, with modified artwork to feature the government's censor-approval certificate, but hopefully that will die soon.)
Yet more evidence that the PATRIOT act had little or nothing to do with actual terrorism...
It isn't evidence of anything of the sort. It just confirms what anyone who actually RTFA (Read The Fscking Act): Title III of which ("International Money Laundering Abatement and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act of 2001") is about money laundering, which is what Paypal seem to have been doing.
So: Paypal's money laundering is being prosecuted under the International Money Laundering Abatement... Act. Wow. Yes, it was passed along with various others under the "PATRIOT" heading, but AFAIK nobody ever claimed it was entirely about combatting terrorism; among other things, it altered immigration rules to prevent immigrants being adversely affected. It imposed a logging requirement on telephone monitoring (if the FBI get a "pen register", every access to the records must be logged, with those logs going to the authorizing court). It altered the HAZMAT licensing requirements. Oh, and it imposed trade sanctions on the Taleban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, and increased the penalties for currency fraud, and broadened the definition of bank fraud to cover non-(debit|credit)-card fraud.
Where exactly is it written that PATRIOT had to be entirely about "terrorism", and couldn't touch money laundering or terrorist funding mechanisms??
For whatever reason, Iraqis want to live as they do.
Or they consider living under Saddam Hussein to be the best of several bad options.
Or they are desperate to change it, but every time they try the attempt is brutally suppressed by Hussein's thugs. (Last time, Uday Hussein went out on a killing spree and slaughtered 2,000 civilians, just to work off his anger.) In fact, one of the major reasons for hatred and distrust of the West is that their first attempt post Kuwait - immediately after the Gulf War - was crushed by Hussein using helicopter gunships. (This was before the no-fly zones had been established.) The assistance they had expected from us (we'd just liberated Kuwait, why would we stop there?) never materialised, and they were slaughtered in the thousands.
They have tried, repeatedly, to remove Hussein - but each time, our governments sat back since the status quo was easier for them. Over a decade later, we finally manage to get off our complacent butts and start helping them finish a war we started, in which thousands of their people have died: expecting unadulterated gratitude would seem rather naive. The Kurds in the North managed to win some autonomy, but at a cost of 110,000 or more lives. The Arabs in the South failed in their attempt, which was opposed with equal brutality and greater effect.
If you were in hospital undergoing surgery, and came round to find the surgeon had gone off for a lunch break part-way through, wouldn't you be a little bit pissed off when he finally deigns to finish the job he started, having left you in pain while he didn't think you were important enough to finish treating?
If motive is the difference then please explain the associated motives behind these acts. It seems all the motives are similar in that wish to kill a human being and killing is morally wrong as freejung has so eloquently explained.
I'm afraid I don't regard "because God said so, apparently, in another language, to some guy a few thousand years ago" as outweighing the conclusions of hundreds of millions of intelligent human beings here and now. In every case, there is a perfectly good justification for believing that the killing in question is not in any way evil. As another poster pointed out earlier, there is even some doubt over the translation freejung is using: the term may well have been "murder", not "kill", at which point not even the quotation of God is on freejung's side. I would also point out the Bible contains wars, in which God even intervened on one side to ensure their victory over the other...
Ah, but this is not how the term 'terrorism' is commonly used. The term 'terrorism' has been used to describe the attack on the US Cole and the attack on the Pentagon which were both primarily military targets. It was also used to describe the recent attack on the military barracks in Qatar which has killed two US soldiers and injured many others. Before the media learned that a US soldier was responsible they labeled it a 'terrorist' act.
Technically, the Cole attack wasn't terrorism; the Pentagon one was, since it deliberately killed a plane full of unarmed civilians. They certainly weren't "freedom fighters", since they weren't fighting for freedom of anybody. The closest term is probably "war crime", since they were conducting a false-flag pseudo-military operation in violation of the Geneva Convention, although it resembles terrorism closely enough to satisfy the media. "Terrorist-style" would be quite accurate, since the Cole attack used terrorist methods with a military target. As for the botched grenade attack in Kuwait, "murder" or "treason" would be the correct term.
You missed one other important distinction. 'Collateral damage' is used by those as a tool to lesson the culpability and mental anguish by those who seek to justify the pre-meditated killing of babies to achieve an end.
The "killing of babies" is not in any way pre-meditated; the Allies go to enormous lengths to avoid killing any civilians. Likewise, drivers take great care to avoid running people over - but sometimes, it fails, and people die accidentally. Would you consider that a "pre-meditated" killing? In neither case is the killing intended, by anybody. Collateral damage is simply the correct term, just as "traffic accident victim" is for the latter. There is nothing euphemistic about either: they simply describe the truth about it, unlike your reference to "pre-meditated killing", which is factually incorrect.
The current administration will be responsible for the killing of countless human beings in this Iraq war and Afghanistan.
Hardly "countless"; as I pointed out, by Iraq's own figures this conflict has accidentally killed about one-sixth the number of Iraqi civilians Uday Hussein personally murdered in a single day. Over the course of this year, the war will have saved many thousands of Iraqi civilian lives overall.
As we've seen the killing of our neighbors and enemies is the second greatest sin we can commit.
As we've seen, it is sometimes necessary to kill one person to save a dozen more.
It is in direct contradiction to the law of God:
... Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live? Or try reading Deuteronomy 17. The bit about stoning those who worship other gods to death. Still convinced that God is totally opposed to killing? When God himself orders his followers to kill certain groups of people, how can you believe freejung's version?
Indeed lots of games are banned in Germany. Another option is to substitute blood for some green substance (only aliens could have green blood).
Hm. Killing people like us is bad, but killing other kinds of people is fine. Why does this policy - especially from the German government - worry me...?
I've always felt that there are some - usually quite obvious - cases where killing someone is justified. Self-defense, for example, or situations like that. A few weeks ago, I saw a British MP claim that invading Iraq would somehow be illegal - at which point, I remembered the incident in the UK a few years ago, in Dunblane:
Thomas Hamilton decided he'd had enough, and went into the local primary school with a couple of pistols and a load of ammunition. He went into the school gym, and opened fire. Now, under UK law, if I had been standing behind him with a weapon (gun, knife, whatever) and I killed him, that would be illegal (murder). (UK law recognizes self-defense, but this case doesn't count.) Illegal - but would anyone try to claim it would be wrong? In this case, I'd say the illegality is simple a "bug" in the law.
Anyway, back on topic: sometimes killing is wrong, sometimes it's right. What kind of message does the government deciding that to kill something is totally wrong, even if you're only pretending - unless the ones you kill have different-colored blood, in which case it's fine?!?
I have to admit, I am a little confused about the difference between "killing" and "murder."
Motive. Murder essentially is the subset of killing which is wrong: an execution, a fatal shooting in self-defence and an enemy soldier being shot on a battlefield are all killing, but none is a murder.
Perhaps you can explain it to me. I am also a little confused about the difference between "shock and awe" and "terror",
The target and intentions. "Shock and awe", in this case, is intended to demonstrate to the Iraqi regime the overwhelming technical superiority of our forces, by destroying legitimate military targets, in the hope this will dissuade [some of] them from fighting. Terrorism is when you target civilians, to intimidate the general population. The attacks of 9/11 were terrorism; Al Queda firing a missile at the Pentagon would not have been.
the difference between "freedom fighter" and "terrorist",
Again, target: terrorists target civilians, undefended targets - a "freedom fighter" would attack the enemy military, just as an army would. The old claim "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter", that is not the case.
the difference between "collateral damage" and "dead babies",
There, there is an intersection of the two. Collateral damage is essentially any unintentional damage, from knocking out a bridge you didn't want damaged, to a stray bomb hitting someone's home. "Dead babies" caused by an attack are indeed collateral damage, but then many of the 1.7m deaths Hussein's regime has caused so far are also "dead babies"...
the difference between "liberation" and "conquest",
The result afterwards. D-day, and for that matter the whole Allied side of WWII, was liberation: the British and American forces invaded France and Germany, but left them under the rule of French and German governments rather than making them British or American territory. The German invasion of Poland (and other countries) was a conquest: they took Polish territory for their own.
the difference between "humanitarian aid" and "occupation",
Duh. Humanitarian aid is what we have been providing for Iraq for over a decade now, mostly via "Oil For Food": Hussein's brutal regime feeds only the people it wishes, and starves opponents as a means of control. An occupation would be a matter of control, nothing to do with feeding the population.
the difference between "police action" and "war",
Difficult. This is mostly a diplomatic piece of BS; in practice, they are both a conflict between two or more entities.
and indeed the difference between the principles held by the current US and Iraqi regimes.
First, the Iraqi regime has killed around 1.7m people, between the two failed conquests (of Iran and Kuwait) and suppression of internal dissent. You are free to disagree with Bush; criticise Hussein in Iraq, and you and your family will be tortured to death. If an Iraqi town opposes Hussein, they'll be gassed or attacked with gunships.
Hussein's older son, Uday, deliberately killed more Iraqi civilians in one day (2000) in revenge for an attempted coup than the Allies have accidentally killed so far in both Gulf Wars combined. He now has the endearing habit of dropping prisoners into a plastic shredder designed for bulk waste disposal; the lucky ones go in head-first, and die quickly. (This comes from witness affidavits gathered as evidence in the hope of bringing Hussein's regime to trial for his crimes against humanity, as Hitler's was at Nuremberg.)
Even attempting to equate the two in the way you do suggests you are either a troll, or deranged; there have been individual days on which Hussein's regime has deliberately killed more of his own civilians than the Allies have accidentally killed in both wars combined. That, to me, is a pretty big distinction.
It's not the Patriot act that is necessarily a problem. It's the continual sweeping of more and more formerly innocent acts or low-pain crime acts into the "terrorist" category, allowing incredibly unjust punishment for the "crime".
Which, AFAICS, PATRIOT doesn't do - it does affect multiple crimes, including money laundering, currency forgery, bank frauds and others, but doesn't call them terrorism. I agree trying to broaden the "terrorist" label is bad, but don't think PATRIOT actually does this.
In Oregon, a recently proposed bill puts "blocking a freeway" as a "terrorist act". Yes, go to jail for life because your car got stuck, and you didn't hire an expensive enough lawyer.
Hm. Google doesn't seem to give any useful results on that yet, although I read about a similar law earlier; if it's the same law, your "... your car got stuck..." scenario is a straw man. It refers to the intentional disruption of traffic - if this is the same law, your line is like "murder laws are dreadful: I could get the chair if I accidentally back my car over someone".
This is what scares me. "Terrorism" is the new "Communism". We must "fight it" at "all costs", and in the process, trade our freedoms away in the name of "Freedom". Feh.
I want terrorism fought (and other crimes, of course!). We should work very hard to crush Al Queda and their "affiliates", and make it very clear that anyone trying it again will face the same fate - then get back to normal. Yes, we should be wary of over-reacting - but also of under-reacting: look in Europe, where terrorist groups such as ETA, Red Army Faction, Baader-Meinhof, the IRA (Provisional IRA, Official IRA and Real IRA!), assorted "loyalist" groups in Northern Ireland, and others, have been in existence for decades. If you visit a UK railway station or airport, you will notice there are no bins, no left luggage lockers - all because of a terrorist group which has been blowing up bits of the UK since before I was born. I hope the US can avoid falling into this mess - so far, I'm quite hopeful.
This, incidentally, has been one advantage to the post-9/11 anti-terrorist work: supporting groups like the IRA is finally a crime in the US. How would you feel if groups in the UK openly solicited donations to fund Al Queda - not a cover group, not some other offshoot, but "Help fund another 9/11 - every penny counts!"?
Despite all the talk of trading freedom for security, I don't see this happening. On the other hand, I don't regard security checks at airports as being an erosion of "freedom". Perhaps because I grew up in the UK, which has had the sort of airport screening the US only introduced post-9/11 for more than a decade now; the only aircraft I've boarded in the UK without going through metal detectors, ID checks and bag X-ray were Air Force ones.
I don't see PATRIOT as eroding anything. Then again, I agree with the law I saw earlier today outlawing intentional obstruction of or interference with transport systems: that kind of behavior should [IMO] be illegal and be properly punished. If there's a version which would, as you say, criminalize your car breaking down, do you have a URL?
compared to the US Constitution (where the federal government cannot violate it, at all, ever
Have you looked at the PATRIOT act recently?
Yes. If any of it does violate the Constitution - and I haven't yet found any part which does - that part is null and void. (Unlike the UK, where such an act would be able to override any "rights" guaranteed by ECHR.) For comparison purposes, Blunkett's recent changes allow the government to detain UK citizens indefinitely - in secret. No lawyer, no right to inform anyone: you just disappear. (ISTR some claims PATRIOT did this; it doesn't. It allows for the detention of aliens pending deportation or prosecution, and the alien must be either begin being prosecuted or deported or be released within 7 days. You can't just be dumped in a cell in secret and forgotten.)
I can't get the EFF's analysis of PATRIOT to load - even from Google's cache - so I'm reading the Act itself. So far, I've found such heinous crimes against humanity as: some counter-terrorism funding. Employing translators for the DOJ. Classing electronic and voicemail communications with phone calls. Oh, the government is now barred from requesting your cable "selection of video programming". The provision for a limited delay of notification of a warrant, provided you convince the court the delay is necessary, and the warrant does not allow seizure of physical property, could be regarded as a problem - but the UK has had that for years. Then they tighten requirements for FISA 'pen register' monitoring.
I'll admit section 501 might be considered a problem (the subpoena of material, in secret) - but there are strong restrictions on how and when that power may be used, and by whom. Any such monitoring must also be logged, with the logs being supplied to the court which issued the original order. It adds trade sanctions against the Taleban - rather academic by now, I think!
SEC. 222. ASSISTANCE TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES.
Nothing in this Act shall impose any additional technical obligation or requirement on a provider of a wire or electronic communication service or other person to furnish facilities or technical assistance. A provider of a wire or electronic communication service, landlord, custodian, or other person who furnishes facilities or technical assistance pursuant to section 216 shall be reasonably compensated for such reasonable expenditures incurred in providing such facilities or assistance.
That helps answer several fears, I think. There's also a sunset clause, just in case...
Technically, the "USA PATRIOT Act" includes the "International Money Laundering Abatement and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act of 2001" - although substantial, it mostly copies the UK's anti-money laundering requirements for banks, plus the seizure of assets of terrorists and other criminals.
***
In short: I have read the entire PATRIOT Act, and see nothing at all 'evil' in it. A few oddities - technically, it makes it a crime to derail a ferry... - but nothing bad, let alone unconstitutional! The one criticism I have is that several elements are carried out with some degree of secrecy, but I'm well aware that is often necessary.
The EFF's page is finally loaded, and... well, I'm glad I haven't donated to them! They do raise one valid query about PATRIOT (that the delayed notification of warrants may be a 4th Amendment issue) but apart from that, I get the impression they are just trying to raise funds through scaremongering. For all the SlashFUD on the subject, how many/. readers have actually read (and understood!) the Act itself?
Or have you forgotten that all you need to do to become President of the US is just get a court to say nobody needs to count the votes...
What they actually said was "no, there shouldn't be a third recount, we'll let the result of the first two counts stand". On the first count: Bush won, but by a small margin, so there was a recount to double-check. He won that count too. Then Gore starts whining "not fair, I wanted to win! Keep counting until it says I did!"
From my (non-USian) perspective, Gore looked like a whiny bad loser. Counting pieces of paper is hardly rocket science, and when both counts say the other guy has more pieces of paper than you do, it's a fairly safe bet that's the case. Now, perhaps some of your would-be voters are too dumb to make a hole in the right place (at which point, WTF are they allowed to vote for? Normally the insane and incapable are excluded...) - but is that really a good enough argument to justify ignoring the real result?
Summary: Gore lost. Twice. Then he tried to get a court to give him a third go. From this lot, I'd say the biggest single improvement in US elections would be deporting Gore;-)
There is, actually. It's called the Human Rights Act. It has freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc.
Unfortunately, most of it is, in geek-speak, bug-ridden. The freedom of expression, for example, has paragraph 2: essentially, it says (1) You have the right to freedom of expression... (2) subject to the interests of national security. As loopholes go, that's pretty damn big. ("We have to censor $group - they might spread information about $govt_stuff!")
Then, we come to the ability of governments to withdraw from (most) elements of it, by giving 6 months notice. So, any government using this piece of paper to "protect" its citizens' rights could just say "Effective 6 months from now, the 'freedom of speech' section no longer applies here". Some sections are protected from this (the prohibition on torture, for example, cannot be suspended without withdrawing from the ECHR entirely) - but compared to the US Constitution (where the federal government cannot violate it, at all, ever. In the UK, it is the Human Rights Act: a mere Act of Parliament - which can be changed by any subsequent Act. In the US, the Constitution is set in stone; only a full Amendment (requiring the support of 75% of the State legislatures, as well as Congress) can remove or change bits. It's a great deal harder to push 38 other legislative bodies, in addition to both halves of Congress, to accept your change than it is to convince the UK's House of Commons...
The Human Rights Act is certainly an improvement on what the UK had before (basically "All your rights are belong to us"!) - but still far from a robust protection of rights. It also misses a great deal; ISTR there's no right to defend yourself or property, for example...
Not really. Sometimes security provides freedom. I.e. I'm free to vote, and security prevents people from taking that away. People can't (shouldn't be able to) vote for me, I can't be physically detained from voting etc etc..
Depends what you mean by security. People here seem to be taking it as meaning physical security: not getting blown up, robbed etc. Personally, I'd define security as "keeping rights [i.e. freedoms] secure". Obviously, it's difficult to exercise any given freedom while dead, but there's much more to it than that. Enforcing the Fourth Amendment (or local equivalent), for example.
My view is: as long as individual's rights are respected, the system's OK. Secret wiretaps on suspects? As long as they're properly authorized by a judge, that's OK - the system the EU or UK (I forget which) proposed, of "All ISPs and telcos must retain every log about everyone for 7 years, just in case" is totally unacceptable. On the other hand, I do recognise we need some mechanisms for investigation or monitoring of criminals and suspects: search warrants, telephone intercepts, etc. I'm just not convinced the existing systems need major changes!
If it's scalable and is brought into full production, this could be a truly ground breaking mechanisim for re-newable engergy. Next to the sun and the wind, the Moon's gravitational pull on the earth is about the only other source of near infinite energy this planet has.
The Moon's gravitational pull? The article isn't/.ed yet you know...;-)
This system is driven by temperature differences, not tidal movements, meaning the ultimate power source is mostly the sun with some input from the earth's core. AFAIK we don't get much heat from the moon's gravity... (Just as well, really: any energy we extracted from it would be orbital kinetic energy. Draining that is bad, since it would cause the orbit to decay and squish people.)
In the long term, I hope fusion will be successful; so far, the biggest research reactors only just pass the break-even point (generating more power than they consume), but the difficult bits (getting a reaction going, then feeding fuel in and removing waste while the reaction continues) are just about solved well enough to build bigger reactors. In the short term: fission. Wind and solar still can't produce enough power; oil - well, we know where that gets us! Gas is OK (and at least the US has ample domestic sources of natural gas, so no need to pour cash into Arab states which hate us...) but still produces pollution. Coal is the worst of all: not only does it pollute on a scale normally only seen in nightmares, it even produces more radiation than fission! (All carbon is slightly radioactive, which is how carbon-dating works; when you burn coal by the truckload, all the little bits add up to more than the small amount of uranium used in fission plants.)
So: Kill fossil fuelled powerplants, build more fission, and keep researching fusion. "Renewables" are improving, but still can't do the job properly - apart from anything else, solar and wind power don't even work 24x7, and power storage is nowhere near advanced enough to compensate. So, those nice clean "renewable" plants still need a conventional power station as backup!
But you have to ask yourself- who is the bad guy in this situation? The person that tries to hide illegal weapons factories inside important civilian buildings, or the people that destroy the illegal weapons factories?
Under international law (i.e. Geneva Convention), the former (Saddam) is a war criminal; the latter is OK. The ban is on targetting hospitals etc; you try very hard to avoid hitting them, but sometimes it happens. Just like police cars sometimes hit other cars during chases.
That, of course, is the flaw in the "human shield"'s plan: if they go to protect hospitals or schools with their presence, they make no difference: we are trying very hard to avoid hitting those targets anyway! Then they act all surprised when they find Saddam keeps them well away from Iraqi civilians (many of whom refer to them as "evil shields", since they are protecting his regime not his people) and wants to place them near his own strategic assets instead...
I'm sure the US has some geostationary satellites up for key sections of the planet.
They certainly have geosync satellites, but they aren't useful for visual surveillance: too far out. For video, you need to be quite close; the best results come from airborne drones. LEO (Low Earth Orbit) is OK: 100-odd miles up, where the Space Shuttle, International Space Station etc live. Out in GEO, you're moving at 2 miles per second, more than 20 000 miles up. Photographing the ground from 100+ miles up is difficult enough, but at 20 000?
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
In other words: it's fine in wartime, as long as Congress passes an Act saying so. In peacetime, of course, they have to make their own arrangements.
for most kids sharing files this is *not* a felony, it's not even a criminal offense! only civil!
It was. Until the "No Electronic Theft Act" appeared, which altered the definition of "commercial" to cover file trading as well. So, if you're running Kazaa, WinMX or whatever except with an empty or disabled share at all times, that's (2) and (3) from the parent post covered. As for (1), are you going to claim you accidentally installed that file trading software? If not, NETA would seem to put you into the "felony" bracket as soon as you've traded a couple of dozen albums - or one copy of Win XP, it seems!
Run a P2P app deliberately, trade $1k worth (at retail prices) of material, and it's a misdemeanour (1 year, $100k fine). 10 or more copies, retailing for $2.5k, and it's a felony (3 years, $250k fine). Ouch!
If this is the same sort of device I remember using in college for this purpose then it is simply an inline hi-pass filter that you can buy at radio shack for a couple of bucks. I always worried we would eventually get a GIGANTIC bill, but luckily that never happened. The worst that ever happend was during a boxing match the screen blanked out and a message came on saying 'We know you are stealing this broadcast' or something to that effect. Scared the shit out of us, but nothing ever came of it. We later speculated that maybe the cable company figured out a way to send the message to people with the filters (which were pretty rampant at the time) but couldn't necessarily tell who was using them.
Apparently, DirecTV did something similar: they sent a signal legitimate viewing cards couldn't decode (hence ignored) saying something like "You've won a free holiday! Call 1-800-555-1234". The non-legit cards happily decode the signal, display it, and the dumber users turned themselves in to DirecTV by mistake. Whoops. I don't know if that's an urban myth or not, but DirecTV certainly have a history of using clever technical tricks to screw users with bent cards, rather than getting lawyered up for a fight: here, for example.
To avoid differing versions, costly rewrites and so on, most publishers give their books to a few select committees in Texas (and California) for approval and only if they pass there do they go on to the rest of the country.
Woo, Texas, where the right-wing trolls control the education system.
Anyone else sick of this damn state too?
I don't like the suppression of prostitution references, but I'll still take that over Kansas's objection to the teaching of evolution any day! Prostitution, after all, is hardly a key element of history, while evolution and natural selection are pretty fundamental to biology...
Not a government. Who cares if they choose to censor things in order to make their business stronger/more profitable? If they don't censor it, they'll get locked out of those countries or censored by a third party, which is even less likely to be accurate. Fight government censorship, that's the real problem.
I agree that Google's own filtering is OK - for one thing, almost by definition they do it to improve the search engine, rather than to achieve some nefarious goal. However, the exclusion of Stormfront's pages from the German view only? Given the nature of their site (a "White Nationalist Resource Page", for those too scared or monitored to look for yourselves), I suspect very strongly this is the result of German government censorship. I expect either Google did it themselves, to prevent attacks from the German government, or they were forced to do so by said government.
It's possible this is some sort of moral judgement by Google themselves - except then, why would they suppress the site only from the German view, not the main index?! No, this smells to me very much like government censorship; Germany's approach to free speech seems to be "Say what you want. As long as it doesn't promote political views we don't like, question our official version of history..."
Slashdot Mirror
No. You just have to pay your share of the development costs - just as you do when you buy anything, from a water supply, through food, to computers and vehicles. If you're very poor, the companies charge you less than your share (making some other sucker cover the difference by paying more for his dose of the same drug...)
No corperation should be able to profit off of someones terminal condition just because they happen to have a piece of paper saying they own the equation to make the drug that cures them. Such a thing is morally disgusting.
It's nothing to do with a "piece of paper". It's a case of "I spent $(large number) to develop this cure. I'll cure you, if you pay your share. If you can't afford that, I'll even make some other sucker pay more to cover part of your tab, too."
As for AIDS - there isn't a cure. There are some very expensive drugs which delay some of the problems, and there might be a cure one day. With a large percentage of cases caused by IV drug usage (note the dramatic difference in AIDS incidence per capita between cities which do or do not allow non-prescription needle purchase) I'm far more hostile towards that case than other conditions - I feel very strongly that it is "morally disgusting" to have public money forced into mitigating self-inflicted problems. Yes, there are other cases which aren't self-inflicted. They can get in line with cancer patients, kidney/liver/lung/heart failure patients, and the millions of others awaiting treatment. From what I can see, the system actually works extremely well: transplants and dialysis save huge numbers of lives, and even cancer can be delayed or even removed in many cases. Every day, another improvement in treatment, another few thousand lives saved which would have been lost a few years ago. Is it really so bad?
Incidentally, if you think the US system is bad, look at the UK. All prescription drugs are government controlled: they decide - based on cost - whether or not to permit the use of certain drugs. Unlike the US, you can't borrow money or approach charities to afford an expensive drug: you're just told "no" (often based on price). Would you really prefer that?
* - I know not everyone in the US has insurance, but that's another topic, not related to patents...
Or have pensions. Those who save money for their retirement do so by (indirectly) buying shares (and related assets, such as bonds) with that money. When they come to retire, those shares then provide their income in retirement.
Yours is a very common misconception, that somehow "shareholders" are a separate species. They aren't. Have a 401(k)? You're one of them. A non-government pension? Same. Even the money in a deposit account in a bank is invested in companies, via credit facilities. Basically, if you have money in any form other than cash under the bed, you are one of those corporate investors who will benefit!
That's the trouble: it doesn't stop them doing it, it just makes it unreasonable for them to do so. Before modern radar cameras, laser range-finders and automated summons issuing, doing so would have been extremely impractical: they couldn't do it even if they wanted to. Now? The only thing to stop this happening is that it would be unpopular! Already, we've seen cases (in California) of a contractor to the city setting ultra-strict timings on red-light cameras; the court overturned that particular practice, because the contractor was receiving a cut of the takings - but the UK already has this practice in place with police forces operating cameras and pocketing the revenue!
There is a legal principle, de minimis non curat lex, which allows a little leeway - but I'm not at all confident it would protect the public from that kind of over-zealous policing. In England, one half-mile stretch of road has eight cameras - that's one every hundred metres! Meanwhile, a few segments of the A1 (trunk road from England-Scotland) drop abruptly from a 70 limit to 50 - camera enforced - then revert. No traffic hazard or other excuse, just a nice revenue stream for the police department concerned...
Nothing. In fact, this is exactly what DeCSS does: decrypt the data as if for playback, but dump it to a file instead. Once decrypted, you can copy the resulting video files freely: it's just a big MPEG file. The only difference is that DeCSS contains its own copy of the decryption software, rather than linking against another application to do that job!
I don't really see that as "scary" - think about it: the people you buy stuff from know what stuff they sell to you. This has been true of shopkeepers for as long as they have existed! It's only a recent anomaly that shops became so large and impersonal that you dealt with a different person each time; 50 years ago, you would buy your meat from a butcher, who would simply remember what meat you bought last time. Granted, the database has a better memory for detail, but it isn't doing anything new: it's doing the same old thing, slightly better than before.
I'm a little more concerned about the idea of the government harvesting and combining all this kind of data, of course. Might that pack of CDRs I bought last month one day be a purchase that would flag me "potential pirate"?
Having said that, I'm reminded of the law requiring London taxi drivers to carry a bale of hay with them at all times. The law was passed back when taxis were horse-drawn, to ensure the horse was always properly fed; when taxis became horseless, the law stopped being enforced. These days, it's increasingly easy to enforce laws thoroughly - look at speed cameras, anti-theft tags in stores, CCTV. Previously, law enforcement had some built-in "slack": the police wouldn't bother chasing and stopping a driver doing 31 in a 30 limit - but with an automated camera, what's to stop them setting the trigger speed at 31 and sending out automated fines?
Really, we'll need some "housekeeping" done on laws. (The "hay in taxis" one was repealed a few years ago, by the way.) Instead of the law setting strict limits on behavior - in the knowledge they cannot be enforced strictly -as written - laws will have to define and justify the prohibitions much more precisely and thoroughly.
Ideally, we'd see a constitutional amendment (or equivalent) of "no crime without victim" - out go all the silly laws, from the "hay in taxis" law to restrictions on consenting sexual acts (Texas!). How on earth can you justify making something a crime, when you cannot show that it harms anybody?
In fact, you could just send the raw DVD data over a network to a remote site *now*, and burn a copy, and to heck with the idea of CSS anyway: a bit-for-bit copy is identical: let your DVD player DeCSS the contents for you with legal chips.
Not with a "normal" DVD burner: they can't write the keys to the appropriate track, it seems. The CSS keys are stored in a special area, which cannot even be read with normal DVD drives directly: you have to go through a cryptographic dance with the hardware (css_auth) before you can read that track. Consumer-type DVD recorders cannot write to that track, and ISTR it's not writable on standard blanks either - you need a special "mastering" recorder and blank. Since those recorders are aimed at movie studios, and priced accordingly, with the blanks costing more than pre-recorded DVDs, that idea is pretty much a non-starter for piracy: it's cheaper to buy legit copies in a store!
Then ...the region codes supposedly stop that from happening, given that most of the large scale piracy actually occurs in China, and no one would ever think to bring a Region 1 or a region-free DVD player into China, and none of those DVD's could ever make it back to the U.S., right?
Region coding does strike me as pretty dumb. Apart from the extra costs - instead of making one "English" version, to sell in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Ireland, you have to make and distribute "North America - English" (US/Canada), "Europe - English" (UK/Ireland), "Asia/Pacific - English" (NZ/Australia)...
(Thanks to national censorship, you have to make separate UK versions anyway, with modified artwork to feature the government's censor-approval certificate, but hopefully that will die soon.)
It isn't evidence of anything of the sort. It just confirms what anyone who actually RTFA (Read The Fscking Act): Title III of which ("International Money Laundering Abatement and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act of 2001") is about money laundering, which is what Paypal seem to have been doing.
So: Paypal's money laundering is being prosecuted under the International Money Laundering Abatement ... Act. Wow. Yes, it was passed along with various others under the "PATRIOT" heading, but AFAIK nobody ever claimed it was entirely about combatting terrorism; among other things, it altered immigration rules to prevent immigrants being adversely affected. It imposed a logging requirement on telephone monitoring (if the FBI get a "pen register", every access to the records must be logged, with those logs going to the authorizing court). It altered the HAZMAT licensing requirements. Oh, and it imposed trade sanctions on the Taleban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, and increased the penalties for currency fraud, and broadened the definition of bank fraud to cover non-(debit|credit)-card fraud.
Where exactly is it written that PATRIOT had to be entirely about "terrorism", and couldn't touch money laundering or terrorist funding mechanisms??
Or they are desperate to change it, but every time they try the attempt is brutally suppressed by Hussein's thugs. (Last time, Uday Hussein went out on a killing spree and slaughtered 2,000 civilians, just to work off his anger.) In fact, one of the major reasons for hatred and distrust of the West is that their first attempt post Kuwait - immediately after the Gulf War - was crushed by Hussein using helicopter gunships. (This was before the no-fly zones had been established.) The assistance they had expected from us (we'd just liberated Kuwait, why would we stop there?) never materialised, and they were slaughtered in the thousands.
They have tried, repeatedly, to remove Hussein - but each time, our governments sat back since the status quo was easier for them. Over a decade later, we finally manage to get off our complacent butts and start helping them finish a war we started, in which thousands of their people have died: expecting unadulterated gratitude would seem rather naive. The Kurds in the North managed to win some autonomy, but at a cost of 110,000 or more lives. The Arabs in the South failed in their attempt, which was opposed with equal brutality and greater effect.
If you were in hospital undergoing surgery, and came round to find the surgeon had gone off for a lunch break part-way through, wouldn't you be a little bit pissed off when he finally deigns to finish the job he started, having left you in pain while he didn't think you were important enough to finish treating?
I'm afraid I don't regard "because God said so, apparently, in another language, to some guy a few thousand years ago" as outweighing the conclusions of hundreds of millions of intelligent human beings here and now. In every case, there is a perfectly good justification for believing that the killing in question is not in any way evil. As another poster pointed out earlier, there is even some doubt over the translation freejung is using: the term may well have been "murder", not "kill", at which point not even the quotation of God is on freejung's side. I would also point out the Bible contains wars, in which God even intervened on one side to ensure their victory over the other...
Ah, but this is not how the term 'terrorism' is commonly used. The term 'terrorism' has been used to describe the attack on the US Cole and the attack on the Pentagon which were both primarily military targets. It was also used to describe the recent attack on the military barracks in Qatar which has killed two US soldiers and injured many others. Before the media learned that a US soldier was responsible they labeled it a 'terrorist' act.
Technically, the Cole attack wasn't terrorism; the Pentagon one was, since it deliberately killed a plane full of unarmed civilians. They certainly weren't "freedom fighters", since they weren't fighting for freedom of anybody. The closest term is probably "war crime", since they were conducting a false-flag pseudo-military operation in violation of the Geneva Convention, although it resembles terrorism closely enough to satisfy the media. "Terrorist-style" would be quite accurate, since the Cole attack used terrorist methods with a military target. As for the botched grenade attack in Kuwait, "murder" or "treason" would be the correct term.
You missed one other important distinction. 'Collateral damage' is used by those as a tool to lesson the culpability and mental anguish by those who seek to justify the pre-meditated killing of babies to achieve an end.
The "killing of babies" is not in any way pre-meditated; the Allies go to enormous lengths to avoid killing any civilians. Likewise, drivers take great care to avoid running people over - but sometimes, it fails, and people die accidentally. Would you consider that a "pre-meditated" killing? In neither case is the killing intended, by anybody. Collateral damage is simply the correct term, just as "traffic accident victim" is for the latter. There is nothing euphemistic about either: they simply describe the truth about it, unlike your reference to "pre-meditated killing", which is factually incorrect.
The current administration will be responsible for the killing of countless human beings in this Iraq war and Afghanistan.
Hardly "countless"; as I pointed out, by Iraq's own figures this conflict has accidentally killed about one-sixth the number of Iraqi civilians Uday Hussein personally murdered in a single day. Over the course of this year, the war will have saved many thousands of Iraqi civilian lives overall.
As we've seen the killing of our neighbors and enemies is the second greatest sin we can commit.
As we've seen, it is sometimes necessary to kill one person to save a dozen more.
It is in direct contradiction to the law of God:
(I regretfully ask)
Well... mine seems to struggle with coffee - all those sparks and flashes can't be good. Marshmallows are tricky, too... ;-)
Hm. Killing people like us is bad, but killing other kinds of people is fine. Why does this policy - especially from the German government - worry me...?
I've always felt that there are some - usually quite obvious - cases where killing someone is justified. Self-defense, for example, or situations like that. A few weeks ago, I saw a British MP claim that invading Iraq would somehow be illegal - at which point, I remembered the incident in the UK a few years ago, in Dunblane:
Thomas Hamilton decided he'd had enough, and went into the local primary school with a couple of pistols and a load of ammunition. He went into the school gym, and opened fire. Now, under UK law, if I had been standing behind him with a weapon (gun, knife, whatever) and I killed him, that would be illegal (murder). (UK law recognizes self-defense, but this case doesn't count.) Illegal - but would anyone try to claim it would be wrong? In this case, I'd say the illegality is simple a "bug" in the law.
Anyway, back on topic: sometimes killing is wrong, sometimes it's right. What kind of message does the government deciding that to kill something is totally wrong, even if you're only pretending - unless the ones you kill have different-colored blood, in which case it's fine?!?
Motive. Murder essentially is the subset of killing which is wrong: an execution, a fatal shooting in self-defence and an enemy soldier being shot on a battlefield are all killing, but none is a murder.
Perhaps you can explain it to me. I am also a little confused about the difference between "shock and awe" and "terror",
The target and intentions. "Shock and awe", in this case, is intended to demonstrate to the Iraqi regime the overwhelming technical superiority of our forces, by destroying legitimate military targets, in the hope this will dissuade [some of] them from fighting. Terrorism is when you target civilians, to intimidate the general population. The attacks of 9/11 were terrorism; Al Queda firing a missile at the Pentagon would not have been.
the difference between "freedom fighter" and "terrorist",
Again, target: terrorists target civilians, undefended targets - a "freedom fighter" would attack the enemy military, just as an army would. The old claim "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter", that is not the case.
the difference between "collateral damage" and "dead babies",
There, there is an intersection of the two. Collateral damage is essentially any unintentional damage, from knocking out a bridge you didn't want damaged, to a stray bomb hitting someone's home. "Dead babies" caused by an attack are indeed collateral damage, but then many of the 1.7m deaths Hussein's regime has caused so far are also "dead babies"...
the difference between "liberation" and "conquest",
The result afterwards. D-day, and for that matter the whole Allied side of WWII, was liberation: the British and American forces invaded France and Germany, but left them under the rule of French and German governments rather than making them British or American territory. The German invasion of Poland (and other countries) was a conquest: they took Polish territory for their own.
the difference between "humanitarian aid" and "occupation",
Duh. Humanitarian aid is what we have been providing for Iraq for over a decade now, mostly via "Oil For Food": Hussein's brutal regime feeds only the people it wishes, and starves opponents as a means of control. An occupation would be a matter of control, nothing to do with feeding the population.
the difference between "police action" and "war",
Difficult. This is mostly a diplomatic piece of BS; in practice, they are both a conflict between two or more entities.
and indeed the difference between the principles held by the current US and Iraqi regimes.
First, the Iraqi regime has killed around 1.7m people, between the two failed conquests (of Iran and Kuwait) and suppression of internal dissent. You are free to disagree with Bush; criticise Hussein in Iraq, and you and your family will be tortured to death. If an Iraqi town opposes Hussein, they'll be gassed or attacked with gunships.
Hussein's older son, Uday, deliberately killed more Iraqi civilians in one day (2000) in revenge for an attempted coup than the Allies have accidentally killed so far in both Gulf Wars combined. He now has the endearing habit of dropping prisoners into a plastic shredder designed for bulk waste disposal; the lucky ones go in head-first, and die quickly. (This comes from witness affidavits gathered as evidence in the hope of bringing Hussein's regime to trial for his crimes against humanity, as Hitler's was at Nuremberg.)
Even attempting to equate the two in the way you do suggests you are either a troll, or deranged; there have been individual days on which Hussein's regime has deliberately killed more of his own civilians than the Allies have accidentally killed in both wars combined. That, to me, is a pretty big distinction.
Which, AFAICS, PATRIOT doesn't do - it does affect multiple crimes, including money laundering, currency forgery, bank frauds and others, but doesn't call them terrorism. I agree trying to broaden the "terrorist" label is bad, but don't think PATRIOT actually does this.
In Oregon, a recently proposed bill puts "blocking a freeway" as a "terrorist act". Yes, go to jail for life because your car got stuck, and you didn't hire an expensive enough lawyer.
Hm. Google doesn't seem to give any useful results on that yet, although I read about a similar law earlier; if it's the same law, your "... your car got stuck..." scenario is a straw man. It refers to the intentional disruption of traffic - if this is the same law, your line is like "murder laws are dreadful: I could get the chair if I accidentally back my car over someone".
This is what scares me. "Terrorism" is the new "Communism". We must "fight it" at "all costs", and in the process, trade our freedoms away in the name of "Freedom". Feh.
I want terrorism fought (and other crimes, of course!). We should work very hard to crush Al Queda and their "affiliates", and make it very clear that anyone trying it again will face the same fate - then get back to normal. Yes, we should be wary of over-reacting - but also of under-reacting: look in Europe, where terrorist groups such as ETA, Red Army Faction, Baader-Meinhof, the IRA (Provisional IRA, Official IRA and Real IRA!), assorted "loyalist" groups in Northern Ireland, and others, have been in existence for decades. If you visit a UK railway station or airport, you will notice there are no bins, no left luggage lockers - all because of a terrorist group which has been blowing up bits of the UK since before I was born. I hope the US can avoid falling into this mess - so far, I'm quite hopeful.
This, incidentally, has been one advantage to the post-9/11 anti-terrorist work: supporting groups like the IRA is finally a crime in the US. How would you feel if groups in the UK openly solicited donations to fund Al Queda - not a cover group, not some other offshoot, but "Help fund another 9/11 - every penny counts!"?
Despite all the talk of trading freedom for security, I don't see this happening. On the other hand, I don't regard security checks at airports as being an erosion of "freedom". Perhaps because I grew up in the UK, which has had the sort of airport screening the US only introduced post-9/11 for more than a decade now; the only aircraft I've boarded in the UK without going through metal detectors, ID checks and bag X-ray were Air Force ones.
I don't see PATRIOT as eroding anything. Then again, I agree with the law I saw earlier today outlawing intentional obstruction of or interference with transport systems: that kind of behavior should [IMO] be illegal and be properly punished. If there's a version which would, as you say, criminalize your car breaking down, do you have a URL?
Yes. If any of it does violate the Constitution - and I haven't yet found any part which does - that part is null and void. (Unlike the UK, where such an act would be able to override any "rights" guaranteed by ECHR.) For comparison purposes, Blunkett's recent changes allow the government to detain UK citizens indefinitely - in secret. No lawyer, no right to inform anyone: you just disappear. (ISTR some claims PATRIOT did this; it doesn't. It allows for the detention of aliens pending deportation or prosecution, and the alien must be either begin being prosecuted or deported or be released within 7 days. You can't just be dumped in a cell in secret and forgotten.)
I can't get the EFF's analysis of PATRIOT to load - even from Google's cache - so I'm reading the Act itself. So far, I've found such heinous crimes against humanity as: some counter-terrorism funding. Employing translators for the DOJ. Classing electronic and voicemail communications with phone calls. Oh, the government is now barred from requesting your cable "selection of video programming". The provision for a limited delay of notification of a warrant, provided you convince the court the delay is necessary, and the warrant does not allow seizure of physical property, could be regarded as a problem - but the UK has had that for years. Then they tighten requirements for FISA 'pen register' monitoring.
I'll admit section 501 might be considered a problem (the subpoena of material, in secret) - but there are strong restrictions on how and when that power may be used, and by whom. Any such monitoring must also be logged, with the logs being supplied to the court which issued the original order. It adds trade sanctions against the Taleban - rather academic by now, I think!
That helps answer several fears, I think. There's also a sunset clause, just in case...
Technically, the "USA PATRIOT Act" includes the "International Money Laundering Abatement and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act of 2001" - although substantial, it mostly copies the UK's anti-money laundering requirements for banks, plus the seizure of assets of terrorists and other criminals.
***
In short: I have read the entire PATRIOT Act, and see nothing at all 'evil' in it. A few oddities - technically, it makes it a crime to derail a ferry... - but nothing bad, let alone unconstitutional! The one criticism I have is that several elements are carried out with some degree of secrecy, but I'm well aware that is often necessary.
The EFF's page is finally loaded, and... well, I'm glad I haven't donated to them! They do raise one valid query about PATRIOT (that the delayed notification of warrants may be a 4th Amendment issue) but apart from that, I get the impression they are just trying to raise funds through scaremongering. For all the SlashFUD on the subject, how many /. readers have actually read (and understood!) the Act itself?
What they actually said was "no, there shouldn't be a third recount, we'll let the result of the first two counts stand". On the first count: Bush won, but by a small margin, so there was a recount to double-check. He won that count too. Then Gore starts whining "not fair, I wanted to win! Keep counting until it says I did!"
From my (non-USian) perspective, Gore looked like a whiny bad loser. Counting pieces of paper is hardly rocket science, and when both counts say the other guy has more pieces of paper than you do, it's a fairly safe bet that's the case. Now, perhaps some of your would-be voters are too dumb to make a hole in the right place (at which point, WTF are they allowed to vote for? Normally the insane and incapable are excluded...) - but is that really a good enough argument to justify ignoring the real result?
Summary: Gore lost. Twice. Then he tried to get a court to give him a third go. From this lot, I'd say the biggest single improvement in US elections would be deporting Gore ;-)
Unfortunately, most of it is, in geek-speak, bug-ridden. The freedom of expression, for example, has paragraph 2: essentially, it says (1) You have the right to freedom of expression ... (2) subject to the interests of national security. As loopholes go, that's pretty damn big. ("We have to censor $group - they might spread information about $govt_stuff!")
Then, we come to the ability of governments to withdraw from (most) elements of it, by giving 6 months notice. So, any government using this piece of paper to "protect" its citizens' rights could just say "Effective 6 months from now, the 'freedom of speech' section no longer applies here". Some sections are protected from this (the prohibition on torture, for example, cannot be suspended without withdrawing from the ECHR entirely) - but compared to the US Constitution (where the federal government cannot violate it, at all, ever. In the UK, it is the Human Rights Act: a mere Act of Parliament - which can be changed by any subsequent Act. In the US, the Constitution is set in stone; only a full Amendment (requiring the support of 75% of the State legislatures, as well as Congress) can remove or change bits. It's a great deal harder to push 38 other legislative bodies, in addition to both halves of Congress, to accept your change than it is to convince the UK's House of Commons...
The Human Rights Act is certainly an improvement on what the UK had before (basically "All your rights are belong to us"!) - but still far from a robust protection of rights. It also misses a great deal; ISTR there's no right to defend yourself or property, for example...
Depends what you mean by security. People here seem to be taking it as meaning physical security: not getting blown up, robbed etc. Personally, I'd define security as "keeping rights [i.e. freedoms] secure". Obviously, it's difficult to exercise any given freedom while dead, but there's much more to it than that. Enforcing the Fourth Amendment (or local equivalent), for example.
My view is: as long as individual's rights are respected, the system's OK. Secret wiretaps on suspects? As long as they're properly authorized by a judge, that's OK - the system the EU or UK (I forget which) proposed, of "All ISPs and telcos must retain every log about everyone for 7 years, just in case" is totally unacceptable. On the other hand, I do recognise we need some mechanisms for investigation or monitoring of criminals and suspects: search warrants, telephone intercepts, etc. I'm just not convinced the existing systems need major changes!
The Moon's gravitational pull? The article isn't /.ed yet you know... ;-)
This system is driven by temperature differences, not tidal movements, meaning the ultimate power source is mostly the sun with some input from the earth's core. AFAIK we don't get much heat from the moon's gravity ... (Just as well, really: any energy we extracted from it would be orbital kinetic energy. Draining that is bad, since it would cause the orbit to decay and squish people.)
In the long term, I hope fusion will be successful; so far, the biggest research reactors only just pass the break-even point (generating more power than they consume), but the difficult bits (getting a reaction going, then feeding fuel in and removing waste while the reaction continues) are just about solved well enough to build bigger reactors. In the short term: fission. Wind and solar still can't produce enough power; oil - well, we know where that gets us! Gas is OK (and at least the US has ample domestic sources of natural gas, so no need to pour cash into Arab states which hate us...) but still produces pollution. Coal is the worst of all: not only does it pollute on a scale normally only seen in nightmares, it even produces more radiation than fission! (All carbon is slightly radioactive, which is how carbon-dating works; when you burn coal by the truckload, all the little bits add up to more than the small amount of uranium used in fission plants.)
So: Kill fossil fuelled powerplants, build more fission, and keep researching fusion. "Renewables" are improving, but still can't do the job properly - apart from anything else, solar and wind power don't even work 24x7, and power storage is nowhere near advanced enough to compensate. So, those nice clean "renewable" plants still need a conventional power station as backup!
Under international law (i.e. Geneva Convention), the former (Saddam) is a war criminal; the latter is OK. The ban is on targetting hospitals etc; you try very hard to avoid hitting them, but sometimes it happens. Just like police cars sometimes hit other cars during chases.
That, of course, is the flaw in the "human shield"'s plan: if they go to protect hospitals or schools with their presence, they make no difference: we are trying very hard to avoid hitting those targets anyway! Then they act all surprised when they find Saddam keeps them well away from Iraqi civilians (many of whom refer to them as "evil shields", since they are protecting his regime not his people) and wants to place them near his own strategic assets instead...
They certainly have geosync satellites, but they aren't useful for visual surveillance: too far out. For video, you need to be quite close; the best results come from airborne drones. LEO (Low Earth Orbit) is OK: 100-odd miles up, where the Space Shuttle, International Space Station etc live. Out in GEO, you're moving at 2 miles per second, more than 20 000 miles up. Photographing the ground from 100+ miles up is difficult enough, but at 20 000?
In other words: it's fine in wartime, as long as Congress passes an Act saying so. In peacetime, of course, they have to make their own arrangements.
It was. Until the "No Electronic Theft Act" appeared, which altered the definition of "commercial" to cover file trading as well. So, if you're running Kazaa, WinMX or whatever except with an empty or disabled share at all times, that's (2) and (3) from the parent post covered. As for (1), are you going to claim you accidentally installed that file trading software? If not, NETA would seem to put you into the "felony" bracket as soon as you've traded a couple of dozen albums - or one copy of Win XP, it seems!
Run a P2P app deliberately, trade $1k worth (at retail prices) of material, and it's a misdemeanour (1 year, $100k fine). 10 or more copies, retailing for $2.5k, and it's a felony (3 years, $250k fine). Ouch!
Apparently, DirecTV did something similar: they sent a signal legitimate viewing cards couldn't decode (hence ignored) saying something like "You've won a free holiday! Call 1-800-555-1234". The non-legit cards happily decode the signal, display it, and the dumber users turned themselves in to DirecTV by mistake. Whoops. I don't know if that's an urban myth or not, but DirecTV certainly have a history of using clever technical tricks to screw users with bent cards, rather than getting lawyered up for a fight: here, for example.
I don't like the suppression of prostitution references, but I'll still take that over Kansas's objection to the teaching of evolution any day! Prostitution, after all, is hardly a key element of history, while evolution and natural selection are pretty fundamental to biology...
I agree that Google's own filtering is OK - for one thing, almost by definition they do it to improve the search engine, rather than to achieve some nefarious goal. However, the exclusion of Stormfront's pages from the German view only? Given the nature of their site (a "White Nationalist Resource Page", for those too scared or monitored to look for yourselves), I suspect very strongly this is the result of German government censorship. I expect either Google did it themselves, to prevent attacks from the German government, or they were forced to do so by said government.
It's possible this is some sort of moral judgement by Google themselves - except then, why would they suppress the site only from the German view, not the main index?! No, this smells to me very much like government censorship; Germany's approach to free speech seems to be "Say what you want. As long as it doesn't promote political views we don't like, question our official version of history..."