However one of the supposed 'great' things we exported was Democracy, as in the 'free' world, esp. the good ole US of A, which is a kind of democracy gone wild.
That's a little revisionist, isn't it? I seem to remember the United States having to fight a certain war of independence in order to establish said "free world." It is widely accepted that the United States is the oldest modern democracy still in existence, not the UK.
Yeah... the lawyer's right here. The FBI will image your encrypted drive. If you then type your password in and in proceeds to the destroy the data, the FBI will then charge you with tampering with evidence, which they can prove.
P.S. What the hell's a "technologist"? I don't know about you but I am a "cryptographer" or a "computer scientist."
Oh, I see you have a laptop. I want to see what you have on it.
Yeah, sure. Here I'll open up the Z: drive for you.
Hey, there's child porn there - you're under arrest.
*Later*
Open up your Z: drive again so that we can show the court your child porn.
No, I plead the fifth.
You already waved your rights - we're not asking you to do anything new or different, just to repeat what you did before. The fifth amendment doesn't apply.
Succinctly, no. There are certain special cases, but it's a pretty clear no, once you waive your rights, you cannot re-invoke them. I highly doubt that SCOTUS will take this case.
TFA states these workers are being paid 41 cents/hour to work 84 hour weeks. Let's pay them 82 cents/hour to work 42 hour weeks. This will require twice as many workers, working shifts half as long, and double the labour cost for each keyboard.
Try again. Double the workers, shifts half as long, paying workers double the money per shift - that's quadruple the labor cost.
You missed his point. Your anecdote is not a reliable source of information or statistical truth, because anyone can have a similar, conflicting anecdote.
What? Of course it's faster. Encryption will compress and remove a certain amount of fragmentation from your data. The bottleneck on the operation is disk I/O, not CPU time. The easy way to correctly benchmark an encrypted filesystem is to use a database on the filesystem and then push a lot of queries and writes. Disk I/O will still play a roll, but hopefully the encryption/decryption CPU time will come out on top.
However and that being said, if Russia goes ahead with this project, it would be clever to agitate for a Sputnik-like panic and suggest that America must beat them to the goal of free software, as the thing that will propel humanity into the future.
That doesn't even make sense. That's like a "War on Terrorism" - there's no goal line.
I don't know about others, but I use OS X because I like having a solid, unified GUI with a solid, unified POSIX base. OS X even installs X by default, meaning that I end up using my Macbook Pro as an extremely stable and easily configured BSD distribution.
Wrong. That assumes that you are only using open source software on your Ubuntu installation. You could say the same of Mac (since it's possible to install almost any Unix program on OS X) - you will be more secure from trojans if you only download open source software from a trusted repository.
You're joking right. Let's have a little perspective here.
The World Health Organization said its study, based on interviews with families, indicated with a 95 percent degree of statistical certainty that between 104,000 and 223,000 civilians had died. It based its estimate of 151,000 deaths on that range.
vs.
The sources cited on this page document an estimated death toll in World War II of roughly 72 million, making it the deadliest so far.
Make no mistake getting people off of windows and onto linux is good for us all
Maybe in persuading 3rd parties to support Linux more explicitly, but simply using Linux does not make them productive members of the community.
they'll encourage linux developers to craft better interfaces rather than ones that will simply get you by with the more advanced users.
A good software product is useable by its target audience. In the past, the target audience has been either advanced users or other programmers. In this case, the user interfaces were often productive and intuitive, if not graphical. If the user base changes, the interface should change to fit the demographic, but that does not mean that the previous interface was inferior or bad. Personally, I still prefer command-line utilities, as they can easily be run from automated scripts.
You make a very good argument and I'm pleased to see a reference to Griswold v. Conn. because it's very important. In Griswold, the court did indeed infer a "right to privacy," but they did it through the "penumbra" of the Bill of Rights. This I can't disagree with.
However, the problem with Roe v. Wade isn't that they came to the wrong conclusion, its that they came to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. Instead of relying upon the Bill of Rights, they formed a right to privacy from the 14th Amendment's (sorry, that was a typo in the first post) due process clause. In fact, it was the theory that they deprived a woman of liberty without due process that led to the eventual Roe argument.
The second problem is that Griswold was actually a more precisely worded case than is often suspected. The result of Griswold is that one cannot forbid the use of contraceptives, as that would intervene in the "circle" of privacy, however it is certainly possible to pass a law forbidding the sale of contraceptives without violating that "privacy." While the words "right to privacy" are repeated ad nauseam, their foundation was far more limited before Roe was decided.
A good reference is the book by liberal law scholar Kermit Roosevelt III, The Myth of Judicial Activism. I'll quote the passage dealing with right to privacy here:
The path to Roe begins with the Supreme Court's 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. In that case, the Court struck down a Connecticut law that prohibited the use of contraceptives. The Court's opinion relied on various provisions of the Bill of Rights to find a "zone of privacy" protected from state intrusiion.
Griswold focused on the question of enforcement against a married couple.. and the "privacy" it protected bore some resemblence to the ordinary understanding of the word: it related to intimate activities conducted out of public view. By "forbidding the use of contraceptives rather than regulating their manufacture or sale," the Court wrote, the state had chosen to achieve its goals in the most intrusive way possible. A statute whose enforcement required prying into the private conduct of a married couple could not be sustained. Read carefully, Griswold did not announce a general right to contraception. If anything, it suggested that a law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives would be acceptable: enforcement of that law would not have the same destructive impact on the marital relationship.
The concept of privacy quickly changed form, however. In the 1972 case of Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court struck down a Massachusetts ban on the sale of contraceptives. Eisenstadt read Griswold to establish a right to contraception, and then ruled that the right must extend to unmarried persons as well. "If the right of privacy means anything," the Court wrote, "it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarrented governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child."
Eisenstadt understood "privacy" to signify a right of autonomy in making important decisions. The inclusinon of the reference to childbearing as a protected decision was entirely gratuitous, but it clearly laid the groundwork for Roe. In Roe, the Court assumed that the Due Process Clause protected certain "fundamental rights" unmentioned in the Constitution. I will discuss that assumption in more detail later, but even granting it, a basic question remains. How should the Court decide whether abortion is one of those rights? The Roe opinion does not explain; instead it simply asserts that the right of privacy "is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
OK, minor history lesson here. The Constitution was written after the Revolutionary War, where former British colonists rebelled against (mostly) taxation without representation and subsequently fought a war for independence from the British. You may remember the Declaration of Independence:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
The thing is, it's more than a little difficult to "throw off such Government" when the government owns all the guns. Instead, the idea was that the People could form their own self-regulated militias which could not be stripped of their weapons. If the time came when the government evinced a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it was the duty of the People to hold an organized revolt and throw off the halter of said oppressive government. Hence the full text of the amendment you so naively truncated
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The Second Amendment is not a right for individual gun ownership, it is a right for collective gun ownership in order to preserve the ability for the People to lead an organized upheaval.
Now, whether or not a new amendment should be passed in order to grant such an individual right is a different issue, but one that I am not necessarily opposed to.
So then segregation is legal? Because the Supreme Court said it was in Plessy v. Furgason.
I'm not sure you understand the way stare decisis works. Just because you took a civics class in high school doesn't mean the law works just as simplistically. Essentially, the Supreme Court holds certain decisions as persuasive in deciding future cases. Many cases have different levels of persuasaveness in deciding future cases in the same vein. In this case, the Supreme Court went against generally accepted precedent to establish a new interpretation which, in my opinion, was highly influenced by politics.
Accepting the Supreme Court's most current decision as lawful and binding is not the same as accepting an interpretation as constitutional. If you really wish to argue stare decisis and revision of stare decisis, the ACLU had a number of amicus briefs and other legal documents that detail the position on their website. Whether or not this right-leaning Court's decision will stand is simply something we will have to wait for.
P.S. Mods: If my post was offtopic, so is this entire subthread. Flamebait would have been the better choice if you didn't like what I said.
District of Columbia v. Heller [wikipedia.org]: The Liberals all dissented in this case, which held that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Apparently that's too much freedom for them.
The liberal justices were correct in this case. All available precedent, as well as the conventional interpretation of the amendment itself, has supported the theory that the 2nd amendment gives a collective right to gun ownership. It only gives an individual right if you ignore the first half of the sentence. The ACLU prevents a clear explanation of the position.
I do not support overactive gun control and may even support an amendment that includes individual gun ownership, but the idea that the Constitution does as written is ridiculous.
The majority opinion even presented a compelling argument for Kelo v. City of New London, arguing that eminent domain could be used for public purpose. From Wikipedia:
Kennedy fleshed out this doctrine in his Kelo concurring opinion, in which he sets out a program of civil discovery in the context of a challenge to an assertion of government purpose in the eminent domain context. However, he does not explicitly limit these criteria to eminent domain, nor to minimum scrutiny, suggesting that they may be generalized to all health and welfare regulation in the scrutiny regime. Because Kennedy signed on to the Court's majority opinion, his concurrence is not binding on lower courts. He writes: "A court confronted with a plausible accusation of impermissible favoritism to private parties should [conduct]â¦.a careful and extensive inquiry into âwhether, in fact, the development plan [chronology] [1.] is of primary benefit to . . . the developerâ¦, and private businesses which may eventually locate in the plan areaâ¦, [2.] and in that regard, only of incidental benefit to the cityâ¦[.]â(TM)" Kennedy is also interested in facts of the chronology which show, with respect to government, [3.] awareness ofâ¦depressed economic condition and evidence corroborating the validity of this concernâ¦, [4.] the substantial commitment of public fundsâ¦before most of the private beneficiaries were knownâ¦, [5.] evidence that [government] reviewed a variety of development plansâ¦[,] [6.] [government] chose a private developer from a group of applicants rather than picking out a particular transferee beforehand and⦠[7.] other private beneficiaries of the project [were]â¦unknown [to government] because theâ¦space proposed to be built [had] not yet been rentedâ¦."
The Gonzales v. Raich case was not about anything you cited. The decision was based almost entirely on the Commerce Clause. Their decision was iffy, but it does fit very well with precedent, which has established the Commerce Clause as almost infallible in these situations.
Honestly, I can not say one of your examples is solid. If you really want a questionable liberal legal decision, take a gander at Roe v. Wade. (Disclaimer: I am a Democrat and support legal abortions in the United States.) That decision was a legal travesty: the foundation of the decision was the 4th Amendment, insinuating that the right to have an abortion is equivalent with the right of the people to be secure in their persons. The decision in this case was just so broad and overreaching that I see its legal foundation as almost laughable.
Wait, what? At least the FCC pick is worthy of moderate discussion because it's already happened.
Bush brought us $4/gallon gasoline to appease his corporate masters, and Obama's going to kill the open internet, to do the same.
[citation needed]. Oh wait, there is no citation because you're criticizing his future actions. He hasn't even remotely insinuated that he'd do any such thing! Please tell me you understand how idiotic this is.
The problem is that people are looking at environmentalism and global warming in completely the wrong way. First, a couple disclaimers/clarifications. I believe that global warming is both happening and mostly human caused. I believe this mainly because of the global scientific consensus that this is true. I have met a number of climatologists and various other scientists at universities and I trust their opinion far more than my own on a subject I am not qualified to hold an informed opinion on. (The most persuasive argument I've seen for this consensus was actually a post on the xkcd fora which I have shared for your enjoyment.)
Now, this is where my commonality with most environmentalists ends. I do not believe in "reducing our carbon footprint" or becoming "carbon neutral" or cutting out various other energy sources in our life. This is not because I don't believe that we have a definite effect on global warming or that I don't believe that the consequences aren't dire for failure to act - I simply see an altogether flawed reasoning system in response.
Most environmentalists hear global warming and immediately think "We have to stop driving cars NOW." Well, that's ridiculous. The answer to global warming is not stopping energy production. In fact, in the next couple of years I predict that our energy usage will rise dramatically, not fall. Is there anything wrong with this? Of course not. It seems that environmentalists like to ignore some of the basic laws of thermodynamics and some important universal truths about humanity, civilization, and life itself.
The first of these is that entropy always increases. I'll stop there as this is slashdot and if you don't understand the laws of thermodynamics, you have no place on this site or in this discussion. The second is that the purpose of life - all life - is to increase entropy. I assumed that this was obvious, but maybe not to many people. We can colloquially refer to entropy as being a measure of order in the universe (please don't skewer my fellow physicists, I know I'm hand-waving here!) and it should be quite obvious that life is an ordered structure. Any life, from a tiny bacterium, to a human adult, causes a local increase in order for a universal net decrease in order.
And so we come to my point - humanity's purpose, it's very existence, is to use various forms of energy to do useful work (the scientific definition, mind!) and cause a net increase in entropy in the universe. While the second law of thermodynamics holds, we can never expect anything different. Humanity requires energy in order to function and, indeed, thrive as a species. This is not unnatural or new, it is fundamental to our structure and the universe.
So, the question is: If we hold it as given that humanity will require vast and ever increasing sources of energy in order to function as a productive society, what is to be done about global warming? The answer does not lie in attempting to drastically decrease total energy usage, nor increase net technological efficiency (while a laudable goal, one eventually hits Carnot and this can never provide a long term solution), but to find a new source for our energy usage, be it nuclear power, hydroelectric power, solar power, geothermal, fusion, Dyson sphere - it doesn't matter. I don't feel one ounce of guilt about practicing computer science or playing Halo because not using energy is not the answer to global warming.
In summary, I beg of everyone, please, stop equating carbon dioxide production with energy usage. They are not the same and it is extremely harmful to those of us who wish to bring humanity from the 21st century to many more and bring the Earth with us in a habitable state. Google should not disappear because the have to use energy in order to produce a useful result. In fact, this is true of everything on the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
However one of the supposed 'great' things we exported was Democracy, as in the 'free' world, esp. the good ole US of A, which is a kind of democracy gone wild.
That's a little revisionist, isn't it? I seem to remember the United States having to fight a certain war of independence in order to establish said "free world." It is widely accepted that the United States is the oldest modern democracy still in existence, not the UK.
Try compiling your C Real Mode code in GCC and get back to me.
Yeah... the lawyer's right here. The FBI will image your encrypted drive. If you then type your password in and in proceeds to the destroy the data, the FBI will then charge you with tampering with evidence, which they can prove.
P.S. What the hell's a "technologist"? I don't know about you but I am a "cryptographer" or a "computer scientist."
No what the case was:
Oh, I see you have a laptop. I want to see what you have on it.
Yeah, sure. Here I'll open up the Z: drive for you.
Hey, there's child porn there - you're under arrest.
*Later*
Open up your Z: drive again so that we can show the court your child porn.
No, I plead the fifth.
You already waved your rights - we're not asking you to do anything new or different, just to repeat what you did before. The fifth amendment doesn't apply.
Succinctly, no. There are certain special cases, but it's a pretty clear no, once you waive your rights, you cannot re-invoke them. I highly doubt that SCOTUS will take this case.
TFA states these workers are being paid 41 cents/hour to work 84 hour weeks. Let's pay them 82 cents/hour to work 42 hour weeks. This will require twice as many workers, working shifts half as long, and double the labour cost for each keyboard.
Try again. Double the workers, shifts half as long, paying workers double the money per shift - that's quadruple the labor cost.
You missed his point. Your anecdote is not a reliable source of information or statistical truth, because anyone can have a similar, conflicting anecdote.
What? Of course it's faster. Encryption will compress and remove a certain amount of fragmentation from your data. The bottleneck on the operation is disk I/O, not CPU time. The easy way to correctly benchmark an encrypted filesystem is to use a database on the filesystem and then push a lot of queries and writes. Disk I/O will still play a roll, but hopefully the encryption/decryption CPU time will come out on top.
However and that being said, if Russia goes ahead with this project, it would be clever to agitate for a Sputnik-like panic and suggest that America must beat them to the goal of free software, as the thing that will propel humanity into the future.
That doesn't even make sense. That's like a "War on Terrorism" - there's no goal line.
I don't know about others, but I use OS X because I like having a solid, unified GUI with a solid, unified POSIX base. OS X even installs X by default, meaning that I end up using my Macbook Pro as an extremely stable and easily configured BSD distribution.
Wrong. That assumes that you are only using open source software on your Ubuntu installation. You could say the same of Mac (since it's possible to install almost any Unix program on OS X) - you will be more secure from trojans if you only download open source software from a trusted repository.
You're joking right. Let's have a little perspective here.
The World Health Organization said its study, based on interviews with families, indicated with a 95 percent degree of statistical certainty that between 104,000 and 223,000 civilians had died. It based its estimate of 151,000 deaths on that range.
vs.
The sources cited on this page document an estimated death toll in World War II of roughly 72 million, making it the deadliest so far.
To be fair, they kind of did. They were called "people with slide rules."
Make no mistake getting people off of windows and onto linux is good for us all
Maybe in persuading 3rd parties to support Linux more explicitly, but simply using Linux does not make them productive members of the community.
they'll encourage linux developers to craft better interfaces rather than ones that will simply get you by with the more advanced users.
A good software product is useable by its target audience. In the past, the target audience has been either advanced users or other programmers. In this case, the user interfaces were often productive and intuitive, if not graphical. If the user base changes, the interface should change to fit the demographic, but that does not mean that the previous interface was inferior or bad. Personally, I still prefer command-line utilities, as they can easily be run from automated scripts.
Newbie, no. But it does reveal some of your beliefs about free software.
You make a very good argument and I'm pleased to see a reference to Griswold v. Conn. because it's very important. In Griswold, the court did indeed infer a "right to privacy," but they did it through the "penumbra" of the Bill of Rights. This I can't disagree with.
However, the problem with Roe v. Wade isn't that they came to the wrong conclusion, its that they came to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. Instead of relying upon the Bill of Rights, they formed a right to privacy from the 14th Amendment's (sorry, that was a typo in the first post) due process clause. In fact, it was the theory that they deprived a woman of liberty without due process that led to the eventual Roe argument.
The second problem is that Griswold was actually a more precisely worded case than is often suspected. The result of Griswold is that one cannot forbid the use of contraceptives, as that would intervene in the "circle" of privacy, however it is certainly possible to pass a law forbidding the sale of contraceptives without violating that "privacy." While the words "right to privacy" are repeated ad nauseam, their foundation was far more limited before Roe was decided.
A good reference is the book by liberal law scholar Kermit Roosevelt III, The Myth of Judicial Activism. I'll quote the passage dealing with right to privacy here:
The path to Roe begins with the Supreme Court's 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. In that case, the Court struck down a Connecticut law that prohibited the use of contraceptives. The Court's opinion relied on various provisions of the Bill of Rights to find a "zone of privacy" protected from state intrusiion.
Griswold focused on the question of enforcement against a married couple.. and the "privacy" it protected bore some resemblence to the ordinary understanding of the word: it related to intimate activities conducted out of public view. By "forbidding the use of contraceptives rather than regulating their manufacture or sale," the Court wrote, the state had chosen to achieve its goals in the most intrusive way possible. A statute whose enforcement required prying into the private conduct of a married couple could not be sustained. Read carefully, Griswold did not announce a general right to contraception. If anything, it suggested that a law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives would be acceptable: enforcement of that law would not have the same destructive impact on the marital relationship.
The concept of privacy quickly changed form, however. In the 1972 case of Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court struck down a Massachusetts ban on the sale of contraceptives. Eisenstadt read Griswold to establish a right to contraception, and then ruled that the right must extend to unmarried persons as well. "If the right of privacy means anything," the Court wrote, "it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarrented governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child."
Eisenstadt understood "privacy" to signify a right of autonomy in making important decisions. The inclusinon of the reference to childbearing as a protected decision was entirely gratuitous, but it clearly laid the groundwork for Roe. In Roe, the Court assumed that the Due Process Clause protected certain "fundamental rights" unmentioned in the Constitution. I will discuss that assumption in more detail later, but even granting it, a basic question remains. How should the Court decide whether abortion is one of those rights? The Roe opinion does not explain; instead it simply asserts that the right of privacy "is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
OK, minor history lesson here. The Constitution was written after the Revolutionary War, where former British colonists rebelled against (mostly) taxation without representation and subsequently fought a war for independence from the British. You may remember the Declaration of Independence:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
The thing is, it's more than a little difficult to "throw off such Government" when the government owns all the guns. Instead, the idea was that the People could form their own self-regulated militias which could not be stripped of their weapons. If the time came when the government evinced a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it was the duty of the People to hold an organized revolt and throw off the halter of said oppressive government. Hence the full text of the amendment you so naively truncated
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The Second Amendment is not a right for individual gun ownership, it is a right for collective gun ownership in order to preserve the ability for the People to lead an organized upheaval.
Now, whether or not a new amendment should be passed in order to grant such an individual right is a different issue, but one that I am not necessarily opposed to.
So then segregation is legal? Because the Supreme Court said it was in Plessy v. Furgason.
I'm not sure you understand the way stare decisis works. Just because you took a civics class in high school doesn't mean the law works just as simplistically. Essentially, the Supreme Court holds certain decisions as persuasive in deciding future cases. Many cases have different levels of persuasaveness in deciding future cases in the same vein. In this case, the Supreme Court went against generally accepted precedent to establish a new interpretation which, in my opinion, was highly influenced by politics.
Accepting the Supreme Court's most current decision as lawful and binding is not the same as accepting an interpretation as constitutional. If you really wish to argue stare decisis and revision of stare decisis, the ACLU had a number of amicus briefs and other legal documents that detail the position on their website. Whether or not this right-leaning Court's decision will stand is simply something we will have to wait for.
P.S. Mods: If my post was offtopic, so is this entire subthread. Flamebait would have been the better choice if you didn't like what I said.
You can use the web interface on your DSL modem at the default address of 192.168.1.1 to login and configure your internet access.
If you have FiOS, the installation rep will set it up, but the system is simply DHCP, so that's not really necessary.
District of Columbia v. Heller [wikipedia.org]: The Liberals all dissented in this case, which held that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Apparently that's too much freedom for them.
The liberal justices were correct in this case. All available precedent, as well as the conventional interpretation of the amendment itself, has supported the theory that the 2nd amendment gives a collective right to gun ownership. It only gives an individual right if you ignore the first half of the sentence. The ACLU prevents a clear explanation of the position.
I do not support overactive gun control and may even support an amendment that includes individual gun ownership, but the idea that the Constitution does as written is ridiculous.
The majority opinion even presented a compelling argument for Kelo v. City of New London, arguing that eminent domain could be used for public purpose. From Wikipedia:
Kennedy fleshed out this doctrine in his Kelo concurring opinion, in which he sets out a program of civil discovery in the context of a challenge to an assertion of government purpose in the eminent domain context. However, he does not explicitly limit these criteria to eminent domain, nor to minimum scrutiny, suggesting that they may be generalized to all health and welfare regulation in the scrutiny regime. Because Kennedy signed on to the Court's majority opinion, his concurrence is not binding on lower courts. He writes:
"A court confronted with a plausible accusation of impermissible favoritism to private parties should [conduct]â¦.a careful and extensive inquiry into âwhether, in fact, the development plan [chronology]
[1.] is of primary benefit to . . . the developerâ¦, and private businesses which may eventually locate in the plan areaâ¦,
[2.] and in that regard, only of incidental benefit to the cityâ¦[.]â(TM)"
Kennedy is also interested in facts of the chronology which show, with respect to government,
[3.] awareness ofâ¦depressed economic condition and evidence corroborating the validity of this concernâ¦,
[4.] the substantial commitment of public fundsâ¦before most of the private beneficiaries were knownâ¦,
[5.] evidence that [government] reviewed a variety of development plansâ¦[,]
[6.] [government] chose a private developer from a group of applicants rather than picking out a particular transferee beforehand andâ¦
[7.] other private beneficiaries of the project [were]â¦unknown [to government] because theâ¦space proposed to be built [had] not yet been rentedâ¦."
The Gonzales v. Raich case was not about anything you cited. The decision was based almost entirely on the Commerce Clause. Their decision was iffy, but it does fit very well with precedent, which has established the Commerce Clause as almost infallible in these situations.
Honestly, I can not say one of your examples is solid. If you really want a questionable liberal legal decision, take a gander at Roe v. Wade. (Disclaimer: I am a Democrat and support legal abortions in the United States.) That decision was a legal travesty: the foundation of the decision was the 4th Amendment, insinuating that the right to have an abortion is equivalent with the right of the people to be secure in their persons. The decision in this case was just so broad and overreaching that I see its legal foundation as almost laughable.
Wait, what? At least the FCC pick is worthy of moderate discussion because it's already happened.
Bush brought us $4/gallon gasoline to appease his corporate masters, and Obama's going to kill the open internet, to do the same.
[citation needed]. Oh wait, there is no citation because you're criticizing his future actions. He hasn't even remotely insinuated that he'd do any such thing! Please tell me you understand how idiotic this is.
The problem is that people are looking at environmentalism and global warming in completely the wrong way. First, a couple disclaimers/clarifications. I believe that global warming is both happening and mostly human caused. I believe this mainly because of the global scientific consensus that this is true. I have met a number of climatologists and various other scientists at universities and I trust their opinion far more than my own on a subject I am not qualified to hold an informed opinion on. (The most persuasive argument I've seen for this consensus was actually a post on the xkcd fora which I have shared for your enjoyment.)
Now, this is where my commonality with most environmentalists ends. I do not believe in "reducing our carbon footprint" or becoming "carbon neutral" or cutting out various other energy sources in our life. This is not because I don't believe that we have a definite effect on global warming or that I don't believe that the consequences aren't dire for failure to act - I simply see an altogether flawed reasoning system in response.
Most environmentalists hear global warming and immediately think "We have to stop driving cars NOW." Well, that's ridiculous. The answer to global warming is not stopping energy production. In fact, in the next couple of years I predict that our energy usage will rise dramatically, not fall. Is there anything wrong with this? Of course not. It seems that environmentalists like to ignore some of the basic laws of thermodynamics and some important universal truths about humanity, civilization, and life itself.
The first of these is that entropy always increases. I'll stop there as this is slashdot and if you don't understand the laws of thermodynamics, you have no place on this site or in this discussion. The second is that the purpose of life - all life - is to increase entropy. I assumed that this was obvious, but maybe not to many people. We can colloquially refer to entropy as being a measure of order in the universe (please don't skewer my fellow physicists, I know I'm hand-waving here!) and it should be quite obvious that life is an ordered structure. Any life, from a tiny bacterium, to a human adult, causes a local increase in order for a universal net decrease in order.
And so we come to my point - humanity's purpose, it's very existence, is to use various forms of energy to do useful work (the scientific definition, mind!) and cause a net increase in entropy in the universe. While the second law of thermodynamics holds, we can never expect anything different. Humanity requires energy in order to function and, indeed, thrive as a species. This is not unnatural or new, it is fundamental to our structure and the universe.
So, the question is: If we hold it as given that humanity will require vast and ever increasing sources of energy in order to function as a productive society, what is to be done about global warming? The answer does not lie in attempting to drastically decrease total energy usage, nor increase net technological efficiency (while a laudable goal, one eventually hits Carnot and this can never provide a long term solution), but to find a new source for our energy usage, be it nuclear power, hydroelectric power, solar power, geothermal, fusion, Dyson sphere - it doesn't matter. I don't feel one ounce of guilt about practicing computer science or playing Halo because not using energy is not the answer to global warming.
In summary, I beg of everyone, please, stop equating carbon dioxide production with energy usage. They are not the same and it is extremely harmful to those of us who wish to bring humanity from the 21st century to many more and bring the Earth with us in a habitable state. Google should not disappear because the have to use energy in order to produce a useful result. In fact, this is true of everything on the Earth.
Yeah. It's called a GUI interface to sudo. Have you ever even used OS X?
*ahem* Some of us go to private schools.
Why are true road warriors using 17" laptops? Don't you think that's a tad big?