The Bundy Ranch's events are just a small outlook of what's gonna happen in the future.
Outlooks like Oklahoma City, Waco and Ruby Ridge? Not likely. There are always right wing elements that miscalculate that a civil war is just around the corner, or that armageddon will occur on a specific date, or that a space ship lurks behind an approaching comet. No one wants to pay taxes, but few are willing to deal with the consequences of abolishing federal taxes for everybody. Go ahead and propose that we disband the US military, end social security payments, abandon our space program, suspend the federal court system, get rid of the FBI, get rid of our spy satellites, fire the coast guard and border patrol. Or you could propose that we continue to collect all federal taxes except the ones that affect you.
Tax dodgers like Bundy are just a side show in politics, not a serious political movement. If you were talking about organized transnational corporate tax dodging by regulatory capture, then yes, we could be talking about a serious threat to the republic.
The will of Congress, a GROUP of representative, has much more legitimacy than the will of a single man.
Single man? No, the only person chosen by a majority of the people to represent them as President from 2013-2017. He is not just any old person. The President has a well defined relationship with Congress, unlike a "single man". The Congress in prior years passed all of the laws enabling the President to classify ISPs as common carriers. Congress routinely passes general laws that gives the President a lot of flexibility to execute those laws. For a Republican-type person, you seem foggy about the nature of a republican government.
Obama's policy, which are more those of a monarch than a democratically elected leader, are NOT popular.
I'm sure if you asked people, "Should your cable and Internet provider be allowed to slow down Internet video services like Netflix and Youtube so that they can sell more of their own video services?" and they understood the President's decision, they would agree with the new policy. That is what we are talking about here, Obama standing up to monopoly power on behalf of people as he is supposed to (under anti-trust laws), not a President behaving like a monarch. You have been very ill served by whatever media you used to arrive at your conclusion.
No matter what, the US were never meant to have a strong federal Government.
Your sentiment has a history. It was called the Civil War by some, and the War Between the States by others. It really did happen. A lot of people died. It decided some issues, and changed the relationship between all the states and the federal government.
I don't know if you follow these responses, Redlemming; this is probably a dead discussion at this point. You should take a look at my website. It actually addresses some of the issues you raise. (There is a section addressing the 9th amendment). While I personally think that the 9th amendment has been ignored too much, that doesn't mean anything, unless someone makes me a supreme court judge. Ultimately, SCOTUS decides what the Constitution means, and if they get it wrong, the only recourse is a civil war or a constitutional amendment.
We need to have final decisions on what the Constitution means in specific cases. There is no getting around that. You have to put good people into the Supreme Court to get good decisions out of it. You will never find angels, and there will always be mistakes. A lot of mistakes have accumulated over time.
The Supreme Court is afraid to start legislating from the bench-- to find lots of new rights that weren't in the Constitution. Those new rights put them in the position of telling the States, Congress and President to go shove their fancy new laws up their butts. It is a very precarious position for the Supreme court, which does not raise taxes, or command an army. It's basically hard to tell the Commander in Chief of the U.S. armed forces to go shove it. If you ask them about the Dred Scott decision on any given Sunday, they can tell you what it was and what it meant without looking at their notes. They are understandably hesitant to get blamed for another civil war. Maybe not hesitant enough, as Bush v. Gore (which they had no business deciding, and which was a blatantly political departure from their previous legal decisions), could have sparked a war if Gore had not conceded. They can tell you about the Court's battles with FDR. Do you remember those? They had a direct bearing on whether the court was going to insist on whether people had a fundamental right to contract (do you remember seeing that in the Bill of Rights?), or whether to let the president and Congress use the commerce clause to legislate their way out of the Great Depression.
The bottom line is that these issues are not as easy as you suggest. The problem is not so much ethics, but the mismatch between the English language and the real world. Constitutions and laws are written in English. The laws cannot anticipate every new situation, or really even decribe the current situation very well. No one writing the Bill of Rights anticipated jets, moon landers, the Internet, or even the electrical power grid. Maybe it needs to be rewritten, but then what? Will it anticipate all the issues with artificial intelligence, genetics or other new stuff? No. We will still need people to decide new situations. They will sometimes get it wrong. And they will be afraid to get real creative with the Constitution, to fix the holes that develop, unless we give them their own army and IRS. What is the likelihood that politicians will make campaign promises to give the Supreme Court it's own army and IRS? You can't even assign a real non-zero probablility to that. Just try to imagine the campaign commercial.
You should be mindful where you put the burden of proof. If you accept the burden to prove that something doesn't affect interstate commerce, as you suggest, you will probably lose. If someone had to prove in a way that would convince beyond a reasonable doubt a jury of 12 citizens to vote unanimously that something did affect interstate commerce, then the pot and the wheat case may have turned out differently. But judges and legislators decide what the laws are and whether they are valid; juries decide whether someone broke the law. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has a very low standard for the Federal Government to make laws regarding the commerce clause. If the law has some "rational relation" to a legitimate government interest, the court will defer to the legislature and find that the law is a valid exercise of the commerce clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Legislators ideally would keep their oath of office to faithfully defend the US constitution. Of course, federal legislators use a "you need to prove in Federal Court that I don't have the power" standard for deciding whether or not they have authority over any given matter. So, a judge is generally the wrong person to convince that the commerce clause is being overextended; you must convince your congresscritter.
Sorry, I forgot to spell out the conclusion, for anyone wondering if this was off topic. Of course fishing falls under the interstate commerce clause, and the Supreme Court will have zero difficulty finding this to be so, because the fish can be sold on the interstate seafood market, just like wheat or pot. Even if the fisherman was eating the fish himself, the Supreme Court would not have trouble under it's own precedent finding federal jurisdiction over the matter. I personally don't think the Supreme Court is right about this, but there is little doubt that the Supreme Court will use these precedents to find that the Feds have jurisdiction over fishing.
This kind of Federal overreach could be overturned by a Supreme Court decision, but that is unlikely. The only real hope is a constitutional amendment limiting the interstate commerce clause.
Dude. You have no idea. The Supreme Court has held that a grandmother named "Angel" growing pot in her basement for her own personal consumption for medical purposes falls under the interstate commerce clause because it "affects" interstate commerce, and therefore she can be prosecuted under the federal law banning the possession of marijuana. In the Supreme Courts view, if she didn't grow it herself, she would have to buy it on the open market. Therefore, growing it affects interstate commerce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was not hard for the Supreme Court to decide this, since they had already decided that a farmer growing wheat on his own property for his own consumption could be regulated by the federal government under the interstate commerce clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's not that simple. The/. "article" doesn't exactly provide a comprehensive restatement of the law. Here you go:
Sec. 1519. Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy
``Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
Notice that the law includes not only destruction, but concealing or covering up. So, the trial court didn't have the easy resolution you suggest, nor can the Supreme Court easily dismiss it on the basis that it isn't "destruction".
Ah yes, who better to judge the hero status and medical knowledge of a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders than the flinty, steely eyed, and incisive Anonymous Coward on Slashdot? You are so insightful to realize the often underappreciated vacation value of treating Ebola patients. In fact, with the epidemic just ramping up, perhaps someone with an entrepeneurial flair like you could parlay the crisis into a money making enterpri$e. You could call it Ebola Tour$ for Citizens. Why should Docs have all the fun?
Come to think of it, nice troll AC. You got me. I thought you were serious.
Your certainty unbalances you. You are missing the broader point. In the 1940s, fission chain reactions were new, and not well understood. If they were well understood, everyone would have been making bombs. The risk of igniting the atmosphere was tiny, proved false by experiment, and now it is so very easy to say there was "no possible way for a self-sustaining nitrogen fusion reaction to occur in our atmosphere". The very tiny risk of error carried with it a risk of extinction. How do you calculate whether it is a risk worth taking? And how do you calculate all the unforseen risks and their consequences? You do recall that there were other unforseen nuclear developments for which no risks were initally calculated?
Musk is right. We are like the guy with the pentagram and the holy water. Artificial Intelligence will not stop improving once it becomes equal to human intelligence. AI already outperforms humans for certain well defined tasks, and even more general tasks, like finding the correct Jeopardy questions faster than humans. If we get what we are asking for, AI will be smarter than us and therefore inherently unforseeable (even less forseeable than calculating nuclear interactions). We literally cannot fully comprehend what we are about to create, we just expect it to be more powerful than us. If we humans can easily defeat the Russian or Chinese war robots, and outcompete their research robots, those robots won't be much good, now will they? They will develop robots (or cyborgs or clones) that are smarter than most people, so we better start developing our own right now!
Musk is saying we have to be smarter than that. We evolved this far. Is this as far as we go? We have evolved for greater intelligence to both cooperate and compete with members of our own species, leaving other animals in the dust. Next, our robots will compete for dominance against other robots, quickly evolving and leaving humans in the dust. How do we control that? We better think fast.
Evolution does not have a goal except to reproduce which is by nature amoral. To use it as a moral or social guide is actually immoral.
Perhaps you have not entertained the theory long enough to develop more than a two-dimensional understanding. Your understanding of evolution appears to be contained in a single sentence. If the the law of evolution was merely to reproduce, we would have trillions of one organism. The real world is highly complex, widely varied, and not easily explained by a single sentence. If the theory is correct, then your sense of morality is a product of evolution. Have you really tried to understand why morality might have evolved, or have you constructed a simple scarecrow, and claimed it was a human being so you could win your argument?
Still, there is a difference between calculations and real-world experiments. In 1900, physicists calculated the ultraviolet contribution to blackbody radiation to be infinite. Max Planck came up with a really crazy idea to fix it. No one understood why the new calculations matched so well with experiment, or what they meant. Even Planck thought it was wrong. I think it was finally in 1905 that someone figured out why Planck's constant worked.
The point is: hindsight. You can calculate all you want, and then the real world says: wrong! We are still looking for dark matter, because our calculations don't match the real world. You don't really know until you do the experiment. Then you find out if the world catches on fire. In hindsight, the world still might catch on fire, if we were to use all our bombs.
Why would a robot try to cut off life support to the Mars colony? Because we programmed it to do that. The U.S. has already started down the path of making autonomous war robots. If we get into a non-nuclear conflict with the Russians or Chinese, they will want to have their autonomous fleet of robots to combat ours. And so the race will be on. We will be in a contest for our survival, and we won't be worried about the long term effects or inherent safety of our actions. We worried that the Manhattan Project could start an uncontrolled chain reaction that turned the earth into a big fireball, but we convinced ourselves that we knew what we were doing, and went ahead and did it anyway. In hindsight, we know that the chain reaction is very hard to maintain. But in the 1940's this was not so certain.
Who would want a stupid robot protecting them in war? We will want the best robots in the world, and that means the smartest. The people making the robots will simply tell us that China or Russia is about to attack, and anyone questioning the new AI programs are putting us at great risk. The AI will be *all about* war on humans. We will dump money into making them incredibly intelligent, networked, and deadly.
And you have obviously cast your vote with the plutocrats in sheep's clothing, AC, who have dressed up their victims as wolves. It's called astroturfing. Yes, the public overall can be ignorant of many issues. Modern life is so specialized that almost everyone has an area of expertise, whether it's operating a fast food kitchen or gene splicing. Other than their full time job, people have a general acquaintance with most other topics. But you could just as easily say that the aristocratic portion of a constitutional democratic republic is *one wolf* representing *two sheep* voting on dinner laws. That's really what we have in the U.S. The sheep get to vote on Wolf D or Wolf R in the general elections.
One wonders if you realize a government-imposed "net neutrality" would in reality be a few thousand pages of tortuous regulations that purport to define "net neutrality" but in reality do nothing more than cement the status quo.
Well, you almost got that right. Try, "advance the interests of monopolists and degrade the status quo for consumers." Where is your solution? Elect Wolf R?
Answer me this: if "net neutrality" had been imposed 10-15 years ago, how could today's smartphones been fit into the business model that imposition would have set in stone?
Not that hard. Separate rules for voice and data communications. Don't let the carriers aquire each other to reduce choice. Require carriers to treat competitor data sources equally. (In other words, if Verizon provides tv programming, it must provide Netflix programming at the same speed and with same protocols. This is basic anti-trust procedure.) Allow competitors to sue each other and regulators. Fair competition requires laws and regulations, just like football, and methods for companies to challenge rulings and procedures.
"Net neutrality" is going to stomp innovation in the head. Goverment-regulated industries go nowhere. Look at how staid the US telephone market was until it was deregulated and AT&T broken up. Within just a few years cell phones started appearing.
You are conflating a lot of problems here. The judicial branch of our government was used to break up a monopoly under anti-trust laws, thereby restoring regulated market competition. If you think all regulations disappeared after AT&T was broken up, you are deluded. The telephone industry remained a "Government-regulated" industry. Instead, anti-trust laws, court orders, and yes, government regulations broke up a private monopoly on voice communications. The push by Comcast and Verizon against net neutrality is a step towards restoring private monopolies on digital communications. That's what most of the "sheep" in favor of net neutrality see. They don't believe net neutrality is going to stomp innovation in the head, because innovation has been thriving on the Internet (in case you haven't noticed) with net neutrality. The only thing that stomps innovation in the head is a monopoly.
Look at how air travel was a big deal everyone dressed up for under government regulation. Now, you just hop on a plane (TSA willing - ANOTHER government fuck up...) and go. For a helluva lot less than the equivalent price of 30 or 40 years ago.
Again, government regulation was changed, not eliminated, to restore competition for air routes. If you knew anything about the airline industry, you would understand that this continues to drive airline prices. The airline industry is still highly regulated in many ways.
So what if net neutrality would pass if voted on by the public?
How people are sucked into the idea that we need to give the aristocracy more power is beyond me. Sure, let's tell our leaders not to care what the public thinks. What could go wrong? If there is some great reason not to abide the will of the majority, let's have it. Are the rich minority being unfairly oppressed by net neutrality? Otherwise, your contemptuous attitude is based on a bunch of empty assertions.
If you wonder if I'm just pointing out problems with no solution, check my Homepage.
I didn't mean to troll. I meant to point out the absurdity of calling the doctor who knowingly risked his life to help Ebola patients a fsking idiot. By extension, any doctor who would get in a room with an Ebola patient is an idiot. Where would that leave us? Without competent doctors to treat us if we get a communicable disease. Regardless of whether he took the subway or went bowling when he got back, that man is a hero, equivalent to the 9/11 firefighters. He does not deserve to be called an idiot, and people who call him that deserve to be mocked, at minimum. But I guess mocking is trolling.
Yeah, doctors are idiots! Why the heck did he even go to Guinea in the first place? What was he thinking!? What a moron! If I ever get ebola, I won't want any doctors like him treating me! They are idiots!
It sounds like you have given this some thought. I agree that the solution for "third parties" is to gain influence through the primary process. But the democrats don't have a tea party yet. I am trying to change that. I think a tea party for the democrats should be organized, and precautions need to be taken to keep it from becoming corrupt. Look for my Declaration of Independence to be out soon... http://i-party.us/
I know the discussion is about dead, but I thought I'd mention my plan anyway. It is right on point to your comment. Read the executive summary, for example, or watch the intro. I'm trying to figure out a way to build grass roots support. http://i-party.us/
Dude, you are seriously misinformed. Don't repeat things you heard when you don't really know. A method or device need only meet all of the elements in one claim to infringe. Maybe someone once said that a device must meet all claim elements to infringe, and someone not familiar with patent law repeated that later, but remembered it as "a device must meet all the claims to infringe". Any competent person analyzing infringement first looks to the independent claims to see if there is infringement. If none of the independent claims are infringed, that is typically the end of the story, and I don't know of any cases where it isn't. But I wouldn't be surprised to find unusual exceptions to the rule.
If you google "patent infringement", and go to the first hit that isn't a law firm trying to get business, you get a USPTO website that helpfully states:
What is patent infringement?
Patent infringement is the act of making, using, selling, or offering to sell a patented invention, or importing into the United States a product covered by a claim of a patent without the permission of the patent owner. Further, you may be considered to infringe a patent if you import items into the United States that are made by a patented method, unless the item is materially changed by subsequent processes or becomes a trivial and nonessential component of another product. A person “infringes” a patent by practicing each element of a patent claim with respect to one of these acts. Further, actively encouraging others to infringe patents, or supplying or importing components of a patented invention, and related acts can also give rise to liability in certain cases.
Notice that it says "each element of a patent claim" not "every claim"?
That suggestion does seem like it would make it hard for the HID attorney to continue to assert that Swende is trying "to incite third parties to infringe our intellectual property rights."
Claim 1 of the patent is pretty long, and the disputed software would have to meet all of the limitations of that claim to infringe.
Method of producing an authentication code (CA), comprising cycles for reading binary words (Mn) out of a secret memory (21) comprising a plurality of binary words, wherein, at each cycle, the address for reading a word out of the secret memory (21) is generated from an address generating binary word (GA) forming the result of a combination operation (Fc, ) of words (M1 to Mn) read out of the memory during previous cycles, characterised in that it comprises a transform operation of the address generating word (GA) consisting in logically combining at least one bit (g'0, g'1, g'2) of the address generating word (GA) with at least one bit (r1, r4, r6) of a pseudo-random shift register (26).
Without inspecting the software, and knowing what the HID attorney is asserting, there is no way of forming a legal opinion... and this is in no way a legal opinion, just a recitation of the first patent claim and some questions. But it does look like the method requires using a "pseudo-random shift register" and a "secret memory" among other things. Do the people who are said to infringe actually use this method? Does the code require that such a register and memory be used, or are there ways the code could be used without infringing all of the elements in the claim? Is the target of the letter simply caving to avoid consulting a lawyer?
I see it more as monopoly busting in the last mile, not socialism. The companies sitting on their last mile monopolies are not all about free markets. They are all about capturing legislators and regulators to pass laws and regulations to maintain their monopolies. It is capitalism ("moneyism") in its crudest form, but has nothing to do with free markets.
Unfortunately, the last mile tends to be a natural monopoly, as far as municipal planners are concerned. They don't want companies to come in and compete over the easiest to serve neighborhoods, and leave people in less dense areas out of luck. Planners like that often lose votes. So they have to make a company agree to cover everyone, and then make sure no competitor comes in and serves just the easy areas. See? It just ends up being a monopoly.
So rather than have some new private company come in and take over the monopoly, cities are just deciding to provide services themselves. They do it with roads, sewers, water, and other utilities. Why not internet? You need right of ways, permits, etc. But you don't need to be a genius entrepeneur to run fiber and connect people to the Internet.
There is no need to throw up your hands and give up. Chatanooga managed a high speed public interenet. http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/2.... Plus, you have people like Lawrence Lessig going after the root of the problem of corruption, and getting some serious traction with Mayday PAC. http://mayday.us./ Hell, even I am trying to fix the problems, but I am not getting too much exposure or traction. http://i-party.us./ But I still have hope. There are too many people trying to fix the problem of corruption and increasing monopolistic control for everyone to fail.
I wouldn't be too quick to trust the FDA. David Kessler no longer works there. Industry has gotten much better at capturing federal agencies, and are still learning how to capture universities. True, soda has been around for about a century, but Coke started out in 6.5 ounce bottles, and was made with cane sugar. The six went to ten (which I can remember buying), 12, 16 and now 20 for a single serving. Now it uses high fructose corn syrup. Before you start saying there is no chemical difference, check the science. http://www.princeton.edu/main/...
And, BTW, Kessler doesn't have much good to say about the food industry, and putting sugar in everything. If you don't believe Kessler, you can also listen to this Robert Lustig, who also has a law degree and a medical degee, like Kessler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It's a long video, but it changed my life. Mark Hyman also helped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... When I realized how addicted to sugar I was, I was able to treat sugar like a highly addictive substance, and overcome my addiction. I gave it up in May, and feel better than I ever have since I was a kid. I no longer have heart burn or attacks of the blues. I have more energy, better concentration, and I've lost 20 pounds.
Seriously? When you say "Welcome to stupidity, my friends...." There is this tiny doubt that makes me wonder if you are masterfully joking/trolling...
The eight people who did the study are professors at serious medical universites (Stanford, Berkeley, etc) and you are saying none of those eight thought to correct for age in a study dealing with the length of telomeres? Or considered reporting bias? That they are all seriously stupid? And their peers at the American Journal of Public Health reviewed and published their work, but you caught the glaring flaw after reading a Slashdot summary of a Toronto Sun article about their study? I hope someone mods you up +1 funny.
There is at least one other study from Princeton directly comparing HFCS to sugar, and finding that rats gained significantly more weight when they had access to HFCS. (I also remember reading about a study from Sweden).
I have puzzled about this myself for a long time. I have come up with two possibilities for why there might be a difference.
First, speed matters when forming addictive behaviors. It doesn't matter that cocaine and crack cocaine are the same chemical. It matters that crack goes into your system much faster because it is smoked. I learned in my first year psychology course in college that people taking cocaine reported feeling the highest not when they had the most cocaine in their system, but when the level in their bloodstream was rising the fastest. THAT is when they feel high, and that is the feeling they crave. Rate of change into the blood stream is addictive. So, even though the metabolism may first break down sucrose into fructose and glucose, that speed difference might be akin to the speed difference between cocaine going in your nose or in your lungs. It might be just enough of a difference to make you more obese than sugar, over a long period.
Second, I have heard that HFCS is not merely fructose and glucose. It also has impurities from the process of making it, specifically enzymes that convert starches in corn to fructose. You are eating those enzymes with HFCS. Might it not affect your metabolism? Don't rush too quickly to ideological conclusions based on assumptions. Real world testing does matter.
Anyway, I gave up sugar and HFCS in May. I began to think of them as the addictive equivalent of cigarettes (which I quit ten years ago). Cutting back doesn't work, and never worked for me. Cold turkey is the only way to deal with nicotine, and now sugar. Since May, I no longer have heart burn, I have more energy, better concentration, I don't get the blues very often, and I have lost 20 pounds. From the way my body feels today, I *know* I'm going to live longer.
Slashdot Mirror
Outlooks like Oklahoma City, Waco and Ruby Ridge? Not likely. There are always right wing elements that miscalculate that a civil war is just around the corner, or that armageddon will occur on a specific date, or that a space ship lurks behind an approaching comet. No one wants to pay taxes, but few are willing to deal with the consequences of abolishing federal taxes for everybody. Go ahead and propose that we disband the US military, end social security payments, abandon our space program, suspend the federal court system, get rid of the FBI, get rid of our spy satellites, fire the coast guard and border patrol. Or you could propose that we continue to collect all federal taxes except the ones that affect you.
Tax dodgers like Bundy are just a side show in politics, not a serious political movement. If you were talking about organized transnational corporate tax dodging by regulatory capture, then yes, we could be talking about a serious threat to the republic.
Single man? No, the only person chosen by a majority of the people to represent them as President from 2013-2017. He is not just any old person. The President has a well defined relationship with Congress, unlike a "single man". The Congress in prior years passed all of the laws enabling the President to classify ISPs as common carriers. Congress routinely passes general laws that gives the President a lot of flexibility to execute those laws. For a Republican-type person, you seem foggy about the nature of a republican government.
I'm sure if you asked people, "Should your cable and Internet provider be allowed to slow down Internet video services like Netflix and Youtube so that they can sell more of their own video services?" and they understood the President's decision, they would agree with the new policy. That is what we are talking about here, Obama standing up to monopoly power on behalf of people as he is supposed to (under anti-trust laws), not a President behaving like a monarch. You have been very ill served by whatever media you used to arrive at your conclusion.
Your sentiment has a history. It was called the Civil War by some, and the War Between the States by others. It really did happen. A lot of people died. It decided some issues, and changed the relationship between all the states and the federal government.
We need to have final decisions on what the Constitution means in specific cases. There is no getting around that. You have to put good people into the Supreme Court to get good decisions out of it. You will never find angels, and there will always be mistakes. A lot of mistakes have accumulated over time.
The Supreme Court is afraid to start legislating from the bench-- to find lots of new rights that weren't in the Constitution. Those new rights put them in the position of telling the States, Congress and President to go shove their fancy new laws up their butts. It is a very precarious position for the Supreme court, which does not raise taxes, or command an army. It's basically hard to tell the Commander in Chief of the U.S. armed forces to go shove it. If you ask them about the Dred Scott decision on any given Sunday, they can tell you what it was and what it meant without looking at their notes. They are understandably hesitant to get blamed for another civil war. Maybe not hesitant enough, as Bush v. Gore (which they had no business deciding, and which was a blatantly political departure from their previous legal decisions), could have sparked a war if Gore had not conceded. They can tell you about the Court's battles with FDR. Do you remember those? They had a direct bearing on whether the court was going to insist on whether people had a fundamental right to contract (do you remember seeing that in the Bill of Rights?), or whether to let the president and Congress use the commerce clause to legislate their way out of the Great Depression.
The bottom line is that these issues are not as easy as you suggest. The problem is not so much ethics, but the mismatch between the English language and the real world. Constitutions and laws are written in English. The laws cannot anticipate every new situation, or really even decribe the current situation very well. No one writing the Bill of Rights anticipated jets, moon landers, the Internet, or even the electrical power grid. Maybe it needs to be rewritten, but then what? Will it anticipate all the issues with artificial intelligence, genetics or other new stuff? No. We will still need people to decide new situations. They will sometimes get it wrong. And they will be afraid to get real creative with the Constitution, to fix the holes that develop, unless we give them their own army and IRS. What is the likelihood that politicians will make campaign promises to give the Supreme Court it's own army and IRS? You can't even assign a real non-zero probablility to that. Just try to imagine the campaign commercial.
You should be mindful where you put the burden of proof. If you accept the burden to prove that something doesn't affect interstate commerce, as you suggest, you will probably lose. If someone had to prove in a way that would convince beyond a reasonable doubt a jury of 12 citizens to vote unanimously that something did affect interstate commerce, then the pot and the wheat case may have turned out differently. But judges and legislators decide what the laws are and whether they are valid; juries decide whether someone broke the law. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has a very low standard for the Federal Government to make laws regarding the commerce clause. If the law has some "rational relation" to a legitimate government interest, the court will defer to the legislature and find that the law is a valid exercise of the commerce clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Legislators ideally would keep their oath of office to faithfully defend the US constitution. Of course, federal legislators use a "you need to prove in Federal Court that I don't have the power" standard for deciding whether or not they have authority over any given matter. So, a judge is generally the wrong person to convince that the commerce clause is being overextended; you must convince your congresscritter.
This kind of Federal overreach could be overturned by a Supreme Court decision, but that is unlikely. The only real hope is a constitutional amendment limiting the interstate commerce clause.
It was not hard for the Supreme Court to decide this, since they had already decided that a farmer growing wheat on his own property for his own consumption could be regulated by the federal government under the interstate commerce clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Notice that the law includes not only destruction, but concealing or covering up. So, the trial court didn't have the easy resolution you suggest, nor can the Supreme Court easily dismiss it on the basis that it isn't "destruction".
Come to think of it, nice troll AC. You got me. I thought you were serious.
Musk is right. We are like the guy with the pentagram and the holy water. Artificial Intelligence will not stop improving once it becomes equal to human intelligence. AI already outperforms humans for certain well defined tasks, and even more general tasks, like finding the correct Jeopardy questions faster than humans. If we get what we are asking for, AI will be smarter than us and therefore inherently unforseeable (even less forseeable than calculating nuclear interactions). We literally cannot fully comprehend what we are about to create, we just expect it to be more powerful than us. If we humans can easily defeat the Russian or Chinese war robots, and outcompete their research robots, those robots won't be much good, now will they? They will develop robots (or cyborgs or clones) that are smarter than most people, so we better start developing our own right now!
Musk is saying we have to be smarter than that. We evolved this far. Is this as far as we go? We have evolved for greater intelligence to both cooperate and compete with members of our own species, leaving other animals in the dust. Next, our robots will compete for dominance against other robots, quickly evolving and leaving humans in the dust. How do we control that? We better think fast.
Perhaps you have not entertained the theory long enough to develop more than a two-dimensional understanding. Your understanding of evolution appears to be contained in a single sentence. If the the law of evolution was merely to reproduce, we would have trillions of one organism. The real world is highly complex, widely varied, and not easily explained by a single sentence. If the theory is correct, then your sense of morality is a product of evolution. Have you really tried to understand why morality might have evolved, or have you constructed a simple scarecrow, and claimed it was a human being so you could win your argument?
The point is: hindsight. You can calculate all you want, and then the real world says: wrong! We are still looking for dark matter, because our calculations don't match the real world. You don't really know until you do the experiment. Then you find out if the world catches on fire. In hindsight, the world still might catch on fire, if we were to use all our bombs.
Who would want a stupid robot protecting them in war? We will want the best robots in the world, and that means the smartest. The people making the robots will simply tell us that China or Russia is about to attack, and anyone questioning the new AI programs are putting us at great risk. The AI will be *all about* war on humans. We will dump money into making them incredibly intelligent, networked, and deadly.
Well, you almost got that right. Try, "advance the interests of monopolists and degrade the status quo for consumers." Where is your solution? Elect Wolf R?
Not that hard. Separate rules for voice and data communications. Don't let the carriers aquire each other to reduce choice. Require carriers to treat competitor data sources equally. (In other words, if Verizon provides tv programming, it must provide Netflix programming at the same speed and with same protocols. This is basic anti-trust procedure.) Allow competitors to sue each other and regulators. Fair competition requires laws and regulations, just like football, and methods for companies to challenge rulings and procedures.
You are conflating a lot of problems here. The judicial branch of our government was used to break up a monopoly under anti-trust laws, thereby restoring regulated market competition. If you think all regulations disappeared after AT&T was broken up, you are deluded. The telephone industry remained a "Government-regulated" industry. Instead, anti-trust laws, court orders, and yes, government regulations broke up a private monopoly on voice communications. The push by Comcast and Verizon against net neutrality is a step towards restoring private monopolies on digital communications. That's what most of the "sheep" in favor of net neutrality see. They don't believe net neutrality is going to stomp innovation in the head, because innovation has been thriving on the Internet (in case you haven't noticed) with net neutrality. The only thing that stomps innovation in the head is a monopoly.
Again, government regulation was changed, not eliminated, to restore competition for air routes. If you knew anything about the airline industry, you would understand that this continues to drive airline prices. The airline industry is still highly regulated in many ways.
How people are sucked into the idea that we need to give the aristocracy more power is beyond me. Sure, let's tell our leaders not to care what the public thinks. What could go wrong? If there is some great reason not to abide the will of the majority, let's have it. Are the rich minority being unfairly oppressed by net neutrality? Otherwise, your contemptuous attitude is based on a bunch of empty assertions.
If you wonder if I'm just pointing out problems with no solution, check my Homepage.
I didn't mean to troll. I meant to point out the absurdity of calling the doctor who knowingly risked his life to help Ebola patients a fsking idiot. By extension, any doctor who would get in a room with an Ebola patient is an idiot. Where would that leave us? Without competent doctors to treat us if we get a communicable disease. Regardless of whether he took the subway or went bowling when he got back, that man is a hero, equivalent to the 9/11 firefighters. He does not deserve to be called an idiot, and people who call him that deserve to be mocked, at minimum. But I guess mocking is trolling.
Yeah, doctors are idiots! Why the heck did he even go to Guinea in the first place? What was he thinking!? What a moron! If I ever get ebola, I won't want any doctors like him treating me! They are idiots!
It sounds like you have given this some thought. I agree that the solution for "third parties" is to gain influence through the primary process. But the democrats don't have a tea party yet. I am trying to change that. I think a tea party for the democrats should be organized, and precautions need to be taken to keep it from becoming corrupt. Look for my Declaration of Independence to be out soon... http://i-party.us/
I know the discussion is about dead, but I thought I'd mention my plan anyway. It is right on point to your comment. Read the executive summary, for example, or watch the intro. I'm trying to figure out a way to build grass roots support. http://i-party.us/
Notice that it says "each element of a patent claim" not "every claim"?
That suggestion does seem like it would make it hard for the HID attorney to continue to assert that Swende is trying "to incite third parties to infringe our intellectual property rights."
Without inspecting the software, and knowing what the HID attorney is asserting, there is no way of forming a legal opinion... and this is in no way a legal opinion, just a recitation of the first patent claim and some questions. But it does look like the method requires using a "pseudo-random shift register" and a "secret memory" among other things. Do the people who are said to infringe actually use this method? Does the code require that such a register and memory be used, or are there ways the code could be used without infringing all of the elements in the claim? Is the target of the letter simply caving to avoid consulting a lawyer?
Unfortunately, the last mile tends to be a natural monopoly, as far as municipal planners are concerned. They don't want companies to come in and compete over the easiest to serve neighborhoods, and leave people in less dense areas out of luck. Planners like that often lose votes. So they have to make a company agree to cover everyone, and then make sure no competitor comes in and serves just the easy areas. See? It just ends up being a monopoly.
So rather than have some new private company come in and take over the monopoly, cities are just deciding to provide services themselves. They do it with roads, sewers, water, and other utilities. Why not internet? You need right of ways, permits, etc. But you don't need to be a genius entrepeneur to run fiber and connect people to the Internet.
There is no need to throw up your hands and give up. Chatanooga managed a high speed public interenet. http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/2.... Plus, you have people like Lawrence Lessig going after the root of the problem of corruption, and getting some serious traction with Mayday PAC. http://mayday.us./ Hell, even I am trying to fix the problems, but I am not getting too much exposure or traction. http://i-party.us./ But I still have hope. There are too many people trying to fix the problem of corruption and increasing monopolistic control for everyone to fail.
And, BTW, Kessler doesn't have much good to say about the food industry, and putting sugar in everything. If you don't believe Kessler, you can also listen to this Robert Lustig, who also has a law degree and a medical degee, like Kessler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It's a long video, but it changed my life. Mark Hyman also helped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... When I realized how addicted to sugar I was, I was able to treat sugar like a highly addictive substance, and overcome my addiction. I gave it up in May, and feel better than I ever have since I was a kid. I no longer have heart burn or attacks of the blues. I have more energy, better concentration, and I've lost 20 pounds.
Seriously? When you say "Welcome to stupidity, my friends...." There is this tiny doubt that makes me wonder if you are masterfully joking/trolling... The eight people who did the study are professors at serious medical universites (Stanford, Berkeley, etc) and you are saying none of those eight thought to correct for age in a study dealing with the length of telomeres? Or considered reporting bias? That they are all seriously stupid? And their peers at the American Journal of Public Health reviewed and published their work, but you caught the glaring flaw after reading a Slashdot summary of a Toronto Sun article about their study? I hope someone mods you up +1 funny.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/...
I have puzzled about this myself for a long time. I have come up with two possibilities for why there might be a difference. First, speed matters when forming addictive behaviors. It doesn't matter that cocaine and crack cocaine are the same chemical. It matters that crack goes into your system much faster because it is smoked. I learned in my first year psychology course in college that people taking cocaine reported feeling the highest not when they had the most cocaine in their system, but when the level in their bloodstream was rising the fastest. THAT is when they feel high, and that is the feeling they crave. Rate of change into the blood stream is addictive. So, even though the metabolism may first break down sucrose into fructose and glucose, that speed difference might be akin to the speed difference between cocaine going in your nose or in your lungs. It might be just enough of a difference to make you more obese than sugar, over a long period.
Second, I have heard that HFCS is not merely fructose and glucose. It also has impurities from the process of making it, specifically enzymes that convert starches in corn to fructose. You are eating those enzymes with HFCS. Might it not affect your metabolism? Don't rush too quickly to ideological conclusions based on assumptions. Real world testing does matter.
Anyway, I gave up sugar and HFCS in May. I began to think of them as the addictive equivalent of cigarettes (which I quit ten years ago). Cutting back doesn't work, and never worked for me. Cold turkey is the only way to deal with nicotine, and now sugar. Since May, I no longer have heart burn, I have more energy, better concentration, I don't get the blues very often, and I have lost 20 pounds. From the way my body feels today, I *know* I'm going to live longer.