Congress can only exercise the powers that the constitution grants it. In some areas (like the ACA mandate) there is legitimate disagreement about the proper scope for that grant of power (does commerce clause allow Congress to pass laws regulating economic inactivity? I think Raich and Wickard were wrongly decided too, but the fact that I don't disagree with the law doesn't give me license to disobey it).
There is no meaningful dispute that Congress can impeach its own members. It can't. The impeachment power may be exercised over the following persons: (let's read it together now, Article 2 section 4): "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and Misdemeanors."
senators (and ex-senators) are not Article 2 "civil Officers." This clause is commonly understood to apply to executive branch persons appointed by the president. It also applies to federal judges, who are (guess what?) appointed by the president.
Congress members are not subject to the impeachment powers of their own house, because the constitution doesn't grant that power to the House or the Senate.
Impeachment is not available as a remedy against Article 1 elected officials. Impeachment is a power granted to Article 1 as a tool to be used against Article 2 and Article 3.
Core inflation in 1974 was about 12% over the entire year. It was over 30% for the period from 1973-1975. This is significant because there is general agreement about the causes of the violent inflation of the early 70s: The global financial order fundamentally changed in 1971 and 1972, when Nixon ended the Bretton Woods agreement and took the US entirely off the gold standard. We had to go off gold because we were printing too much money to pay for the war in Vietnam, which devalued the dollar.
Sound familiar?
Spending on Vietnam created an arbitrage opportunity for [french] people to buy dollars, exchange them for gold at the US-pegged price of $35 per oz of gold, and then sell the gold on the market for $40ish. When the US went off gold and floated our currency, there was a long (5-10 year) period of economic shock while everyone had to work out what happened. Part of the consequence was widespread price inflation in the US. This turned out to be a good thing for people who had 30-yr fixed mortgage payments, but not such a great thing for profits at banks.
The spot price for an ounce of gold today is hovering around $1400/oz.
Last month's food and energy price increases will not show up in CPI-based adjustments to wages and durable-goods prices because the US bureau of labor statistics excludes those costs from its calculations.
Good thing people don't include the cost of food or gas in their estimated cost of living.
again, no. OP and the rest of this thread is about a ruling in a civil case, where the cause of action is civil copyright infringement. here's a link to the entire docket. Notice how there are no state parties involved? That's because infringement for non-commercial use is a civil violation.
17 USC 506 provides for criminal penalties in cases of infringement for commercial purposes or for financial gain. No one is accusing the downloaders in this case of selling their copies, so 506 is not relevant to this conversation.
Your personal information is not "private." Your ISP can easily relate your IP address back to your personal information, and they will happily happily do so and then release the information to comply with a subpoena.
I don't know enough about Tor to say whether it might help to conceal your identity from other nodes on the internet... but if it does, that might be enough to avoid this kind of problem.
If it was a criminal case, you'd have real 4th-Amendment and 1st-Amendment issues. As it is, we're talking about a civil matter, and those constraints don't apply to non-state plaintiffs.
Judge Collyer isn't breaking new ground here- it's generally accepted by US courts that individuals can have no expectation that information they freely give to other persons is "private." I think one of the problems here is that people are confusing "personal" with "private." Your personal information is not necessarily "private," in either the ordinary sense or in the technical legal sense.
Your name is not private. Your street address is not private. Your vehicle license plate number is not private. In many states, your driver's license number and your driving records are not private.
In this case, the USCG is asking the ISP to give up the names and mailing addresses of people who were using certain IP addresses at a given time on a given date. Since names and mailing addresses are not private, neither the ISP nor the people using those addresses can claim "privacy" as a reason not to comply with this request.
That's just how it is. People who are reacting to this with surprise are wrong to blame the judge in this case- her ruling was made according to well-settled law. She cited this portion of her analysis to cases in the 4th and 6th circuit courts of appeals, and there are similar decisions from several of the other circuits as well.
Now, if the question was whether your ISP could turn over your DNS logs, effectively showing the list of sites you were connected to and the dates and times of connection... well, that's a very different sort of thing.
(why yes, I am a lawyer working on some of these cases).
Why the HELL does HP want to load stupid monitor apps for every device installed?
They've learned from corporate experience that they need to watch added hardware very closely or it will damage operations. See, e.g., the itanium, the iPaq, Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd...
Or, you know, the Palm Treo series. I got my first one in 2003. Still have a 755p now, but shopping for an android to replace it (droid 2 probably, I'm a sucker for hardware keyboard). Palm OS had an open dev environment, free SDK availability, widely distributed app downloads, native ssh and imap clients, the first big (for the time) color touchscreens, data tethering over usb cable and bluetooth, etc etc etc.
Too bad they were so goddamn stupid at actually running a business that they've never made a profit.
1. When we moved to Portland, Oregon, we had Qwest come out to the house to rewire one of the phone jacks because the mooks who hooked it up to the outside world crosswired the connections- we didn't even have dial tone. After the tech fixed the problem, first thing he did after confirming DSL sync was to run a speed test. I asked him if that was SOP and he said that he was trained to always run a speed test for new customers- he suggested that it might be part of an upsell but that he doesn't like selling so he never comments (oh, you're only getting 750k down, but you're in an area where 7/1 MB service is available... did you know you can upgrade for just $3.50/month!????...). YMMV but if this is SOP for Qwest on installs, there is one population of regular testers.
2. I agree with earlier commenters- there is probably a self-selecting sampling bias.
3. Because of #2, any "data" they collect is probably very skewed towards computer-savvy users who are demanding higher-speed services and using their website to check if the service they're getting matches what they're paying for. Unless there are some details of the methodology that they're not telling us about, the survey probably reports higher bandwidth than actually is delivered to the majority of people with net access in those cities. If it's just a simple aggregation & average of whoever decides to click on speedtest.com from inside a given city's IP range, well, that probably tells you something... but it's probably not a good proxy for a complete picture of "last mile" connectivity.
if you had a treo running palm OS, you could get something like TreoButler or CallFilter (or, I'm sure, any number of other apps) to control incoming calls. I have CallFilter, which allows me to sort calls by caller ID. You can select straight-to-voicemail, ring-to-voicemail, pickup/hangup with or without alerting, etc. I have all incoming 1-800 numbers and unknown callers set to go straigt to voicemail, and when I encounter a pest like the autodialer you've described they get the pickup/hangup treatment.
Works great. I'm sure something similar will come out for the Pre soon, because people expect that functionality. I don't know if the iPhone has something like this, but if it doesn't, it should. This is a feature that should come standard on every smartfone.
Or had your drunk 6-year-old child change lanes with his eyes closed. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty apt description of the way the Bushies ran the country.
I don't think the intent is to make the promise binding on this case. I think the intent is to make Obama look like a hypocrite in front of the whole world. The problem isn't with this judge, it's with the Obama administration's approach to dealing with the wholesale criminality of their predecessors. People can try to change that policy by winning lawsuits, or they can try to change it by shaming Obama into actually sacking up and doing something about it. This case just presents a nice opportunity to do both at the same time.
the IG report does confirm that the warrantless surveillance involved "unprecedented collection activities," beyond the surveillance program of Al-Qaeda touted by President Bush. The report described the scope of the additional spying only as "Other Intelligence Activities." Collectively, the so-called terrorist surveillance program and the Other Intelligence Activities were referred to as the "President's Surveillance Program." The report does not use the program's code name, Stellar Wind, which remains classified. Given the scope of the Nixon Administration's illegal spying (which led to FISA in the first place), it is sobering to consider that the Other Intelligence Activities were unprecedented. [...]
The report damns the effectiveness of the program with faint praise. [...]
The IG report provided a dramatic summary of the dispute in March 2004, when dozens of Bush Administration officials nearly resigned in protest over the Other Intelligence Activities. The Department of Justice could find no legal support for these activities, and found that the factual basis for prior legal opinions was substantially incorrect. [emphasis mine]
that last bit is referring to some of John Yoo's embarrassingly shoddy 'legal' work, which (now 9th Circuit Judge-for-life) Jay Bybee signed off on.
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Congress can only exercise the powers that the constitution grants it. In some areas (like the ACA mandate) there is legitimate disagreement about the proper scope for that grant of power (does commerce clause allow Congress to pass laws regulating economic inactivity? I think Raich and Wickard were wrongly decided too, but the fact that I don't disagree with the law doesn't give me license to disobey it).
There is no meaningful dispute that Congress can impeach its own members. It can't. The impeachment power may be exercised over the following persons: (let's read it together now, Article 2 section 4): "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and Misdemeanors."
senators (and ex-senators) are not Article 2 "civil Officers." This clause is commonly understood to apply to executive branch persons appointed by the president. It also applies to federal judges, who are (guess what?) appointed by the president.
Congress members are not subject to the impeachment powers of their own house, because the constitution doesn't grant that power to the House or the Senate.
Impeachment is not available as a remedy against Article 1 elected officials. Impeachment is a power granted to Article 1 as a tool to be used against Article 2 and Article 3.
See Article 1, Section 2, Clause 5 and Article 1, Section 3, Clauses 6 and 7.
Article 1 gives both houses of Congress the power to police and sanction their own members, but good luck getting them to use it.
We'd be damn lucky to see only 8%. Food costs went up 4% month over month in February alone, the greatest monthly increase since 1974. Assume the February increase is double the "actual" rate and we'd still be looking at 25% year-over-year inflation.
Core inflation in 1974 was about 12% over the entire year. It was
over 30% for the period from 1973-1975. This is significant because
there is general agreement about the causes of the violent inflation
of the early 70s: The global financial order fundamentally changed in
1971 and 1972, when Nixon ended the Bretton Woods agreement and took
the US entirely off the gold standard. We had to go off gold because
we were printing too much money to pay for the war in Vietnam, which
devalued the dollar.
Sound familiar?
Spending on Vietnam created an arbitrage opportunity for [french]
people to buy dollars, exchange them for gold at the US-pegged price
of $35 per oz of gold, and then sell the gold on the market for
$40ish. When the US went off gold and floated our currency, there was
a long (5-10 year) period of economic shock while everyone had to work
out what happened. Part of the consequence was widespread price
inflation in the US. This turned out to be a good thing for
people who had 30-yr fixed mortgage payments, but not such a great thing for profits at banks.
The spot price for an ounce of gold today is hovering around $1400 /oz.
Last month's food and energy price increases will not show up in
CPI-based adjustments to wages and durable-goods prices because the US
bureau of labor statistics excludes those costs from its calculations.
Good thing people don't include the cost of food or gas in their
estimated cost of living.
again, no. OP and the rest of this thread is about a ruling in a civil case, where the cause of action is civil copyright infringement. here's a link to the entire docket. Notice how there are no state parties involved? That's because infringement for non-commercial use is a civil violation.
17 USC 506 provides for criminal penalties in cases of infringement for commercial purposes or for financial gain. No one is accusing the downloaders in this case of selling their copies, so 506 is not relevant to this conversation.
no. copyright infringement is a civil violation.
Your personal information is not "private." Your ISP can easily relate your IP address back to your personal information, and they will happily happily do so and then release the information to comply with a subpoena.
I don't know enough about Tor to say whether it might help to conceal your identity from other nodes on the internet... but if it does, that might be enough to avoid this kind of problem.
Read it yourself before you leap to judgment. It's actually pretty easy to grok, as these things go.
If it was a criminal case, you'd have real 4th-Amendment and 1st-Amendment issues. As it is, we're talking about a civil matter, and those constraints don't apply to non-state plaintiffs.
Judge Collyer isn't breaking new ground here- it's generally accepted by US courts that individuals can have no expectation that information they freely give to other persons is "private." I think one of the problems here is that people are confusing "personal" with "private." Your personal information is not necessarily "private," in either the ordinary sense or in the technical legal sense.
Your name is not private. Your street address is not private. Your vehicle license plate number is not private. In many states, your driver's license number and your driving records are not private.
In this case, the USCG is asking the ISP to give up the names and mailing addresses of people who were using certain IP addresses at a given time on a given date. Since names and mailing addresses are not private, neither the ISP nor the people using those addresses can claim "privacy" as a reason not to comply with this request.
That's just how it is. People who are reacting to this with surprise are wrong to blame the judge in this case- her ruling was made according to well-settled law. She cited this portion of her analysis to cases in the 4th and 6th circuit courts of appeals, and there are similar decisions from several of the other circuits as well.
You can read the whole order here: Order denying motion to quash.
Now, if the question was whether your ISP could turn over your DNS logs, effectively showing the list of sites you were connected to and the dates and times of connection... well, that's a very different sort of thing.
(why yes, I am a lawyer working on some of these cases).
In criminal court, yes. This is a civil lawsuit.
Why the HELL does HP want to load stupid monitor apps for every device installed?
They've learned from corporate experience that they need to watch added hardware very closely or it will damage operations. See, e.g., the itanium, the iPaq, Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd...
except who wants to go to Lodi? Presumably highway expansion would happen in places where people tend to want to go.
Or, you know, the Palm Treo series. I got my first one in 2003. Still have a 755p now, but shopping for an android to replace it (droid 2 probably, I'm a sucker for hardware keyboard). Palm OS had an open dev environment, free SDK availability, widely distributed app downloads, native ssh and imap clients, the first big (for the time) color touchscreens, data tethering over usb cable and bluetooth, etc etc etc.
Too bad they were so goddamn stupid at actually running a business that they've never made a profit.
And the Pre feels like a piece of junk.
first a nugget of fact, then some commentary:
1. When we moved to Portland, Oregon, we had Qwest come out to the house to rewire one of the phone jacks because the mooks who hooked it up to the outside world crosswired the connections- we didn't even have dial tone. After the tech fixed the problem, first thing he did after confirming DSL sync was to run a speed test. I asked him if that was SOP and he said that he was trained to always run a speed test for new customers- he suggested that it might be part of an upsell but that he doesn't like selling so he never comments (oh, you're only getting 750k down, but you're in an area where 7/1 MB service is available... did you know you can upgrade for just $3.50/month!???? ...). YMMV but if this is SOP for Qwest on installs, there is one population of regular testers.
2. I agree with earlier commenters- there is probably a self-selecting sampling bias.
3. Because of #2, any "data" they collect is probably very skewed towards computer-savvy users who are demanding higher-speed services and using their website to check if the service they're getting matches what they're paying for. Unless there are some details of the methodology that they're not telling us about, the survey probably reports higher bandwidth than actually is delivered to the majority of people with net access in those cities. If it's just a simple aggregation & average of whoever decides to click on speedtest.com from inside a given city's IP range, well, that probably tells you something... but it's probably not a good proxy for a complete picture of "last mile" connectivity.
I am intrigued by your ideas and I wish to subscribe to your news-letter.
and here I thought I was coming to read a post about Romanesco Broccoli (link goes to gis for "romanesco"). Seriously, it's like eating math.
anyone who thinks different from me isn't necessarily weird, but if they arrive at a different conclusion than I reached, they're most likely wrong.
funny. You are my new hero.
my kingdom for mod points- even though parent is AC it deserves to be a 5...
and after that was Earth 2025.
Don't bother starting without a build strategy. ... the command line might actually be more fun.
if you had a treo running palm OS, you could get something like TreoButler or CallFilter (or, I'm sure, any number of other apps) to control incoming calls. I have CallFilter, which allows me to sort calls by caller ID. You can select straight-to-voicemail, ring-to-voicemail, pickup/hangup with or without alerting, etc. I have all incoming 1-800 numbers and unknown callers set to go straigt to voicemail, and when I encounter a pest like the autodialer you've described they get the pickup/hangup treatment.
Works great. I'm sure something similar will come out for the Pre soon, because people expect that functionality. I don't know if the iPhone has something like this, but if it doesn't, it should. This is a feature that should come standard on every smartfone.
The iPhone and Blackberries would bounce up to more normal $800+ pricing.
I call BS. You can buy an 8 gig ipod touch today for under $200. According to the iSupply teardown, the GSM chipset in the iphone costs $2.80.
$179.00 + $3.00 != $800
Or had your drunk 6-year-old child change lanes with his eyes closed. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty apt description of the way the Bushies ran the country.
Bush didn't see himself as breaking any laws.
the fact that he was wrong doesn't make his conduct lawful. Ignorance of the law is no defense.
I don't think the intent is to make the promise binding on this case. I think the intent is to make Obama look like a hypocrite in front of the whole world. The problem isn't with this judge, it's with the Obama administration's approach to dealing with the wholesale criminality of their predecessors. People can try to change that policy by winning lawsuits, or they can try to change it by shaming Obama into actually sacking up and doing something about it. This case just presents a nice opportunity to do both at the same time.
Since I wrote the summary, the EFF has a new page up with some analysis and commentary.
that last bit is referring to some of John Yoo's embarrassingly shoddy 'legal' work, which (now 9th Circuit Judge-for-life) Jay Bybee signed off on.