Well... we all know what's in this stuff don't we ? It's custard (possibly with some orange food colorant).
The behavior described here is identical to that exhibited by custard and other liquids with low viscosity but high surface tension. The effect is that low velocity impacts are passed through easily but high velocity impact causes the surface tension to rapidly increase and prevents entry. To put it bluntly, you can run over a swimming pool full of custard, but you can't walk over one (brainiac did an episode on it, though they could have done a better job of explaining the theory about why it works that way - wikipedia is your friend here - as per their usual script, they were mostly interested in the fun-value of a swimming pool full of custard... the test subject did indeed run over it until he got to the middle, was told to stop... and then sank).
Now I'm sure it's not actually custard in this goo (well, fairly sure) but the phenomenon is certainly not new and has been known for a while. What seems new is that this is a much lower liquidity and viscosity than most of these substances (it appears to be at the level of clay or playdough rather than a flowing liquid) - which clearly makes for a whole new range of practical applications, since it won't soak into things or leak, you can make things like laptop protective cases lined with the stuff which would be impractical with custard....
Thanks AshtangiMan - it seems you understood the point I was trying to make. I wasn't trying to take shots at America though - I was trying to show an outsiders perspective. As for the "best you have" comment: considering that SF was the only place I visited where the majority of the society was open minded and had a genuinely inclusive rather than exclusive culture of not just accepting but celebrating individual choice... well I still think that by the values I hold most dear, it's the best you have.
Wait - let me get this straight, an uninformed git gives his entire country a bad name, I correct him with simple, factual arguments and put him in his place... and I am the troll ? I guess I know who the mod voted for...
Define "healthy economy" - I think 98% of the people in the country can pay their bills and afford food is a pretty good definition myself.
Besides which, your econ101 is pretty much a myth - in reality, low unemployment does not in any way reduce the movement of workers, people move jobs because of ambition, it just means nobody don't spend huge amounts of time starving without the opportunity to work.
Most hires in any economy are inter-company from people already employed, new workforce entrants is always the lowest part of the equation - they lack experience. This is no difference if there is a 2% or a 20% unemployment rate. In fact most of that 2% will be new entrants to the workforce that lack the experience of their employed counterparts - who get hired next door.
You don't see massive inflation there... since everyone can actually afford to pay for stuff, you see booming business and prices dropping because business can make bigger profits by lowering margins and focussing on bulk.
Some of that 2% will drive new business ventures, some of the employed people will save up and start new companies. What low unemployment actually means is they are more likely to do so ! If you start a company where work is easily available and it fails (as 80% of new companies do) - you can always get a job again. If you start one where work is hard to find, and it fails - you end up in bankruptcy court.
The massive risk reduction is a major motivation for entrepeneurship, the high employment rate means that businesses have to compete for skilled workers so that those are the only economies where salaries actually go up faster than the inflation rate - meaning normal working people actually have a chance at a comfortable or even wealthy retirement... what is your post-Bush social security worth again ? Oh but that's okay right, cos you invested additional money for your retirement - how is that 401K of yours doing ?
Sorry, but the only country that deems America's economy as the largest and richest in the world is America, the rest of think the economy is supposed to serve more than 1% of the population with "CEO" on their business cards. By practically any metric other than "total money produced" - you are near the bottom of the pile, hell my own African homeland beats you on some of them ! What's the point of making billions if it all goes to the same few people who already *have* billions while the rest of the population is living on the breadline ? Heck recent studies suggest as much as 25% of Americans live below the poverty line - and your drive to go for educated work is largely based on the startling reality that nobody else has a chance at a good life. Every other job, you earn almost nothing, and your job could be outsourced tomorrow because your company decided it's cheaper to use sweatshop labor in another country - thus neatly impoverishing two nations:)
God... you're the kind of American who gives the whole country a really bad name... do you have any idea how arrogant and stupid you sound ? The land of the free ? I've got more civil liberties than you do and I live in a poor semi-socialist country in Africa ! (Example: It took one case in the constitutional court to find that not allowing gay marriage is discrimination, which is specifically prohibited by the constitution - and the court had the power to *order* the government to provide the legal means for gay marriage within a year. The government was required to comply, and did so).
Note: no discussion on founding fathers (your version of "oh spirits of the ancients") - the only question that mattered was "are we treating some people differently than others ?", when the answer was "yes we are" - the court had no choice but to rule that as discrimination and the government had no choice but to change the law.
Now *that* is civil liberty.
Okay, enough ranting... just get over yourself... oh - and for the record, I've been to America, nice place to visit - I would definitely not want to live there - and I spent most of my time in San Francisco, the best you have was still too pathetically primitive.
Printing books is actually very low on pollution and could even be carbon negative. You have some pollution with the equipment to cut the tree down, pulp it and the printing presses and such - but that's once off. The paper in the books, assuming they don't get burned are... you guessed it: carbon, not carbon dioxide and not in the atmosphere.
You have a permanent safe and useful storage of carbon where it doesn't pollute. Running a website uses energy all the time, meaning a constant pollution, even if books are carbon positive (I doubt it) - they are still a lot lower on emissions than websites.
*NOTE: I said books, not paper, flyers, leaflets and toilet paper do not have this advantage as they are generally not stored safely indoors for centuries.
The confusion here is because people still think trees are carbon negative. They're not, they are mostly carbon neutral, trees produce oxygen only in sunlight, in darkness - they produce carbon dioxide. Depending on the amount of daylight the region gets there is therefore a minor shift to either side, usually seasonally.
Now - that does not mean rampant deforestation is good either. Deforestation mostly replaces a carbon neutral setup with carbon positive setups, and there is a lot more to environmental protection (an environment we do need to survive) than just carbon levels. Saving the rainforrests is a very crucial matter for many important reasons: to protect cultures that would go extinct with them, the survival of many species dependent on them, the likelihood cures to various diseases waiting to be discovered... but global warming is not one of the reasons to protect the trees. In fact, the two have exactly nothing to do with each other.
You got the facts right - but unfortunately - people will are greedy and will try to abuse the law. Take for example a whole bunch of recent copyright lawsuits launched by J.K. Rowling against a number of authors world-wide. None of these authors copied or translated her works, they wrote stories about their own characters which were heavily inspired by the kind of story in Harry Potter - and she sued them. Now it's true that under most international copyright law systems - her suits were completely without merit, proving that however costs money - and most of these authors simply couldn't afford to defend - so they had to settle, usually with a no-further-publication clause.
Basically, the law handles this right, but the legal system is not always (and this is better or worse in various countries but never ideal) good at ensuring the law is only used the right way.
I agree with you - such a system would actually be beneficial - provided you meet one more criteria, software patents expire after 18 months. There is no point to having uncopyrighted public code for an idea to call on when it's useful life is exceeded already and only a tiny minority of software algorithms outlast 5 years, the vast average is between 2 and 3. Even 18 months gives the majority of the average useful life of the invention to the inventor - and the remainder to others for building upon - before it's too late.
Well I think it's about fifty/fifty at this stage and the trend is moving more and more toward the pay-guys being behind.
Programming languages are a good example. Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Java - all highly innovative programming languages that appeared in the last 20 years, all free (I include Java because it was always free as in beer, I know it wasn't always free as in speech - but the argument here is about profit motivation so free as in beer counts to this particular argument).
Now what, in the same time has come out of the pay world that was truly innovative ? Delphi doesn't count - object pascal just added GUI libs to an existing language. Visual Basic perhaps you could count because it really isn't BASIC anymore... but then - it is hardly a great language, is single platform (all my examples were multiplatform) oh and it came way after Perl (to name just one). The only other one that's even remotely notable is C# - and hey wait, that bears about the same resemblance to Java as ogg does to mp3 now doesn't it ?
In short, what you point out as a "trend" is just not true, it looks like it because of selective reporting. With my selective reporting (another kind of software innovation) I have made it look like the proprietary software-for-money world basically never invents anything and all the innovation is done for free, mostly by academics but occasionally by corporations.
The reality is that in different sub-fields, different approaches have had the best results, I don't personally think that this is because either approach is better at anything - for initial-idea purposes, I think it shows that money plays no role whatsoever - dumb luck determines if it's a company or a FOSS developer that thinks of it first. But here is the clincher, because the FOSS developers don't patent, and don't use restrictive copyright - our ideas are reused, built into new things and form building blocks for other ideas... to put it a different way - that secondary level of innovation, happens far faster and more efficiently in this reduced income (it's just not true to think FOSS is a zero-income economy but it is probably a lower-potential-income approach) system.
That's odd... ogg vorbis is unpatented and by virtue of it's FOSS licensing effectively losing out on copyright monetization - and in fact came to exist because the mp3 patent so greatly reduced it's actual usefulness that the developers felt a genuine need to replace it.
You can't copyright a process - because that is not creative, the expression of that process is creative. If you make the "process" copyrightable - then you are allowing ideas to be copyrightable - or to put it another way "one artist paints a still life of an apple, now nobody else can ever paint an apple again because he owns the copyright on the idea of 'painting an apple'".
Yes it is that ludicrous and that's why not even US law is that stupid.
Software is unique in being the only thing in the entirety of law that can be both copyrighted (in implementation) and patented (at the algorythm/idea) level.
This is already a logical inconsistency. Quite frankly most software patents are about as logical to grant as a patent on "a story about two people falling in love" - and suddenly every romance writer owes you royalties ? Even if you come up with a truly new story idea (and that is very, very rare, stories by their very nature use the same basic structures over and over) should you be allowed to patent it so nobody else can write a story like that - even if it's a new and original one ? Well.. there goes all Terry Pratchett's books - I mean, he satirizes other stories all the time... in fact you just destroyed the entire field of satire so scrap mad magazine as well...
This is what is happening in software right now, because we've allowed them to not only copyright the implementation of ideas, but patent the ideas themselves. The very fact that software is deemed copyrightable should have automatically excluded algorithms from being patentable on the same grounds that we don't allow patenting ideas for any other creative process.
You remind me of the last bully fight I ever got into. Now I had, had to deal with groups of atackers often enough - my reaction was to kick and punch at anything I could reach, they grab limbs, I jerk madly until something comes free and lash out- of course I always lost those, but I left a few of them with some serious bruises at least. But the last one was a solo, who was just coming at me for no reason. By then I had been doing martial arts for some years - and I also had learned one thing, beating a bully doesn't stop him - they just come back harder because you upset their little power-system, they only stop when they are so badly beaten and humiliated that they are dead scared of you - too scared to be able to hide it behind macho. This time though... I was going to try something new. I never threw a single punch but I dodged and blocked with everything I ever learned in class - I avoided every punch he threw, every kick hit air or bounced harmlessly of a deflection move. For ten minutes he was punching at nothing before teachers found us. When I pointed out, as witnessed by the entire schoolyard that I didn't even hit back once, I just dodged his punches and he still kept coming, he was sumarily suspended for three weeks, and I got off without so much as a warning. When he came back, his arm was in a cast, turns out one of those blocked punches of his was so stupidly thrown (lots of power behind it, no brains) that he broke his thumb on my arm. Poetic justice that was... and somehow, I never got into a fight again.
I didn't set up the machine, the software on it was out of date, hardly my fault. None of the machines *I* set up in the company was ever compromised.
And I still never said my password fell to a dictionary attack, an old system that didn't do lockouts where both usernames AND passwords were brute-forced was bound to fail. For that, some blame belongs with the person who DID set it up (who wasn't there anymore). It was a box that should have long been modified, and should never have BEEN outside the firewalls to begin with (it is possible to measure bandwith from inside) - that design decision however, was never one I made.
In the time I was there, security improved a great deal - but it was still a work in progress. My point however was simply this: I was told in so many words that the reason I'm losing my job was to maintain the illusion of an uncrackable system. If the system had fallen because of something I couldn't have controlled (maybe a debian ssh key in the time before the exploit became known or such) the results would have been exactly the same.
Yes, thank you, it was not a dictionary attack, it was a cycle-through-all-characters attack, and what made me unlucky was having the first username in the alphabet - if he hadn't hit me, he would have (eventually) hit the next admin.
Now I HAD previously advised that we should dispense with password based logins entirely and use keys, but this process was not yet complete at the time and of course the less critical servers were secured first. Ergo, the little bandwith monitoring box was fairly low on the priority list BECAUSE even if somebody got in there he still had some pretty tight firewalls to get around before getting to the actual datacenters.
Not even the most powerful encryption is completely unbruteforceable, but keyfiles at least have the advantage that the brute-force would take YEARS, not HOURS. Oh well, the downside of being a contractor is not having labour-law protection, so if firing you is a good way to save face with customers, the truth doesn't matter much.
>Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor.
Just for the record, that's not true. The actual legend, which is at least in part based on facts, is that he led a revolt against a corrupt aristrocracy that overtaxed peasants (to the point of leaving them unable to eat). The revolt consisted of robbing said corrupt aristocrats (in particular the tax collectors) and then giving the money back to it's rightful owners. The oldest version of the legend I could find in a book (published in the 1700's) explained their system as follows: 1/3 of the money the aristocrat had was left with him - (this was deemed a fair amount, even in taxes) 1/3 was given to the peasants it came from - (that was deemed fair by said peasants) the last 1/3 was kept by Robin Hood and his men to buy their own food and weaponry.
Basically, an early form of guerilla warfare and civil disobedience rather than outright theft.
Most modern tellings do remember that Robin Hood was born a nobleman and a knight (Sir Robert of Locksley) but very few recall the end of the legend completely (as per said oldest book version). Most end with the return of Richard I from the crusades who punishes his corrupt brother and the aristocrats who scored from the system he set up. According to the older versions though, he didn't just punish them and pardon Robin Hood. He then rewarded Robert of Locksley for what he deemed exceptional service to the country, by greatly upgrading his title and making him the Earl of Huntingdon. Said title is still extant, and I do believe it's carriers take some pride in being (probably) descended from Robin Hood.
Of course, with an almost 500 year old legend, a lot of facts are not known - especially when the oldest book about it I could find was written more than a 2 centuries after the fact, but the old 'steal from the rich, give to the poor' idea is really a rather massive oversimplification of what he said to have done. I think it would almost be more fair to think of Robin Hood as an early form of a welfare system in a taxed-state.
I have a feeling their logic was much the same as a company I once worked for. This company handled large amounts of credit card transactions on behalf of merchants, so security was considered vital (which always left my wondering why they chose to have windows desktops with draconian rules for humans to follow, rather than a secure OS of some sort... hem hem). I was a linux sysadmin there, charged with maintaining servers. Mostly the network was very secure and we never had a break-in at any points that mattered, but somebody did manage to break in to a harmless little box whose sole purpose was to monitor internet bandwith, since we had two outgoing networks, and it had to monitor both, it ended up being outside both firewalls. The person used a brute-force ssh attack, and compromised my account, for no other reason than that my username was the first (alphabetically) of all the admins. My password was strong but nothing is stronger than a persistent brute-force attack at a place nobody is really watching. Of course, there were tools installed to detect brute-forcing and it picked it up, and reported it to us - sadly, only after he succeeded. Since it was my account that was compromised, I had a disciplinary charge brought and though I COULD prove that I had nothing to do with it and hadn't helped the person in any way (after all, the logs clearly showed a brute-force process discovering my username by simply counting up) - I was still sumarilly dismissed. The reasoning was this: we have to uphold to our customers an image of being virtually unbreakable. We know that no system ever can be, but we cannot market this fact to them - so we call you negligent, and we can tell them "it was one negligent admin, a human error, and he was fired for it." That the machine he got didn't contain or have access for reaching anything that did contain, secure data was irrelevant, rather than acknowledge that no system is ever completely secure, fire an admin who had nothing to do with it and just got hit by sheer numeric bad luck so you can pretend the only problem you ever had was a bad employee you fired. I suspect much the same logic is becoming common among management types and probably had something to do with this case, and others like it that regularly make slashdot. Management types hate the idea of aiming for acceptable risk, of admitting that no: our systems are not, and will not ever be, completely uncrackable. So rather than using those breaches as opportunities to learn and to close one more hole - they come down on whoever revealed it like a ton of bricks so they can pretend it was just human error. You could theoretically fire and hire in such a way that you end up with only honest workers, but you can never get a completely secure system - so their logic is to present and image of doing the former, so they can deny the reality of the latter.
I have a large heap of plastic bags I keep in a bin on the fridge, before we go shopping I always stuff a few in my pockets - heck the shop guy will even pack my groceries for me, but I only ever buy new bags when I run out - that's about R5 total expense per year, and because the bags are stronger you also use less of them. Nowadays I can carry a bottle of wine or a 2lt coke without having to double-bag it.
This is one case where a smartly thought out plan really did work well.
And I didn't NEED proof that plastic bags were bad for the environment, they were dirty, litter that visible ruined all our public parks and streets and I was LIVING here, I could SEE that with my own eyes. It's also not hard to verify how many children and animals have choked to death on discarded plastic bags, a simple newspaper search will pick up a few - and it's safe to assume that the newspapers don't carry a story about more than a minor percentage (when it coincides with them running a "think of the children" edition usually).
All that aside, I am strongly in favour of better environmental care, but I rarely sound off on it because the kind of people who don't care aren't ever going to be convinced - instead I try to point them at the very real SHORT-TERM benefits. Cleaner public parks (try this plastic bags hold water, stagnant water grows mosquitos and all sorts of lovely diseases, and this is no less true of small puddles, especially when trapped in something that prevents it evaporating - thousands of tiny puddles full of cholera is such a nice thing to think of your children playing amongst...), the simple reality that air polution means WE BREATH TOXIC STUFF is another. Global warming detractors can clamour as much as they want about whether it happens or not - they cannot argue that high polution rates lead to respiratory illnesses, reduced energy levels (we need oxygen to burn food for energy, dirtier air means more breaths needed to get that oxygen) and poisons in our blood. It is not surprising that areas around oil refineries and other high-polution places have the highest instances of child-asthma and sinusitus in the world - often 30-40 percent higher than the rest of the region. That's a bit too high a figure to dismiss as 'lack of causal' especially since there is no known case where the correlation don't hold (where a high polluting industry has existed for more than ten years and there isn't a marked increase in child respiratory diseases among children under ten).
I just don't get how people can go off on tangents about whether global warming is real - and just completely ignore the elephant in the room. Global warming or not - right now, the air you breath is shortening your lifespan, and that of everyone around you - if we clean up the air better that risk is greatly reduced (and we're not even getting into the complex politics like being less dependent on trade with countries that really don't LIKE us very much...)
Intriguing, Here in SA we had a huge problem with plastic bag litter. So much so that one MP described them as 'our new national flower'. A law was passed - it didn't ban bags, but it DID require them to be made at least 0.5 microns thick - meaning they are reusable (the older 0.3micron thin ones tended to tear if you use them more than once). This of course, costs money, so they ALLOWED (didn't require but in practise everybody did it) the shops to charge the price difference back to the customers. That means you pay about R0.40 for bag - but suddenly, people KEEP the bags, and reuse them as many times as possible because those fourty-cent charges add up. The result it that plastic bag litter has become notably less common in South Africa, they are a valuable commodity now. People tend to be so terrible they won't even avoid littering public parks out of caring for shared resources for the community - but they will damn well do it if it means not throwing away their own personal money. Sorry - if giving people an economic incentive not to throw their trash in the public park to strangle birds and fish (and yes, human children !) is 'telling them how to live' then I'm all for telling people how to live in some cases. Note also: I am NOT a fan of my government, my posting history will show how extremely critical I am of them in general - but where a well thought out plan has given a genuine benefit to the entire nation I will also give them fair credit.
PS. Now if only we can find a way to give people an economic incentive not to throw ciggarette-butts, coke-cans, used-condom and broken beer bottles in the parks.
Please do not assume that ALL legal systems are as stupid as yours are. My country uses the Dutch-Roman system in which common-law DOES include matters of societal law and JUDGES decide common law. Common-law cases do NOT require you to sue for damages, you can sue over policy - for example when the church sued the Durban tourism board to prevent them allowing topless sunbathing and it backfired because the judge found that societal norms are NOT opposed to topless sunbathing and instead of preventing it their case ended up legalizing it nationwide.
Now our system is still far from perfect as there is no real system in place to PREVENT the legislature from passing laws over matters that SHOULD be handled by our common-law system - but the idea that common-law is ONLY about harm between individuals and all other matters are decided by legislature seems completely stupid to us. No wonder your legislative laws SEEM arbitrary to you (funny - you have all these examples of stupid 200 year old laws never repealed...) the legislature decides over social norms on a day-to-day basis but society only gets to have any notable influence on the legislature every 4 years ! Corporations can bribe every day... sounds to me like the people in your country must lose all the way... and if the average/. is anything to go by - everyone here knows that, in fact, that IS what is happening.
Our system is ideal in that judgements have the FORCE of law, but the flexibility of social development, it is imperfect because there isn't anything in the constitution to prevent the legislature from making laws about things that actually have nothing to DO with their job.
But - we CAN sue our government about laws if those laws violate the constitution and they WILL be forced to change the laws. Thus far at least, the government has been shitscared of the constitutional court and fixed every law they were sued over (and lost) with commendable speed.
Law systems are complex and there are many in the world. The anglo-saxon system with American attachments that rule in the US is considered terribly incomplete, slow and centralized by those countries that favor the Duth-Roman system (the roman part here goes back to the Republic, not the ages of emperors). On the other hand, adherents of your system find the idea of trial-by-judge to be only marginally more humane than trial-by-ordeal(funny though - we've never had that... you did) and think trial-by-jury is better.
Personally - I think both systems have their pros and cons, but I think the Duth-Roman system wins by a small margin if you believe that the purpose of the courts is to protect the innocent and the man on the street and serve the cause of justice rather than the cause of politicians. However, you are welcome to disagree on that, but my point is: do not assume that what is true for you is true for the whole world... that is the kind of attitude that gives Americans in general a bad name - I deliberately AVOIDED talking about US common-law systems since I don't KNOW how they work, I talked about South Africa, and cited South African cases as examples because I DO know how THEY work. If you do not HAVE such a common-law system, then that doesn't change the validity of my post to your situation anyway as I was talking about how things SHOULD work, and I daresay that you SHOULD have a common-law system like that if you give a damn about your people's civil rights.
>I would argue the election of the President is tremendously important to the state of law in America.
You are rigt about that, but you missed my point. My point is that moral matters shouldn't BE legal matters. Part of the purpose of your supreme court (and our constitutional court) is to evaluate particular cases which were not there previously and determine how (and if) the constitution applies to them.
But courts also serve another function. That of 'common law'. The determination of how moral matters should be enforced to be inline with needs of the majority of society. I am saying that these things which are such political platform issues in the USA should be matters like that: decided on a court-by-court and region-by-region basis, not a national basis and certainly not by the legislative power. It won't be a perfect solution (since the system isn't) but it is how the system is MEANT to work and will be a lot better than what we have now.
Let me use two local examples (since I know them well). In the 1920's a South African man wanted to have his wife jailed for adultery which was a common-law crime at the time. The judge decided however that the vast majority of society no longer believes adultery should be a crime - it may be grounds for divorce but that's an entirely different thing - and ever since then, it ISN'T a crime. In 1993 the city of Durban wanted to legalize topless sunbathing on the beaches. There was quite an outcry from our own religious right who took the matter to court. The court however decided that the vast majority of people would not be offended by topless sunbathing and that it therefore was no longer out of line with moral believes of the majority of society. Since then, topless sunbathing is legal on South African beaches. Intriguingly this didn't lead to any kind of major upsets, beaches became known as 'good topless spots' and women there tend to feel free to be topless, and most of them will be. Other beaches are not popular for toplessnes and since any women taken her top of there will be entirely alone in doing so, nobody does. So the people who think that seeing breasts are harmful to children go to the beaches where toplessness is not the norm, everybody else goes to the beaches where it is. Nobody is particularly inconvenienced and there are no laws about this, society just adapted to make room for both sets of believes.
The interesting thing about my examples are that both of them are cases where things which used to be illegal was made legal because the court research indicated (and the lawyers made a good case of course) that society in general had changed it's views on the matters. What I was trying to say is that both our countries should give a lot more respect to the common-law tradition because common-law decisions are much easier to change with society than legislative laws and can change on demand and based on current societal norms. Legislative laws are hard to change and hard for the man in the street to influence. Anybody can bring a case to change a common-law matter and if the case is well made will change it - only a small elite has real influence on legislative laws. We have to realize that ALL matters of morality ought to be the exlusive domain of common-law (in an ideal world they wouldn't be a matter of LAW at ALL and would be 100% individually decided at all times, but we don't live in an ideal world so I doubt we can ever make that happen) - while matters of NATIONAL interest and FOREIGN policy (technically the one is the other of course) should be the SOLE powers of the legislature. Property laws are national interest, gay-marriage is not. Trade negotiations are national interest, abortions are not, inter-region highways and postal deliveries are matters of national interest - people who like a bit of weed now and then are not.
Man, I wish I could find a country that worked like that... I would emigrate faster than you can say "VISA APPROVED"
>With web crackdowns like this becoming more and more frequent do you think we will start to see similar (overt) activities from US and European governments?"
Duh.
Of course we will. There is only one way to prevent governments from abusing power and that is not to let them. With the general complacency that the population shows about issues where civil liberties are at stake (remember most people are in favor of censorship 'to protect the children' [and oddity since I rather think we should be protecting our children from living in a police state shouldn't we ?]) this kind of thing will only get more mainstream. When will people want to fight back ? The same time they always have- when they have lost all their rights, people as a rule aren't known for valuing their most precious gifts until they lose them. The trouble is - this time, that may really be too late. With the kind of weaponry and power governments can wield today, if a citizenry doesn't defend it's rights while it still has them - they are likely to find that when they have lost them, there is no way to ever get it back. And sorry folks, the second amendment will not help my US friends when that day comes. You will pull out your nine-mill and find out exactly HOW useless it is against a tank. And don't count on massive revolt from the soldiery either, they sign away their civil rights when they join so the services tends to self-selects against those who actually value having those rights. Ultimately our biggest problem isn't that corrupt politicians want too much power (that's always been the case) but that people who value short-term security over freedom are happy to hand all our rights over to them for the promise of protection. Throw in the fact that some of them are skillfull manipulators of people's religious and moral believes and you have real trouble. Even McCain has been campaigning for the religious right vote with his anti-abortion stuff. By making moral issues into artificial legal issues - they can get a lot of people to vote on a moral base instead of a practical base. Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice really shouldn't HAVE anything to do with what president you vote for, that's a matter for the courts. What should matter is who will give you the highest level of protection of your basic civil rights. That is after all what the government is SUPPOSED to be for. We can never get one that won't mess up at least a bit, but we can do a damn site better than the kind that wants you to think his ideas about who-can-marry-who is a valid consideration of his potential skill as a leader.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait... you mean you got past the pigeons on the ceiling in that game ?
Mmmm, do I want to figure out how to make a 12 year old game run on Linux just to finally settle the score with those stupid skeleton birds...
Well... we all know what's in this stuff don't we ? It's custard (possibly with some orange food colorant).
The behavior described here is identical to that exhibited by custard and other liquids with low viscosity but high surface tension. The effect is that low velocity impacts are passed through easily but high velocity impact causes the surface tension to rapidly increase and prevents entry. To put it bluntly, you can run over a swimming pool full of custard, but you can't walk over one (brainiac did an episode on it, though they could have done a better job of explaining the theory about why it works that way - wikipedia is your friend here - as per their usual script, they were mostly interested in the fun-value of a swimming pool full of custard... the test subject did indeed run over it until he got to the middle, was told to stop... and then sank).
Now I'm sure it's not actually custard in this goo (well, fairly sure) but the phenomenon is certainly not new and has been known for a while. What seems new is that this is a much lower liquidity and viscosity than most of these substances (it appears to be at the level of clay or playdough rather than a flowing liquid) - which clearly makes for a whole new range of practical applications, since it won't soak into things or leak, you can make things like laptop protective cases lined with the stuff which would be impractical with custard....
Am I the only one who instantly thought of the "securefoam" stuff in the copcar in Demolition Man ?
"Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity"
Do you know a better way to make more virgins ?
Classic quote gets classic rebuttal...
Thanks AshtangiMan - it seems you understood the point I was trying to make. I wasn't trying to take shots at America though - I was trying to show an outsiders perspective. As for the "best you have" comment: considering that SF was the only place I visited where the majority of the society was open minded and had a genuinely inclusive rather than exclusive culture of not just accepting but celebrating individual choice... well I still think that by the values I hold most dear, it's the best you have.
Wait - let me get this straight, an uninformed git gives his entire country a bad name, I correct him with simple, factual arguments and put him in his place... and I am the troll ? I guess I know who the mod voted for...
Define "healthy economy" - I think 98% of the people in the country can pay their bills and afford food is a pretty good definition myself.
Besides which, your econ101 is pretty much a myth - in reality, low unemployment does not in any way reduce the movement of workers, people move jobs because of ambition, it just means nobody don't spend huge amounts of time starving without the opportunity to work.
Most hires in any economy are inter-company from people already employed, new workforce entrants is always the lowest part of the equation - they lack experience. This is no difference if there is a 2% or a 20% unemployment rate.
In fact most of that 2% will be new entrants to the workforce that lack the experience of their employed counterparts - who get hired next door.
You don't see massive inflation there... since everyone can actually afford to pay for stuff, you see booming business and prices dropping because business can make bigger profits by lowering margins and focussing on bulk.
Some of that 2% will drive new business ventures, some of the employed people will save up and start new companies. What low unemployment actually means is they are more likely to do so ! If you start a company where work is easily available and it fails (as 80% of new companies do) - you can always get a job again.
If you start one where work is hard to find, and it fails - you end up in bankruptcy court.
The massive risk reduction is a major motivation for entrepeneurship, the high employment rate means that businesses have to compete for skilled workers so that those are the only economies where salaries actually go up faster than the inflation rate - meaning normal working people actually have a chance at a comfortable or even wealthy retirement... what is your post-Bush social security worth again ? Oh but that's okay right, cos you invested additional money for your retirement - how is that 401K of yours doing ?
Sorry, but the only country that deems America's economy as the largest and richest in the world is America, the rest of think the economy is supposed to serve more than 1% of the population with "CEO" on their business cards. By practically any metric other than "total money produced" - you are near the bottom of the pile, hell my own African homeland beats you on some of them ! What's the point of making billions if it all goes to the same few people who already *have* billions while the rest of the population is living on the breadline ? Heck recent studies suggest as much as 25% of Americans live below the poverty line - and your drive to go for educated work is largely based on the startling reality that nobody else has a chance at a good life. :)
Every other job, you earn almost nothing, and your job could be outsourced tomorrow because your company decided it's cheaper to use sweatshop labor in another country - thus neatly impoverishing two nations
God ... you're the kind of American who gives the whole country a really bad name... do you have any idea how arrogant and stupid you sound ? The land of the free ? I've got more civil liberties than you do and I live in a poor semi-socialist country in Africa !
(Example: It took one case in the constitutional court to find that not allowing gay marriage is discrimination, which is specifically prohibited by the constitution - and the court had the power to *order* the government to provide the legal means for gay marriage within a year. The government was required to comply, and did so).
Note: no discussion on founding fathers (your version of "oh spirits of the ancients") - the only question that mattered was "are we treating some people differently than others ?", when the answer was "yes we are" - the court had no choice but to rule that as discrimination and the government had no choice but to change the law.
Now *that* is civil liberty.
Okay, enough ranting... just get over yourself... oh - and for the record, I've been to America, nice place to visit - I would definitely not want to live there - and I spent most of my time in San Francisco, the best you have was still too pathetically primitive.
Printing books is actually very low on pollution and could even be carbon negative. You have some pollution with the equipment to cut the tree down, pulp it and the printing presses and such - but that's once off.
The paper in the books, assuming they don't get burned are... you guessed it: carbon, not carbon dioxide and not in the atmosphere.
You have a permanent safe and useful storage of carbon where it doesn't pollute. Running a website uses energy all the time, meaning a constant pollution, even if books are carbon positive (I doubt it) - they are still a lot lower on emissions than websites.
*NOTE: I said books, not paper, flyers, leaflets and toilet paper do not have this advantage as they are generally not stored safely indoors for centuries.
The confusion here is because people still think trees are carbon negative. They're not, they are mostly carbon neutral, trees produce oxygen only in sunlight, in darkness - they produce carbon dioxide. Depending on the amount of daylight the region gets there is therefore a minor shift to either side, usually seasonally.
Now - that does not mean rampant deforestation is good either. Deforestation mostly replaces a carbon neutral setup with carbon positive setups, and there is a lot more to environmental protection (an environment we do need to survive) than just carbon levels. Saving the rainforrests is a very crucial matter for many important reasons: to protect cultures that would go extinct with them, the survival of many species dependent on them, the likelihood cures to various diseases waiting to be discovered... but global warming is not one of the reasons to protect the trees. In fact, the two have exactly nothing to do with each other.
You got the facts right - but unfortunately - people will are greedy and will try to abuse the law. Take for example a whole bunch of recent copyright lawsuits launched by J.K. Rowling against a number of authors world-wide. None of these authors copied or translated her works, they wrote stories about their own characters which were heavily inspired by the kind of story in Harry Potter - and she sued them.
Now it's true that under most international copyright law systems - her suits were completely without merit, proving that however costs money - and most of these authors simply couldn't afford to defend - so they had to settle, usually with a no-further-publication clause.
Basically, the law handles this right, but the legal system is not always (and this is better or worse in various countries but never ideal) good at ensuring the law is only used the right way.
I agree with you - such a system would actually be beneficial - provided you meet one more criteria, software patents expire after 18 months.
There is no point to having uncopyrighted public code for an idea to call on when it's useful life is exceeded already and only a tiny minority of software algorithms outlast 5 years, the vast average is between 2 and 3. Even 18 months gives the majority of the average useful life of the invention to the inventor - and the remainder to others for building upon - before it's too late.
Well I think it's about fifty/fifty at this stage and the trend is moving more and more toward the pay-guys being behind.
Programming languages are a good example. Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Java - all highly innovative programming languages that appeared in the last 20 years, all free (I include Java because it was always free as in beer, I know it wasn't always free as in speech - but the argument here is about profit motivation so free as in beer counts to this particular argument).
Now what, in the same time has come out of the pay world that was truly innovative ? Delphi doesn't count - object pascal just added GUI libs to an existing language. Visual Basic perhaps you could count because it really isn't BASIC anymore... but then - it is hardly a great language, is single platform (all my examples were multiplatform) oh and it came way after Perl (to name just one). The only other one that's even remotely notable is C# - and hey wait, that bears about the same resemblance to Java as ogg does to mp3 now doesn't it ?
In short, what you point out as a "trend" is just not true, it looks like it because of selective reporting. With my selective reporting (another kind of software innovation) I have made it look like the proprietary software-for-money world basically never invents anything and all the innovation is done for free, mostly by academics but occasionally by corporations.
The reality is that in different sub-fields, different approaches have had the best results, I don't personally think that this is because either approach is better at anything - for initial-idea purposes, I think it shows that money plays no role whatsoever - dumb luck determines if it's a company or a FOSS developer that thinks of it first.
But here is the clincher, because the FOSS developers don't patent, and don't use restrictive copyright - our ideas are reused, built into new things and form building blocks for other ideas... to put it a different way - that secondary level of innovation, happens far faster and more efficiently in this reduced income (it's just not true to think FOSS is a zero-income economy but it is probably a lower-potential-income approach) system.
That's odd... ogg vorbis is unpatented and by virtue of it's FOSS licensing effectively losing out on copyright monetization - and in fact came to exist because the mp3 patent so greatly reduced it's actual usefulness that the developers felt a genuine need to replace it.
You can't copyright a process - because that is not creative, the expression of that process is creative. If you make the "process" copyrightable - then you are allowing ideas to be copyrightable - or to put it another way "one artist paints a still life of an apple, now nobody else can ever paint an apple again because he owns the copyright on the idea of 'painting an apple'".
Yes it is that ludicrous and that's why not even US law is that stupid.
Software is unique in being the only thing in the entirety of law that can be both copyrighted (in implementation) and patented (at the algorythm/idea) level.
This is already a logical inconsistency. Quite frankly most software patents are about as logical to grant as a patent on "a story about two people falling in love" - and suddenly every romance writer owes you royalties ? Even if you come up with a truly new story idea (and that is very, very rare, stories by their very nature use the same basic structures over and over) should you be allowed to patent it so nobody else can write a story like that - even if it's a new and original one ? ... in fact you just destroyed the entire field of satire so scrap mad magazine as well...
Well.. there goes all Terry Pratchett's books - I mean, he satirizes other stories all the time
This is what is happening in software right now, because we've allowed them to not only copyright the implementation of ideas, but patent the ideas themselves. The very fact that software is deemed copyrightable should have automatically excluded algorithms from being patentable on the same grounds that we don't allow patenting ideas for any other creative process.
You gotta admit though, the subject matter deserves to be anal-ized...
You remind me of the last bully fight I ever got into. Now I had, had to deal with groups of atackers often enough - my reaction was to kick and punch at anything I could reach, they grab limbs, I jerk madly until something comes free and lash out- of course I always lost those, but I left a few of them with some serious bruises at least.
But the last one was a solo, who was just coming at me for no reason. By then I had been doing martial arts for some years - and I also had learned one thing, beating a bully doesn't stop him - they just come back harder because you upset their little power-system, they only stop when they are so badly beaten and humiliated that they are dead scared of you - too scared to be able to hide it behind macho.
This time though... I was going to try something new. I never threw a single punch but I dodged and blocked with everything I ever learned in class - I avoided every punch he threw, every kick hit air or bounced harmlessly of a deflection move. For ten minutes he was punching at nothing before teachers found us.
When I pointed out, as witnessed by the entire schoolyard that I didn't even hit back once, I just dodged his punches and he still kept coming, he was sumarily suspended for three weeks, and I got off without so much as a warning. When he came back, his arm was in a cast, turns out one of those blocked punches of his was so stupidly thrown (lots of power behind it, no brains) that he broke his thumb on my arm. Poetic justice that was... and somehow, I never got into a fight again.
By that logic, the government should stop funding cancer research by universities because it may directly compete with drug companies ?
I didn't set up the machine, the software on it was out of date, hardly my fault.
None of the machines *I* set up in the company was ever compromised.
And I still never said my password fell to a dictionary attack, an old system that didn't do lockouts where both usernames AND passwords were brute-forced was bound to fail. For that, some blame belongs with the person who DID set it up (who wasn't there anymore). It was a box that should have long been modified, and should never have BEEN outside the firewalls to begin with (it is possible to measure bandwith from inside) - that design decision however, was never one I made.
In the time I was there, security improved a great deal - but it was still a work in progress.
My point however was simply this: I was told in so many words that the reason I'm losing my job was to maintain the illusion of an uncrackable system. If the system had fallen because of something I couldn't have controlled (maybe a debian ssh key in the time before the exploit became known or such) the results would have been exactly the same.
Yes, thank you, it was not a dictionary attack, it was a cycle-through-all-characters attack, and what made me unlucky was having the first username in the alphabet - if he hadn't hit me, he would have (eventually) hit the next admin.
Now I HAD previously advised that we should dispense with password based logins entirely and use keys, but this process was not yet complete at the time and of course the less critical servers were secured first. Ergo, the little bandwith monitoring box was fairly low on the priority list BECAUSE even if somebody got in there he still had some pretty tight firewalls to get around before getting to the actual datacenters.
Not even the most powerful encryption is completely unbruteforceable, but keyfiles at least have the advantage that the brute-force would take YEARS, not HOURS. Oh well, the downside of being a contractor is not having labour-law protection, so if firing you is a good way to save face with customers, the truth doesn't matter much.
>Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor.
Just for the record, that's not true. The actual legend, which is at least in part based on facts, is that he led a revolt against a corrupt aristrocracy that overtaxed peasants (to the point of leaving them unable to eat). The revolt consisted of robbing said corrupt aristocrats (in particular the tax collectors) and then giving the money back to it's rightful owners.
The oldest version of the legend I could find in a book (published in the 1700's) explained their system as follows:
1/3 of the money the aristocrat had was left with him - (this was deemed a fair amount, even in taxes)
1/3 was given to the peasants it came from - (that was deemed fair by said peasants)
the last 1/3 was kept by Robin Hood and his men to buy their own food and weaponry.
Basically, an early form of guerilla warfare and civil disobedience rather than outright theft.
Most modern tellings do remember that Robin Hood was born a nobleman and a knight (Sir Robert of Locksley) but very few recall the end of the legend completely (as per said oldest book version). Most end with the return of Richard I from the crusades who punishes his corrupt brother and the aristocrats who scored from the system he set up. According to the older versions though, he didn't just punish them and pardon Robin Hood. He then rewarded Robert of Locksley for what he deemed exceptional service to the country, by greatly upgrading his title and making him the Earl of Huntingdon.
Said title is still extant, and I do believe it's carriers take some pride in being (probably) descended from Robin Hood.
Of course, with an almost 500 year old legend, a lot of facts are not known - especially when the oldest book about it I could find was written more than a 2 centuries after the fact, but the old 'steal from the rich, give to the poor' idea is really a rather massive oversimplification of what he said to have done. I think it would almost be more fair to think of Robin Hood as an early form of a welfare system in a taxed-state.
I have a feeling their logic was much the same as a company I once worked for. This company handled large amounts of credit card transactions on behalf of merchants, so security was considered vital (which always left my wondering why they chose to have windows desktops with draconian rules for humans to follow, rather than a secure OS of some sort... hem hem). I was a linux sysadmin there, charged with maintaining servers.
Mostly the network was very secure and we never had a break-in at any points that mattered, but somebody did manage to break in to a harmless little box whose sole purpose was to monitor internet bandwith, since we had two outgoing networks, and it had to monitor both, it ended up being outside both firewalls.
The person used a brute-force ssh attack, and compromised my account, for no other reason than that my username was the first (alphabetically) of all the admins. My password was strong but nothing is stronger than a persistent brute-force attack at a place nobody is really watching.
Of course, there were tools installed to detect brute-forcing and it picked it up, and reported it to us - sadly, only after he succeeded.
Since it was my account that was compromised, I had a disciplinary charge brought and though I COULD prove that I had nothing to do with it and hadn't helped the person in any way (after all, the logs clearly showed a brute-force process discovering my username by simply counting up) - I was still sumarilly dismissed.
The reasoning was this: we have to uphold to our customers an image of being virtually unbreakable. We know that no system ever can be, but we cannot market this fact to them - so we call you negligent, and we can tell them "it was one negligent admin, a human error, and he was fired for it."
That the machine he got didn't contain or have access for reaching anything that did contain, secure data was irrelevant, rather than acknowledge that no system is ever completely secure, fire an admin who had nothing to do with it and just got hit by sheer numeric bad luck so you can pretend the only problem you ever had was a bad employee you fired.
I suspect much the same logic is becoming common among management types and probably had something to do with this case, and others like it that regularly make slashdot. Management types hate the idea of aiming for acceptable risk, of admitting that no: our systems are not, and will not ever be, completely uncrackable. So rather than using those breaches as opportunities to learn and to close one more hole - they come down on whoever revealed it like a ton of bricks so they can pretend it was just human error.
You could theoretically fire and hire in such a way that you end up with only honest workers, but you can never get a completely secure system - so their logic is to present and image of doing the former, so they can deny the reality of the latter.
Mod parent up - that was HILARIOUS !
Thank you sir, you got it in one :)
I have a large heap of plastic bags I keep in a bin on the fridge, before we go shopping I always stuff a few in my pockets - heck the shop guy will even pack my groceries for me, but I only ever buy new bags when I run out - that's about R5 total expense per year, and because the bags are stronger you also use less of them. Nowadays I can carry a bottle of wine or a 2lt coke without having to double-bag it.
This is one case where a smartly thought out plan really did work well.
And I didn't NEED proof that plastic bags were bad for the environment, they were dirty, litter that visible ruined all our public parks and streets and I was LIVING here, I could SEE that with my own eyes. It's also not hard to verify how many children and animals have choked to death on discarded plastic bags, a simple newspaper search will pick up a few - and it's safe to assume that the newspapers don't carry a story about more than a minor percentage (when it coincides with them running a "think of the children" edition usually).
All that aside, I am strongly in favour of better environmental care, but I rarely sound off on it because the kind of people who don't care aren't ever going to be convinced - instead I try to point them at the very real SHORT-TERM benefits. Cleaner public parks (try this plastic bags hold water, stagnant water grows mosquitos and all sorts of lovely diseases, and this is no less true of small puddles, especially when trapped in something that prevents it evaporating - thousands of tiny puddles full of cholera is such a nice thing to think of your children playing amongst...), the simple reality that air polution means WE BREATH TOXIC STUFF is another.
Global warming detractors can clamour as much as they want about whether it happens or not - they cannot argue that high polution rates lead to respiratory illnesses, reduced energy levels (we need oxygen to burn food for energy, dirtier air means more breaths needed to get that oxygen) and poisons in our blood.
It is not surprising that areas around oil refineries and other high-polution places have the highest instances of child-asthma and sinusitus in the world - often 30-40 percent higher than the rest of the region. That's a bit too high a figure to dismiss as 'lack of causal' especially since there is no known case where the correlation don't hold (where a high polluting industry has existed for more than ten years and there isn't a marked increase in child respiratory diseases among children under ten).
I just don't get how people can go off on tangents about whether global warming is real - and just completely ignore the elephant in the room. Global warming or not - right now, the air you breath is shortening your lifespan, and that of everyone around you - if we clean up the air better that risk is greatly reduced (and we're not even getting into the complex politics like being less dependent on trade with countries that really don't LIKE us very much...)
Intriguing,
Here in SA we had a huge problem with plastic bag litter. So much so that one MP described them as 'our new national flower'.
A law was passed - it didn't ban bags, but it DID require them to be made at least 0.5 microns thick - meaning they are reusable (the older 0.3micron thin ones tended to tear if you use them more than once). This of course, costs money, so they ALLOWED (didn't require but in practise everybody did it) the shops to charge the price difference back to the customers.
That means you pay about R0.40 for bag - but suddenly, people KEEP the bags, and reuse them as many times as possible because those fourty-cent charges add up.
The result it that plastic bag litter has become notably less common in South Africa, they are a valuable commodity now. People tend to be so terrible they won't even avoid littering public parks out of caring for shared resources for the community - but they will damn well do it if it means not throwing away their own personal money.
Sorry - if giving people an economic incentive not to throw their trash in the public park to strangle birds and fish (and yes, human children !) is 'telling them how to live' then I'm all for telling people how to live in some cases.
Note also: I am NOT a fan of my government, my posting history will show how extremely critical I am of them in general - but where a well thought out plan has given a genuine benefit to the entire nation I will also give them fair credit.
PS. Now if only we can find a way to give people an economic incentive not to throw ciggarette-butts, coke-cans, used-condom and broken beer bottles in the parks.
Please do not assume that ALL legal systems are as stupid as yours are. My country uses the Dutch-Roman system in which common-law DOES include matters of societal law and JUDGES decide common law.
Common-law cases do NOT require you to sue for damages, you can sue over policy - for example when the church sued the Durban tourism board to prevent them allowing topless sunbathing and it backfired because the judge found that societal norms are NOT opposed to topless sunbathing and instead of preventing it their case ended up legalizing it nationwide.
Now our system is still far from perfect as there is no real system in place to PREVENT the legislature from passing laws over matters that SHOULD be handled by our common-law system - but the idea that common-law is ONLY about harm between individuals and all other matters are decided by legislature seems completely stupid to us. No wonder your legislative laws SEEM arbitrary to you (funny - you have all these examples of stupid 200 year old laws never repealed...) the legislature decides over social norms on a day-to-day basis but society only gets to have any notable influence on the legislature every 4 years ! Corporations can bribe every day... sounds to me like the people in your country must lose all the way ... and if the average /. is anything to go by - everyone here knows that, in fact, that IS what is happening.
Our system is ideal in that judgements have the FORCE of law, but the flexibility of social development, it is imperfect because there isn't anything in the constitution to prevent the legislature from making laws about things that actually have nothing to DO with their job.
But - we CAN sue our government about laws if those laws violate the constitution and they WILL be forced to change the laws. Thus far at least, the government has been shitscared of the constitutional court and fixed every law they were sued over (and lost) with commendable speed.
Law systems are complex and there are many in the world. The anglo-saxon system with American attachments that rule in the US is considered terribly incomplete, slow and centralized by those countries that favor the Duth-Roman system (the roman part here goes back to the Republic, not the ages of emperors). On the other hand, adherents of your system find the idea of trial-by-judge to be only marginally more humane than trial-by-ordeal(funny though - we've never had that... you did) and think trial-by-jury is better.
Personally - I think both systems have their pros and cons, but I think the Duth-Roman system wins by a small margin if you believe that the purpose of the courts is to protect the innocent and the man on the street and serve the cause of justice rather than the cause of politicians.
However, you are welcome to disagree on that, but my point is: do not assume that what is true for you is true for the whole world... that is the kind of attitude that gives Americans in general a bad name - I deliberately AVOIDED talking about US common-law systems since I don't KNOW how they work, I talked about South Africa, and cited South African cases as examples because I DO know how THEY work.
If you do not HAVE such a common-law system, then that doesn't change the validity of my post to your situation anyway as I was talking about how things SHOULD work, and I daresay that you SHOULD have a common-law system like that if you give a damn about your people's civil rights.
>I would argue the election of the President is tremendously important to the state of law in America.
You are rigt about that, but you missed my point. My point is that moral matters shouldn't BE legal matters. Part of the purpose of your supreme court (and our constitutional court) is to evaluate particular cases which were not there previously and determine how (and if) the constitution applies to them.
But courts also serve another function. That of 'common law'. The determination of how moral matters should be enforced to be inline with needs of the majority of society. I am saying that these things which are such political platform issues in the USA should be matters like that: decided on a court-by-court and region-by-region basis, not a national basis and certainly not by the legislative power.
It won't be a perfect solution (since the system isn't) but it is how the system is MEANT to work and will be a lot better than what we have now.
Let me use two local examples (since I know them well). In the 1920's a South African man wanted to have his wife jailed for adultery which was a common-law crime at the time. The judge decided however that the vast majority of society no longer believes adultery should be a crime - it may be grounds for divorce but that's an entirely different thing - and ever since then, it ISN'T a crime.
In 1993 the city of Durban wanted to legalize topless sunbathing on the beaches. There was quite an outcry from our own religious right who took the matter to court. The court however decided that the vast majority of people would not be offended by topless sunbathing and that it therefore was no longer out of line with moral believes of the majority of society. Since then, topless sunbathing is legal on South African beaches.
Intriguingly this didn't lead to any kind of major upsets, beaches became known as 'good topless spots' and women there tend to feel free to be topless, and most of them will be. Other beaches are not popular for toplessnes and since any women taken her top of there will be entirely alone in doing so, nobody does. So the people who think that seeing breasts are harmful to children go to the beaches where toplessness is not the norm, everybody else goes to the beaches where it is. Nobody is particularly inconvenienced and there are no laws about this, society just adapted to make room for both sets of believes.
The interesting thing about my examples are that both of them are cases where things which used to be illegal was made legal because the court research indicated (and the lawyers made a good case of course) that society in general had changed it's views on the matters.
What I was trying to say is that both our countries should give a lot more respect to the common-law tradition because common-law decisions are much easier to change with society than legislative laws and can change on demand and based on current societal norms. Legislative laws are hard to change and hard for the man in the street to influence. Anybody can bring a case to change a common-law matter and if the case is well made will change it - only a small elite has real influence on legislative laws.
We have to realize that ALL matters of morality ought to be the exlusive domain of common-law (in an ideal world they wouldn't be a matter of LAW at ALL and would be 100% individually decided at all times, but we don't live in an ideal world so I doubt we can ever make that happen) - while matters of NATIONAL interest and FOREIGN policy (technically the one is the other of course) should be the SOLE powers of the legislature. Property laws are national interest, gay-marriage is not. Trade negotiations are national interest, abortions are not, inter-region highways and postal deliveries are matters of national interest - people who like a bit of weed now and then are not.
Man, I wish I could find a country that worked like that... I would emigrate faster than you can say "VISA APPROVED"
>With web crackdowns like this becoming more and more frequent do you think we will start to see similar (overt) activities from US and European governments?"
Duh.
Of course we will. There is only one way to prevent governments from abusing power and that is not to let them. With the general complacency that the population shows about issues where civil liberties are at stake (remember most people are in favor of censorship 'to protect the children' [and oddity since I rather think we should be protecting our children from living in a police state shouldn't we ?]) this kind of thing will only get more mainstream.
When will people want to fight back ? The same time they always have- when they have lost all their rights, people as a rule aren't known for valuing their most precious gifts until they lose them. The trouble is - this time, that may really be too late. With the kind of weaponry and power governments can wield today, if a citizenry doesn't defend it's rights while it still has them - they are likely to find that when they have lost them, there is no way to ever get it back.
And sorry folks, the second amendment will not help my US friends when that day comes. You will pull out your nine-mill and find out exactly HOW useless it is against a tank. And don't count on massive revolt from the soldiery either, they sign away their civil rights when they join so the services tends to self-selects against those who actually value having those rights.
Ultimately our biggest problem isn't that corrupt politicians want too much power (that's always been the case) but that people who value short-term security over freedom are happy to hand all our rights over to them for the promise of protection. Throw in the fact that some of them are skillfull manipulators of people's religious and moral believes and you have real trouble. Even McCain has been campaigning for the religious right vote with his anti-abortion stuff.
By making moral issues into artificial legal issues - they can get a lot of people to vote on a moral base instead of a practical base. Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice really shouldn't HAVE anything to do with what president you vote for, that's a matter for the courts. What should matter is who will give you the highest level of protection of your basic civil rights. That is after all what the government is SUPPOSED to be for. We can never get one that won't mess up at least a bit, but we can do a damn site better than the kind that wants you to think his ideas about who-can-marry-who is a valid consideration of his potential skill as a leader.