There's a lot to be said for self reliance folks. Makes you strong. Screw the big companies, they don't give a fuck about you. Don't work for them, do your own thing.
That may be a little extreme. They do control a nice chunk of the money floating around that's gonna end up in paychecks.
Someone back in the 1980's had a saying: "Trust, but verify." That was really a polite way of saying "Work with them, but don't trust them." If they're handing out the money, then take it, but don't believe anything they say unless you get it in writing.
And then get yourself a copy of M.G. Kains' "Five Acres and Independence" and the phone number of your county agent. If your company is going to be as helpful to you as Enron was to their retirees, then you'll want the subscriptions to Mother Earth News and Backwoods Home and all the other hippy/survivalist magazines. And I thought about suggesting the misc.survivalism usenet group, except the signal-to-noise ratio there is arguably the worst on usenet.
If you can brew your own beer, you don't have to drink Coor's. If you can bake your own bread, you'll be a lot healthier than the folks who eat WonderBread (and you can screw up the baking royally and still have better-tasting bread than most supermarkets) If you chop your own firewood, you'll be twice-warmed. If you lift weights, you won't have to call your cousins every time your girlfriend wants to rearrange the furniture. And so forth.
But that's indulging a pet theory of mine: The less-dependant you are on other people, the happier you'll be. And it's easier to deal with other people when you're not so dependent on them: you don't resent them for controlling you, they don't resent you for needing them for everything, and as a result everybody's blood pressure drops about ten points.
Let's be realistic. Culture takes time to transform. It takes France about 50 years after revolution to establish the modern day balance between mornach, church and people. It takes US at least a century from the liberation of slaves (the Civil Wars) to the removal of all the racial discrimination policy against African American (around JFK).
Point taken that changes rarely happen overnight.
However, the state needs to get out of the way for changes to happen at all.
It's a common stereotype that old men tend to be stubborn and set in their ways. However, it's common precisely because it's often true. And the PRC's leaders are old indeed. As I understand it, the ones who are in their 60's are considered to be relatively young. Here in the US, that's retirement age. And in any country, that's old enough to be resistant to any kind of change and old enough to be firmly convinced that the young have no business having contradictory opinions.
Unless I miss my guess, important political decisions in the PRC are made by a committee from the Communist Party. And the only way to get on that committee is to be a party member, an old man, and in the right place when someone dies and a vacancy opens up. That's not a system that leads to much turnover. Low turnover means that bad ideas tend to develop a lot of inertia and stick around. As a result, there's a brake on favorable change that doesn't need to exist and doesn't serve much useful purpose.
Not only the Chinese Govt need to learn, the general public also need some time to figure out how a "normal" reglion should behave (and that's why devious cult in developed countries cannot attract much followers)... Completely out-of-hand approach is liable for radical religious problem that everyone worries in recent time.
It's hard to define a "normal" religion. All religions, even the established and stable ones, show up in abberant behavior. My girlfriend's family are Southern Baptist. Fine, peaceful people. Their theological beliefs are not that much different from those of the people who bomb abortion clinics. I'm a Roman Catholic myself. I'm a cop-one of the people who keeps the peace and stability in my society. It seems to me ironic that my own beliefs are identical to those of the Irish Republican Army, some of the most notorious terrorists in the English-speaking world.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, religion is not the cause of violent behavior. It's often an excuse, but a poor one. Some people are naturally violent. Other people become violent for whatever reason. They'll grasp at religion as an excuse to commit violence, but if that doesn't work they'll find another excuse.
Yeah, the Chinese people will need to get used to freedom of religion and a few other freedoms. That'll take time. However, they'll never even have the chance until the government gets out of the way. People can't learn to live with something if they never are exposed to it.
You guys are -way- too easy on China on this site. When did China stop being the evil, ruthless country that they are?
You'll certainly get no argument from me that the Beijing government is a bunch of fascist murderers. However, that discussion is a tangent from a tangent.
The reason that China cares about software development is probably because they're trying to stop getting their web pages hacked by human rights advocates, or they're building some more Falun Gong firewalls or something.
One thing I've learned is that there's almost never just one cause for any remotely-complex phenomenon. Whatever their national government uses for OS'es, those things you named above may be part of it. These weren't for the national government but for a municipal government, which probably doesn't admin the Great Firewall of China.
Part of it may be the fear of backdoors. Part of it may be keeping MS in their place. And recent Chinese history includes a fair bit of the "Not Made Here" attitude. Remember how, for a time back in the 1970's, Fortran was banned because it was a Western product?
This isn't just some bland racism, or an overboarding sense of "patriotism", China is a brutal, dangerous country, and a testament to the powers of corruption.
Most of the world is a "testament to the powers of corruption." Most of the world doesn't ban price-fixing. In much of the business world, there's a culture of gifts and gratuities that would have gotten a US businessman locked up for bribery. The People's Republic of China may be a fascist rathole, but they're hardly the only one out there. Hell, I'm a staunch Republican, usually, but I'm not going to waste too much breath on praising the current administration.
Same applies to Falun Gong. Most of its followers are nice. But, "Master Li"'s (Falun Gong leader) teaching is very dubious. His early tape circulating in China contains something like "Upon the request of Li Peng (the infamous premier), Master Li stopped the Earth from imploding for a further 10 yrs"....
So what? Part of freedom is the freedom of morons to make moronic statements in public. I mean, Patrick Buchanan is allowed to campaign for public office here, LA County judge Lance Ito was once actually granted a law license, and look at all of the web sites making a folk hero out of Mumia Abu-Jamal. We've long since learned to tolerate morons and public idiocy in the US.
China's Communist Party is going to have to learn that they can't harass/intimidate/imprison/kill people for being idiots in public. That's the price of being allowed into the modern world.
BTW, "registered Christians?" Wow. Here in my corner of the western US, we don't even register guns!
It would be ok if the judges are actually limiting the warrents they approve. Unfortunatly it's seeming like judges are just rubberstamping anything put in front of them. If the reason for the search is 'an informer told me', then it should be rejected.
There basically are no search warrants that are based entirely upon the four words 'an informer told me.'
The last time I used a confidential informant to support a search warrant, it took me about twelve pages to write the affidavit in support. It was more like "This person informed me that the house at 12345 Bullshit Lane contained over one pound of methamphetamine, and the laboratory and materials commonly used to manufacture methamphetamine. He stated that he knew this because...."
If a private citizen with no personal involvement is willing to go on the record with the above, that may or may not be a complete affidavit right there. If the private citizen is going on record and his statement contains facts which work against his penal interest, then it's almost certainly enough. Something like "I know the meth is there because I helped to make it."
Unfortunately, I don't seem to get that lucky. In the case I'm talking about, my informant didn't want his name mentioned and I had to take a different tack. What I did was I stated in the affidavit that this informant had provided me with important information in sixteen prior cases, that the information was material and was not common knowledge, and that the information had proven correct on every occasion. I then took about ten of the twelve pages and outlined each of those sixteen cases to establish my informant's credibility to the judge.
Even if a judge issues a warrant on a faulty affidavit, it can be suppressed by the trial judge. If the supporting affidavit doesnt contain probable cause within its "four corners," then it's easily-attacked at trial.
But then, it's always fun to watch a bunch of/. people watch a Law&Order re-run, read some ACLU junk mail, and suddenly know everything about what the cops do or don't do.
Well, technically they can. But the public, including that rent-a-cop in the convenience store, can only detain a person 1) if they witnessed a crime and 2) to turn them over to a sworn police officer at the earliest possible time.
It's a good thing you're not a lawyer.
The standard for investigative detentions throughout the US is "reasonable suspicion," as set down in the Supreme Court's ruling _Terry v. Ohio_. It's not whether someone actually witnessed a crime. It's actually a fairly minimal standard-all it takes is a suspicion, and the ability to articulate that suspicion and its reason for existence. Someone walking through a parking lot at night looking into multiple cars without getting into any of them counts, and I could definitely detain that person for a field interview, check him for wants and prior contacts, et cetera. It would be a tactically stupid thing for the lot's owner to do the same, but he could. (To an extent: only cops have access to the computerized warrant database or our field contact records. He wouldn't be able to check those)
A typical police academy will cover about two dozen court decisions, with this one being the first.
In my state, the law does not distinguish between the powers of peace officers and private citizens to detain, and there's almost no distinction made between officers and the public WRT warrantless arrest. In other words, if the Sears loss-prevention guys have a reasonable suspicion that you're shoplifting, they're legally able to detain you whether they actually saw it or not.
Almost as reliable as a trained seal.
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Polygraphs, voice-stress analyzers, and these new cameras don't measure deceit. They measure stress. As accurate as they are, that's why getting them admitted into court is a bitch if not impossible. (There's only one US state in which any of the three have successfully been admitted into evidence at a criminal trial)
I know why they're doing it, though. Any cop with three years on the street (or two in a corrections setting-jail deputies and corrections officers learn to read people FAST) will be more accurate at reading people and detecting deception or aggression than any machine. But we didn't become cops in order to hand out boarding passes.
Counselors and Pdocs also deal in the same thing-they need to interpret their patients' body language.
But a polygraph isn't all that accurate. It measures any number of variables and has a skilled technician operating it, and it's not that accurate. One camera, measuring one variable, and read by someone untrained, just isn't going to pick out the "agrarian reformers" with death wishes.
Excuse me, but who in this world, except lawyers, has the knowledge to read and understand all those liscenses and terms. (And they probably don't have the time.)
Have you ever read your ISP's AUP? I have, for every single ISP I've had. They all basically said "You agree not to spam. You agree not to sell spamware or host a spammed site. You agree to not launch DoS attacks from our service. You agree that your bill is due on the fourth of every month. You agree that service outages are not our fault."
If you're even a little bit literate, it should take ten minutes at most to fully understand. Blaming a complex AUP on those eevil lawyers is a sign of mental laziness.
Their current slogan is "Ride the Light." That's a little too close to the title of a Metallica song (from back when they didn't suck) about dying in the electric chair.
In my area (Colorado front range) it's possible to get local phone service from AT&T Broadband as well. Now, AT&T are a bunch of mopes as well, but at least they're !Qwest.
I spent about thirteen hours driving around in a pretty white POS Ford sedan. In ten years as a cop, I've had Christmas off precisely once. (Scheduled off twice, but there's a reason my department bought pagers for everybody...)
I can see why, though. It's apparently a lot of peoples' favorite day to get drunk and beat the shit out of their spouses. Celebrating the birth of our Saviour by arresting two people in three separate situations for domestic assault, and two drunk drivers who wandered into cows at 25MPH is probably not what the man upstairs had in mind.
On the other hand, the Christmas spirit does exist. Four of our reservists (the police version of a volunteer firefighter) actually volunteered this year, and it was nice to have someone working in the car with me. And a woman who I wrote for some traffic beef two years ago spent most of Christmas eve flagging cops and firefighters and private security guards down to give them hot chocolate.
I'd still rather be spending it with my girlfriend and her daughter, though.
Most of the enthusiasm for photo IDs is from merchants, not cops. If cops really want to know who you are, they take fingerprints. A PDA-sized gadget with a fingerprint sensor and a wireless link to a fingerprint database would be far more useful than an implanted chip.
That works really well in the jail, where most counties have an AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) terminal. That is, it works really well if the subject's fingerprints are on file with the FBI. Someone who has never been a cop, or in the Armed Services, or arrested probably will not have prints on file.
Note that I said 'in the jail.' The terminals are pretty big, big enough that I wouldn't even try to carry something that big in the car.
Yeah, I can roll someone's prints on scene. However, that does no good until I can get the card to someone who can sit down with it at the terminal.
And I can't take someone to the jail against his will unless he'd been arrested. For that, I need probable cause to believe that he committed an arrestable crime. Merely being a suspicious person who I suspect is lying about his identity isn't enough.
Now, if there were print terminals the size of PDA's, they'd be damn useful. However, I'm not holding my breath on it being this year.
Besides, there are ways to tell if someone really belongs to his ID, and if he's lying, and if the ID's fake. THey give us $1500 radios and put computers in our cars, but this job is still about people and not technology.
We use ear tags for cattle. They're a hell of a lot cheaper.
Let's say that I contact someone while I'm at work, wearing the icky blue polyester suit. How am I going to read this chip? With a regular driver's license, I can take it back to my car, shine a light on it, see if it's fake, run it for warrants and license status, find out if the holder is a sex offender, and copy everything onto a citation or a field interview card. And if my flashlight and my car's map light quit, I can still read them.
Oh, and did I mention I can look to see if it's been faked, maybe compare it to one of the standard references?
With these things, no. I'm a cop, not an electronics tech. I've got no way of knowing if the signal is legitimate or from a black-market home-programmed chip. It'll probably take special equipment to read these chips, and I've learned that expensive electronics have a way of failing about fifteen seconds before I need them. And six lines of data leaves no room for a signature.
So, I'm not entirely sure about the practical aspects of this, or whether there's actually anything to gain.
And how about we look at the legal aspects. I'll admit that I haven't gone through either the Federal or Colorado constitutions with a magnifying glass lately, but I don't recall seeing any authorization for government to brand people like so many livestock.
Of course, I could be wrong about the Constitition thing. However, at the academy they did say that the parts of the Constitution that were written in the margins in red crayon didn't count.
But then, a lot of the experimentation with implantable ID was overseas. And in much of western Europe and in Japan, cops are expected to know aspects of individuals' lives that I don't even tell my parents. Like who's sleeping with who. Or who lives where-there are ways in the US for that information to be pretty much completely unavailable to police, but not in Japan or most of western Europe (for some reason, France, Germany and Holland spring to mind, but I wouldn't swear to that.)
The letter referenced above is a good one. It's clear, and probably more important, literate.
Public agencies tend to get flooded with written public comments. I'm with a local law enforcement agency which has occasionally solicited public commentary. Sometimes, we get good, valuable comments and (even better) useful and intelligent criticism. More often, we get sub-literate scrawled rants about how "pigs suck." Needless to say, the letters with poor grammar and spelling or little useful information tend to get passed around for comic relief rather than taken seriously.
The point I'm trying to make is, if you get defensive about being told to use a spell-checker, keep your mouth shut or you'll make MS look better. If your idea of commentary is 'M$ 5uX0Rz,' then stick to some IRC channel or you'll do more harm than good. And for God's sake, don't get into pointless esoterica about licensing or 'free speech/free beer.' If you go beyond the scope of the case at hand, you run a risk of not being taken seriously.
And AC's: I imagine they've already gotten their first letter. It's too late to get f15T pR05T.
Heinlein wrote a book _Take_Back_Your_Government_. Think of it as the HOWTO for political activism, although it's several rev's out of date
Several revisions? Several DECADES!
When you buy your copy, make sure you get the edition with Jerry Pournelle's commentary. The commentary is probably more applicable to today's politicking than the rest of the book.
Remember the Moral Majority? Remember how much influence they wielded? (Still do some places - hell in Kansas they managed to overthrow 100+ years of biology!)
First of all, you've got a misconception there. The KS BoE removed evolution/origins from the mandatory curriculum. They did not mandate creationist nonsense. Nor the so-called "scientific creationism" crap. Nor did they open the door for equal time. Nor did they prohibit teachers from teaching evolutionary biology or singing praises of Stephen Jay Gould. They simply removed the entire question from the mandatory curriculum and dumped the school standards onto the local school boards.
And you've hit on something. Just about every law that can send you to jail is state or municipal. It's your city commission, county board, and state assembly that you should be watching most of all. You should be paying attention to your county/district judges and remembering them when the judicial retention elections come around (like they do in most states). You should be watching your county school board and your zoning board. You should be able to explain why you plan to vote for one candidate for Sheriff over another. Is your nearest public library part of city government or is it part of a special tax district? Who's on the special district board? Who is the chief of police in your city and were you watching when the city manager selected him? Do you even know where your property tax goes? (If you live near Denver, guess how much of your property taxes go to pay for the Donkeys' new stadium. They're the biggest welfare queens in Colorado)
In other words, Congress is 90% irrelevant on their best days. It's the local electionsand the local entities with the real power to screw up your life if you don't watch them.
It's not that kind of sugar - not what you put in your coffee to make it sweet! I believe they are talking about four different sugars that make up DNA and RNA. These four sugars are called nucleotide bases and have the names adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. So, not quite as fun as rock candy.:)
Um, those are nucleic acids. They're definitely not sugars. All sugars (yes, ALL sugars) have the formula n(CH20). That means the composition is always an integer multiple of one carbon atom, two hydrogen atoms, and one oxygen atom. That's actually the definition of sugar (well, carbohydrate, anyway).
All of the nucleic acids include amino groups, NH2. That makes this easy, since sugars NEVER include nitrogen. The only sugars involved in nucleotide bases are ribose and deoxyribose, both of which are five-carbon-atom sugars matching the formula above.
I couldn't get to the article. I'm going to guess, however, that it was referencing simple carbohydrates, one- or two-carbon sugars.
What exactly made them call this a squid, rather than a jellyfish? I'm not questioning the marine biologist's decision, and I dont think TeaserX was either. What I'd like to know is what key differences might I have overlooked that gives us the differences between squid and jellyfish?
Some very significant differences. They have differentiated tissue-muscles separate from skin, an actual digestive tract, and probably the most-developed nervous system of all of the invertebrates, including eyes structured similarly to ours. Squid also have an actual circulatory system, but something that actually functions almost like a heart. And squids are actually bilaterally symmetrical. In plain English, that means there's one plane down which you can split a squid, and the two parts will be mirror images of each other.
OTOH, jellyfish are like anemones and hydrae. That means they're undifferentiated. Their tissues are only two cells thick, because each cell needs to be exposed to seawater in order to get oxygen or nutrients. They're undifferentiated, meaning they don't have different types of cells. They have no real nervous system at all. Nor do they have a circulatory system. They're radially symmetrical, meaning that any radial section will be pretty much identical to any other.
Hmmm... you know, when I was in China... I had absolutely no problems reading/., going to the drudgereport, or accessing my mail. That's not to say that censorship does not exist in China, and their TV news shows most definitely present a slanted view of the world; especially the US...
I don't doubt it. And I know that most US media isn't that useful either. However, I'm paid to be paranoid and I take my cues from other people who are also paid to be paranoid. We're taught to evaluate people in terms of their abilities, and not their intentions. If a government has the power to block a website, then one is right to worry. If the power is there, then the intention can change on a whim. I can get to an Amnesty International website very easily-sit down at a web browser and I'm about thirty keystrokes away. And the US government doesn't have a whole lot of power to shut it down. I can get to American Indian Movement sites and the various socialist loonies just as easily, without being easily monitored. How hard was it to get to a Free Tibet site over there?
Or, I hate to use this example, because I think the central figure should have visited a gas chamber some years ago, but imagine a Chinese cop gets murdered. How big an internet campaign would there be over there to make a folk hero out of his killer? In other words, imagine a Chinese Mumia. Would he give graduation speeches from death row the way the real Mumia does here?
I don't know if you've ever read Tom Clancy's latest bore, _The Bear and the Dragon_. If you have, how much truth is there to his description of their population-control policy? It's consistent with info from some other human-rights groups, but if you've been there you're a first- or second-hand source which beats the crap out of the third- and fourth-hand sources that I've seen thus far.
(2) Chinese are some of the most capitalistic sobs I've ever met.
Capitalism, alas, doesn't necessarily imply freedom-loving. The vast majority of the Pacific Rim economic powerhouses (Singapore, Japan, California) prove that well enough IMHO. I personally think they should go hand-in-hand, but there are enough governments on this planet that only recognize freedom when it involves the freedom to make a buck (and pay taxes on it).
I don't know whether the poster is upset at our priorities because he/she feels that we should have the same restrictions and laws as Europe (which seems to be a common complaint from Europeans, though I don't know where the poster hails from) or because of the inherent hypocracy of touting free speech and indicting Skylarov with the same mouth.
I'm not fond of blowing hot and cold either. I don't like the DMCA. I didn't become a cop to protect the MPAA/DVDCCA from having their disks viewed on *bsd boxen.
That being said, I can understand the dichotomy. It's a shaky argument, but it is illegal in many US states to teach people specific skills knowing that those skills will be used for criminal purposes (c.f. your state's terrorist training laws such as CO Revised Statute 18-9-120 and equivalents).
Don't misconstrue me here. I'm not defending the DMCA or the disgrace that has been done to Skylarov, Felten, and others. I'm just saying that there arguably is precedent. My own opinion is that, short of perjury/harassment/menacing/threats and Constitutionally-tested time/place/manner restrictions, speech absolutely should not be criminalized. Public safety and peacekeeping give us enough work to do without also having to enforce good manners.
I wanted to address both possibilities, which is probably why my real position sounded conflicted. My position, which I didn't really mention in the post because I only wanted to address the technical side of things, is that hate crime legislation is redundant and unnecessary in the U.S. If someone murders someone else, does the race of the victim really matter in determining the severity of the crime? What about battery? Or repeated harassment? If we think the punishments are too weak in the cases where these crimes cross racial lines, they're too weak when they don't. Hate crime legislation categorizes people in a world where we need to think of each other as equals. It achieves what it is seeking to prevent.
I'll certainly not argue with you here. I've had perfectly valid harassment, menacing, and criminal mischief cases get clouded by DA's who wanted to also charge Ethnic Intimidation (what we call "hate crimes" here.) I believe that involving race/ethnicity/religion/etc. at best will cloud what should be a clear issue.
Could hate crime statutes criminalize mere speech? Of course; we've got other laws on the books that do as well.
There's a slight disconnect here. My state's Ethnic Intimidation law reads a lot like Idaho's. The only things that it seems to criminalize are things that are already illegal under other statutes-harassment/stalking, assault, menacing, criminal mischief, and so forth. It does expand on them a little, but not much.
I also think that we'd be prudent to consider harassment/stalking laws separately from slander/libel/defamation laws. The former are criminal. The latter usually are not. Criminal libel statutes do still exist in some states, but they tend to get knocked down whenever they're
charged.
I usually cite sources, BTW, but I got lazy in my last post. You can read more about the Idaho case involving Lonny Rae here [go.com]. This is from August of this year, and while I'm sure there will be more to this story it hasn't happened yet.
Now that I've read it, it seems slightly more plausible. Even without a hate-crimes law it would arguably be a valid disorderly-conduct case. And since the article included the actual statute, it looks a lot more sound to me.
Since when CNN is a news site ? I see similarities between Chinese people who read the People's Daily and westerners who watch CNN.
There's a critical difference.
In the US/Europe/Australia/the civilized world in general, people actually have the choice to read the People's Daily or whatever. When I was in college during the Reagan Years, the only problem I had with getting copies of Pravda or Izvestia was that the local newsstand didn't want to waste shelf space on publications in Russian. And I learned Spanish by listening to Radio Havana.
The cops didn't kick down my door for reading Communist bullshit or listening to it on the radio. RH wasn't jammed by the government. And if the Chinese People's Daily is online, there's nothing stopping you from finding it other than their webmaster's incompetence.
Think someone in China could lay hands on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page or the Economist so easily and with so few repercussions?
Take Ed Abbey's masterpiece, _The Brave Cowboy_. In it, no end of trouble is caused by the fact that the protagonists/heroes refused to pay taxes, carry ID, or be drafted. Ten buck in any decent bricks-and-mortar bookstore in the US. And I'll just bet that China has no trouble whatsoever with such subversive books floating around.
Or we can look at the books which portray the US as a corrupt, decaying empire. Heinlein's _TMIAHM_ or Pournelle's _High Justice_ or Falkenberg's Legion series. Or psuedo-subversive nonfiction like Noam Chomsky's garbage. All of it sold openly and completely unrestricted in the US. And I dare you to try to translate it into Mandarin and distribute it in China.
Most Americans are idiots, maybe. I don't agree with that statement, but it has been made and defended here on/. Two or three generations of television and a generation of computer/video games have made our culture a culture of people who sit around, accept the entertainment given them, and make no effort to learn beyond what's presented to them. And they end up with the attention span long enough to last from one commercial break to the next on the TV news. And as a result, CNN and most other major news outlets in the US tailor their material to the short attention span crowd. And some people claim that the news is doctored to some degree to meet the wishes of co-owners or advertisers. I mean, would WB News carry an expose about how Time Magazine can't get anything right? Would NBC (or MSNBC) go in-depth about what a bloated, spying POS Windows XP is? I'm not holding my breath.
But there's a distinction to be made. Here in the US, we CAN have better if we want it. It's a matter of just getting a decent newspaper, the BBC World Service on shortwave, or whatever. It takes more effort than turning on the latest insipid bullshit from WB/SeeBS/FOX/ABC/Whatever, but it's there.
There are plenty of countries where that's not an option. You WILL get your news from politically-acceptable sources. You WILL view only acceptable web sites. And if you don't, then you can be dragged off to die in a slave labor camp or shot with your spouse billed for the ammunition. And China is exactly that kind of fascist rathole.
Not only is it not likely that one could say that and continue to enjoy a full set of teeth in most places in America, but there are a few jurisdictions that have made it illegal as well under hate crimes law (one guy in Idaho is facing up to five years in prison for something similar)
There's probably more to the story than that. Appellate-level courts have taken a very dim view of "hate crimes" laws that criminalize mere speech. The common standard is that "hate crime" statutes are permissible when there's an actual crime and hate is a motive. Merely being an asshole, however, remains protected by the Constitution.
I'm not overly thrilled with the DMCA either. However, I really don't understand the parent's position. One type of speech arguably could be used to facilitate the commission of a crime. And most if not all US states do have laws against supplying training to people knowing that training will be used for criminal purposes. OTOH, so-called "hate crimes" laws (of the Euro flavor) mostly criminalize speech on the basis of "It makes someone feel bad and tries to assuage our guilt over the Nazis/Fascists/Vichy/et cetera."
At any rate, were I with Dow Jones, I'd quite simply tell the Australian plaintiff where to get off. If Australia's court marshalls (or whoever enforces court orders) want to seize DJ's AU holdings, then maybe we should just claim Eminent Domain on Rupert Murdoch's US holdings and offer him the five bucks that Fox is actually worth.
China is one of the biggest world powers. It's starting to get good at the whole space thing and they ALWAYS have a chip on their shoulder.
They can have all of the chips on their shoulders that they want, but they're not going to be considered a civilized nation until they act civilized.
If you want a grasp of their actual military power, look at their equipment. They issue AK-pattern rifles. That indicates a poorly-trained army. Had they actually taken an interest in having soldiers able to fight with any skill, they would have tried a rifle that's actually capable of some accuracy. That alone should tell you something about just what they can do.
Also look at their naval capability: slim and less. They don't have the sealift capability to threaten Taiwan. They don't have the capability to threaten Taiwan even if Taiwan didn't have any real defenses. They may never have that capability. Hell, NOBODY has the shipping capacity to actually do amphibious assaults anymore.
Militarily, they're a regional power. Nothing more. I don't expect them to be capable of much more. The PLA is the only thing holding some of the provinces in, and if they're off fighting to reclaim Taiwan or take over Siberia or whatever, then China just lost its western third. Maybe more.
What if the same word has several different trademarks on it? One is owned by an American company, another is owned by a British company.
The American company files suit in a US court; the British company files suit in a British court; each court decides that they have jurisdiction.
If the two companies are coming into conflict, that means that the US company has a UK subsidiary, and/or the UK company has a US subsidiary. That means there IS someone to show up when it goes to trial. That also means that both cases will have defendants under the courts' respective jurisdiction. I don't expect reality to be that nice and neat, but it'll work for an example.
And from there, it's potentially a royal goat rope. In theory, the UK court would issue orders which are binding only in the UK on the UK litigants, and the US court verdict would be binding only in the US and only on the litigants in the US case. That's not exactly neat and tidy, but it should make sense if you think about it.
In practice, I expect it to turn out to be a big-assed, ugly, and complicated mess. One of the courts might try to assert jurisdiction where it shouldn't, which may or may not result in the trial judge getting his dick knocked down by the US Supreme Court or the UK's equivalent (a panel drawn from the House of Lords, is it?). Maybe a defendant is going to decide he doesn't want to do business in that country after all and screw you, Judge. There's something about civil court that tends to bring out the spoiled children in people.
I'm sorry that this isn't the insight you were probably hoping for. This is an area where "having an insight" and pulling a wild guess out of one's ass are pretty much the same thing for the time being.
when German (or French, or British, or Canadian) courts rule that *they* also have jurisdiction? There is certainly no reason why American courts would have any more jurisdiction over international domain names than any other national courts.
Whose trademark is in dispute in a given case?
Traditionally, a plaintiff would file civil suits in the jurisdiction in which a tort happened. With something like this, that means he'd file in his home jurisdiction.
So, I could say something mean about France, like a a crack about how French automobiles are a disgrace to the mechanical world. Someone in France decides my statement violated some French defamation law and files on me in a French court. Where it breaks down is, French civil court rulings are meaningless in the US. IIRC, there is no extradition in civil matters.
It gets back to the same thing as the talk about an international human rights court: Who enforces the ruling? US Marshals are not going to arrest people who are in contempt of UK courts. The sheriff of Pueblo County, Colorado, USA, is not going to evict someone on the say-so of a German court. Italian Carabinieri probably don't care too much about the US Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
So, this ruling by the US court only moves the paralysis back a level. That doesn't bother me. For one thing, I am not a citizen of any nation other than the US. I have not left the US in five years. I own copies of GPG and Mein Kampf, unregistered guns, lockpicks, a truck that may never pass an emissions test again, and other such items. All perfectly legal in Colorado, USA, but would make me a criminal pretty much everywhere else on the planet.
I'm not one of those people who believes that the internet means the end of national borders. The notion of Yahoo being subject to France's "don't think about Nazi's" law or porn sites being subject to Germany's "Children shouldn't be allowed to see internet pr0n-that's what the TV is for" law bothers me. And I'm even more bothered when Dimitri Skylarov gets locked up in the US because of the "Just because you bought and own an eBook doesn't necessarily give you the right to read it" law or when Amnesty International gets attacked under China's "Anybody who refers to the glorious People's Liberation Army as a bunch of fascist thugs will be tortured and executed" law. I'm very much a fervent US patriot, but let's be realistic: National jurisdiction really does end twelve miles off the coastline.
Which means the courts can pontificate all they want. The US courts will accept jurisdiction if a suit is filed with them. French/Swedish/UK courts will probably do likewise. And the rulings may well be unenforceable, except against large businesses with operations in that country.
Frankly, unenforceable rulings don't bother me so much. A person or business can honor them anyway. If so, that maintains some semblance of stability and the rule of law, and IMHO that's generally a good thing. Or he can disregard an unenforceable ruling, and the Court of Public Opinion gets to rule on that.
And there's no jurisdictional limits and no appeal out of that one.
Slashdot Mirror
That may be a little extreme. They do control a nice chunk of the money floating around that's gonna end up in paychecks.
Someone back in the 1980's had a saying: "Trust, but verify." That was really a polite way of saying "Work with them, but don't trust them." If they're handing out the money, then take it, but don't believe anything they say unless you get it in writing.
And then get yourself a copy of M.G. Kains' "Five Acres and Independence" and the phone number of your county agent. If your company is going to be as helpful to you as Enron was to their retirees, then you'll want the subscriptions to Mother Earth News and Backwoods Home and all the other hippy/survivalist magazines. And I thought about suggesting the misc.survivalism usenet group, except the signal-to-noise ratio there is arguably the worst on usenet.
If you can brew your own beer, you don't have to drink Coor's. If you can bake your own bread, you'll be a lot healthier than the folks who eat WonderBread (and you can screw up the baking royally and still have better-tasting bread than most supermarkets) If you chop your own firewood, you'll be twice-warmed. If you lift weights, you won't have to call your cousins every time your girlfriend wants to rearrange the furniture. And so forth.
But that's indulging a pet theory of mine: The less-dependant you are on other people, the happier you'll be. And it's easier to deal with other people when you're not so dependent on them: you don't resent them for controlling you, they don't resent you for needing them for everything, and as a result everybody's blood pressure drops about ten points.
Point taken that changes rarely happen overnight.
However, the state needs to get out of the way for changes to happen at all.
It's a common stereotype that old men tend to be stubborn and set in their ways. However, it's common precisely because it's often true. And the PRC's leaders are old indeed. As I understand it, the ones who are in their 60's are considered to be relatively young. Here in the US, that's retirement age. And in any country, that's old enough to be resistant to any kind of change and old enough to be firmly convinced that the young have no business having contradictory opinions.
Unless I miss my guess, important political decisions in the PRC are made by a committee from the Communist Party. And the only way to get on that committee is to be a party member, an old man, and in the right place when someone dies and a vacancy opens up. That's not a system that leads to much turnover. Low turnover means that bad ideas tend to develop a lot of inertia and stick around. As a result, there's a brake on favorable change that doesn't need to exist and doesn't serve much useful purpose.
Not only the Chinese Govt need to learn, the general public also need some time to figure out how a "normal" reglion should behave (and that's why devious cult in developed countries cannot attract much followers)... Completely out-of-hand approach is liable for radical religious problem that everyone worries in recent time.
It's hard to define a "normal" religion. All religions, even the established and stable ones, show up in abberant behavior. My girlfriend's family are Southern Baptist. Fine, peaceful people. Their theological beliefs are not that much different from those of the people who bomb abortion clinics. I'm a Roman Catholic myself. I'm a cop-one of the people who keeps the peace and stability in my society. It seems to me ironic that my own beliefs are identical to those of the Irish Republican Army, some of the most notorious terrorists in the English-speaking world.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, religion is not the cause of violent behavior. It's often an excuse, but a poor one. Some people are naturally violent. Other people become violent for whatever reason. They'll grasp at religion as an excuse to commit violence, but if that doesn't work they'll find another excuse.
Yeah, the Chinese people will need to get used to freedom of religion and a few other freedoms. That'll take time. However, they'll never even have the chance until the government gets out of the way. People can't learn to live with something if they never are exposed to it.
You'll certainly get no argument from me that the Beijing government is a bunch of fascist murderers. However, that discussion is a tangent from a tangent.
The reason that China cares about software development is probably because they're trying to stop getting their web pages hacked by human rights advocates, or they're building some more Falun Gong firewalls or something.
One thing I've learned is that there's almost never just one cause for any remotely-complex phenomenon. Whatever their national government uses for OS'es, those things you named above may be part of it. These weren't for the national government but for a municipal government, which probably doesn't admin the Great Firewall of China.
Part of it may be the fear of backdoors. Part of it may be keeping MS in their place. And recent Chinese history includes a fair bit of the "Not Made Here" attitude. Remember how, for a time back in the 1970's, Fortran was banned because it was a Western product?
This isn't just some bland racism, or an overboarding sense of "patriotism", China is a brutal, dangerous country, and a testament to the powers of corruption.
Most of the world is a "testament to the powers of corruption." Most of the world doesn't ban price-fixing. In much of the business world, there's a culture of gifts and gratuities that would have gotten a US businessman locked up for bribery. The People's Republic of China may be a fascist rathole, but they're hardly the only one out there. Hell, I'm a staunch Republican, usually, but I'm not going to waste too much breath on praising the current administration.
So what? Part of freedom is the freedom of morons to make moronic statements in public. I mean, Patrick Buchanan is allowed to campaign for public office here, LA County judge Lance Ito was once actually granted a law license, and look at all of the web sites making a folk hero out of Mumia Abu-Jamal. We've long since learned to tolerate morons and public idiocy in the US.
China's Communist Party is going to have to learn that they can't harass/intimidate/imprison/kill people for being idiots in public. That's the price of being allowed into the modern world.
BTW, "registered Christians?" Wow. Here in my corner of the western US, we don't even register guns!
There basically are no search warrants that are based entirely upon the four words 'an informer told me.'
The last time I used a confidential informant to support a search warrant, it took me about twelve pages to write the affidavit in support. It was more like "This person informed me that the house at 12345 Bullshit Lane contained over one pound of methamphetamine, and the laboratory and materials commonly used to manufacture methamphetamine. He stated that he knew this because...."
If a private citizen with no personal involvement is willing to go on the record with the above, that may or may not be a complete affidavit right there. If the private citizen is going on record and his statement contains facts which work against his penal interest, then it's almost certainly enough. Something like "I know the meth is there because I helped to make it."
Unfortunately, I don't seem to get that lucky. In the case I'm talking about, my informant didn't want his name mentioned and I had to take a different tack. What I did was I stated in the affidavit that this informant had provided me with important information in sixteen prior cases, that the information was material and was not common knowledge, and that the information had proven correct on every occasion. I then took about ten of the twelve pages and outlined each of those sixteen cases to establish my informant's credibility to the judge.
Even if a judge issues a warrant on a faulty affidavit, it can be suppressed by the trial judge. If the supporting affidavit doesnt contain probable cause within its "four corners," then it's easily-attacked at trial.
But then, it's always fun to watch a bunch of /. people watch a Law&Order re-run, read some ACLU junk mail, and suddenly know everything about what the cops do or don't do.
It's a good thing you're not a lawyer.
The standard for investigative detentions throughout the US is "reasonable suspicion," as set down in the Supreme Court's ruling _Terry v. Ohio_. It's not whether someone actually witnessed a crime. It's actually a fairly minimal standard-all it takes is a suspicion, and the ability to articulate that suspicion and its reason for existence. Someone walking through a parking lot at night looking into multiple cars without getting into any of them counts, and I could definitely detain that person for a field interview, check him for wants and prior contacts, et cetera. It would be a tactically stupid thing for the lot's owner to do the same, but he could. (To an extent: only cops have access to the computerized warrant database or our field contact records. He wouldn't be able to check those)
A typical police academy will cover about two dozen court decisions, with this one being the first.
In my state, the law does not distinguish between the powers of peace officers and private citizens to detain, and there's almost no distinction made between officers and the public WRT warrantless arrest. In other words, if the Sears loss-prevention guys have a reasonable suspicion that you're shoplifting, they're legally able to detain you whether they actually saw it or not.
I know why they're doing it, though. Any cop with three years on the street (or two in a corrections setting-jail deputies and corrections officers learn to read people FAST) will be more accurate at reading people and detecting deception or aggression than any machine. But we didn't become cops in order to hand out boarding passes.
Counselors and Pdocs also deal in the same thing-they need to interpret their patients' body language.
But a polygraph isn't all that accurate. It measures any number of variables and has a skilled technician operating it, and it's not that accurate. One camera, measuring one variable, and read by someone untrained, just isn't going to pick out the "agrarian reformers" with death wishes.
Have you ever read your ISP's AUP? I have, for every single ISP I've had. They all basically said "You agree not to spam. You agree not to sell spamware or host a spammed site. You agree to not launch DoS attacks from our service. You agree that your bill is due on the fourth of every month. You agree that service outages are not our fault."
If you're even a little bit literate, it should take ten minutes at most to fully understand. Blaming a complex AUP on those eevil lawyers is a sign of mental laziness.
In my area (Colorado front range) it's possible to get local phone service from AT&T Broadband as well. Now, AT&T are a bunch of mopes as well, but at least they're !Qwest.
(And AT&T DSL doesn't require using MSN!)
I can see why, though. It's apparently a lot of peoples' favorite day to get drunk and beat the shit out of their spouses. Celebrating the birth of our Saviour by arresting two people in three separate situations for domestic assault, and two drunk drivers who wandered into cows at 25MPH is probably not what the man upstairs had in mind.
On the other hand, the Christmas spirit does exist. Four of our reservists (the police version of a volunteer firefighter) actually volunteered this year, and it was nice to have someone working in the car with me. And a woman who I wrote for some traffic beef two years ago spent most of Christmas eve flagging cops and firefighters and private security guards down to give them hot chocolate.
I'd still rather be spending it with my girlfriend and her daughter, though.
That works really well in the jail, where most counties have an AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) terminal. That is, it works really well if the subject's fingerprints are on file with the FBI. Someone who has never been a cop, or in the Armed Services, or arrested probably will not have prints on file.
Note that I said 'in the jail.' The terminals are pretty big, big enough that I wouldn't even try to carry something that big in the car.
Yeah, I can roll someone's prints on scene. However, that does no good until I can get the card to someone who can sit down with it at the terminal.
And I can't take someone to the jail against his will unless he'd been arrested. For that, I need probable cause to believe that he committed an arrestable crime. Merely being a suspicious person who I suspect is lying about his identity isn't enough.
Now, if there were print terminals the size of PDA's, they'd be damn useful. However, I'm not holding my breath on it being this year.
Besides, there are ways to tell if someone really belongs to his ID, and if he's lying, and if the ID's fake. THey give us $1500 radios and put computers in our cars, but this job is still about people and not technology.
Let's say that I contact someone while I'm at work, wearing the icky blue polyester suit. How am I going to read this chip? With a regular driver's license, I can take it back to my car, shine a light on it, see if it's fake, run it for warrants and license status, find out if the holder is a sex offender, and copy everything onto a citation or a field interview card. And if my flashlight and my car's map light quit, I can still read them.
Oh, and did I mention I can look to see if it's been faked, maybe compare it to one of the standard references?
With these things, no. I'm a cop, not an electronics tech. I've got no way of knowing if the signal is legitimate or from a black-market home-programmed chip. It'll probably take special equipment to read these chips, and I've learned that expensive electronics have a way of failing about fifteen seconds before I need them. And six lines of data leaves no room for a signature.
So, I'm not entirely sure about the practical aspects of this, or whether there's actually anything to gain.
And how about we look at the legal aspects. I'll admit that I haven't gone through either the Federal or Colorado constitutions with a magnifying glass lately, but I don't recall seeing any authorization for government to brand people like so many livestock.
Of course, I could be wrong about the Constitition thing. However, at the academy they did say that the parts of the Constitution that were written in the margins in red crayon didn't count.
But then, a lot of the experimentation with implantable ID was overseas. And in much of western Europe and in Japan, cops are expected to know aspects of individuals' lives that I don't even tell my parents. Like who's sleeping with who. Or who lives where-there are ways in the US for that information to be pretty much completely unavailable to police, but not in Japan or most of western Europe (for some reason, France, Germany and Holland spring to mind, but I wouldn't swear to that.)
Public agencies tend to get flooded with written public comments. I'm with a local law enforcement agency which has occasionally solicited public commentary. Sometimes, we get good, valuable comments and (even better) useful and intelligent criticism. More often, we get sub-literate scrawled rants about how "pigs suck." Needless to say, the letters with poor grammar and spelling or little useful information tend to get passed around for comic relief rather than taken seriously.
The point I'm trying to make is, if you get defensive about being told to use a spell-checker, keep your mouth shut or you'll make MS look better. If your idea of commentary is 'M$ 5uX0Rz,' then stick to some IRC channel or you'll do more harm than good. And for God's sake, don't get into pointless esoterica about licensing or 'free speech/free beer.' If you go beyond the scope of the case at hand, you run a risk of not being taken seriously.
And AC's: I imagine they've already gotten their first letter. It's too late to get f15T pR05T.
Several revisions? Several DECADES!
When you buy your copy, make sure you get the edition with Jerry Pournelle's commentary. The commentary is probably more applicable to today's politicking than the rest of the book.
Remember the Moral Majority? Remember how much influence they wielded? (Still do some places - hell in Kansas they managed to overthrow 100+ years of biology!)
First of all, you've got a misconception there. The KS BoE removed evolution/origins from the mandatory curriculum. They did not mandate creationist nonsense. Nor the so-called "scientific creationism" crap. Nor did they open the door for equal time. Nor did they prohibit teachers from teaching evolutionary biology or singing praises of Stephen Jay Gould. They simply removed the entire question from the mandatory curriculum and dumped the school standards onto the local school boards.
And you've hit on something. Just about every law that can send you to jail is state or municipal. It's your city commission, county board, and state assembly that you should be watching most of all. You should be paying attention to your county/district judges and remembering them when the judicial retention elections come around (like they do in most states). You should be watching your county school board and your zoning board. You should be able to explain why you plan to vote for one candidate for Sheriff over another. Is your nearest public library part of city government or is it part of a special tax district? Who's on the special district board? Who is the chief of police in your city and were you watching when the city manager selected him? Do you even know where your property tax goes? (If you live near Denver, guess how much of your property taxes go to pay for the Donkeys' new stadium. They're the biggest welfare queens in Colorado)
In other words, Congress is 90% irrelevant on their best days. It's the local electionsand the local entities with the real power to screw up your life if you don't watch them.
Um, those are nucleic acids. They're definitely not sugars. All sugars (yes, ALL sugars) have the formula n(CH20). That means the composition is always an integer multiple of one carbon atom, two hydrogen atoms, and one oxygen atom. That's actually the definition of sugar (well, carbohydrate, anyway).
All of the nucleic acids include amino groups, NH2. That makes this easy, since sugars NEVER include nitrogen. The only sugars involved in nucleotide bases are ribose and deoxyribose, both of which are five-carbon-atom sugars matching the formula above.
I couldn't get to the article. I'm going to guess, however, that it was referencing simple carbohydrates, one- or two-carbon sugars.
Some very significant differences. They have differentiated tissue-muscles separate from skin, an actual digestive tract, and probably the most-developed nervous system of all of the invertebrates, including eyes structured similarly to ours. Squid also have an actual circulatory system, but something that actually functions almost like a heart. And squids are actually bilaterally symmetrical. In plain English, that means there's one plane down which you can split a squid, and the two parts will be mirror images of each other.
OTOH, jellyfish are like anemones and hydrae. That means they're undifferentiated. Their tissues are only two cells thick, because each cell needs to be exposed to seawater in order to get oxygen or nutrients. They're undifferentiated, meaning they don't have different types of cells. They have no real nervous system at all. Nor do they have a circulatory system. They're radially symmetrical, meaning that any radial section will be pretty much identical to any other.
I don't doubt it. And I know that most US media isn't that useful either. However, I'm paid to be paranoid and I take my cues from other people who are also paid to be paranoid. We're taught to evaluate people in terms of their abilities, and not their intentions. If a government has the power to block a website, then one is right to worry. If the power is there, then the intention can change on a whim. I can get to an Amnesty International website very easily-sit down at a web browser and I'm about thirty keystrokes away. And the US government doesn't have a whole lot of power to shut it down. I can get to American Indian Movement sites and the various socialist loonies just as easily, without being easily monitored. How hard was it to get to a Free Tibet site over there?
Or, I hate to use this example, because I think the central figure should have visited a gas chamber some years ago, but imagine a Chinese cop gets murdered. How big an internet campaign would there be over there to make a folk hero out of his killer? In other words, imagine a Chinese Mumia. Would he give graduation speeches from death row the way the real Mumia does here?
I don't know if you've ever read Tom Clancy's latest bore, _The Bear and the Dragon_. If you have, how much truth is there to his description of their population-control policy? It's consistent with info from some other human-rights groups, but if you've been there you're a first- or second-hand source which beats the crap out of the third- and fourth-hand sources that I've seen thus far.
(2) Chinese are some of the most capitalistic sobs I've ever met.
Capitalism, alas, doesn't necessarily imply freedom-loving. The vast majority of the Pacific Rim economic powerhouses (Singapore, Japan, California) prove that well enough IMHO. I personally think they should go hand-in-hand, but there are enough governments on this planet that only recognize freedom when it involves the freedom to make a buck (and pay taxes on it).
I'm not fond of blowing hot and cold either. I don't like the DMCA. I didn't become a cop to protect the MPAA/DVDCCA from having their disks viewed on *bsd boxen.
That being said, I can understand the dichotomy. It's a shaky argument, but it is illegal in many US states to teach people specific skills knowing that those skills will be used for criminal purposes (c.f. your state's terrorist training laws such as CO Revised Statute 18-9-120 and equivalents).
Don't misconstrue me here. I'm not defending the DMCA or the disgrace that has been done to Skylarov, Felten, and others. I'm just saying that there arguably is precedent. My own opinion is that, short of perjury/harassment/menacing/threats and Constitutionally-tested time/place/manner restrictions, speech absolutely should not be criminalized. Public safety and peacekeeping give us enough work to do without also having to enforce good manners.
I wanted to address both possibilities, which is probably why my real position sounded conflicted. My position, which I didn't really mention in the post because I only wanted to address the technical side of things, is that hate crime legislation is redundant and unnecessary in the U.S. If someone murders someone else, does the race of the victim really matter in determining the severity of the crime? What about battery? Or repeated harassment? If we think the punishments are too weak in the cases where these crimes cross racial lines, they're too weak when they don't. Hate crime legislation categorizes people in a world where we need to think of each other as equals. It achieves what it is seeking to prevent.
I'll certainly not argue with you here. I've had perfectly valid harassment, menacing, and criminal mischief cases get clouded by DA's who wanted to also charge Ethnic Intimidation (what we call "hate crimes" here.) I believe that involving race/ethnicity/religion/etc. at best will cloud what should be a clear issue.
Could hate crime statutes criminalize mere speech? Of course; we've got other laws on the books that do as well.
There's a slight disconnect here. My state's Ethnic Intimidation law reads a lot like Idaho's. The only things that it seems to criminalize are things that are already illegal under other statutes-harassment/stalking, assault, menacing, criminal mischief, and so forth. It does expand on them a little, but not much.
I also think that we'd be prudent to consider harassment/stalking laws separately from slander/libel/defamation laws. The former are criminal. The latter usually are not. Criminal libel statutes do still exist in some states, but they tend to get knocked down whenever they're charged.
I usually cite sources, BTW, but I got lazy in my last post. You can read more about the Idaho case involving Lonny Rae here [go.com]. This is from August of this year, and while I'm sure there will be more to this story it hasn't happened yet.
Now that I've read it, it seems slightly more plausible. Even without a hate-crimes law it would arguably be a valid disorderly-conduct case. And since the article included the actual statute, it looks a lot more sound to me.
The EFF! Ignoring your privacy and property rights in order to defend spammers for more than X years!
There's a critical difference.
In the US/Europe/Australia/the civilized world in general, people actually have the choice to read the People's Daily or whatever. When I was in college during the Reagan Years, the only problem I had with getting copies of Pravda or Izvestia was that the local newsstand didn't want to waste shelf space on publications in Russian. And I learned Spanish by listening to Radio Havana.
The cops didn't kick down my door for reading Communist bullshit or listening to it on the radio. RH wasn't jammed by the government. And if the Chinese People's Daily is online, there's nothing stopping you from finding it other than their webmaster's incompetence.
Think someone in China could lay hands on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page or the Economist so easily and with so few repercussions?
Take Ed Abbey's masterpiece, _The Brave Cowboy_. In it, no end of trouble is caused by the fact that the protagonists/heroes refused to pay taxes, carry ID, or be drafted. Ten buck in any decent bricks-and-mortar bookstore in the US. And I'll just bet that China has no trouble whatsoever with such subversive books floating around.
Or we can look at the books which portray the US as a corrupt, decaying empire. Heinlein's _TMIAHM_ or Pournelle's _High Justice_ or Falkenberg's Legion series. Or psuedo-subversive nonfiction like Noam Chomsky's garbage. All of it sold openly and completely unrestricted in the US. And I dare you to try to translate it into Mandarin and distribute it in China.
Most Americans are idiots, maybe. I don't agree with that statement, but it has been made and defended here on /. Two or three generations of television and a generation of computer/video games have made our culture a culture of people who sit around, accept the entertainment given them, and make no effort to learn beyond what's presented to them. And they end up with the attention span long enough to last from one commercial break to the next on the TV news. And as a result, CNN and most other major news outlets in the US tailor their material to the short attention span crowd. And some people claim that the news is doctored to some degree to meet the wishes of co-owners or advertisers. I mean, would WB News carry an expose about how Time Magazine can't get anything right? Would NBC (or MSNBC) go in-depth about what a bloated, spying POS Windows XP is? I'm not holding my breath.
But there's a distinction to be made. Here in the US, we CAN have better if we want it. It's a matter of just getting a decent newspaper, the BBC World Service on shortwave, or whatever. It takes more effort than turning on the latest insipid bullshit from WB/SeeBS/FOX/ABC/Whatever, but it's there.
There are plenty of countries where that's not an option. You WILL get your news from politically-acceptable sources. You WILL view only acceptable web sites. And if you don't, then you can be dragged off to die in a slave labor camp or shot with your spouse billed for the ammunition. And China is exactly that kind of fascist rathole.
Oops, that was a bit of a rant. Sorry about that.
..but most of the content already is, judging by how much spam I get and how much of it's Chinese.
There's probably more to the story than that. Appellate-level courts have taken a very dim view of "hate crimes" laws that criminalize mere speech. The common standard is that "hate crime" statutes are permissible when there's an actual crime and hate is a motive. Merely being an asshole, however, remains protected by the Constitution.
I'm not overly thrilled with the DMCA either. However, I really don't understand the parent's position. One type of speech arguably could be used to facilitate the commission of a crime. And most if not all US states do have laws against supplying training to people knowing that training will be used for criminal purposes. OTOH, so-called "hate crimes" laws (of the Euro flavor) mostly criminalize speech on the basis of "It makes someone feel bad and tries to assuage our guilt over the Nazis/Fascists/Vichy/et cetera."
At any rate, were I with Dow Jones, I'd quite simply tell the Australian plaintiff where to get off. If Australia's court marshalls (or whoever enforces court orders) want to seize DJ's AU holdings, then maybe we should just claim Eminent Domain on Rupert Murdoch's US holdings and offer him the five bucks that Fox is actually worth.
They can have all of the chips on their shoulders that they want, but they're not going to be considered a civilized nation until they act civilized.
If you want a grasp of their actual military power, look at their equipment. They issue AK-pattern rifles. That indicates a poorly-trained army. Had they actually taken an interest in having soldiers able to fight with any skill, they would have tried a rifle that's actually capable of some accuracy. That alone should tell you something about just what they can do.
Also look at their naval capability: slim and less. They don't have the sealift capability to threaten Taiwan. They don't have the capability to threaten Taiwan even if Taiwan didn't have any real defenses. They may never have that capability. Hell, NOBODY has the shipping capacity to actually do amphibious assaults anymore.
Militarily, they're a regional power. Nothing more. I don't expect them to be capable of much more. The PLA is the only thing holding some of the provinces in, and if they're off fighting to reclaim Taiwan or take over Siberia or whatever, then China just lost its western third. Maybe more.
Would they try, though? It wouldn't shock me.
The American company files suit in a US court; the British company files suit in a British court; each court decides that they have jurisdiction.
If the two companies are coming into conflict, that means that the US company has a UK subsidiary, and/or the UK company has a US subsidiary. That means there IS someone to show up when it goes to trial. That also means that both cases will have defendants under the courts' respective jurisdiction. I don't expect reality to be that nice and neat, but it'll work for an example.
And from there, it's potentially a royal goat rope. In theory, the UK court would issue orders which are binding only in the UK on the UK litigants, and the US court verdict would be binding only in the US and only on the litigants in the US case. That's not exactly neat and tidy, but it should make sense if you think about it.
In practice, I expect it to turn out to be a big-assed, ugly, and complicated mess. One of the courts might try to assert jurisdiction where it shouldn't, which may or may not result in the trial judge getting his dick knocked down by the US Supreme Court or the UK's equivalent (a panel drawn from the House of Lords, is it?). Maybe a defendant is going to decide he doesn't want to do business in that country after all and screw you, Judge. There's something about civil court that tends to bring out the spoiled children in people.
I'm sorry that this isn't the insight you were probably hoping for. This is an area where "having an insight" and pulling a wild guess out of one's ass are pretty much the same thing for the time being.
Whose trademark is in dispute in a given case?
Traditionally, a plaintiff would file civil suits in the jurisdiction in which a tort happened. With something like this, that means he'd file in his home jurisdiction.
So, I could say something mean about France, like a a crack about how French automobiles are a disgrace to the mechanical world. Someone in France decides my statement violated some French defamation law and files on me in a French court. Where it breaks down is, French civil court rulings are meaningless in the US. IIRC, there is no extradition in civil matters.
It gets back to the same thing as the talk about an international human rights court: Who enforces the ruling? US Marshals are not going to arrest people who are in contempt of UK courts. The sheriff of Pueblo County, Colorado, USA, is not going to evict someone on the say-so of a German court. Italian Carabinieri probably don't care too much about the US Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
So, this ruling by the US court only moves the paralysis back a level. That doesn't bother me. For one thing, I am not a citizen of any nation other than the US. I have not left the US in five years. I own copies of GPG and Mein Kampf, unregistered guns, lockpicks, a truck that may never pass an emissions test again, and other such items. All perfectly legal in Colorado, USA, but would make me a criminal pretty much everywhere else on the planet.
I'm not one of those people who believes that the internet means the end of national borders. The notion of Yahoo being subject to France's "don't think about Nazi's" law or porn sites being subject to Germany's "Children shouldn't be allowed to see internet pr0n-that's what the TV is for" law bothers me. And I'm even more bothered when Dimitri Skylarov gets locked up in the US because of the "Just because you bought and own an eBook doesn't necessarily give you the right to read it" law or when Amnesty International gets attacked under China's "Anybody who refers to the glorious People's Liberation Army as a bunch of fascist thugs will be tortured and executed" law. I'm very much a fervent US patriot, but let's be realistic: National jurisdiction really does end twelve miles off the coastline.
Which means the courts can pontificate all they want. The US courts will accept jurisdiction if a suit is filed with them. French/Swedish/UK courts will probably do likewise. And the rulings may well be unenforceable, except against large businesses with operations in that country.
Frankly, unenforceable rulings don't bother me so much. A person or business can honor them anyway. If so, that maintains some semblance of stability and the rule of law, and IMHO that's generally a good thing. Or he can disregard an unenforceable ruling, and the Court of Public Opinion gets to rule on that.
And there's no jurisdictional limits and no appeal out of that one.