a clause which seems mysteriously to be forgotten every time someone is allowed to patent a bit of DNA that has been part of the human genome for who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years...
Well said, but there is another side to be considered, an alternate way to read the remarks. Something like "You should be the first to taste your own medicine," or "Very well, then I hope you have to live by your own rules if you're going to promote them as good for other people to endure" isn't necessarily completely accurately portrayed as "two wrongs make a right". If spun went out and actually brought about such an attack or tried to make one happen, that would be a stronger case for reading it the way you do.
Seems to me that scientists have been regularly booking multi-million dollar flights on the Space Shuttle for the last quarter of a century without knowing even which year it would fly.
Too bad in China, "spam" worthy of blocking not only includes "want to get cheap pills / anatomical improvements?" emails, but also "want to go protest government policy?" emails. Not sure I like the government getting better at blocking the former if it is a byproduct of attempts to more effectively block the latter.
The ICC? Obviously, because the U.S. is not subject to it. For which I, as an American citizen who rather likes the idea that courts cannot convict people of, and punish people for, crimes poorly defined by nebulous, non-representative, international, pseudo-governmental organizations, am fairly glad. Which isn't to say I am uninterested in justice, merely that courts with the power of legal enforcement, but lacking a very clearly defined, and democratic, legislative process that writes the laws those courts are enforcing-- a judicial system with no real corresponding legislative branch-- are a very dangerous sort of thing to have in the world.
As for American laws, however, the President is supposed to be subject to those, but unfortunately Gerald Ford decided that what the nation needed most was the end of a scandal rather than the just resolution of it, and, in pre-emptively pardoning Richard Nixon, created the precedent that the President won't ever have to face prosecution for crimes committed in office, a precedent that Barack Obama seems uninterested in overturning, as will, I suspect, every future President who will one day be a former President with enemies. And thus we end up with a Chief Executive power who is above the law-- another very dangerous sort of thing to have in the world.
I don't mean "members of the Libertarian Party," I mean people who are generally in favor of the libertarian notions of limited government, which are what are under discussion here. Whose support base is not near zero at all, it is close to half the country.
Works of the U.S. government have no copyright protection in the United States (they might still overseas, however, which would indeed affect Wikileaks). Also, documents that came from government contractors are still copyrighted. But if this passes, surely a bill identical to it but dealing with classified documents instead of copyrighted ones, will follow shortly thereafter.
1. The Attorney General would now be a point of initiation. You wouldn't have to sue me for infringing your copyright (though you still could). The AG could do it directly, with or without a complaint from you. (Actually, technically, the AG would not be pursuing action against me, but against my site itself.)
2. There is no power to compel takedowns without a court order in the law. However, the AG is required to maintain a list of sites considered to be dedicated to infringing activities, but against which no action has been pursued, and the agents who would take down your domain (normally the registrar) receive immunity from any lawsuit that you might bring if they take pre-emptive action based on this list, even though no court order has been issued or even sought. You can bet that they will get pressure to do so, and a lot of them will probably simply decide it is good policy to automatically follow that list.
Interestingly enough, it looks to me like the whole law can be circumvented by using straight IP addresses and never bothering with a domain name at all. It talks about sites, but really, procedurally, is all worded around taking down domains.
1. If socialism is state ownership of industry, then state ownership of the health care industry, a goal of Obama and many others, is socialistic by definition.
2. The current health care law actually requires private citizens to purchase a product, which is not a Constitutional prerogative of the federal government, and thus differs significantly from medicare and medicaid, which are the government itself providing a product.
3. Really? Do you really think the Supreme Court has struck down "every" other unconstitutional law, with a 100% accuracy rate? I sure hope you are exaggerating here...but if you are, then your argument loses force, because it relies on the Supreme Court's having let laws stand as an actual positive argument for their Constitutionality.
Um...doesn't this all depend on how limited the government is? A few points that need to be made:
The opposite of "limited government" is not "powerful government", it is "unlimited government".
Financial power translates into political power regardless of whether government is limited or not. Also, just having a slight edge in government gives you the power to award yourself an even bigger edge. A current example: redistricting will now take place all around the United States this year, where the party with the majority in each state, if they have the governorship as well, can redraw the lines to protect their majority and make it larger in future years. Or, an example of what would happen in the unlimited government scenario, a few people could make the laws so they gained, and their gain would give them even more influence in turn.
A government with no limitations on it, controlled by the dominant financial interests, is therefore the most likely result, and is the worst possible outcome.
Therefore we need limited government. That does not mean government without the power to protect people from one another. In fact, that power is exactly what limited government proponents want to limit the government to.
Then how come a significant proportion of the support for libertarian movements is from the lower, weaker classes?
You're right that government is a group of people banding together to protect their interest, but mistaken as to who therefore needs to be protected from whom. A great deal of the Constitution is designed to prevent the tyranny of the majority-- that is, domination and control by means of the government. There's always a tug of war, because there are always people under the thumb of other individuals or corporations, who want more government to get out from under this...and there also are always people under the thumb of a dominating government, who want less government for exactly the same reason. Given that government is the biggest, most durable, most powerful entity that can dominate and control, and the hardest to remove once it has established that control, I'd say we should always treat skeptically the request for more of it.
And you might note, too, that your claim as to the useful role of government-- to protect people from one another-- is exactly the primary role libertarians believe the government should have. What they don't agree with is that it should go much beyond this, into what might be termed as "messing around in" the lives of people, or exerting control itself.
Of course, there are plenty of people who think as you say, who want to get what they can get and ride all over everyone else to get it, and they want government control reduced to allow them to do what they want. Except we can't forget those same people are quite ready to use government for the very purpose of giving themselves those advantages when they can get away with it. Both government reduction and government intervention are often covers for people's power plays. I think we'd be wise to understand why so many people truly view government as one of the powers they need protection from, and also need to be wise enough to recognize when an argument couched in libertarian appeals is really just a gambit for being allowed to do things that go altogether against libertarian ideals (run over other people's rights)
I still disagree that it is trivial. We're talking about around 2000 square nautical miles of ocean after just the first hour traveling at 25 knots, and yes, it is near the coast, but still several hundred to a thousand feet of depth. That is a large grid, and by the time enough searchers are on scene to cover the whole thing, it is far larger. A lot really depends on how many ready-to-launch anti-submarine helicopters are close by, which, for any given spot on the coast, may well be zero. For that particular spot, I'd imagine the Navy has applicable assets, but they might not be on high alert ready to jump on the chase instantly. I agree there is a good chance of finding it, but I don't think it is trivial. I mean, for that matter, a nuclear submarine could hide motionless at the bottom in a good spot to get lost in ground noise for weeks, if it wanted to.
I also am pretty convinced that the "measured response" would be limited to pinging the heck out of the boat to harass them and let them know we found them.
The response to all this is getting weird, with people, including the military, implausibly claiming it was an airplane contrail-- a claim that ought to be 100% verifiable based on ground radar records, and yet nobody has come up with such records showing a plane in that spot.
Yes, likely, but by no means certainly. I don't know how we can have any idea whether "almost all" such things in the past have included notification, because the ones that don't are more or less by definition an unknown quantity. I have a feeling a lot of those decisions are made politically. If U.S. interests are better served by quietly demonstrating or testing something such that only the people who need to know about it know about it, then that's what they will do. There are more ways of conveying the proper message to foreign governments than a public claim of responsibility, and sometimes the back-channel hints are more appropriate than the publicly acknowledged sabre-rattling.
I don't think locating a submarine is really as easy as you think. Especially when you're unlikely to get any sub hunting ships on scene for hours, or even helicopters for long enough that the search radius would be very large.
More importantly, since the missile was launched from international waters, and was fired away from the United States, sinking the boat that launched it would be a very unlikely response. Launching an actual attack against a vessel not in U.S. waters that was simply engaged in demonstrating its capabilities would be an unacceptable risk for us, as it would make a sabre-rattling incident into a real, shooting international conflict, and it would set a changed precedent for how other nations could be expected to fairly react when American ships or planes go near their territory and act provocatively, as they often do.
3. The US Military doesn't want to look like idiots or make people panic, so they keep silent and let us assume it was theirs while they scramble like crazy internally and non-publicly.
Exactly. "Did it come back down?" and "Where did it go?" are obvious questions none of the articles I've seen are asking. And why aren't the media outlets seeming to ask anyone other than the Pentagon who could answer those questions? I haven't seen any reports of comments from NASA or from any Russian government agency.
I think by the end of your post ("requirement to file paperwork with the FAA," etc.) you forgot what you said at the beginning ("is in international waters").
No, a sub 35 miles away from the US coast would very likely submerge after launch and be long gone by the time anyone got near to find it. We don't have destroyers covering every inch of the coast every minute. Certainly by the time anyone capable of locating the sub got near, it would be clear that there was no direct hostile action taking place. The missile appears to have been directed northwest, which suggests it may have been meant to be a show to the US without actually causing anyone in Washington to believe we were under attack.
"Over there" means "Asia", I suspect. Obama's tour does not include a stop in China, but it does include stops in potential or actual rivals of China, and could reasonably be coupled with a demonstration aimed at China to show we are serious about alliances with Japan, India, South Korea, etc., and about continued U.S. influence in that part of the world.
Marcionism, named after Marcion, who lived in the Second Century and believed that the God described by the Hebrew Bible was mostly evil, and the newly revealed, forgiving God seen in Jesus was the true, highest God. It was regarded as heretical from very early on, so it had long since been cast out of the main body of the church and mostly died out before even the First Council at Nicea in 325. It was written against strongly by Tertullian around AD 200, so it must have still had some followers then. It is indeed kind of an interesting bit of Christian history.
Slashdot Mirror
a clause which seems mysteriously to be forgotten every time someone is allowed to patent a bit of DNA that has been part of the human genome for who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years...
If changes in the magnetic field of the earth keep accelerating, chances are that the answer may be no.
Actually, if he is truly a majority share holder, then I don't think the board can force him to do anything, because he is the one who appoints them.
Well said, but there is another side to be considered, an alternate way to read the remarks. Something like "You should be the first to taste your own medicine," or "Very well, then I hope you have to live by your own rules if you're going to promote them as good for other people to endure" isn't necessarily completely accurately portrayed as "two wrongs make a right". If spun went out and actually brought about such an attack or tried to make one happen, that would be a stronger case for reading it the way you do.
Seems to me that scientists have been regularly booking multi-million dollar flights on the Space Shuttle for the last quarter of a century without knowing even which year it would fly.
Too bad in China, "spam" worthy of blocking not only includes "want to get cheap pills / anatomical improvements?" emails, but also "want to go protest government policy?" emails. Not sure I like the government getting better at blocking the former if it is a byproduct of attempts to more effectively block the latter.
The ICC? Obviously, because the U.S. is not subject to it. For which I, as an American citizen who rather likes the idea that courts cannot convict people of, and punish people for, crimes poorly defined by nebulous, non-representative, international, pseudo-governmental organizations, am fairly glad. Which isn't to say I am uninterested in justice, merely that courts with the power of legal enforcement, but lacking a very clearly defined, and democratic, legislative process that writes the laws those courts are enforcing-- a judicial system with no real corresponding legislative branch-- are a very dangerous sort of thing to have in the world.
As for American laws, however, the President is supposed to be subject to those, but unfortunately Gerald Ford decided that what the nation needed most was the end of a scandal rather than the just resolution of it, and, in pre-emptively pardoning Richard Nixon, created the precedent that the President won't ever have to face prosecution for crimes committed in office, a precedent that Barack Obama seems uninterested in overturning, as will, I suspect, every future President who will one day be a former President with enemies. And thus we end up with a Chief Executive power who is above the law-- another very dangerous sort of thing to have in the world.
I don't mean "members of the Libertarian Party," I mean people who are generally in favor of the libertarian notions of limited government, which are what are under discussion here. Whose support base is not near zero at all, it is close to half the country.
Works of the U.S. government have no copyright protection in the United States (they might still overseas, however, which would indeed affect Wikileaks). Also, documents that came from government contractors are still copyrighted. But if this passes, surely a bill identical to it but dealing with classified documents instead of copyrighted ones, will follow shortly thereafter.
There are a couple of salient points.
1. The Attorney General would now be a point of initiation. You wouldn't have to sue me for infringing your copyright (though you still could). The AG could do it directly, with or without a complaint from you. (Actually, technically, the AG would not be pursuing action against me, but against my site itself.)
2. There is no power to compel takedowns without a court order in the law. However, the AG is required to maintain a list of sites considered to be dedicated to infringing activities, but against which no action has been pursued, and the agents who would take down your domain (normally the registrar) receive immunity from any lawsuit that you might bring if they take pre-emptive action based on this list, even though no court order has been issued or even sought. You can bet that they will get pressure to do so, and a lot of them will probably simply decide it is good policy to automatically follow that list.
Interestingly enough, it looks to me like the whole law can be circumvented by using straight IP addresses and never bothering with a domain name at all. It talks about sites, but really, procedurally, is all worded around taking down domains.
1. If socialism is state ownership of industry, then state ownership of the health care industry, a goal of Obama and many others, is socialistic by definition.
2. The current health care law actually requires private citizens to purchase a product, which is not a Constitutional prerogative of the federal government, and thus differs significantly from medicare and medicaid, which are the government itself providing a product.
3. Really? Do you really think the Supreme Court has struck down "every" other unconstitutional law, with a 100% accuracy rate? I sure hope you are exaggerating here...but if you are, then your argument loses force, because it relies on the Supreme Court's having let laws stand as an actual positive argument for their Constitutionality.
Um...doesn't this all depend on how limited the government is? A few points that need to be made:
The opposite of "limited government" is not "powerful government", it is "unlimited government".
Financial power translates into political power regardless of whether government is limited or not. Also, just having a slight edge in government gives you the power to award yourself an even bigger edge. A current example: redistricting will now take place all around the United States this year, where the party with the majority in each state, if they have the governorship as well, can redraw the lines to protect their majority and make it larger in future years. Or, an example of what would happen in the unlimited government scenario, a few people could make the laws so they gained, and their gain would give them even more influence in turn.
A government with no limitations on it, controlled by the dominant financial interests, is therefore the most likely result, and is the worst possible outcome.
Therefore we need limited government. That does not mean government without the power to protect people from one another. In fact, that power is exactly what limited government proponents want to limit the government to.
Then how come a significant proportion of the support for libertarian movements is from the lower, weaker classes?
You're right that government is a group of people banding together to protect their interest, but mistaken as to who therefore needs to be protected from whom. A great deal of the Constitution is designed to prevent the tyranny of the majority-- that is, domination and control by means of the government. There's always a tug of war, because there are always people under the thumb of other individuals or corporations, who want more government to get out from under this...and there also are always people under the thumb of a dominating government, who want less government for exactly the same reason. Given that government is the biggest, most durable, most powerful entity that can dominate and control, and the hardest to remove once it has established that control, I'd say we should always treat skeptically the request for more of it.
And you might note, too, that your claim as to the useful role of government-- to protect people from one another-- is exactly the primary role libertarians believe the government should have. What they don't agree with is that it should go much beyond this, into what might be termed as "messing around in" the lives of people, or exerting control itself.
Of course, there are plenty of people who think as you say, who want to get what they can get and ride all over everyone else to get it, and they want government control reduced to allow them to do what they want. Except we can't forget those same people are quite ready to use government for the very purpose of giving themselves those advantages when they can get away with it. Both government reduction and government intervention are often covers for people's power plays. I think we'd be wise to understand why so many people truly view government as one of the powers they need protection from, and also need to be wise enough to recognize when an argument couched in libertarian appeals is really just a gambit for being allowed to do things that go altogether against libertarian ideals (run over other people's rights)
I still disagree that it is trivial. We're talking about around 2000 square nautical miles of ocean after just the first hour traveling at 25 knots, and yes, it is near the coast, but still several hundred to a thousand feet of depth. That is a large grid, and by the time enough searchers are on scene to cover the whole thing, it is far larger. A lot really depends on how many ready-to-launch anti-submarine helicopters are close by, which, for any given spot on the coast, may well be zero. For that particular spot, I'd imagine the Navy has applicable assets, but they might not be on high alert ready to jump on the chase instantly. I agree there is a good chance of finding it, but I don't think it is trivial. I mean, for that matter, a nuclear submarine could hide motionless at the bottom in a good spot to get lost in ground noise for weeks, if it wanted to.
I also am pretty convinced that the "measured response" would be limited to pinging the heck out of the boat to harass them and let them know we found them.
The response to all this is getting weird, with people, including the military, implausibly claiming it was an airplane contrail-- a claim that ought to be 100% verifiable based on ground radar records, and yet nobody has come up with such records showing a plane in that spot.
Yes, likely, but by no means certainly. I don't know how we can have any idea whether "almost all" such things in the past have included notification, because the ones that don't are more or less by definition an unknown quantity. I have a feeling a lot of those decisions are made politically. If U.S. interests are better served by quietly demonstrating or testing something such that only the people who need to know about it know about it, then that's what they will do. There are more ways of conveying the proper message to foreign governments than a public claim of responsibility, and sometimes the back-channel hints are more appropriate than the publicly acknowledged sabre-rattling.
I don't think locating a submarine is really as easy as you think. Especially when you're unlikely to get any sub hunting ships on scene for hours, or even helicopters for long enough that the search radius would be very large.
More importantly, since the missile was launched from international waters, and was fired away from the United States, sinking the boat that launched it would be a very unlikely response. Launching an actual attack against a vessel not in U.S. waters that was simply engaged in demonstrating its capabilities would be an unacceptable risk for us, as it would make a sabre-rattling incident into a real, shooting international conflict, and it would set a changed precedent for how other nations could be expected to fairly react when American ships or planes go near their territory and act provocatively, as they often do.
3. The US Military doesn't want to look like idiots or make people panic, so they keep silent and let us assume it was theirs while they scramble like crazy internally and non-publicly.
...and Rod Blagojevich goes from criminal to hero in an instant, as he donates his hair for use as a missile shield.
More likely the point of the demonstration would be that they could launch at the U.S. from close enough that we'd have practically no response time.
Exactly. "Did it come back down?" and "Where did it go?" are obvious questions none of the articles I've seen are asking. And why aren't the media outlets seeming to ask anyone other than the Pentagon who could answer those questions? I haven't seen any reports of comments from NASA or from any Russian government agency.
I think by the end of your post ("requirement to file paperwork with the FAA," etc.) you forgot what you said at the beginning ("is in international waters").
No, a sub 35 miles away from the US coast would very likely submerge after launch and be long gone by the time anyone got near to find it. We don't have destroyers covering every inch of the coast every minute. Certainly by the time anyone capable of locating the sub got near, it would be clear that there was no direct hostile action taking place. The missile appears to have been directed northwest, which suggests it may have been meant to be a show to the US without actually causing anyone in Washington to believe we were under attack.
"Over there" means "Asia", I suspect. Obama's tour does not include a stop in China, but it does include stops in potential or actual rivals of China, and could reasonably be coupled with a demonstration aimed at China to show we are serious about alliances with Japan, India, South Korea, etc., and about continued U.S. influence in that part of the world.
Marcionism, named after Marcion, who lived in the Second Century and believed that the God described by the Hebrew Bible was mostly evil, and the newly revealed, forgiving God seen in Jesus was the true, highest God. It was regarded as heretical from very early on, so it had long since been cast out of the main body of the church and mostly died out before even the First Council at Nicea in 325. It was written against strongly by Tertullian around AD 200, so it must have still had some followers then. It is indeed kind of an interesting bit of Christian history.