You're entitle to your beliefs, of course, and I doubt either of us will be able to convince the other. But you are making a classic mistake made by many others who have problems with Big Bang cosmology, evolution, etc.
Science is not about knowledge. Science is about a carefully quantified ignorance. Properly done, and properly presented, science is more about what we don't know than what we do.
Science is not a collection of facts. Science is a process of validation.
We sacrifice "certainty" on many many things so that we can claim true certainty on what remains. Science is a severe filter with rigorous standards of what can be accepted as "proven". Eveything that is "proven" is done so provisionally, because scientists understand that we cannot ever have the whole truth. All we can be sure of is further approximations to the ultimate truth.
It sort of irks me when creationists (not necessarily the poster, but others) point to the process of scientific refinement as "evidence" that, say, the Big Bang is "just" a theory. I teach high school physics, and around May 1, we begin modern physics -- relativity and quantum mechanics. There is always a student or two who throw their arms up in frustration: "Why'd we bother learning that other stuff if it isn't true? What good is a theory if it can be overturned later?"
But very few theories are actually overturned and discarded. What usually happens is that their regime of applicability shrinks. Newtownian theory is "true", for human-scale objects moving not too quickly. Sure, Relativity is true for those objects, too, and more besides: it's a more accurate, more general theory. But for the sorts of objects
In modern parlance, "mass" means "rest mass". Photons, which can never be at rest (since the speed of light is c for all observers), have no rest mass.
More technically, the rest mass of an object can be found through:
(m c^2)^2 = E^2 - (pc)^2
with E the energy and p the momentum. For photons, where E=pc, it's clear that m = 0. For a long time we thought the same thing applied to neutrinos, but apparently not...
If you're jumping up and down saying, "But mass increases with velocity", you're using an outmoded lexicon. The idea of relativistic mass simply isn't useful, and can lead to a lot of misconceptions.
Anti-matter: matter with opposite spin, helicity(? I think), and especially, charge. (Other quantum numbers, such as baryon number, are reversed, too.) Anti-matter particles are like mirror images of "normal" matter. As far as we know, no large sources of anti-matter occur in the Universe (although we can make some on Earth and some decay processes -- like the potassium in your banana -- create some).
"dark" matter: Matter that, for one reason or another, is not luminous. There is growing evidence that we cannot see all the matter in the Universe. The best evidence, IMHO, comes from studies of galaxy rotation, which show that galaxies are not rotating in a so-called "Keplerian" manner. A collection of particles orbiting a central mass should have a velocity that falls off (as 1/sqrt(r)) with distance. Saturn's rings do this, for example, which was how they were proven not to be solid.
It turns out that galaxies (which are rotating systems) do not obey this relation, as one might expect (since most of the luminous matter is contained near the center). This implies that there is something else "adding" mass as we travel out from the center of a galaxy. We can't see it, so it must be dark.
There are also cosmological arguments for dark matter. Most especially, there's a paramter (called Omega) which is the ratio of the Universe's density to "critical density". If Omega 1, the Universe will eventually collapse under the gravitational attraction of its elements. Observation of luminous matter indicates that Omega = 0.1. For a long time people had a bias that Omega should be exactly, leading to the claim that 90% of the matter must be "dark". Since that number agrees reasonably well with the one from galaxy rotations, people saw these as mutually supporting each other. (For the record, I find the cosmological evidence quite unconvincing.)
So, once you believe there is dark matter, you start to wonder what it's made of. In essence there are three classes of candidates:
Regular, but cold, baryonic matter. This could be gas clouds, failed stars, burnt-out embers, etc. After all, things only glow if they're hot enough. Observed stars, etc. ("luminous baryonic matter") seem to have Omega_luminous about 0.01. Limits from Big Bang nucleosynthesis (the formation of elements in the creation of the Universe) seem to limit all "normal" matter to Omega_baryonic = 0.1.
Neutrinos. We can estimate the flux of comsic neutrinos in the sky independently of their mass. Now that they've been shown to have some, we can estimate the total mass of neutrinos zipping around the Universe. According to the article, Omega_neutrinos is about 0.18.
WIMPs: weakly-interacting massive particles. Since they're weakling interacting, they'd be hard to detect. These would be new particles, so far undiscovered, and they would involve that highest of objects, new physics. Candidates include axions, supersymmetric partners, and other more esoteric items.
No matter what the "dark matter" is, it will likely consist of anti-matter conjugates as well.
Every time rights get trampled, it starts with a fairly reasonable restriction that is approved without thought of the consequence.
So the big deal is not this case, typo squatting for porn is something we'd all be better off without. Rather it's the consequences that you alude to regarding parody, and a dozen other cases that could be dreamt of once the precedent was set.
While your hesitation is understandable, both the judge and the Act explicitly allow "fair use" defenses, and the judge specifically investigated whether the defendant's claim of "protest site" was valid. This implies that, had it been a legitimate protest site (and not a hurriedly retconned one), that would have sufficed.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but we don't have to mistrust everything.
MS has been pretty good at keeping the distinction between GPL and the rest of the OS licenses in their arguments.
... Except, of course, that they fail to make any distinction between GPL and the rest of the OS licenses in their arguments. Sure, they describe the GPL, but they always name it "Open Source".
And if you think they're just "confused" on the topic, there's a bridge in my hometown that I'd love to sell you...
It's like saying people that owned slaves in the old days were socially good, because they also employed payed personal
Actually, it's more like the sickening arguments actually offered, "Slavery was good even for the slaves, since it provided them with work, food, and security."
This exactly illustrates my contention that the goal of the so-called "free software" movement is the destruction of the software industry as we know it today.
I'm not a FSFer, but I suspect they would not quibble with this. They view current practices of the software industry as wrong, so of course they'd want to end it.
I don't believe that the error -- or even negative economic impact -- of this belief is self-evident, as some would like to claim. Or to put it this way, backers of the status quo need to actively defend it, not just attack the alternatives.
This is hardly in the same class as being unemployed and unemployable in one's chosen field of work.
No one has a "right" to earn a living at their "chosen field of work". If you can, hey, great... that way lies happiness. But don't tell me that I should make my economic decisions based on keeping you employed in a way maximizing your self-satisfaction. I have no such obligation.
Read the decisioRe:Unreasonable Search etv
on
Carnivore To Die?
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· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
What is the difference in tracking from an odor or an infra red light device?
Where, as here, the Government uses
a device that is not in gen-eral [sic]
public use, to explore details of a private home that would previ-ously [sic]
have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveil-lance [sic]
is a Fourth Amendment "search," and is presumptively
unreasonable without a warrant. Pp. 3-13.
(emphasis mine)
Since most people come equipped with a nose as a standard option, police could use a nose to detect things.
They have said it will not. They had independent reviewers look at it who said as much. Yeah, I know they weren't quite independent (blah blah blah).
"blah blah blah"? "blah blah blah"????
The FBI says, in essence, "Hey, trust us". Then they appoint contaminated reviewers and try to pass them off as independent. Surprise, surprise, the reviewers with ties to the FBI find that, hey, we can trust them.
And all you can say is "blah blah blah"? My goodness, the willful naivete that you show!
As a good American, I don't trust the government. Government is only good so long as it is vigilantly supervised. I don't expect the FBI would routinely abuse Carnivore... but I expect they would on occasion, and that's too often.
There are days when I wonder exactly why anyone is bothering to even attempt to safeguard the rights of an American populace that, apparently, doesn't know or care about those rights.
Who would have thought the tech sector would create such starry-eyed romantics (as many online activists seem to be)?
Actually, it doesn't surprise me at all. Techies, in my experience, tend to be the hopeful, look-to-the-future types (if only for the gadgets) and that wanders easily into ideological rigidity.
Wow, that evidences such a profound misunderstanding of the American system and the American public, that it's hard to know where to begin...
The Supreme Court can nullify laws, although realistically, they don't all that often. They can review lower court actions. They can wag a finger at the other two branches. All of these are well-established in the common law of the US and well-understood throughout the legal system.
They are not a dictatorship, firstly, because more than one speaks. More importantly, they are appointed through the elected representatives and serve under the (distant) review of the legislature. Consistent and clarion violations of their jurisdiction could -- and, probably, would -- be met with impeachment and removal. Additionally, Congress essentially controls their budget. It didn't quite work but FDR's court-packing scheme illustrates another indirect check.
More significantly, if the Court rules in a way that fundamentally offends the American people -- that really and truly violates, in an inarguable way, the precepts of the Republic -- then the American people, through their elected representatives or directly, can amend the Constitution so as to correct the flaw. This is of course the atom bomb of judicial interventions and so is used rarely.
Now, you might have your laundry list of rulings that "fundamentally offend". They might involve flag burning, or capital punishment, or abortion, or suspects' rights, or police powers. The Court may have ruled, at some point, in a manner inimical to your heartfelt and cherished beliefs about the core values of American civil society, and you might very well feel that they have undermined the very Republic.
But if the country hasn't risen up to pass an amendment to support you, I would argue you're talking smoke.
Interestingly, the poster had one thing right: The Court's power is extra-Constitutional, in that the primary power of judicial review is not (specifcially) mentioned in the Constitution. (Really. Go check.) It was argued, most successfully by Chief Justice Marshall, that such a power is implied in the mission of the Court, but it isn't stated. (This, ironically, means that even the most "strict constructionist" Supreme must, at heart, be somewhat of an interpretationalist.)
If that's the case, how can the Court function? Because, by and large, they do a good job... good enough that the people trust them and respect their judgments. The biggest problem with the Supreme Court involvement in the election was not the decision they made. (I admit it, I think they goofed.) It was the clumsy and ill-odored manner in which they got involved.
For me, one of the high points of American democracy and dedication to the rule of Law came during 1974. The Watergate prosecutor subpoenaed the Oval Office tapes from Richard Nixon, and Nixon refused to surrender them. He tried to bluff the prosecutor, but the prosecutor stood fast. A district court said, "Mr. Nixon, hand over the tapes." The appellate court said, "Mr. Nixon, hand over the tapes." And so he went to the Supreme Court (including a number of justices he himself had appointed) and claimed privelege. The Supreme Court said, "Mr. Nixon, hand over the tapes."
Picture the scene: On the one hand is Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America: chief executive, commander-in-chief, the single most powerful man in the world. At his fingertips he commanded the resources of the FBI, the CIA, Secret Service, the DoD, literally millions of armed personnel. In Maryland, not too far away, was the 82nd Airborne, a mobil and elite fighting force capable of siezing a city in a matter of hours.
Against that, stood "nine old men" clothed only in black robes and the Law.
The President capitulated and surrendered the tapes.
If that doesn't send a thrill down your spine, you haven't been paying attention. I say, bring on the justices and bless them for the splendid, if fallible, job they do.
Looked at from the viewpoint of "a continuous system of government based upon a written Constitution and marked by the peaceful transfer of power between regimes of differing ideology", well, then 200 years is forever.
These days it's fashionable to downplay the accomplishments of those dead white 55 guys in Philadelphia, but the fact of the matter is, the United States remains the world's oldest continuous constitutional democracy. That ain't bad.
Good suggestion about staggered terms, but one problem. If they can get a second term, that subjects first-termers to political pressures. If retirement is mandatory after one term, then when a judge dies after 32 years, that leaves his replacement in a bad position (3 years and out). If you give the replacement a 35 year term starting from when he begins, eventually the system will get out of sync again...
Um, actually, that's two problems (or three, depending on how you count the replacement item).:)
More seriously, why not say that justices have a minimum tenure of, say, 20 years. Then, on the first day of session (or last), they roll a six-sided die. On a roll of 6, they retire at the end of the term. On average, they'd last about six years past the minimum...
OK, so it introduces some randomness into the process. Personally, I think that's a good thing.
Well, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not even a professional grammarian, but...
I actually think the original poster (I think this is very good law) was not only OK but in fact poetic. It would be different had he/she said, "I think this is a very good law". That would speak to the particular, in this case, the ruling. But as formulated, the poster speaks to the universal, that is, the practice of law itself.
Your mileage may vary and I probably deserve the "off-topic" that'll be assessed but, hey, we're not poetical enough these days.
I'm all in favour of getting something for nothing, but what about up-coming bands that don't have massive record sales who are losing money because people are distributing their material free of charge?
Is there a documented case of this occurring? Because from my understanding of how the recording industry works, up-and-coming bands either (a) don't get contracts or (b) don't make any money off the contracts they do get.
As some documentation for my statement:), I'll offer "Courtney Love Does the Math", which appeared a year ago in Salon. It's a good read.
Companies have no "moral obligations" - their only true obligation is to their shareholders, and their obligation to them is to make money.
I disagree. Although it is important to maintain an clear distinction between their legal and their moral obligations, I don't think they are free of the latter. For individuals, there exist certain obligations specified and maintained through law, and then a large set of obligations which cannot be enforced legally but which (I hold) nonethless apply. And anyone not meeting those obligations can certainly be judged and perhaps viewed askance by others for that failing. I see no reason that such should not hold for corporations.
In my opinion, the current cultural blindness to the moral responsibilities of corporations is one of the root causes of the general degeneration of today.
Nothing personal, but this is the one aspect of Slashdot that I truely hate: the negative rumormongering.
As someone else pointed out in this thread, the TiVo folks have acknowledged this one as a bug, and are turning the feature back on in an update.
OK, so maybe I've watched too many "X-Files".`but... just because they now say it was just a bug doesn't mean that it was just a bug. It's entirely possible they had a PR wake-up call and are dong some damage-control.
Even if this was a fluke, it shows me the danger inherent in becoming too used to any service over which I don't have control. As far as possible I avoid that, and so, TiVo is still out for me.
Services also let you easily figure out how much something's going to cost.
Until the service provider realizes that you're in pretty deep, and that they can raise prices, lower service, or change options as much as they want, so long as they remain infinitesimally below the annoyance threshhold. In other words, you essentially get tied to legacy situations wherein future costs cannot be predicted.
As a counterexample to your philosophy, I would offer computers in general. The hardware has come down precisely because movement is easy. But additionally, because you own the box, boxes have shown up in places that would never see a computer if everything were leased... because the end user gets to decide the eventual fate of the outmoded machine.
As a teacher at a school I've seen the real advantage of that.
Frankly, I consider the fact that the unit works at all without the service to be an unexpected bonus; the box was clearly designed and intended to be used with the service, and doing otherwise, it seems to me, is just asking for this kind of thing to happen over time.
And if TiVo and retailers were honest, hey, that'd be OK. But the subscription is almost exclusively pitched as "optional", "enhancing" the TiVo experience. As such, a customer could quite easily assume that one could use the basic functionality of the TiVo without the service.
From the ads I've seen, TiVo created that impression quite deliberately. As such, they should have factored the expected cost of non-subscribers into the cost of the machine. Also, through malice or incompetence, they apparently designed software that can set the clock (officially) only through a dial-in. Therefore they are automatically tying non-subscribers to their network and are obligated to support them, too.
If TiVo doesn't want to deal with non-subscribers, then they should give a fix that allows core functionality of the machine (clock set, recording, etc.) without a connection. From then on, they can refuse all calls from non-subscribers justifiably and they can cease upgrading/fixing the software of non-subscribers.
Until then, whatever legal immunities they might have, they have a moral obligation to make the devices work for all customers.
The tie-in to service is why I hesitated from getting TiVo at all. I feel vindicated. You can be sure they will never get dollar one from me now.
I ask you: Have you ever run a business? When running a business, is your priority the people who pay more, or the other people?
Your obligation is to provide the service advertised for the price agreed upon.
TiVo advertises these boxes as digital recorders. They say that subscription "enhances" -- not "enables" -- that functionality. Therefore, they imply that subscription is optional.
They wrote code that, when used as intended, requires a dial-in, to keep the clock from drifting one minute per month. There might be other ways of avoiding that, but they don't give them and they don't support them. Therefore, they created a situation where non-subscribers would be forced to connect to their network.
I'm tired of the rants that say, "You're not paying for the service so shut up." In the business world, you need to anticipate legacy costs. They should either have charged enough to cover for non-subscribers or should never have created a class of non-subscribers at all. They blew the call and now they're abusing their customers.
In order to do this, you would have to have a quality source of guide data....
I don't have a TiVo (and now, never will), so perhaps I don't understand what "guide data" is. If it's essentially just TV listings, well, free sites for that abound on the Net. yahooTV, for one.
Court rulings == BORDERLINE legal?????
on
TiVo Upgrade Isn't
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· Score: 4
Blockquoth the poster:
Or is it because it allows you to engage in borderline legal activity (time-shifting) that you think that they are on "your side"?
Um, what's exactly "borderline" about time-shifting? It is a result of the Betamax ruling and a now well-established part of copyright law. I guess being "only" 20 years old and supported in every case is not enough.
Sheesh. How we can complain about people taking away our rights when we seem willing to abdicate them ourselves?
The difference is that under UK law the defendant must prove the truth of his allegations.
I stand grateful for the correction. I didn't want to imply that our British cousins were entirely uncivilized.:)
More seriously, I still think the US system is superior. (OK, I'm an American, so maybe it's just what I'm used to.) By forcing proof onto the defendant, you definitely chill speech. The thrust of, say, the First Amendment is that more and open information flow is healthy for a democracy. From the viewpoint of American political theory, it is much safer to err on the side of too much published, rather than too little.
Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on your cultural norms. But considering the tremendous advantage possessed by the wealthy and the powerful, and their overriding interest in quashing uncomfortable truths, I'll accept the occasional mis-truth rather than see even one truth snuffed out.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that this data was taken, and has been used to put an upper limit on neutrino mass. But I'll be darned if I have a reference handy... :(
Science is not about knowledge. Science is about a carefully quantified ignorance. Properly done, and properly presented, science is more about what we don't know than what we do.
Science is not a collection of facts. Science is a process of validation.
We sacrifice "certainty" on many many things so that we can claim true certainty on what remains. Science is a severe filter with rigorous standards of what can be accepted as "proven". Eveything that is "proven" is done so provisionally, because scientists understand that we cannot ever have the whole truth. All we can be sure of is further approximations to the ultimate truth.
It sort of irks me when creationists (not necessarily the poster, but others) point to the process of scientific refinement as "evidence" that, say, the Big Bang is "just" a theory. I teach high school physics, and around May 1, we begin modern physics -- relativity and quantum mechanics. There is always a student or two who throw their arms up in frustration: "Why'd we bother learning that other stuff if it isn't true? What good is a theory if it can be overturned later?"
But very few theories are actually overturned and discarded. What usually happens is that their regime of applicability shrinks. Newtownian theory is "true", for human-scale objects moving not too quickly. Sure, Relativity is true for those objects, too, and more besides: it's a more accurate, more general theory. But for the sorts of objects
More technically, the rest mass of an object can be found through:
with E the energy and p the momentum. For photons, where E=pc, it's clear that m = 0. For a long time we thought the same thing applied to neutrinos, but apparently not...If you're jumping up and down saying, "But mass increases with velocity", you're using an outmoded lexicon. The idea of relativistic mass simply isn't useful, and can lead to a lot of misconceptions.
"dark" matter: Matter that, for one reason or another, is not luminous. There is growing evidence that we cannot see all the matter in the Universe. The best evidence, IMHO, comes from studies of galaxy rotation, which show that galaxies are not rotating in a so-called "Keplerian" manner. A collection of particles orbiting a central mass should have a velocity that falls off (as 1/sqrt(r)) with distance. Saturn's rings do this, for example, which was how they were proven not to be solid.
It turns out that galaxies (which are rotating systems) do not obey this relation, as one might expect (since most of the luminous matter is contained near the center). This implies that there is something else "adding" mass as we travel out from the center of a galaxy. We can't see it, so it must be dark.
There are also cosmological arguments for dark matter. Most especially, there's a paramter (called Omega) which is the ratio of the Universe's density to "critical density". If Omega 1, the Universe will eventually collapse under the gravitational attraction of its elements. Observation of luminous matter indicates that Omega = 0.1. For a long time people had a bias that Omega should be exactly, leading to the claim that 90% of the matter must be "dark". Since that number agrees reasonably well with the one from galaxy rotations, people saw these as mutually supporting each other. (For the record, I find the cosmological evidence quite unconvincing.)
So, once you believe there is dark matter, you start to wonder what it's made of. In essence there are three classes of candidates:
- Regular, but cold, baryonic matter. This could be gas clouds, failed stars, burnt-out embers, etc. After all, things only glow if they're hot enough. Observed stars, etc. ("luminous baryonic matter") seem to have Omega_luminous about 0.01. Limits from Big Bang nucleosynthesis (the formation of elements in the creation of the Universe) seem to limit all "normal" matter to Omega_baryonic = 0.1.
- Neutrinos. We can estimate the flux of comsic neutrinos in the sky independently of their mass. Now that they've been shown to have some, we can estimate the total mass of neutrinos zipping around the Universe. According to the article, Omega_neutrinos is about 0.18.
- WIMPs: weakly-interacting massive particles. Since they're weakling interacting, they'd be hard to detect. These would be new particles, so far undiscovered, and they would involve that highest of objects, new physics. Candidates include axions, supersymmetric partners, and other more esoteric items.
No matter what the "dark matter" is, it will likely consist of anti-matter conjugates as well.The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but we don't have to mistrust everything.
And if you think they're just "confused" on the topic, there's a bridge in my hometown that I'd love to sell you...
Bleh.
I don't believe that the error -- or even negative economic impact -- of this belief is self-evident, as some would like to claim. Or to put it this way, backers of the status quo need to actively defend it, not just attack the alternatives.
Since most people come equipped with a nose as a standard option, police could use a nose to detect things.
The FBI says, in essence, "Hey, trust us". Then they appoint contaminated reviewers and try to pass them off as independent. Surprise, surprise, the reviewers with ties to the FBI find that, hey, we can trust them.
And all you can say is "blah blah blah"? My goodness, the willful naivete that you show!
As a good American, I don't trust the government. Government is only good so long as it is vigilantly supervised. I don't expect the FBI would routinely abuse Carnivore... but I expect they would on occasion, and that's too often.
There are days when I wonder exactly why anyone is bothering to even attempt to safeguard the rights of an American populace that, apparently, doesn't know or care about those rights.
The Supreme Court can nullify laws, although realistically, they don't all that often. They can review lower court actions. They can wag a finger at the other two branches. All of these are well-established in the common law of the US and well-understood throughout the legal system.
They are not a dictatorship, firstly, because more than one speaks. More importantly, they are appointed through the elected representatives and serve under the (distant) review of the legislature. Consistent and clarion violations of their jurisdiction could -- and, probably, would -- be met with impeachment and removal. Additionally, Congress essentially controls their budget. It didn't quite work but FDR's court-packing scheme illustrates another indirect check.
More significantly, if the Court rules in a way that fundamentally offends the American people -- that really and truly violates, in an inarguable way, the precepts of the Republic -- then the American people, through their elected representatives or directly, can amend the Constitution so as to correct the flaw. This is of course the atom bomb of judicial interventions and so is used rarely.
Now, you might have your laundry list of rulings that "fundamentally offend". They might involve flag burning, or capital punishment, or abortion, or suspects' rights, or police powers. The Court may have ruled, at some point, in a manner inimical to your heartfelt and cherished beliefs about the core values of American civil society, and you might very well feel that they have undermined the very Republic.
But if the country hasn't risen up to pass an amendment to support you, I would argue you're talking smoke.
Interestingly, the poster had one thing right: The Court's power is extra-Constitutional, in that the primary power of judicial review is not (specifcially) mentioned in the Constitution. (Really. Go check.) It was argued, most successfully by Chief Justice Marshall, that such a power is implied in the mission of the Court, but it isn't stated. (This, ironically, means that even the most "strict constructionist" Supreme must, at heart, be somewhat of an interpretationalist.)
If that's the case, how can the Court function? Because, by and large, they do a good job... good enough that the people trust them and respect their judgments. The biggest problem with the Supreme Court involvement in the election was not the decision they made. (I admit it, I think they goofed.) It was the clumsy and ill-odored manner in which they got involved.
For me, one of the high points of American democracy and dedication to the rule of Law came during 1974. The Watergate prosecutor subpoenaed the Oval Office tapes from Richard Nixon, and Nixon refused to surrender them. He tried to bluff the prosecutor, but the prosecutor stood fast. A district court said, "Mr. Nixon, hand over the tapes." The appellate court said, "Mr. Nixon, hand over the tapes." And so he went to the Supreme Court (including a number of justices he himself had appointed) and claimed privelege. The Supreme Court said, "Mr. Nixon, hand over the tapes."
Picture the scene: On the one hand is Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America: chief executive, commander-in-chief, the single most powerful man in the world. At his fingertips he commanded the resources of the FBI, the CIA, Secret Service, the DoD, literally millions of armed personnel. In Maryland, not too far away, was the 82nd Airborne, a mobil and elite fighting force capable of siezing a city in a matter of hours.
Against that, stood "nine old men" clothed only in black robes and the Law.
The President capitulated and surrendered the tapes.
If that doesn't send a thrill down your spine, you haven't been paying attention. I say, bring on the justices and bless them for the splendid, if fallible, job they do.
These days it's fashionable to downplay the accomplishments of those dead white 55 guys in Philadelphia, but the fact of the matter is, the United States remains the world's oldest continuous constitutional democracy. That ain't bad.
More seriously, why not say that justices have a minimum tenure of, say, 20 years. Then, on the first day of session (or last), they roll a six-sided die. On a roll of 6, they retire at the end of the term. On average, they'd last about six years past the minimum...
OK, so it introduces some randomness into the process. Personally, I think that's a good thing.
I actually think the original poster (I think this is very good law) was not only OK but in fact poetic. It would be different had he/she said, "I think this is a very good law". That would speak to the particular, in this case, the ruling. But as formulated, the poster speaks to the universal, that is, the practice of law itself.
Your mileage may vary and I probably deserve the "off-topic" that'll be assessed but, hey, we're not poetical enough these days.
As some documentation for my statement :), I'll offer "Courtney Love Does the Math", which appeared a year ago in Salon. It's a good read.
In my opinion, the current cultural blindness to the moral responsibilities of corporations is one of the root causes of the general degeneration of today.
Even if this was a fluke, it shows me the danger inherent in becoming too used to any service over which I don't have control. As far as possible I avoid that, and so, TiVo is still out for me.
As a counterexample to your philosophy, I would offer computers in general. The hardware has come down precisely because movement is easy. But additionally, because you own the box, boxes have shown up in places that would never see a computer if everything were leased... because the end user gets to decide the eventual fate of the outmoded machine.
As a teacher at a school I've seen the real advantage of that.
From the ads I've seen, TiVo created that impression quite deliberately. As such, they should have factored the expected cost of non-subscribers into the cost of the machine. Also, through malice or incompetence, they apparently designed software that can set the clock (officially) only through a dial-in. Therefore they are automatically tying non-subscribers to their network and are obligated to support them, too.
If TiVo doesn't want to deal with non-subscribers, then they should give a fix that allows core functionality of the machine (clock set, recording, etc.) without a connection. From then on, they can refuse all calls from non-subscribers justifiably and they can cease upgrading/fixing the software of non-subscribers.
Until then, whatever legal immunities they might have, they have a moral obligation to make the devices work for all customers.
The tie-in to service is why I hesitated from getting TiVo at all. I feel vindicated. You can be sure they will never get dollar one from me now.
TiVo advertises these boxes as digital recorders. They say that subscription "enhances" -- not "enables" -- that functionality. Therefore, they imply that subscription is optional.
They wrote code that, when used as intended, requires a dial-in, to keep the clock from drifting one minute per month. There might be other ways of avoiding that, but they don't give them and they don't support them. Therefore, they created a situation where non-subscribers would be forced to connect to their network.
I'm tired of the rants that say, "You're not paying for the service so shut up." In the business world, you need to anticipate legacy costs. They should either have charged enough to cover for non-subscribers or should never have created a class of non-subscribers at all. They blew the call and now they're abusing their customers.
Sheesh. How we can complain about people taking away our rights when we seem willing to abdicate them ourselves?
More seriously, I still think the US system is superior. (OK, I'm an American, so maybe it's just what I'm used to.) By forcing proof onto the defendant, you definitely chill speech. The thrust of, say, the First Amendment is that more and open information flow is healthy for a democracy. From the viewpoint of American political theory, it is much safer to err on the side of too much published, rather than too little.
Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on your cultural norms. But considering the tremendous advantage possessed by the wealthy and the powerful, and their overriding interest in quashing uncomfortable truths, I'll accept the occasional mis-truth rather than see even one truth snuffed out.