The most important grant of rejection is that the plaintiff "lack any cognizable first amendment right to exploit the copyrighted work of others".
The basis of this claim is the supreme court's precedent Harper & Row vs Nation Enter.that explains how the regime of copyright itself respects and adequately safeguards the freedom of speech protected by the first amendment.
The court explains this inherent protection as residing in the distinction between non-copyrightable ideas and copyrightable concrete expression.
The court reasoning is self-contradictory. According to this line of reasoning
the first ammendment does not protect concrete expression but only ideas ( which will presumably allow government to dictate which words journalists can use).
no legislation concerning copyright can infringe anybody's first ammendment right.
The first point makes an impossibly hard distinction between concrete words and ideas.
Can I express the idea of Donald Duck without using the concrete expression "Donald Duck"? Try at home! Can I express the emotional force of using obscenities in a clean language?
The second point is both circular and self-contradictory. The court admits, pace itself, that there is some tension between the Constitution's copyright clause and the first ammendment.
It should follow that copyright
is a restriction of speech ( otherwise, where the tension?). And therefore any statement that a copyright regime adequately safeguards free speech must come not from the principle of copyright (which is in tension with the free ammendment), but from the balance obtained in a particular application of copyright. In other words, the totality of copyright, the free use of ideas, the "fair use" doctrine, the time limits, etc., constitute a balance. Any act that changes that balance cannot possibly be sanctionned based on the constitutionality of the previously existing balance. Yet the court draw the opposite conclusion: the (untenable) distinction between ideas and expression has always been held to give adequate protection to free expression. Thus the court basicly says that an issue of fact, whether free expression is preserved by a particular act of congress, can be decided in principle without attending to the facts and to the particular act in question.
If we were to apply it to other laws, no law would ever fail. Since every law that affects constitutional balance ( security vs. privacy , free speech vs. harm , etc.) is passed on the background of a balance that has already been sanctionned as constitutional.
It almost seems pointless to argue. As Bush vs. Gore made plain, legal arguments are used as FUD to cover deep political symphaties. I bet that any research will discover that the majority has a record of protecting commercial interests and the dissenter has a record of protecting civil rights.
Someone has already point out that you are wrong. I do not have a mastery of the evidence to prove you wrong. But while you may be right you are certainly irrational.
There is a clear consensus among scientists ( excluding a few coropate sponsored disinformation) that global warming is real and can have extremely disastrous consequences. Scientists can be wrong. But it is irrational to believe they are unless you are a climatologist with solid credentials. Would you dismiss with the same attitude a doctor who told you you must remove a tumor to survive? Even if you thought he was wrong you would ( assuming you are rational) at most seek a second opinion. And if most doctors told you you have cancer would you dare ignore their advice?
Well, most climatologists have concluded global warming is real. Rationality requires that we act as if it is true even if they can be wrong: first, because we have no alterntative to science, and second, because if we fail to act and they are right, it may well be our last mistake.
I don't see these various odious laws and consortiums lasting all that long, as they will hurt or kill the media companies in the long run.
as Keynes said, "In the long run, we are all dead". Media executives, like most executives, think from today to the next quarterly report because of the structure of incentives. This is quite rational. Long term thinking is risky, (the world changes ), a dollar today is worth much more than a dollar in a decade ( depreciation) and, most importantly, they will be elsewhere in a decade.
In the short run, it pays to protect monopolies by all possible means. Every day you pay $18 for a cd because you are stuck, it is $18 more to bottomlime today. They know they will eventually "lose" . But time is money. So they are mostly concerned about "losing" later rather than sooner.
We all value aspects of our ways of life as birthrights, and no amount of explanation will assuage ( for those who are smart enough to notice) the loss of what is "self-evidently" ours.
Unfortunately or not, the list of dead certainties
is long. If there is one thing that can be learnt from Western history, it is that, as a civilization, we will use any technology that we can use. That is what defines us. Economists now talk about "disruptive inventions" as a new thing.
But they are as old as print and gunpowder, and if we know ourselves we know that we cannot have enough disruption ( as long as it increases our ability to do things).
That does not mean that technology is deterministic. we do shape it to fit our preconceptions; we do try to fit it within old legal and political structures ( cf. Napster) . But we ( as a civilization) just do not say, 'No Thanks'.
given this copious history, my feeling is that too many privacy mourners are barking at the wrong tree. We now have the technology to track individuals in their everyday life and access that knowledge with growing efficiency. Whether it is good or bad is rather irrelevent. Does this technology increase power? Can we do, thanks to it, what we couldn't do yesterday, or do it with less expenses? Does it create wealth? It seems that the answear is a triple yes. Extrapolating from the past, I believe it is a sure bet that this technology will be widely adopted across the developed world in two decades.
Culture matters! In the UK and France, the government will hold the keys. Scandinavians will put the new databases under public control while the Americans will pretend that as long as its Visa rather than Uncle Sam that knows all about you than it is ok. But we will all use it, ( to all those who think the US is different, btw, New York City is already widely covered by video surveillance)
So what should we do,Give up? I think we need to recognize that while privacy as we know it is as good as dead, power isn't. We will lose our privacy. But it is up to us whether we will also lose the power over our life that privacy affords us and because of which we value it. Rather than bitch about privacy itself, we should concerns ourselves with the way the new technologies alter the balance of power in society and concentrate on new mechanisms that compensate for it.
heavy handed big government? the same guys who are payed to shout blue murder and "let the market decide" when congress ponders pollution or privacy were hired by those whose application was rejected by ICANN, to argue that big brother actually must intervene this time.
Before all the libertarians start salivating, please note that congressmen are simply responding to the desires of their real constituency, business executives.
And pleeese, there is not going to be a nice clean solution to this, neither with nor without government. Too much money is at stake and there is zero public awareness, which is the only thing that can stop the suits (usually with 20 years latency-- see tobacco). May I thus respectfully suggests that comments about the real world mess are more relevant that schemes to fix everything by the book?
The article mentions that the GEML fragment on display may be incomprehensible to even geneticists, but is readable by computers. It goes on saying that the value of the GEML is allowing computers to share data. I am confused, since XML is either offering a verbose definition of computer data that even humans can understand, or allowing human data ( David is an Employee of IBM) to be expressed in self-describing computer accessible form.
Since the genetic code is already digital, transforming in into something that computers can process seems rather pointless, what is wrong with AGTCTTCGADC? making it verbose for humans is also not very useful, because what the GEML seems to offer is very raw data, essentially a wrapper around raw sequences.
Maybe the issue is really hype. I.e. a clever gimmick to drive companies to share information by offering them bandwagons they can't refuse to climb?
In a more general way, control of communication channels is control of speech. This should be obvious to anyone with a mind.
The problem is this. The first ammendment forbids congress to regulate speech without qualification. The supreme court case history has qualified that prohibition, to good effect mostly, by recognizing, among other things, that the motivation behind the first ammendment is the public interest in fostering "a marketplace of ideas".
The question is: does congress has the authority to regulate channels of communication in a way that promote the actual exercise rather than the abstract right of free speech?
The concept of the marketplace of ideas and the judicial history of the first ammendment could easily lend itself to such an interpretation. But at least six justices in the present court ( the five assholes + breyer) prefer the narrower one. That is of course very convenient. If actual access to communication channels cannot be regulated (qua speech), it does not mean that everyone has access. It means that access is decided by power ( money in our society) rather than by law.
The FCC regulatory powers are thus conveniently based on the power to regulate commerce, not speech. If the FCC were to prefer "community radio" over commercial radio, it would have been very likely challenged in court too (on free speech ground!). And the present court's decision is best left to the wild imagination.
Internet Bandwidth and radio bandwidth are not the same at all. Radio bandwith is more like a namespace, but one which is finite ( at any given moment) because of the nature of radio.
it is possible to create more radio bandwidth through innovation. But innovation is more expensive then bullying. It would be easier to carve up the airwaves in a way that discourages new and small players.
Look at the internet namespace. It is effectively infinite and yet the corporate world has managed to appropriate it, create scarcity within it and by and large own it. All it takes to extend the internet namespace is will, not innovation, and yet it isn't happening. Yet, you want to suggest that a much scarcier namespace like the FM spectrum will be extended through innovation.
The problem with the FCC is not that it regulates, it is that the purpose of its regulation is divorced from the public interest by the sick US plutocracy.
It is unfair to accuse the devil's spokesperson for making a deal with the devil.
PBS has been consistently pro business and is shunning any controversial content that could annoy business. This is not however because it is publically funded but because it is publically underfunded. It has no money so it panhandles among corporations. They pay the bill and they control the content and the personel.
Of course, since Congress is also controlled by corporations, it is a pipe dream to have public funding for broadcasting anything that would be 'business-unfriendly'.
I think one of the most important insights of this article is the way legislation and public policy is affected by obscure accountabe to nobody organizations whose members are payed by whoever is smart enough to pay them. When a "respectable" think-tank proposes a lengthy and complex solution to a thorny public policy issue, legislators are mostly happy that someone else has done their work for them. THey rarely have an incentive to delve too deeply into the manner.
It is nice to see that the good guys are prevailing. But it is a measure of the good guys' lack of forsight/resources that this battle is fought in our territory. Had the UCITA been proposed by a liberty minded organization, we'd still have the same fight but AOWintel would be on the defensive. Now that would be sweet, wouldn't it?
There should be a credible organization that provides model law from a perspective informed by freedom and consumer protection.
The most sesible and cost effective solution for yahoo may be probably to adopt the most restrictive legal standarts in the rich world. The loss of income from Nazi propaganda will be smaller than the combined cost of selective cesorship and litigation.
This may seem not so bad to many non Americans who lack the absolute 1st Ammendment commitment. But, ask yourself, what will happen when a country with an important enough market tries to impose restrictions than no democraticly inclined person can tolerate ( No sale of nativity scenes in China?) As much as I understand French consternation, i believe that the benefits of a legally unified Internet are greater than the loss to France's ability to effictively censor what it considers reprehensible. I thus suggest that such issues are better not left to national courts to resolve at all.
The Internet is global, and it would thus be apropriate to seek relief from the French ruling in a number of global venues that may be more sympathetic to yahoo, such as the WTO, and the EU supreme court. Since mosts losses from such rulings will be incurred by US based companies, it might be possible to get some positive US bullying at these institutions, with the apropriate lobbying.
Most likely, we will see countries pushing more and more for effective censorship. And I predict that most big corporations, including yahoo, vill just cave in. There is not enough money in being controversial. The pursuit of global standards of
openness and access are thus left to NGOs like the FSF (and all of us;-).
as an adage, I believe that Nazzi memorabilia and its prohibition in Europe both serve a very worthy goal, reminding yet another generation that the road to hell is just one right turn away.
Or one that had one too many viewings of Batman;-}
The problem is: if we are too jaded to believe in the effectiveness of democratic institutions, and not hyped enough to believe in the perrenial benevolence of markets, then Batmen are tho only people who can save us from ourselves.
Jamie's name is all over files in my computer, so I honestly say, Good luck Jamie. Hopefully, the next Bartender Almanach will have drinks with names like yacc! or SIGTERM.
While I welcaome anything open, I have to rant a bit.
In the interest of speed, I downloaded the tgz file and put it on my local server. The css files are missing, resulting in
loss of style information
nedd to sed the files to death before you can read anything
failure in so far as openess is concerned. An open source book should have everything open. No css is as if someone would publish the source but keep the makefiles.
I slightly disagree. It is not about security vs privacy only. A complete control over information flow is a chimera. Any attempt to achieve it results in practically no information flowing at all. The CIA has goals, and the most important one of them is to provide information to the government.
if senior employees have keystrokes monitors, that means that all communication between them is 'official' and vetted by their back-of-the-head-lawyer. This should be devastating in an organization whose purpose it to evaluate and analize information.
There a tradeoff here between security and being able to successfully do the job. Out of fear of scandal and the desire to cover their ass the CIA has compromised its usefulness in the interest of security ( job security mostly).
At the end of the day, the price of this attitude is dead Americans in botched or badly conceived missions.
I am sorry that good hackers could not find a better job. It seems that 'working' at the CIA is a little like participating in MAD's spy vs spy. Not surprising that they fuck up so often since few people with other options would choose to be in this atmosphere. There a true joke that goes 'How do you identify the CIA agent at a US embassy? He is the only one who doesn't speak the local language.' I guess this story goes a mile in explaining why it must be so.
I think one of the most important points in the paper is that absolute trust/knowledge is absolutely unnecessary. The drive for PKI stems for fear that people will not engage in transactions that are too risky. A look at Credit Cards usage on the net/mailorder market shows something interesting. One of the main reasons that e-commerce took off at all was that customers new that they can cancel a transaction even a month later if needed, simply by calling their card issuer. Absent that security, few would have dared to buy anyhing substanial from an uknown company thousands of miles away.
This suggests that the only thing really needed to e-commerce is not trust between parties but the availability of cheap insurance against fraud. A digital identification mechanism's minimal requirement is that it allow insurance companies to manage their risks. A scheme would be good enough if the dollar amount of fraud that it allows is less than the cost of eliminating it (that doesn't refer to SPKI which has a different focus).
I have no idea what that is the implication of what I just said; I hope someone else has;-).
Yes, you miss some basic historical knowledge. Islam was an empire, or more exactly a chaliphate, that streched from Baghdad to Cordoba. China wasn't a religion, but the West isn't one either. Christianity is a group of religions. And Chinese history has been dominate by an ethical outlook that is rather atheistic from a Western perspective. Civilization is neither a country nor a religion, it is an amorphous set of common histories.
This is an abuse of the first ammendment. The relation between carriers is purely commercial.
Using a law whose clear intention is to protect the public space and encourage the free exchange of ideas to justify limits on commercial regulation that has nothing whatsoever to do with the expreossion of ideas is constitutional travesty.
I guess this is a republican judge who was elected erronously by an old lady who wanted to buy a poodle.
First, there is reality. For all practical purposes voting is the way the electors are chosen. T
Second, the case you cite assumes that the states are democratic. Tthe electors may be appointed, but that is because a state acts through its elected officials. There is no question that for a state to cancel the right to vote altogether would be "repugnant to the constitution" ( and in particular to the 14th ammendment).
Even if you were right, That is no objection to a federal requirement that, whenever elections are held, they should meet standards of fairness.
I must confess that listening to people who think that requiring high standards of fairenss be preserved in elections is "too much government" is a mind boggling experience. If this is the case, what exactly is wrong with Cuba?
If we live in a democracy it follows to everyone, including morons, reckless scums, attention deficit disorder sufferers, inebriated drivers, etc., everyone have a right to vote and be counted. If ten people get confuse, OK. if 4% gets confused that is not OK unless you believe that there should me minimum standards for voters.
The attitude of 'Caveat elector' means that voters are fair game for the parties to manipulate in whatever way they can get away with. This is what used to be the case in America 30 years ago. We are still too close to those days for comfort.
The federal Government sets standards for health, liability, police, etc, all of which goodies are not constitutionally protected. if the Federal Government is not the right body to guarantee the integrity of the (federally guaranteed in the constitution) right to vote, then what is the Federal government for? Your statement only makes sense if you believe that the Federal Government should be abolished. In that case indeed I'd agree that Federal standards are not necessary
The alternative of course, is to do what all other countries with screwed up election systems do: invite UN election monitors.
Given that it is politics, you indeed have a choice to make it your business, but it is a very poor choice, fueled by prurience and media craze rather than by any enlightened self interest.
Slashdot Mirror
The basis of this claim is the supreme court's precedent Harper & Row vs Nation Enter.that explains how the regime of copyright itself respects and adequately safeguards the freedom of speech protected by the first amendment.
The court explains this inherent protection as residing in the distinction between non-copyrightable ideas and copyrightable concrete expression.
The court reasoning is self-contradictory. According to this line of reasoning
The first point makes an impossibly hard distinction between concrete words and ideas. Can I express the idea of Donald Duck without using the concrete expression "Donald Duck"? Try at home! Can I express the emotional force of using obscenities in a clean language?
The second point is both circular and self-contradictory. The court admits, pace itself, that there is some tension between the Constitution's copyright clause and the first ammendment.
It should follow that copyright is a restriction of speech ( otherwise, where the tension?). And therefore any statement that a copyright regime adequately safeguards free speech must come not from the principle of copyright (which is in tension with the free ammendment), but from the balance obtained in a particular application of copyright. In other words, the totality of copyright, the free use of ideas, the "fair use" doctrine, the time limits, etc., constitute a balance. Any act that changes that balance cannot possibly be sanctionned based on the constitutionality of the previously existing balance. Yet the court draw the opposite conclusion: the (untenable) distinction between ideas and expression has always been held to give adequate protection to free expression. Thus the court basicly says that an issue of fact, whether free expression is preserved by a particular act of congress, can be decided in principle without attending to the facts and to the particular act in question.
If we were to apply it to other laws, no law would ever fail. Since every law that affects constitutional balance ( security vs. privacy , free speech vs. harm , etc.) is passed on the background of a balance that has already been sanctionned as constitutional.
It almost seems pointless to argue. As Bush vs. Gore made plain, legal arguments are used as FUD to cover deep political symphaties. I bet that any research will discover that the majority has a record of protecting commercial interests and the dissenter has a record of protecting civil rights.
Someone has already point out that you are wrong. I do not have a mastery of the evidence to prove you wrong. But while you may be right you are certainly irrational.
There is a clear consensus among scientists ( excluding a few coropate sponsored disinformation) that global warming is real and can have extremely disastrous consequences. Scientists can be wrong. But it is irrational to believe they are unless you are a climatologist with solid credentials. Would you dismiss with the same attitude a doctor who told you you must remove a tumor to survive? Even if you thought he was wrong you would ( assuming you are rational) at most seek a second opinion. And if most doctors told you you have cancer would you dare ignore their advice?
Well, most climatologists have concluded global warming is real. Rationality requires that we act as if it is true even if they can be wrong: first, because we have no alterntative to science, and second, because if we fail to act and they are right, it may well be our last mistake.
as Keynes said, "In the long run, we are all dead". Media executives, like most executives, think from today to the next quarterly report because of the structure of incentives. This is quite rational. Long term thinking is risky, (the world changes ), a dollar today is worth much more than a dollar in a decade ( depreciation) and, most importantly, they will be elsewhere in a decade.
In the short run, it pays to protect monopolies by all possible means. Every day you pay $18 for a cd because you are stuck, it is $18 more to bottomlime today. They know they will eventually "lose" . But time is money. So they are mostly concerned about "losing" later rather than sooner.
Unfortunately or not, the list of dead certainties is long. If there is one thing that can be learnt from Western history, it is that, as a civilization, we will use any technology that we can use. That is what defines us. Economists now talk about "disruptive inventions" as a new thing. But they are as old as print and gunpowder, and if we know ourselves we know that we cannot have enough disruption ( as long as it increases our ability to do things).
That does not mean that technology is deterministic. we do shape it to fit our preconceptions; we do try to fit it within old legal and political structures ( cf. Napster) . But we ( as a civilization) just do not say, 'No Thanks'.
given this copious history, my feeling is that too many privacy mourners are barking at the wrong tree. We now have the technology to track individuals in their everyday life and access that knowledge with growing efficiency. Whether it is good or bad is rather irrelevent. Does this technology increase power? Can we do, thanks to it, what we couldn't do yesterday, or do it with less expenses? Does it create wealth? It seems that the answear is a triple yes. Extrapolating from the past, I believe it is a sure bet that this technology will be widely adopted across the developed world in two decades.
Culture matters! In the UK and France, the government will hold the keys. Scandinavians will put the new databases under public control while the Americans will pretend that as long as its Visa rather than Uncle Sam that knows all about you than it is ok. But we will all use it, ( to all those who think the US is different, btw, New York City is already widely covered by video surveillance)
So what should we do ,Give up? I think we need to recognize that while privacy as we know it is as good as dead, power isn't. We will lose our privacy. But it is up to us whether we will also lose the power over our life that privacy affords us and because of which we value it. Rather than bitch about privacy itself, we should concerns ourselves with the way the new technologies alter the balance of power in society and concentrate on new mechanisms that compensate for it.
Insightful? duh! Who would believe that fans of Ayn Rand and Jo Stalin share the same core values!
heavy handed big government? the same guys who are payed to shout blue murder and "let the market decide" when congress ponders pollution or privacy were hired by those whose application was rejected by ICANN, to argue that big brother actually must intervene this time.
Before all the libertarians start salivating, please note that congressmen are simply responding to the desires of their real constituency, business executives.
And pleeese, there is not going to be a nice clean solution to this, neither with nor without government. Too much money is at stake and there is zero public awareness, which is the only thing that can stop the suits (usually with 20 years latency-- see tobacco). May I thus respectfully suggests that comments about the real world mess are more relevant that schemes to fix everything by the book?
The article mentions that the GEML fragment on display may be incomprehensible to even geneticists, but is readable by computers. It goes on saying that the value of the GEML is allowing computers to share data. I am confused, since XML is either offering a verbose definition of computer data that even humans can understand, or allowing human data ( David is an Employee of IBM) to be expressed in self-describing computer accessible form.
Since the genetic code is already digital, transforming in into something that computers can process seems rather pointless, what is wrong with AGTCTTCGADC? making it verbose for humans is also not very useful, because what the GEML seems to offer is very raw data, essentially a wrapper around raw sequences.
Maybe the issue is really hype. I.e. a clever gimmick to drive companies to share information by offering them bandwagons they can't refuse to climb?
In a more general way, control of communication channels is control of speech. This should be obvious to anyone with a mind.
The problem is this. The first ammendment forbids congress to regulate speech without qualification. The supreme court case history has qualified that prohibition, to good effect mostly, by recognizing, among other things, that the motivation behind the first ammendment is the public interest in fostering "a marketplace of ideas".
The question is: does congress has the authority to regulate channels of communication in a way that promote the actual exercise rather than the abstract right of free speech?
The concept of the marketplace of ideas and the judicial history of the first ammendment could easily lend itself to such an interpretation. But at least six justices in the present court ( the five assholes + breyer) prefer the narrower one. That is of course very convenient. If actual access to communication channels cannot be regulated (qua speech), it does not mean that everyone has access. It means that access is decided by power ( money in our society) rather than by law.
The FCC regulatory powers are thus conveniently based on the power to regulate commerce, not speech. If the FCC were to prefer "community radio" over commercial radio, it would have been very likely challenged in court too (on free speech ground!). And the present court's decision is best left to the wild imagination.
Internet Bandwidth and radio bandwidth are not the same at all. Radio bandwith is more like a namespace, but one which is finite ( at any given moment) because of the nature of radio.
it is possible to create more radio bandwidth through innovation. But innovation is more expensive then bullying. It would be easier to carve up the airwaves in a way that discourages new and small players.
Look at the internet namespace. It is effectively infinite and yet the corporate world has managed to appropriate it, create scarcity within it and by and large own it. All it takes to extend the internet namespace is will, not innovation, and yet it isn't happening. Yet, you want to suggest that a much scarcier namespace like the FM spectrum will be extended through innovation.
The problem with the FCC is not that it regulates, it is that the purpose of its regulation is divorced from the public interest by the sick US plutocracy.
It is unfair to accuse the devil's spokesperson for making a deal with the devil.
PBS has been consistently pro business and is shunning any controversial content that could annoy business. This is not however because it is publically funded but because it is publically underfunded. It has no money so it panhandles among corporations. They pay the bill and they control the content and the personel.
Of course, since Congress is also controlled by corporations, it is a pipe dream to have public funding for broadcasting anything that would be 'business-unfriendly'.
It is nice to see that the good guys are prevailing. But it is a measure of the good guys' lack of forsight/resources that this battle is fought in our territory. Had the UCITA been proposed by a liberty minded organization, we'd still have the same fight but AOWintel would be on the defensive. Now that would be sweet, wouldn't it?
There should be a credible organization that provides model law from a perspective informed by freedom and consumer protection.
The most sesible and cost effective solution for yahoo may be probably to adopt the most restrictive legal standarts in the rich world. The loss of income from Nazi propaganda will be smaller than the combined cost of selective cesorship and litigation.
This may seem not so bad to many non Americans who lack the absolute 1st Ammendment commitment. But, ask yourself, what will happen when a country with an important enough market tries to impose restrictions than no democraticly inclined person can tolerate ( No sale of nativity scenes in China?) As much as I understand French consternation, i believe that the benefits of a legally unified Internet are greater than the loss to France's ability to effictively censor what it considers reprehensible. I thus suggest that such issues are better not left to national courts to resolve at all.
The Internet is global, and it would thus be apropriate to seek relief from the French ruling in a number of global venues that may be more sympathetic to yahoo, such as the WTO, and the EU supreme court. Since mosts losses from such rulings will be incurred by US based companies, it might be possible to get some positive US bullying at these institutions, with the apropriate lobbying.
Most likely, we will see countries pushing more and more for effective censorship. And I predict that most big corporations, including yahoo, vill just cave in. There is not enough money in being controversial. The pursuit of global standards of openness and access are thus left to NGOs like the FSF (and all of us ;-).
as an adage, I believe that Nazzi memorabilia and its prohibition in Europe both serve a very worthy goal, reminding yet another generation that the road to hell is just one right turn away.
The problem is: if we are too jaded to believe in the effectiveness of democratic institutions, and not hyped enough to believe in the perrenial benevolence of markets, then Batmen are tho only people who can save us from ourselves.
Jamie's name is all over files in my computer, so I honestly say, Good luck Jamie. Hopefully, the next Bartender Almanach will have drinks with names like yacc! or SIGTERM.
I guess you are right; I stand corrected.
The information as provided is unusable without modification.
In the interest of speed, I downloaded the tgz file and put it on my local server. The css files are missing, resulting in
if senior employees have keystrokes monitors, that means that all communication between them is 'official' and vetted by their back-of-the-head-lawyer. This should be devastating in an organization whose purpose it to evaluate and analize information.
There a tradeoff here between security and being able to successfully do the job. Out of fear of scandal and the desire to cover their ass the CIA has compromised its usefulness in the interest of security ( job security mostly).
At the end of the day, the price of this attitude is dead Americans in botched or badly conceived missions.
There is a perl-Qt library. it seems as yet less advanced than Perl-Tk, but given the power of Qt, it is likely to be eventually better.
This suggests that the only thing really needed to e-commerce is not trust between parties but the availability of cheap insurance against fraud. A digital identification mechanism's minimal requirement is that it allow insurance companies to manage their risks. A scheme would be good enough if the dollar amount of fraud that it allows is less than the cost of eliminating it (that doesn't refer to SPKI which has a different focus).
I have no idea what that is the implication of what I just said; I hope someone else has;-).
Yes, you miss some basic historical knowledge. Islam was an empire, or more exactly a chaliphate, that streched from Baghdad to Cordoba. China wasn't a religion, but the West isn't one either. Christianity is a group of religions. And Chinese history has been dominate by an ethical outlook that is rather atheistic from a Western perspective. Civilization is neither a country nor a religion, it is an amorphous set of common histories.
I guess this is a republican judge who was elected erronously by an old lady who wanted to buy a poodle.
First, there is reality. For all practical purposes voting is the way the electors are chosen. T
Second, the case you cite assumes that the states are democratic. Tthe electors may be appointed, but that is because a state acts through its elected officials. There is no question that for a state to cancel the right to vote altogether would be "repugnant to the constitution" ( and in particular to the 14th ammendment).
Even if you were right, That is no objection to a federal requirement that, whenever elections are held, they should meet standards of fairness.
I must confess that listening to people who think that requiring high standards of fairenss be preserved in elections is "too much government" is a mind boggling experience. If this is the case, what exactly is wrong with Cuba?
The attitude of 'Caveat elector' means that voters are fair game for the parties to manipulate in whatever way they can get away with. This is what used to be the case in America 30 years ago. We are still too close to those days for comfort.
The federal Government sets standards for health, liability, police, etc, all of which goodies are not constitutionally protected. if the Federal Government is not the right body to guarantee the integrity of the (federally guaranteed in the constitution) right to vote, then what is the Federal government for? Your statement only makes sense if you believe that the Federal Government should be abolished. In that case indeed I'd agree that Federal standards are not necessary
The alternative of course, is to do what all other countries with screwed up election systems do: invite UN election monitors.
Given that it is politics, you indeed have a choice to make it your business, but it is a very poor choice, fueled by prurience and media craze rather than by any enlightened self interest.