The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.
.
A few countries establish their own rights to hear international claims, known as universal jurisdiction - thats claimed by the UK, France, Canada, and Australia for instance. I'm sure there's some nuance in the difference between Universal Jurisdiction and that created under the Alien Tort Statute that I don't know, but at it's essentially the same thing. The cases heard tend to relate to human rights issues. The Supreme Court in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain reiterated their commitment to a test that considers international norms that are "specific, universal, and obligatory" but that's lead to it's own bundle of questions.
And what if the allegations are real? Does that really change the substance of what's been done or the revelations that have been made? I feel like we veer away from complexity too often - people are heroes or villians, whistleblowers or rapists, good guys or jerks. We try to spin everything into a nicely packaged little modern fairy tale where someone is 100% without question evil and their actions and motivations dismissable. Sometimes people do bad things but that doesn't change what they've done before, or what they'll do after.
So there's a chance Assage committed a horrible crime. Does that really change anything about his work with WikiLeaks, questionable though it's been at times. HIs actions may contextualize prior or future events, but they cannot solely define them.
Ars has a better summary which addresses your points. It notes that
Telenet recently published a list of its top 25 downloaders to a discussion forum—but the goal wasn't to demonize the users. Instead, it was to show other people just how much data could be transferred in a single month. The ISP hopes to encourage people to migrate up from its least-expensive plans (with 50GB and 80GB data caps, respectively) to its more expensive "fair use" plans.
In this case, "fair use" doesn't refer to copyright but to downloading. Telenet doesn't want to call its plans "unlimited," but it does say that "'fair use' means that you can send and receive a very large quantity of data via the Telenet network. Telenet will only ask you to adjust your consumption in the case of excessive volume consumption that may threaten the comfort of other subscribers."
So the data provided is fine for the intended purpose - advertising to customers what they could be getting if they upgraded their service - but insufficient for the point others seem to be interested in making.
Yeah requiring manual dexterity introduces some new and interesting challenges. I wonder how they'll ensure every student is able to finish the games, or if that is even important enough to consider. The stats suggest that most of the upcoming generations have access to gaming systems, and play games of one kind or another, so they shouldn't be too out of their element.
As for cultural literacy...perhaps. You're expected to be able to engage with literature, academic text, cinema, the visual; performance; and oral arts, and so on at college - video games are just going to get added to the list. Entertainment has always been political and fundamentally positioned to reflect social and cultural attitudes, the more tools we develop to analyse what play means, the better.
The most obvious problem is addressed near the end of the article
Deploying a game for an entire cohort to play at the same time requires more problem-solving than you might expect. We ultimately decided that hardware, installation, and licensing issues were complex enough to dissuade us from teaching Portal in all sections of the course this year; so I and a group of eager colleagues will play the game in our sections to work out the kinks. I don't want our first college-wide experience with a game to be plagued with problems.
So not quite as advertised, but certainly pretty cool nonetheless.
That's a really good point and I find myself wondering if maybe that comes to the core of my discomfort. Should all public information be so readily available that it doesn’t require even a modicum of effort to access? If you took the time to drive over to my place then sure, look to your heart’s content. Flew a thousand miles? Enjoy harassing the locals for photo opportunities. But just pulling it all up with the click of a button? That seems qualitatively different somehow.
I guess I'm going slippery-slope on this, and perhaps not thinking rationally, but isn't there value in the idea that some information requires an investment of energy to access. I'm thinking of sex offenders for some reason - there are many good reasons for having publically accessible lists but does that mean that they should be conveniently attached to Google-maps complete with photographs and all contact information? Our laws were constructed without any comprehension of the ease of access the modern day provides nor of the reach purportedly local info has. A lot of public info was deemed public as long as that selfsame public was going to march down to the courthouse, or whatever, and invest effort in their search – that effort almost served as a defence against low level abuse. Maybe I just need to reconsider the idea in its totality – either way you’ve given me something to think about so cheers for that.
But previously those pictures you took of things in public view would most likely end up in some boring slideshow that only you and your unfortunate friends would ever see. Now I can sit here in my boxers on a random Friday night and digitally stroll up and down a random street 3000 miles away. "Public view" was once local, in much the same way public was once "immediate and present." Using google maps in this way makes the entire internet community your viewing public, billions of potential watching eyes where once there were thousands.
I'm not sure really how I feel about that, surely locals have the right to request their homes not be broadcast to the entire world? Is there some greater public good I'm not considering?
Which is somewhat my point. We were specifically told that 1 in 4 women would be raped on campus. Not 1 in 5 in her lifetime. Not with all the significant caveats and modifiers that precede the numbers at the CDC you've referenced (the 1995 numbers).
Check out the 2007 numbers - it’s now 20 to 25% either attempted or completed. The Institute of Justice found that
A survey of college women found that 2.8 percent had experienced either a completed (1.7 percent) or an attempted (1.1 percent) rape within a 9-month timeframe.
13.7% of undergraduate women had been victims of at least one completed sexual assault since entering college: 4.7% were victims of physically forced sexual assault; 7.8% of women were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after voluntarily consuming drugs, alcohol or both; and 0.6% were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after having been given a drug without their knowledge
Finally, a national-level study of college and community based women found that approximately 673,000 of nearly 6 million current college women (11.5 percent) have ever been raped, and approximately twelve percent of these rapes were reported to law enforcement
I'm not questioning the underlying idea that rape is pervasive and wrong. What I'm getting at is that by dragging out exaggerated, faulty numbers you introduce weakness into an argument. Those men in that room would have been horrified to hear that 13.7% of women had been sexually assaulted on campus - but that numbers not sexy enough for widespread hyperbole. All it took was for one guy to do a little digging into the stats, find the body of literature that criticized the methodology of that one source, and campus rape became a joke to half the community. Instead of disgust we had widespread disdain for the claim itself, and that is extremely damaging.
There is something extremely patronising, or condescending, which presumes that people cannot be motivated by subtle or nuanced arguments – every problem doesn’t have to directly affect 98.43% of the population to count.
That's pretty much TFA's point, and it's a scary one. Interest groups propogate faulty statistics so as to support questionable claims. Exaggeration, conflation, and the like does nothing more than undermine legitimate concerns. We've seen it with climate change - the desire to effect policy by presenting worst case scenario journalism has just fed the other side.
I remember when I got the "you're a guy so try not to rape everyone" speech in college. Good underlying point...concent is important, getting concent is complicated, sex under the influence is generally a bad idea. It was totally undermined by the 1-in-4 statistic, and the way in which it was presented, and ultimatly served to offend my friends and I while also instilling the seeds of anti-feminism (ooh those stupid fem-nazis and their crazy ideas....)in a bunch of guys. The stat is wrong, it's been shown to be lacking, and it's still repeated. It has significant utility and so it's not questioned but, ultimatly, it does more to harm a good cause than it does to support it.
Yeah I was suprised too, made for a great way to burn through a Saturday. Apparently they've recently been re-released and partially rewritten by the author (the first book is now 450 pages and the origin story retooled for instance). I haven't given the new ones a look yet but the info can be found here.
Yup. I've been rereading the old Lone Wolf gamebooks over at Project Aon which use the hypertext route really well. They've got a couple programs which let you run the books after download, all permitted under license of course, the one I'm enjoying using the most is Seventh Sense. It's a nice way of cutting down on the annoyances of using a book - keeping track of the math and the rules, losing your place - but there's something to be said for the charm of doing it oldschool.
Some crimes require mens rae which is criminal intent. Others are Strict Liability - think statuatory rape - meaning that intent doesn't matter. In both cases there exists Prosecutorial Discretion which does what it says on the box - lets prosecutors chose whether or not to go after a defendant.
So there's been no judgment as to the actual legality of the issues at question, the prosecutor has just decided not to bring suit. In some situations that seems to be the fairer idea - 18yr old having sex with her 17yr old long term partnet being the most cited example - but there's obviously room for a lot of unfairness.
Yeah, and will demonstrate exactly how much is expected of companies. If caselaw shows that you don't have to invest a million into ensuring political broadcasts - a completely made up example incidentally - have closed-caption then it's reasonably to expect that MTV's The Hills app' isn't going to be found to be in violation if it lacks similar functionality. There is a huge body of law which has examined the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Communications Act, and in both cases reviewed the Reasonable Accomodation requirements - of course precedent is going to be a guide.
SEC. 104. ACCESS TO INTERNET-BASED SERVICES AND EQUIPMENT.
(a) Title VII Amendment- Title VII of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 601 et seq.), as amended by section 103, is further amended by adding at the end the following new sections:
The Communications Act of 1934 (pdf) includes a section on catering to the disabled, which in turn specifically includes (Sec 713 on page 329)
(3) a provider of video programming or program owner may
petition the Commission for an exemption from the requirements of this
section, and the Commission may grant such petition upon a showing that
the requirements contained in this section would result in an undue burden.
(e) UNDUE BURDEN.--The term ''undue burden'' means significant difficulty
or expense. In determining whether the closed captions necessary to comply with
the requirements of this paragraph would result in an undue economic burden, the
factors to be considered include--
(1) the nature and cost of the closed captions for the programming;
(2) the impact on the operation of the provider or program owner;
(3) the financial resources of the provider or program owner; and
(4) the type of operations of the provider or program owner.
So it's probably a similar standard here - companies will have to make reasonable attempts to cater to as broad a population as possible. They can look to prior precedent to determine how far exactly that is.
Thats what I was wondering about really - if Assange becomes a contributor to a newspaper, and draws on wikileaks as a source for his columns, does that perhaps meet the standard of "author and contributor" as defined in the Freedom of Press law. So essentially I'm wondering if this job in itself can be used to shield WikiLeaks in the event of it failing to achieve newspaper-registration.
I have no idea about the standard for danger under Swedish law but that section is written really broadly. All you have to show is "detriment to the defence of the Realm or the national supply of goods...or otherwise to the security of the Realm." Hopefully a Swedish legal expert can jump in there but depending on how high a bar the courts set, it would appear that it wouldn't be all that difficult really.
I'm not a Swedish law expert, and if someone has a better grasp they should correct me, but it would seem that there's a clear legal advantage to being a journalist. The Freedom of the Press Act includes the following in Chapter 1, Article 1:
All persons shall likewise be free, unless otherwise provided in this Act, to communicate information and intelligence on any subject whatsoever, for the purpose of publication in print, to an author or other person who may be deemed to be the originator of material contained in such printed matter, the editor or special editorial office, if any, of the printed matter, or an enterprise which professionally purveys news or other information to periodical publications.
All persons shall furthermore have the right, unless otherwise provided in this Act, to procure information and intelligence on any subject whatsoever, for the purpose of publication in print, or in order to communicate information under the preceding paragraph.
What I found more interesting was the stuff buried down in Chapter 7 where it's noted that
Art. 4. With due regard to the purpose of freedom of the press for all under Chapter 1, the following acts shall be deemed to be offences against the freedom of the press if committed by means of printed matter and if they are punishable under law:
4. unauthorised trafficking in secret information, whereby a person, with-out due authority but with no intent to assist a foreign power, conveys, consigns or discloses information concerning any circumstance of a secret nature, the disclosure of which to a foreign power could cause detriment to the defence of the Realm or the national supply of goods in the event of war or exceptional conditions resulting from war, or otherwise to the security of the Realm, regardless of whether the information is correct;
any attempt or preparation aimed at such unauthorised trafficking in secret information;
That would seem to suggest that if Swedish defence is undermined by WikiLeaks then there are grounds for prosecution. As far as I know Sweden doesn't have forces in Iraq but they do have people in Afghanistan.
Because he occupies an interesting space where both the police and the drug cartels are using him as a front for their media outreach campaign. As long as he's useful to both sides, and not too much of an annoyance, he'll be played by both.
Thats the thing though - even if its only 19% as they say, that's still a massive amount. Certainly not quite as emotive when yelled about on opinion-news, but clearly a troublingly high amount.
Slashdot Mirror
. A few countries establish their own rights to hear international claims, known as universal jurisdiction - thats claimed by the UK, France, Canada, and Australia for instance. I'm sure there's some nuance in the difference between Universal Jurisdiction and that created under the Alien Tort Statute that I don't know, but at it's essentially the same thing. The cases heard tend to relate to human rights issues. The Supreme Court in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain reiterated their commitment to a test that considers international norms that are "specific, universal, and obligatory" but that's lead to it's own bundle of questions.
Short answer, yup they can.
And what if the allegations are real? Does that really change the substance of what's been done or the revelations that have been made? I feel like we veer away from complexity too often - people are heroes or villians, whistleblowers or rapists, good guys or jerks. We try to spin everything into a nicely packaged little modern fairy tale where someone is 100% without question evil and their actions and motivations dismissable. Sometimes people do bad things but that doesn't change what they've done before, or what they'll do after.
So there's a chance Assage committed a horrible crime. Does that really change anything about his work with WikiLeaks, questionable though it's been at times. HIs actions may contextualize prior or future events, but they cannot solely define them.
So the data provided is fine for the intended purpose - advertising to customers what they could be getting if they upgraded their service - but insufficient for the point others seem to be interested in making.
Well that's a lot to mull over, cheers for giving me a lot of food for thought.
Yeah requiring manual dexterity introduces some new and interesting challenges. I wonder how they'll ensure every student is able to finish the games, or if that is even important enough to consider. The stats suggest that most of the upcoming generations have access to gaming systems, and play games of one kind or another, so they shouldn't be too out of their element.
As for cultural literacy...perhaps. You're expected to be able to engage with literature, academic text, cinema, the visual; performance; and oral arts, and so on at college - video games are just going to get added to the list. Entertainment has always been political and fundamentally positioned to reflect social and cultural attitudes, the more tools we develop to analyse what play means, the better.
So not quite as advertised, but certainly pretty cool nonetheless.
That's a really good point and I find myself wondering if maybe that comes to the core of my discomfort. Should all public information be so readily available that it doesn’t require even a modicum of effort to access? If you took the time to drive over to my place then sure, look to your heart’s content. Flew a thousand miles? Enjoy harassing the locals for photo opportunities. But just pulling it all up with the click of a button? That seems qualitatively different somehow.
I guess I'm going slippery-slope on this, and perhaps not thinking rationally, but isn't there value in the idea that some information requires an investment of energy to access. I'm thinking of sex offenders for some reason - there are many good reasons for having publically accessible lists but does that mean that they should be conveniently attached to Google-maps complete with photographs and all contact information? Our laws were constructed without any comprehension of the ease of access the modern day provides nor of the reach purportedly local info has. A lot of public info was deemed public as long as that selfsame public was going to march down to the courthouse, or whatever, and invest effort in their search – that effort almost served as a defence against low level abuse. Maybe I just need to reconsider the idea in its totality – either way you’ve given me something to think about so cheers for that.
But previously those pictures you took of things in public view would most likely end up in some boring slideshow that only you and your unfortunate friends would ever see. Now I can sit here in my boxers on a random Friday night and digitally stroll up and down a random street 3000 miles away. "Public view" was once local, in much the same way public was once "immediate and present." Using google maps in this way makes the entire internet community your viewing public, billions of potential watching eyes where once there were thousands.
I'm not sure really how I feel about that, surely locals have the right to request their homes not be broadcast to the entire world? Is there some greater public good I'm not considering?
For those of us who don't read German fluently click here
Ah notice that 13.7% is sexual assault, not rape.
And by "precede the numbers at the CDC" I of course meant, "following the numbers at the CDC"
Ouch, and I had the link with the right spelling sitting there too. Well caught good sir, well caught.
I'm not questioning the underlying idea that rape is pervasive and wrong. What I'm getting at is that by dragging out exaggerated, faulty numbers you introduce weakness into an argument. Those men in that room would have been horrified to hear that 13.7% of women had been sexually assaulted on campus - but that numbers not sexy enough for widespread hyperbole. All it took was for one guy to do a little digging into the stats, find the body of literature that criticized the methodology of that one source, and campus rape became a joke to half the community. Instead of disgust we had widespread disdain for the claim itself, and that is extremely damaging.
There is something extremely patronising, or condescending, which presumes that people cannot be motivated by subtle or nuanced arguments – every problem doesn’t have to directly affect 98.43% of the population to count.
That's pretty much TFA's point, and it's a scary one. Interest groups propogate faulty statistics so as to support questionable claims. Exaggeration, conflation, and the like does nothing more than undermine legitimate concerns. We've seen it with climate change - the desire to effect policy by presenting worst case scenario journalism has just fed the other side.
I remember when I got the "you're a guy so try not to rape everyone" speech in college. Good underlying point...concent is important, getting concent is complicated, sex under the influence is generally a bad idea. It was totally undermined by the 1-in-4 statistic, and the way in which it was presented, and ultimatly served to offend my friends and I while also instilling the seeds of anti-feminism (ooh those stupid fem-nazis and their crazy ideas....)in a bunch of guys. The stat is wrong, it's been shown to be lacking, and it's still repeated. It has significant utility and so it's not questioned but, ultimatly, it does more to harm a good cause than it does to support it.
Yeah I was suprised too, made for a great way to burn through a Saturday. Apparently they've recently been re-released and partially rewritten by the author (the first book is now 450 pages and the origin story retooled for instance). I haven't given the new ones a look yet but the info can be found here.
Yup. I've been rereading the old Lone Wolf gamebooks over at Project Aon which use the hypertext route really well. They've got a couple programs which let you run the books after download, all permitted under license of course, the one I'm enjoying using the most is Seventh Sense. It's a nice way of cutting down on the annoyances of using a book - keeping track of the math and the rules, losing your place - but there's something to be said for the charm of doing it oldschool.
Some crimes require mens rae which is criminal intent. Others are Strict Liability - think statuatory rape - meaning that intent doesn't matter. In both cases there exists Prosecutorial Discretion which does what it says on the box - lets prosecutors chose whether or not to go after a defendant.
So there's been no judgment as to the actual legality of the issues at question, the prosecutor has just decided not to bring suit. In some situations that seems to be the fairer idea - 18yr old having sex with her 17yr old long term partnet being the most cited example - but there's obviously room for a lot of unfairness.
Yeah, and will demonstrate exactly how much is expected of companies. If caselaw shows that you don't have to invest a million into ensuring political broadcasts - a completely made up example incidentally - have closed-caption then it's reasonably to expect that MTV's The Hills app' isn't going to be found to be in violation if it lacks similar functionality. There is a huge body of law which has examined the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Communications Act, and in both cases reviewed the Reasonable Accomodation requirements - of course precedent is going to be a guide.
The Communications Act of 1934 (pdf) includes a section on catering to the disabled, which in turn specifically includes (Sec 713 on page 329)
So it's probably a similar standard here - companies will have to make reasonable attempts to cater to as broad a population as possible. They can look to prior precedent to determine how far exactly that is.
Guy really, really good at playing with his balls? Sounds pretty important to me.
Thats what I was wondering about really - if Assange becomes a contributor to a newspaper, and draws on wikileaks as a source for his columns, does that perhaps meet the standard of "author and contributor" as defined in the Freedom of Press law. So essentially I'm wondering if this job in itself can be used to shield WikiLeaks in the event of it failing to achieve newspaper-registration.
I have no idea about the standard for danger under Swedish law but that section is written really broadly. All you have to show is "detriment to the defence of the Realm or the national supply of goods...or otherwise to the security of the Realm." Hopefully a Swedish legal expert can jump in there but depending on how high a bar the courts set, it would appear that it wouldn't be all that difficult really.
What I found more interesting was the stuff buried down in Chapter 7 where it's noted that
That would seem to suggest that if Swedish defence is undermined by WikiLeaks then there are grounds for prosecution. As far as I know Sweden doesn't have forces in Iraq but they do have people in Afghanistan.
Because he occupies an interesting space where both the police and the drug cartels are using him as a front for their media outreach campaign. As long as he's useful to both sides, and not too much of an annoyance, he'll be played by both.
Thats the thing though - even if its only 19% as they say, that's still a massive amount. Certainly not quite as emotive when yelled about on opinion-news, but clearly a troublingly high amount.