I'm sympathetic to your view, but you're about 80 years too late. Our Constitution is not the one the Founding Fathers adopted; it's been amended formally 27 times. The "amendment" that allows administrative agencies to make law was not a formal one--basically FDR bludgeoned the Supreme Court into ratifying agencies' legality during the New Deal. However, the Constitution is not just what's written on a piece of parchment, it's the organizing principle of our society, and therefore it is fair to say the New Deal ushered in a new Constitution that contemplates power residing in agencies with authority delegated from the legislature. Yale law prof Bruce Ackerman is the original exponent of this theory; he calls the New Deal a "constitutional moment," just like Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era.
In short, the constitutionality of administrative agencies has been settled for 80 years. They're at this point as American as apple pie. Heck, in some cases, agencies can actually "interpret" the law in a manner that is literally inconsistent with the congressionally-enacted statute. See Zuni Public School Dist. 89 v. Secretary of Education.
You know, the Bush administration supported Quanta in this case. TFA says so. This wasn't a conservative/liberal issue--this was a commercial dispute between two corporate giants--and the fact that the decision was unanimous attests to that. Contrary to popular belief, not every Supreme Court decision is an earth-shattering moment in the culture wars. Most of the Court's docket is really boring, like resolving the water rights conflict between NJ and Delaware over the Delaware river, or determining the proper scope of ERISA preemption.
I want to point out that the Court is not on the same left/right continuum as most of American politics. For example, check out U.S. v. Santos, where a plurality composed of Scalia, Thomas, Souter, and Ginsburg (Stevens concurred separately) interpreted a criminal statute in a solidly pro-defendant manner. I'm not saying that political orientation is irrelevant in predicting the Court, but the splits in the Court is much more based on legal philosophy than politics, like whether statutes should be read literally or purposively; the proper amount of deference to administrative agencies, the President, and Congress; the original meaning of the Constitution (and whether that's even relevant); etc. Remember that the most liberal Justice, Stevens, was appointed by Ford, and Souter (another "liberal" Justice) is a Bush I appointee.
And if it's not obvious by the extreme amount of law-geekness displayed, IAAL.
I just finished teaching a bioethics course at Harvard College and we studied this topic in detail; it was one of the questions on the final exam. I am convinced that this is a well-intentioned but bad law.
The problem with this law is that it creates adverse selection in health insurance. Health insurers won't be able to get genetic info on the people they're covering, but the people themselves will. That creates asymmetric information, and is ripe for abuse. Think about it: if I get my DNA sequenced and find out that I'm a walking health hazard, then I'll buy the most comprehensive policy out there. If I find out I'm genetically clear, I scale down my coverage, or drop it completely. Meanwhile, the insurer can't adjust my premium to accurately reflect my risk. The result: only genetically unhealthy (and risk-averse) people will buy into health insurance pools, or the genetically health will only buy insurance for physical accidents. And when the insurance pools are small, and the insurers can't accurately price risk, they pools collapse: nobody gets health insurance.
Of course, the obvious alternative--let both buyers and sellers of health insurance use DNA analysis to accurately price risk--is unpalatable because people will suffer from higher premiums through no fault of their own (i.e. because they have bad genes), and people will benefit through no effort of their own (i.e. because they have good genes). This concern (coupled with privacy concerns) is why GINA passed overwhelmingly, and I don't mean to diminish it.
Insurance works best when the risks aren't ascertainable in an individual case but are ascertainable in the aggregate. DNA sequencing really threatens the concept of health insurance, because it greatly decreases the uncertainty surrounding an individual's health future. The best way to keep insurance alive is to insure before it is possible to determine a person's health risk. Now, you could do that by banning DNA testing for individuals unless they are willing to permanently waive their ability to buy or modify their health insurance policies, but DNA testing is so cheap that the ban will be hard to enforce, and a permanent waiver seems rather harsh. You could require people to buy insurance for their kids before conception, but that has the same problem that the kid will be stuck with the same health insurance for ever (and that there might not be a kid in sad circumstances)
The ultimate, fool-proof solution: social gene insurance. Essentially, when any private insurer wants to charge you more than the base rate because of your genes, you just pay the base rate and society picks up the difference. The gene insurance would be funded through taxes, much like social security is now, though none of that "lockbox" BS. Socialized health insurance would work, too, being a superset of social gene insurance. The idea behind social insurance schemes is that they in effect force citizens to buy in before anyone has any knowledge of their genetic risk, making it a sound insurance product. And the solution works from the view of liberal theories of justice, e.g. Rawls, because it is essentially a redistribution of social resources from those who happen to be born with (and hence do not deserve) such resources to those who happen to be dealt a bad hand, through no fault of their own.
I'm shocked that the military would try to edit Gitmo facts out of Wikipedia. Don't they know that pages' history is saved, so that improper deletions can be easily restored? Don't they know that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of editors paranoid enough about the Bush administration and war on terror to monitor the Gitmo page? Couldn't the military be doing something, um, useful to prosecute the war on terror? Didn't the military realize that these efforts would come back to bite them in the ass (thanks Wikileaks!) and further hamper their efforts?
And regarding Lt. Col. Bush's "He was just doing his job" defense, I'd like to note that that defense hasn't been recognized in law since at least Nuremburg.
We apparently can't get ethical intelligence officers, but can we at least get intelligent intelligence officers?
We're having enough trouble convincing the public that when we say "evolution is a theory," we really mean "evolution is a set of statements that have each been experimentally verified multiple times." Let's not make it easier for ID nuts to confuse the public about what scientific theories are. A theory must be something that has overwhelming empirical support. Under this definition, string "theory" isn't a theory--it's a set of hypotheses.
If it's true that the $150,000 damage figure includes both compensatory and punitive elements, then the statutory damages may be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has said on multiple occasions that punitive damages may not exceed 9 times compensatory damages (see, e.g., BMW of N. America v. Gore). So if there's $11 million in compensatory damages, then total damages would be limited to $110 million. Awards over this limit will be violative of due process as excessive; there's simply no way a judge would allow punitve damages five orders of magnitude greater than compensatory damages.
The First Amendment prohibits *government* from censoring speech. If it were the government trying to push this title off the shelves, I'd agree with you.
But this isn't state censorship. This a group of private citizens leveraging their power as consumers to get another private actor (Walmart) to stop spreading a message the group disagrees with. Private actors do *not* have tolerate every idea out there; if they did, we would cease to have a marketplace of ideas where the truth wins out. The First Amendment *contemplates* private citizens attempting to promote their favored ideas and suppress ideas they think are wrong--that's called deliberative democracy.
Always remember the private/state distinction when you think of free speech.
I disagree, and I'll quote you a source: Elizabeth Warren, "The Two Income Trap" (Warren is a bankruptcy professor at Harvard Law School). Warren goes through the data and shows that your argument is false: families today do not spend more money on luxuries than in the 1950s, and the two cars come from needing both to get to work.
In fact, Warren argues that capitalism adapted just as the grandparent predicted: when some women went to work, some families had more disposable income. By and large, those families spent that income on buying houses in better school districts (which are of course more expensive). To compete with those families, and make sure Junior went to a good public school, all the other families had to send the wife to work to snag a house in the good school districts. Of course, that just spurred a bidding war for houses in good school districts, driving the prices up so much that the middle class family had to cut down on luxuries to afford the house in the good school district.
Moral of the story: if you create more wealth (whether by doubling the labor force, doubling the number of hours we work, or whathever), you cause inflation. It's not necessarily a zero-sum game, but it can be, as Warren demonstrates.
Actually, many animals do have rights, just not human rights. Pets, for example, have a right not to be abused by their owners, which is why if you see somebody kicking his dog, you can call the city officials and have the dog rescued. Of course, dogs don't have a right to a free public education, like all American children. Children, in turn, don't have the right to vote. Having "rights" isn't all-or-nothing; you can have some but not others.
As a supporter of animal rights, I would never claim that a non-human animal should have the same rights as a developed human. Rather, rights should be commensurate with interests. Bacteria through fish are, as far as our neuroscience can tell, essentially biological automatons, being unable even to feel pain (octopi and squid being exceptions). Thus, no rights. Reptiles have the ability to feel pain, and should thus have a right to be free from pain. Mammals have the additional capacity to experience emotion, including fear and suffering, and should thus have a right to free of fear and suffering. The higher mammals (chimps, gorillas, dolphins) probably have, as adults, self-awareness and a conception of death, and should thus have a right to life, and a relatively undisturbed one at that. Of course, humans have an even richer cognitive life and deeper emotional capacities, and thus have more extensive rights than higher mammals (e.g., political rights).
Of course, this will lead to a conflict of rights. Cancer implicates many rights for humans: the right to be free from pain for those afflicted, the right to be free from the apprehension of being afflicted, the right to not die prematurely, etc. Arguably, the only way to vindicate those rights are to use animals to develop cancer treatments. Animals, however, have rights to, so the experimentation cannot violate those rights. And if there is a direct conflict, we can do what our courts have done for centuries: balance competing rights, with the winner respecting the loser's rights to the greatest extent possible. Generally speaking, that would mean at the least sparing animals from gratuitious pain, and reserving chimps, gorillas, and dolphins only for the most crucial experiments. Basic research probably wouldn't count--you'd need to be pretty sure of a significant benefit to a human to justify experimenting on a chimp (assuming that the experimentation is painful, stressful, or otherwise undesirable to the subject).
Actually, that's exactly the case. Quoth the article: "Because XM makes available vast catalogues of music in every genre, XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings," the lawsuit says referring to the hand held "Inno" device."
That same reasoning could be used to sue, say, somebody that owns every single CD every recorded. Surely, that person would have "little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings." So, what would the RIAA do? Presumably, sue the music collector since he's not giving them more money.
Now, the obvious flaw to that argument is that the prolific collector still has to buy new music. If the RIAA is concerned about XM listeners not buying new music, they should just not allow new music to be played on XM.
Actually, there is data: lending behaviors from a time before gov't regulation. Or, you could infer what would happen in the lending marketplace from what happens in other sectors of the market. I just finished a course on race relations law in law school, where I learned the following: blacks are discriminated against in buying cars (they pay a premium); minorities are discriminated against in obtaining housing (though the Fair Housing Act helps); blacks are discriminated against in the workforce, with an employer less likely to respond to a job applicant with a "black" name (e.g., Tyrone) than a "white" one (e.g., Robert); minority cab drivers get tipped less than white cab drivers; whether or not one gets the death penalty correlates strongly with the victim's race (you're better off killing a minority than a white guy); minorities are disproportionately excluded from juries.
Given the history and current reality of racism in the U.S., I don't think it's reasonable to expect the market to overcome racism in the P2P lending market.
Sadly, the data don't agree [PDF alert]. Studies show that racial minorities pay, on average, substantially more interest on loans than whites do. Racism is one of the most persistent market failures of the 20th and 21st centuries; we need government regulation to mitigate or erase it.
On top of Terry frisks and searches incident to arrest, you have searches based on exigent circumstances (hot pursuit, evanescent evidence, emergency response), consent, automobile searches, inventory searches, and administrative searches (border or airport).
On top of that, there are searches that the S.Ct. has ruled aren't "searches" within the meaning of the 4th Amend., and hence, don't require a warrant. These include: flyovers, objects held out to the public, open fields, and dog sniffs for drugs.
For seizures, again police often don't need a warrant. One major exception is plain view. Also, arrests in public don't require a warrant if the officer has probable cause to believe a suspect committed a crime.
Which goes to the heart of your confusion, I think. Warrant != probable cause. Probable cause is a necessary condition for *getting* a warrant but the two are seperate concepts. So when I said that there are tons of searches that don't require probable cause, that's not quite saying that there are tons of searches that don't require a warrant.
But anyway, police execute literally thousands of Terry stops every day, so I'd call that a huge exception to probable cause. Plus you have administrative searches at airports (every time you go though a metal detector and put your bags through the x-ray, that's a search), which number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, per day, and require neither a warrant nor even reasonable suspicion. Terry plus airport searches mean that probably the majority of searches on a given day require neither warrant nor probable cause.
Note that I'm not taking a stand on wiretapping either way, though the latest NSA program reportedly doesn't monitor the content of calls so there's no "eavedropping" per se. Prof. Orin Kerr on the Volokh Conspiracy has detailed analyses of the law, which I encourage you to read; he concludes the NSA program is not unconstitutional, though it may violate one of several statutes.
Hayden is right. The 4th Amendment has 2 clauses: one prohibits against unreasonable search and seizure; the other says that warrants must be based on probable cause. The Supreme Court generally treats these two as seperate requirements. A warrant (based on probable cause) is a sufficient condition for a reasonable search or seizure, but it's not necessary.
There are tons of searches that don't require probable cause. One famous example is the Terry stop, where police, upon having a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot, can stop a suspect and ask him some questions. Similarly, if they have reasonable suspicion that he's armed, they can frisk the suspect for weapons. Note that reasonable suspicion is a lower standard than probable cause.
Information courtesy of having to study for my Criminal Law exam.
Note to mods: how the hell can a post which is based on a "rumour going around" be labeled "5, Informative." There's no information here beyond the poster's bald assertion. I know Slashdot sometimes posts rumors as stories (e.g., Apple products), but come on. We don't even know the source of this rumor, so we can't even confirm it is a rumor!
Scott Adams wrote a book, God's Debris, that explores your question of what happens if God gives up his omnipotence. I'll let you read the free ebook yourself, but the basic idea is that God, as a perfect being, gets bored of his own existance and tries to spice things up by committing suicide. In doing so, God created the universe.
Wikipedia notes the parallels of this to Hinduism. When I read God's Debris, I was reminded of GWF Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, where God also empties himself of divinity in order to start time and create the universe because he realized that his pure existence is meaningless. Time is the progress of God, the spirit of whom is now extended in all matter, coming to 'realize' himself as God. So, in a sense, God is evolving.
These theological moves (God is extended in the world and God is realized in the future) allow for dodging some thorny questions. For example, Can God create a rock that he can't lift? The answer is, for *now*, yes. But he might be stronger tomorrow.
My Contracts professor banned laptops. Not because he had anything against them per se, but because he had asked students what they preferred. One year, apparently, he let the class use laptops for half the semester, then banned laptops for the other half. At the end, he asked the class to vote on whether he should allow laptops. The result: an overwhelming majority thought class was better without laptops, as it was much easier to have discussion without them. Among my section, everyone invariably says that Contracts was a great class for that reason--discussion--and even though we grumbled at first about the lack of laptops, we were thankful for it in the end. I even gave up my laptop next semester.
If you had a straight lecture class, then I could see how laptops might be beneficial. But I think that class format is inefficient, anyways, as it doesn't promote active learning. Law school avoids lectures in favor of active learning via the socratic method, mock oral arguments, writing excercises, and class discussion. Having taken undergraduate (and some graduate) classes of the liberal arts and technical varieties, I think law classes are hands down better taught, and it's largely related to how they're taught.
I'm guessing the law you speak of is the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. Here's Bush's signing statement. For the reason you predicted, Public Citizen has already sued to have this law declared unconstitutional.
I envision the lawsuit failing because the courts will essentially say, "Close enough. It's too cumbersome to send this back to Congress and the President to fix a 'harmless' error." Besides, how can a court strike down a law that gives so many agencies funding for a whole year, especially after they've started spending that money? It would be a budgetary and administrative nightmare. No court is going to penalize all those agencies for Congress' and Bush's error.
Coincidentally, the New York Times today has an op-ed that argues this is a terrible idea. The main point of the op-ed is that such power generation would encourage environmentally-harmful factory farming, which is the source of all the dung, by essentially subsidizing their dung production. Dung power would have other bad environmental side effects, too.
The reason they settled is because the judge said that he wouldn't wait for the USPTO to issue final rulings on the patents before he granted the injunction to shut down Blackberry service. RIM thus faced: 1. the possibility that the PTO would ultimately uphold at least one of the patents; 2. the likely possibility that Blackberries would be shut down while the PTO review proceeded; 3. the possibility that they'd lose on their motion to remove the injunction if the PTO ruled the patents invalid; 5. the certain appeals to the ruling motion (from either side); 5. all the lost business from this uncertainty; 6. the legal fees from continuing litigation.
It depends on how you define efficiency. The federal rules of civil procedure were designed to encourage adjudication of cases on the merits. The reason SCO has survived so far in court is that their allegations are seen as sufficient to state some sort of claim. What that claim is just isn't relevant at this early stage; the discovery process, which they're in the middle of now, is what will shape the nature of their claim.
If this seems inefficient, consider the following hypothetical: you sue Bob for stealing your wallet. Now, you didn't see him do it because he was behind you, but you knew he (and only he) was behind you. You get to court, and in discovery, you learn that it wasn't Bob but Joe that robbed you. Should you lose immediately for your mistake, or be able to amend your complaint to accuse Joe? Suppose further that you find your wallet in your home--Joe didn't steal it after all--but you discover that Joe stole your watch. Should you immediately be kicked out of court?
Perhaps you would say yes, but then you could refile a new lawsuit alleging the facts as discovered. But it seems to me that's a pretty inefficient formality, since you have to refile, get a new judge (who won't be familiar with the case), wait months for the docket to clear, etc. The federal rules generally follow the maxim, "If you do it right the first time, you'll do less work in the long run."
That's not to say SCO isn't abusing the rules. But they're the problem, not the rules. Changing the rules to prevent SCO-like behavior will be harmful to the majority of cases, which are meritorious.
Cringely talked about a company called Grid Networks and their killer P2P app that may change TV distribution. They seem to have an interesting idea, but I wanted to look into it further. Owing to the genericness of their name, however, I haven't been able to devise a Google search that finds their website.
Does anybody have any info on Grid Networks, or are they vaporware?
I haven't heard of this explanation, and I took several biology and anthropology courses in college.
The problem with this explanation, and with the "man the hunter" mythology in general, is that it's a "just so" story. It may make intuitive sense, but the data just isn't there to support such a hypothesis. To put another way, I can come up with an equally plausible account of the facts/adaptations you mentioned, and in the end, there's no way to choose between competing explanations. One major problem with "man the hunter" is it's quite difficult to falsify its claims (meaning, of course, it can't be a scientific theory).
But as long as we're in the realm of speculation, the explanation of why we can run long distances makes no sense. Humans evolved as an edge species, on the border of the jungle. If an animal could outrun us, it would probably duck into the underbrush, climb a tree, or just disappear in the darkness, and it wouldn't matter that the pursuing human could run for another mile before feeling tired.
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I'm sympathetic to your view, but you're about 80 years too late. Our Constitution is not the one the Founding Fathers adopted; it's been amended formally 27 times. The "amendment" that allows administrative agencies to make law was not a formal one--basically FDR bludgeoned the Supreme Court into ratifying agencies' legality during the New Deal. However, the Constitution is not just what's written on a piece of parchment, it's the organizing principle of our society, and therefore it is fair to say the New Deal ushered in a new Constitution that contemplates power residing in agencies with authority delegated from the legislature. Yale law prof Bruce Ackerman is the original exponent of this theory; he calls the New Deal a "constitutional moment," just like Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era.
In short, the constitutionality of administrative agencies has been settled for 80 years. They're at this point as American as apple pie. Heck, in some cases, agencies can actually "interpret" the law in a manner that is literally inconsistent with the congressionally-enacted statute. See Zuni Public School Dist. 89 v. Secretary of Education.
You know, the Bush administration supported Quanta in this case. TFA says so. This wasn't a conservative/liberal issue--this was a commercial dispute between two corporate giants--and the fact that the decision was unanimous attests to that. Contrary to popular belief, not every Supreme Court decision is an earth-shattering moment in the culture wars. Most of the Court's docket is really boring, like resolving the water rights conflict between NJ and Delaware over the Delaware river, or determining the proper scope of ERISA preemption.
I want to point out that the Court is not on the same left/right continuum as most of American politics. For example, check out U.S. v. Santos, where a plurality composed of Scalia, Thomas, Souter, and Ginsburg (Stevens concurred separately) interpreted a criminal statute in a solidly pro-defendant manner. I'm not saying that political orientation is irrelevant in predicting the Court, but the splits in the Court is much more based on legal philosophy than politics, like whether statutes should be read literally or purposively; the proper amount of deference to administrative agencies, the President, and Congress; the original meaning of the Constitution (and whether that's even relevant); etc. Remember that the most liberal Justice, Stevens, was appointed by Ford, and Souter (another "liberal" Justice) is a Bush I appointee.
And if it's not obvious by the extreme amount of law-geekness displayed, IAAL.
I just finished teaching a bioethics course at Harvard College and we studied this topic in detail; it was one of the questions on the final exam. I am convinced that this is a well-intentioned but bad law.
The problem with this law is that it creates adverse selection in health insurance. Health insurers won't be able to get genetic info on the people they're covering, but the people themselves will. That creates asymmetric information, and is ripe for abuse. Think about it: if I get my DNA sequenced and find out that I'm a walking health hazard, then I'll buy the most comprehensive policy out there. If I find out I'm genetically clear, I scale down my coverage, or drop it completely. Meanwhile, the insurer can't adjust my premium to accurately reflect my risk. The result: only genetically unhealthy (and risk-averse) people will buy into health insurance pools, or the genetically health will only buy insurance for physical accidents. And when the insurance pools are small, and the insurers can't accurately price risk, they pools collapse: nobody gets health insurance.
Of course, the obvious alternative--let both buyers and sellers of health insurance use DNA analysis to accurately price risk--is unpalatable because people will suffer from higher premiums through no fault of their own (i.e. because they have bad genes), and people will benefit through no effort of their own (i.e. because they have good genes). This concern (coupled with privacy concerns) is why GINA passed overwhelmingly, and I don't mean to diminish it.
Insurance works best when the risks aren't ascertainable in an individual case but are ascertainable in the aggregate. DNA sequencing really threatens the concept of health insurance, because it greatly decreases the uncertainty surrounding an individual's health future. The best way to keep insurance alive is to insure before it is possible to determine a person's health risk. Now, you could do that by banning DNA testing for individuals unless they are willing to permanently waive their ability to buy or modify their health insurance policies, but DNA testing is so cheap that the ban will be hard to enforce, and a permanent waiver seems rather harsh. You could require people to buy insurance for their kids before conception, but that has the same problem that the kid will be stuck with the same health insurance for ever (and that there might not be a kid in sad circumstances)
The ultimate, fool-proof solution: social gene insurance. Essentially, when any private insurer wants to charge you more than the base rate because of your genes, you just pay the base rate and society picks up the difference. The gene insurance would be funded through taxes, much like social security is now, though none of that "lockbox" BS. Socialized health insurance would work, too, being a superset of social gene insurance. The idea behind social insurance schemes is that they in effect force citizens to buy in before anyone has any knowledge of their genetic risk, making it a sound insurance product. And the solution works from the view of liberal theories of justice, e.g. Rawls, because it is essentially a redistribution of social resources from those who happen to be born with (and hence do not deserve) such resources to those who happen to be dealt a bad hand, through no fault of their own.
I'm shocked that the military would try to edit Gitmo facts out of Wikipedia. Don't they know that pages' history is saved, so that improper deletions can be easily restored? Don't they know that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of editors paranoid enough about the Bush administration and war on terror to monitor the Gitmo page? Couldn't the military be doing something, um, useful to prosecute the war on terror? Didn't the military realize that these efforts would come back to bite them in the ass (thanks Wikileaks!) and further hamper their efforts?
And regarding Lt. Col. Bush's "He was just doing his job" defense, I'd like to note that that defense hasn't been recognized in law since at least Nuremburg.
We apparently can't get ethical intelligence officers, but can we at least get intelligent intelligence officers?
I'll take him up on that. IAAL, so he's getting the raw end of the deal :)
We're having enough trouble convincing the public that when we say "evolution is a theory," we really mean "evolution is a set of statements that have each been experimentally verified multiple times." Let's not make it easier for ID nuts to confuse the public about what scientific theories are. A theory must be something that has overwhelming empirical support. Under this definition, string "theory" isn't a theory--it's a set of hypotheses.
If it's true that the $150,000 damage figure includes both compensatory and punitive elements, then the statutory damages may be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has said on multiple occasions that punitive damages may not exceed 9 times compensatory damages (see, e.g., BMW of N. America v. Gore). So if there's $11 million in compensatory damages, then total damages would be limited to $110 million. Awards over this limit will be violative of due process as excessive; there's simply no way a judge would allow punitve damages five orders of magnitude greater than compensatory damages.
Or so my law professors would have me believe.
The First Amendment prohibits *government* from censoring speech. If it were the government trying to push this title off the shelves, I'd agree with you.
But this isn't state censorship. This a group of private citizens leveraging their power as consumers to get another private actor (Walmart) to stop spreading a message the group disagrees with. Private actors do *not* have tolerate every idea out there; if they did, we would cease to have a marketplace of ideas where the truth wins out. The First Amendment *contemplates* private citizens attempting to promote their favored ideas and suppress ideas they think are wrong--that's called deliberative democracy.
Always remember the private/state distinction when you think of free speech.
I disagree, and I'll quote you a source: Elizabeth Warren, "The Two Income Trap" (Warren is a bankruptcy professor at Harvard Law School). Warren goes through the data and shows that your argument is false: families today do not spend more money on luxuries than in the 1950s, and the two cars come from needing both to get to work.
In fact, Warren argues that capitalism adapted just as the grandparent predicted: when some women went to work, some families had more disposable income. By and large, those families spent that income on buying houses in better school districts (which are of course more expensive). To compete with those families, and make sure Junior went to a good public school, all the other families had to send the wife to work to snag a house in the good school districts. Of course, that just spurred a bidding war for houses in good school districts, driving the prices up so much that the middle class family had to cut down on luxuries to afford the house in the good school district.
Moral of the story: if you create more wealth (whether by doubling the labor force, doubling the number of hours we work, or whathever), you cause inflation. It's not necessarily a zero-sum game, but it can be, as Warren demonstrates.
Does anyone else find it ironic that *Fox* is running this story and claiming that this dolphin supports evolution?
Actually, many animals do have rights, just not human rights. Pets, for example, have a right not to be abused by their owners, which is why if you see somebody kicking his dog, you can call the city officials and have the dog rescued. Of course, dogs don't have a right to a free public education, like all American children. Children, in turn, don't have the right to vote. Having "rights" isn't all-or-nothing; you can have some but not others.
As a supporter of animal rights, I would never claim that a non-human animal should have the same rights as a developed human. Rather, rights should be commensurate with interests. Bacteria through fish are, as far as our neuroscience can tell, essentially biological automatons, being unable even to feel pain (octopi and squid being exceptions). Thus, no rights. Reptiles have the ability to feel pain, and should thus have a right to be free from pain. Mammals have the additional capacity to experience emotion, including fear and suffering, and should thus have a right to free of fear and suffering. The higher mammals (chimps, gorillas, dolphins) probably have, as adults, self-awareness and a conception of death, and should thus have a right to life, and a relatively undisturbed one at that. Of course, humans have an even richer cognitive life and deeper emotional capacities, and thus have more extensive rights than higher mammals (e.g., political rights).
Of course, this will lead to a conflict of rights. Cancer implicates many rights for humans: the right to be free from pain for those afflicted, the right to be free from the apprehension of being afflicted, the right to not die prematurely, etc. Arguably, the only way to vindicate those rights are to use animals to develop cancer treatments. Animals, however, have rights to, so the experimentation cannot violate those rights. And if there is a direct conflict, we can do what our courts have done for centuries: balance competing rights, with the winner respecting the loser's rights to the greatest extent possible. Generally speaking, that would mean at the least sparing animals from gratuitious pain, and reserving chimps, gorillas, and dolphins only for the most crucial experiments. Basic research probably wouldn't count--you'd need to be pretty sure of a significant benefit to a human to justify experimenting on a chimp (assuming that the experimentation is painful, stressful, or otherwise undesirable to the subject).
Actually, that's exactly the case. Quoth the article: "Because XM makes available vast catalogues of music in every genre, XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings," the lawsuit says referring to the hand held "Inno" device."
That same reasoning could be used to sue, say, somebody that owns every single CD every recorded. Surely, that person would have "little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings." So, what would the RIAA do? Presumably, sue the music collector since he's not giving them more money.
Now, the obvious flaw to that argument is that the prolific collector still has to buy new music. If the RIAA is concerned about XM listeners not buying new music, they should just not allow new music to be played on XM.
Actually, there is data: lending behaviors from a time before gov't regulation. Or, you could infer what would happen in the lending marketplace from what happens in other sectors of the market. I just finished a course on race relations law in law school, where I learned the following: blacks are discriminated against in buying cars (they pay a premium); minorities are discriminated against in obtaining housing (though the Fair Housing Act helps); blacks are discriminated against in the workforce, with an employer less likely to respond to a job applicant with a "black" name (e.g., Tyrone) than a "white" one (e.g., Robert); minority cab drivers get tipped less than white cab drivers; whether or not one gets the death penalty correlates strongly with the victim's race (you're better off killing a minority than a white guy); minorities are disproportionately excluded from juries.
Given the history and current reality of racism in the U.S., I don't think it's reasonable to expect the market to overcome racism in the P2P lending market.
Sadly, the data don't agree [PDF alert]. Studies show that racial minorities pay, on average, substantially more interest on loans than whites do. Racism is one of the most persistent market failures of the 20th and 21st centuries; we need government regulation to mitigate or erase it.
On top of Terry frisks and searches incident to arrest, you have searches based on exigent circumstances (hot pursuit, evanescent evidence, emergency response), consent, automobile searches, inventory searches, and administrative searches (border or airport).
On top of that, there are searches that the S.Ct. has ruled aren't "searches" within the meaning of the 4th Amend., and hence, don't require a warrant. These include: flyovers, objects held out to the public, open fields, and dog sniffs for drugs.
For seizures, again police often don't need a warrant. One major exception is plain view. Also, arrests in public don't require a warrant if the officer has probable cause to believe a suspect committed a crime.
Which goes to the heart of your confusion, I think. Warrant != probable cause. Probable cause is a necessary condition for *getting* a warrant but the two are seperate concepts. So when I said that there are tons of searches that don't require probable cause, that's not quite saying that there are tons of searches that don't require a warrant.
But anyway, police execute literally thousands of Terry stops every day, so I'd call that a huge exception to probable cause. Plus you have administrative searches at airports (every time you go though a metal detector and put your bags through the x-ray, that's a search), which number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, per day, and require neither a warrant nor even reasonable suspicion. Terry plus airport searches mean that probably the majority of searches on a given day require neither warrant nor probable cause.
Note that I'm not taking a stand on wiretapping either way, though the latest NSA program reportedly doesn't monitor the content of calls so there's no "eavedropping" per se. Prof. Orin Kerr on the Volokh Conspiracy has detailed analyses of the law, which I encourage you to read; he concludes the NSA program is not unconstitutional, though it may violate one of several statutes.
Hayden is right. The 4th Amendment has 2 clauses: one prohibits against unreasonable search and seizure; the other says that warrants must be based on probable cause. The Supreme Court generally treats these two as seperate requirements. A warrant (based on probable cause) is a sufficient condition for a reasonable search or seizure, but it's not necessary.
There are tons of searches that don't require probable cause. One famous example is the Terry stop, where police, upon having a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot, can stop a suspect and ask him some questions. Similarly, if they have reasonable suspicion that he's armed, they can frisk the suspect for weapons. Note that reasonable suspicion is a lower standard than probable cause.
Information courtesy of having to study for my Criminal Law exam.
Note to mods: how the hell can a post which is based on a "rumour going around" be labeled "5, Informative." There's no information here beyond the poster's bald assertion. I know Slashdot sometimes posts rumors as stories (e.g., Apple products), but come on. We don't even know the source of this rumor, so we can't even confirm it is a rumor!
Scott Adams wrote a book, God's Debris, that explores your question of what happens if God gives up his omnipotence. I'll let you read the free ebook yourself, but the basic idea is that God, as a perfect being, gets bored of his own existance and tries to spice things up by committing suicide. In doing so, God created the universe.
Wikipedia notes the parallels of this to Hinduism. When I read God's Debris, I was reminded of GWF Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, where God also empties himself of divinity in order to start time and create the universe because he realized that his pure existence is meaningless. Time is the progress of God, the spirit of whom is now extended in all matter, coming to 'realize' himself as God. So, in a sense, God is evolving.
These theological moves (God is extended in the world and God is realized in the future) allow for dodging some thorny questions. For example, Can God create a rock that he can't lift? The answer is, for *now*, yes. But he might be stronger tomorrow.
My Contracts professor banned laptops. Not because he had anything against them per se, but because he had asked students what they preferred. One year, apparently, he let the class use laptops for half the semester, then banned laptops for the other half. At the end, he asked the class to vote on whether he should allow laptops. The result: an overwhelming majority thought class was better without laptops, as it was much easier to have discussion without them. Among my section, everyone invariably says that Contracts was a great class for that reason--discussion--and even though we grumbled at first about the lack of laptops, we were thankful for it in the end. I even gave up my laptop next semester.
If you had a straight lecture class, then I could see how laptops might be beneficial. But I think that class format is inefficient, anyways, as it doesn't promote active learning. Law school avoids lectures in favor of active learning via the socratic method, mock oral arguments, writing excercises, and class discussion. Having taken undergraduate (and some graduate) classes of the liberal arts and technical varieties, I think law classes are hands down better taught, and it's largely related to how they're taught.
I'm guessing the law you speak of is the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. Here's Bush's signing statement. For the reason you predicted, Public Citizen has already sued to have this law declared unconstitutional.
I envision the lawsuit failing because the courts will essentially say, "Close enough. It's too cumbersome to send this back to Congress and the President to fix a 'harmless' error." Besides, how can a court strike down a law that gives so many agencies funding for a whole year, especially after they've started spending that money? It would be a budgetary and administrative nightmare. No court is going to penalize all those agencies for Congress' and Bush's error.
Coincidentally, the New York Times today has an op-ed that argues this is a terrible idea. The main point of the op-ed is that such power generation would encourage environmentally-harmful factory farming, which is the source of all the dung, by essentially subsidizing their dung production. Dung power would have other bad environmental side effects, too.
The reason they settled is because the judge said that he wouldn't wait for the USPTO to issue final rulings on the patents before he granted the injunction to shut down Blackberry service. RIM thus faced: 1. the possibility that the PTO would ultimately uphold at least one of the patents; 2. the likely possibility that Blackberries would be shut down while the PTO review proceeded; 3. the possibility that they'd lose on their motion to remove the injunction if the PTO ruled the patents invalid; 5. the certain appeals to the ruling motion (from either side); 5. all the lost business from this uncertainty; 6. the legal fees from continuing litigation.
It depends on how you define efficiency. The federal rules of civil procedure were designed to encourage adjudication of cases on the merits. The reason SCO has survived so far in court is that their allegations are seen as sufficient to state some sort of claim. What that claim is just isn't relevant at this early stage; the discovery process, which they're in the middle of now, is what will shape the nature of their claim.
If this seems inefficient, consider the following hypothetical: you sue Bob for stealing your wallet. Now, you didn't see him do it because he was behind you, but you knew he (and only he) was behind you. You get to court, and in discovery, you learn that it wasn't Bob but Joe that robbed you. Should you lose immediately for your mistake, or be able to amend your complaint to accuse Joe? Suppose further that you find your wallet in your home--Joe didn't steal it after all--but you discover that Joe stole your watch. Should you immediately be kicked out of court?
Perhaps you would say yes, but then you could refile a new lawsuit alleging the facts as discovered. But it seems to me that's a pretty inefficient formality, since you have to refile, get a new judge (who won't be familiar with the case), wait months for the docket to clear, etc. The federal rules generally follow the maxim, "If you do it right the first time, you'll do less work in the long run."
That's not to say SCO isn't abusing the rules. But they're the problem, not the rules. Changing the rules to prevent SCO-like behavior will be harmful to the majority of cases, which are meritorious.
Cringely talked about a company called Grid Networks and their killer P2P app that may change TV distribution. They seem to have an interesting idea, but I wanted to look into it further. Owing to the genericness of their name, however, I haven't been able to devise a Google search that finds their website.
Does anybody have any info on Grid Networks, or are they vaporware?
I haven't heard of this explanation, and I took several biology and anthropology courses in college.
The problem with this explanation, and with the "man the hunter" mythology in general, is that it's a "just so" story. It may make intuitive sense, but the data just isn't there to support such a hypothesis. To put another way, I can come up with an equally plausible account of the facts/adaptations you mentioned, and in the end, there's no way to choose between competing explanations. One major problem with "man the hunter" is it's quite difficult to falsify its claims (meaning, of course, it can't be a scientific theory).
But as long as we're in the realm of speculation, the explanation of why we can run long distances makes no sense. Humans evolved as an edge species, on the border of the jungle. If an animal could outrun us, it would probably duck into the underbrush, climb a tree, or just disappear in the darkness, and it wouldn't matter that the pursuing human could run for another mile before feeling tired.