The plan as I read it is to offshore everything with the thought that we'll still own the capital and intellectual property that people who do the actual work will be dependent on. I think incidents like this shine a spotlight on why this kind of thing won't work in the long term. What happens when the people who do the actual work (and that you're throwing the equivalent of scraps to) decide they don't like your arrangement?
That's not the only thing wrong with the "ownership society".
Even if it works, the overseas revolt you describe never happens, and money flows into the country, the percentage of Americans who will actually benefit from this arrangement is extremely tiny. The rest of us will be SOL.
Here is more CATO drivel from the link you posted:
The United States today has the most widespread property ownership in history. This year an all-time high of 68.6 percent of American households own their own homes. Even more significantly, increasing numbers of Americans are becoming capitalists--people who own a share of productive businesses through stocks or mutual funds. About half of American households qualify as stockholding in some form. That's up from 32 percent in 1989 and only 19 percent in 1983, a remarkable change in just 20 years. That means almost half of Americans directly benefited from the enormous market appreciation between 1982 and 2000 and are prepared to see their wealth increase again when the current stock market slump ends.
Notice how he fails to mention how much these half of Americans "directly benefited" from appreciation of securities. This is an example of lying with statistics- and it isn't a distortion, it's an outright lie. Instead of what percentage of individuals own stock, the relevant statistic is what percentage of stock is owned by whom. The percentage of households "owning stock in some form" is meaningless in this context. It includes everyone who has a 401k, every dentist and granny who owns 60 shares of IBM. In terms of total market capitalization the "half of American households" alluded to above owns an extremely small fraction of all stock, and generally most people invest no more than they can afford to gamble with. The vast majority of stock is held by the lucky few who can afford to pay for all this propaganda.
And spammers could easily deduce from the timing which bounces were genuine and which were not. Assuming they'd even bother to purge nonworking addresses from their lists in the first place, when many of them don't even bother removing duplicates.
Your tax dollars at work. How much money did this cost?
Here we go again.
In order to avoid these inevitable comments that appear in every thread with a scientific topic, I suggest that no international research project be allowed to proceed unless it has been cleared by a panel of Anonymous Cowards who have been convinced after watching the teevee for too long that all science is really a scam to squander their tax dollars on foolishness like basic research that shows no promise of an immediate economic benefit such as a drug that makes your peepee harder.
In response to your question, you might be able to maintain a botched occupation for a few hours with the money.
Jeez, try to imagine the havoc if the cable comes loose from its orbital anchor.
But it would make a great seventies-style movie, sort of like "Towering Inferno". Frankly, I'm surprised that nobody has made a bad movie about a collapsing space elevator, now that we have all these computers. A space elevator would likely take several hours to fall, which is perfect for a movie.
Scene I. The Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony. THE PRESIDENT:[Holding large pair of scissors] It is with great fanfare that I dedicate this space elevator to the United States of America, and its coalition of willing allied nations all over the world, without whom this great day might not have been possible.[Prepares to cut] SCIENTIST: No, Mr. President! Cut the green horizontal ribbon! Not the black vertical one!
a patent on a PB&J with the crust? Has the Patent Office ruled on that, or is this my one chance to sue every person that eats a sandwitch with a crust?
No. Not people who eat a sandwich with a crust. But people who manufacture or consume ravioli would be in for a surprise.
Once again the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has struck a blow for our rights online. We can email each other peanut butter and jelly sanwiches without fear of lawsuits.
This just goes to show how liberal activist judges are legislating from the bench. How would a real judge- like Judge Scalia- handle this? He knows the Constitution is a "dead document", and would have invoked the original intent of the framers.
Peanut butter didn't even exist until 1890. The original framers of the Constitution lived in the 1790s and would have been completely befuddled by the creamy tasty goodness of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Ergo, it is nonobvious, patentable, and the court was unjustified in rejecting Smuckers' efforts to patent the device.
Is this really a problem? Has anyone really been calling for the regulation of nanotech?
The only evidence he offers is that people were worrying that buckyballs might cause cancer, and the NSF is funding toxicity studies. And the British are also interested in studying nanoparticle toxicity. So what?
But he also offers this, from the same source from which he gets his scary "wide societal debate" quote:
Also the ETC (an action group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration)--the same group that had lobbied against Monsanto's (nyse: MON - news - people ) genetically engineered crops in the 1990s--has called for nothing less than a moratorium on the use of synthetic nanoparticles in the lab and in commercial products.
So a small Canadian corporate watchdog group with an unsuccessful record of opposing biotech holds an extreme position on nanotechnology. Oooh, I'm scared!
This link found in the article is rather telling:
Special Offer: Get in on the ground floor of a growth industry still in its infancy. Click here for a complete list of stocks in Josh Wolfe's "Nanosphere" portfolio and for up-and-coming private companies.
With your subscription for the special introductory price of only $195 (a 67% discount off the cover price), you will receive 12 monthly hard-copy issues of the author's Nanotech Report delivered right to your door. No doubt each issue will be filled with screeching about nonexistent political threats to nanotechnology from powerful Canadians.
Pretty much everyone on the board agreed that on-line sites like this were and are exempt. The revised version of the bill makes this crystal clear. But in speech after speech, almost all of the 11 members of the board said they didn't intend to regulate web logs or - like they would try - stand alone journalists.
"Blogs are to be exempt," said Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, specifically citing the phrasing that cuts "news stories, commentaries or editorials distributed through any newspaper, radio station, television station or other recognized news medium unless such news medium is owned or controlled by a political party" out of the ordinance. "The intent of the legislation is to cover blogs as a recognized news entity," Maxwell said.
It was a wingnutty story summary, anyway, since "People's Republic of" wasn't followed by "China".
I think that if you're freely breathing in dust with no protection between you and the lunar surface, you've got bigger issues to worry about than silicosis.
Lunar dust is reported to smell like exploded firecrackers, according to a 2002 interview with John Hirasaki, an Apollo recovery technician:
JIM [interviewer]: Did you have to go into isolation prior to the splashdown? If so how long beforehand? Was this done to minimize your exposure to viruses and germs that might have caused alarm if you and/or others in isolation became ill?
JOHN: Dr. Bill Carpentier and I were placed into isolation within the MQF about the same time as the launch of Apollo 11. The reason for our biological isolation was for the reason that you indicated... At the LRL, on our side of the biological barrier, I recall that the Public Affairs Officer joined the five of us to assist in post-flight debriefings and interviews with the news media. Also during our stay in the LRL, we had two laboratory technicians join us at different intervals because of accidental breeches of biological isolation while they were handling lunar samples on their side of the LRL. The LRL itself is a fascinating story that deserves to be told.
JIM: You personally retrieved the Apollo 11 lunar sample containers from Columbia shortly after the Command Module was brought on board the Hornet. Do you have specific memories of entering the spacecraft? Did the boxes look "dusty" or smudged?
JOHN: The first unusual item that I noticed upon entering the Apollo 11 Command Module was a unique scent that reminded me of smell of exploded firecrackers or the scent that you notice when you strike flint together. I had not noticed this scent when I opened other Command Modules following their flights.
The lunar sample return containers were slightly smudged with dust from the surface of the moon but this dust was especially prevalent on the surface of the suits worn by Armstrong and Aldrin. These suits were stored in the Command Module below the crew couches. Traces of the dust appeared on many surfaces since the fine powder like nature of the moon dust inadvertently allowed it to be transferred to other surfaces.
I cannot say that the aroma was a direct result of the "moon dust" being present in the cabin even though that was what I surmised. There could be other explanations for the aroma that are not related to the presence of the dust. After reviewing the post-flight notes from the Apollo 11 mission, there was a comment made during crew debriefing that a "strong odor of burnt material" was noticed following the S-IVB stage separation when the crew opened the CSM tunnel.
This person purchased a domain name that is the company name and used it to slam a company (or hospital, whatever). Free speech is the right to take out an ad in the newspaper, not use a domain name that can be confused for an offical company website.
These two sentences conflict with each other. If you're slamming the company, isn't it going to be obvious that your site is not the company's own site? How could anyone be confused by that?
Sending e-mails advertising a product is free speech. Flooding e-mail servers is akin to vandalism.
Free speech and vandalism are not mutually exclusive. Graffiti may carry a Constitutionally protected message, but the paint on the wall makes it vandalism no matter what the graffiti says.
I just had to repost this at +2:
Amendment I makes no distinction between political and commercial speech, and back when it was written, there was plenty of commercial speech.
Any judge who tries to make a distinction needs to be killed.
For supporting laws banning false or misleading advertising? This was a precedent set in 1942.
Even on Slashdot, these people are now getting so emboldened as to openly call for the assassination of judges.
The 1st amendment is about freedom of speech, which congress may not abridge, period. Any damn thing you want to say, no ifs ands or buts.
This is an absolutist view of "free speech" that is actually common on Slashdot, but doesn't make much sense in the real world. Think about what you're saying- any damn thing you want to say, no ifs and or buts. Such an interpretation would permit death threats. It would grant Constitutional protection to bribery and scams. It would undermine verbal contracts. It would prohibit laws against slander and libel. And it would grant Constitutional protection to spam- those idiots who post First Amendment arguments in every spam thread would have a point.
Which is ironic- such an absolutist definition of free speech is ahistorical for the US, to say the least.
So, all the crap about commercial and political speech has basically been tacked on illegally afterward, by a politically compliant judiciary, to allow the FedGov to "regulate" far beyond its defined remit.
This really part of a larger discussion about the two competing views of the Constitution: as a "living document" or a "dead document". The debate concerns how much to rely on "strict constructionism", which ostensibly relies on the original intent of the poeple who actually wrote the Constitution, versus relying on an understanding based on evolving values and meanings, as applied by case law. The "living document" view has prevailed over most of the past 200 years, but recently the "dead document" position has come into vogue, advanced principally by Scalia, and vigorously promoted by many who praise it for consistency- but who may in fact be aiming to remove power from the judiciary, the only remaining branch of government still not under their influence.
The US Constitution is a Case-Law Constitution. That gives it the advantage of flexibility. It is also a very brief Constitution. Its brevity is one of its greatest weaknesses, as well as a source of strength. For example it is the oldest Constitution for its age in the world. But the brevity requires significant interpretation. Courts are put in the position, for example, of having to determine whether the First Amendment protects nudie bar dancing. If you feel that a right should not exist unless it is specifically mentioned in the Constitution, or if you get upset about "liberal activist judges", you are probably sympathetic to the "dead document" interpretation. Nudie bars are mentioned nowhere on the actual parchment.
This view has certain advantages. First of all there is consistency. It removes discretion from individual judges, by forbidding the very function that Article III mandates that they do- interpret the Constitution. (Effectively, Congress would unofficially take over this job.)
However, it has the disadvantage of being false on its face. The mechanism for the citizenry to amend the Constitution is written right into it. As can be seen in contemporaneous writings, it was obvious that members of the Convention expected, and even hoped, that the Constitution would not be a static document, but that it would be amended by the people through legal means, sometimes as Constitutional amendments, and often as the result of judicial challenges (to refute the concept of "activist judges"). For example many members of the convention would obviously have been thrilled to see that there is no longer slavery in the US. This despite language in the Constitution explicitly discussing the international sale of slaves.
BTW, free speech isn't a right because of the constitution - it's in the constitution because it's a right!
Sorry to get offtopic, but no, it really doesn't. Spam has everything to do with volume and unsolicitedness and nothing with content; therefore, it has nothing to do with speech.
Spam does involve infringement on property rights. It screws up your servers, wastes your bandwidth, and consumes your time. But that shouldn't obscure the fact that the First Amendment protections that it does enjoy for being speech are in fact extremely limited by case law. It's advertising. Not only are they breaking laws by appropriating bandwidth and resources that aren't theirs, they're also breaking it if they make unsubstantiated commercial claims- like if they claim you can add an inch to your penis if you spend $50 for a book with "exercise instructions". There was a case last year where some perpetually-unendowed plaintiffs actually sued a spammer on exactly that basis and won.
Unsolicited email can still enjoy full First Amendment protection. If the spam had been political in nature, like a "Free So-and-So from jail" type thing, a suit like that would have been much more difficult to pursue. The only ones who could sue in that case would be the people whose time or bandwidth was wasted- they would still have a good property-rights suit.
Dang - I must have the abbreviated version of the First Amendment. All my copy says is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Naturally your copy, and that of our esteemed judiciary, must have the small print version many of us lack.
(Emphasis mine) You are correct. Interpretation of the Constitution is the Federal Court's Constitutionally mandated role, as per Article III.
in other words, you have freedom of speech as long as you don't discuss politics? how long before i get my papers?
No. You can't be on the payroll of some politician or otherwise perform electioneering on his behalf without making it public that that's what you're doing.
Not all speech is protected by the First Amendment. Speech ranges from "I have a dream" to spam. The type of speech that enjoys First Amendment protection is politically protected speech. If you are spending money to sell a product, like turtle wax, that's commercial speech- which is subject to a limited set of restrictions. Examples are when they force pharmaceutical companies to mention the diarrhea and vomiting, or when weight loss ads are forced to put "ADVERTISEMENT" in the footer of real-looking news articles. Restrictions on commercial speech are perfectly constitutional as long as they are reasonable.
This business with campaigning is treading closer to politically protected speech, and overlapping with it, since the speech is primarily political rather than purely commercial in nature. The controversial campaign finance reform was controversial precisely because it attempted to regulate speech in this domain. But not all political speech is necessarily constitutionally protected political speech- depending on the circumstances, it may have a commercial character. I may be receiving money in response for saying what I'm saying. The campaign finance laws- however you feel about them- were part of an attempt to impose reasonable and legitimate regulation of speech in this domain. One of the main strategies that this legislation took was to enforce full disclosure of the commercial aspects of speech, and to make sure that commercial means were not used to escape political consequences of speech. That's why you hear "I approved this message".
This ordinance looks like a minor piece of accountability legislation. It says that if you spend more than $1000 in any venue performing electioneering for a candidate, you have to register. This is so that accurate information about election funding can be kept as part of the public record. That is all. This is a restriction in that you are forced to disclose this information to the public, but they're not preventing you from saying anything, and it only applies to the commercial component of your speech.
This is much ado about nothing. Political demonstrations and public gatherings are about the most protected form of political speech there is, but in the United States you have to remain inside designated fenced-in areas or they'll arrest you for leaving your "First Amendment Zone".
Ok, so, it works something like this. 1) You plug your car into the house. 2) Your house gets electricty from "somewhere." 3) That somewhere is a diesel fired power plant.
4) The electric company notifies the cops of your excessive electricity usage. 5) Armed narcotics agents arrive with a search warrant and ransack your house looking for a grow operation.
You'd have to be nuts to plug a car into the wall if you live in the United States.
And, AFAIK, this form of transportation is emmissionless.
At the point of use, maybe. How does the air get into the tank? A rough rule of thumb is that one kilowatt-hour translates to one pound of coal burned at a power plant.
This might be a good mechanism for a hybrid car- store the energy in a compressed air cylinder instead of a battery. You'd have a little gas or diesel engine continuously filling the tank at a steady rate while you drive around putting variable demands on the stored energy in the tank. Unfortunately when you compress the air you heat it, and once it's in the tank it will lose thermal energy to its surroundings. That also means the pressure in the tank goes down. To get near 100% efficiency from a pressurized gas cylinder as an energy storage mechanism, you have to wrap lots of insulation around it to prevent the heat from escaping. This is a problem that the French car undoubtedly has- even if it's plugged in, the air is heated as it enters the tank, and as the air cools to ambient temperature, you lose that energy for good- it's unavailable to the motor later on.
So far, two of you moderators just modded the idea for a AM/FM radio as insightful. I know the iPod was mentioned and you probably got excited but you guys need to focus man, focus.
It was Funny. It was also Insightful, but only because it was Funny in an Ironic way. Unfortunately it was too Subtle for some people to realize it was meant to be a joke, prompting several Clueless posts who have taken the liberty of explaining the punch line to the joke's author, mistaking his Insightfulness for their own. I hate when people do this to my own jokes. Recognizing something as being Funny without realizing it was meant to be Funny means you didn't get the joke!
And here I was ready to build on this Fiasco, by noting that if such a thing were invented today, it would surely be smothered under a swarm of intellectual property motions and lawyers, forced to incorporate scrambling, subscriptions, and licenses. They certainly knew how to innovate a century ago. Nowadays everything has to be against the law unless it Sucks.
Instead, I would like to challenge someone to explain how this could possibly be a good thing.
It could provide a mechanism for shutting down spam relays in China.
This quote disturbs me though:
People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. I argue that in any country, if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service?
If I am not standing on your neck, do I not deserve credit for everything you do?
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the only thing wrong with the "ownership society".
Even if it works, the overseas revolt you describe never happens, and money flows into the country, the percentage of Americans who will actually benefit from this arrangement is extremely tiny. The rest of us will be SOL.
Here is more CATO drivel from the link you posted:Notice how he fails to mention how much these half of Americans "directly benefited" from appreciation of securities. This is an example of lying with statistics- and it isn't a distortion, it's an outright lie. Instead of what percentage of individuals own stock, the relevant statistic is what percentage of stock is owned by whom. The percentage of households "owning stock in some form" is meaningless in this context. It includes everyone who has a 401k, every dentist and granny who owns 60 shares of IBM. In terms of total market capitalization the "half of American households" alluded to above owns an extremely small fraction of all stock, and generally most people invest no more than they can afford to gamble with. The vast majority of stock is held by the lucky few who can afford to pay for all this propaganda.
And spammers could easily deduce from the timing which bounces were genuine and which were not. Assuming they'd even bother to purge nonworking addresses from their lists in the first place, when many of them don't even bother removing duplicates.
Your tax dollars at work. How much money did this cost?
Here we go again.
In order to avoid these inevitable comments that appear in every thread with a scientific topic, I suggest that no international research project be allowed to proceed unless it has been cleared by a panel of Anonymous Cowards who have been convinced after watching the teevee for too long that all science is really a scam to squander their tax dollars on foolishness like basic research that shows no promise of an immediate economic benefit such as a drug that makes your peepee harder.
In response to your question, you might be able to maintain a botched occupation for a few hours with the money.
Oh you've got to be kidding me. Name one Adam Sandler movie that has not been a disaster.
Jeez, try to imagine the havoc if the cable comes loose from its orbital anchor.
But it would make a great seventies-style movie, sort of like "Towering Inferno". Frankly, I'm surprised that nobody has made a bad movie about a collapsing space elevator, now that we have all these computers. A space elevator would likely take several hours to fall, which is perfect for a movie.
Scene I. The Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony.
THE PRESIDENT: [Holding large pair of scissors] It is with great fanfare that I dedicate this space elevator to the United States of America, and its coalition of willing allied nations all over the world, without whom this great day might not have been possible.[Prepares to cut]
SCIENTIST: No, Mr. President! Cut the green horizontal ribbon! Not the black vertical one!
If the system was working the way it was supposed to, this patent & 90% of the others would be laughed out of the Patent Office front door.
But it was. The USPTO cited ravioli as prior art. Smucker's appealed the denial of their application, and that's how it got into court.
a patent on a PB&J with the crust? Has the Patent Office ruled on that, or is this my one chance to sue every person that eats a sandwitch with a crust?
No. Not people who eat a sandwich with a crust. But people who manufacture or consume ravioli would be in for a surprise.
Once again the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has struck a blow for our rights online. We can email each other peanut butter and jelly sanwiches without fear of lawsuits.
This just goes to show how liberal activist judges are legislating from the bench. How would a real judge- like Judge Scalia- handle this? He knows the Constitution is a "dead document", and would have invoked the original intent of the framers.
Peanut butter didn't even exist until 1890. The original framers of the Constitution lived in the 1790s and would have been completely befuddled by the creamy tasty goodness of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Ergo, it is nonobvious, patentable, and the court was unjustified in rejecting Smuckers' efforts to patent the device.
I have to ask, what in the bloody hell is a "pocket" peanut butter and jam sandiwch?
Nonobvious, I guess.
The only evidence he offers is that people were worrying that buckyballs might cause cancer, and the NSF is funding toxicity studies. And the British are also interested in studying nanoparticle toxicity. So what?
But he also offers this, from the same source from which he gets his scary "wide societal debate" quote:So a small Canadian corporate watchdog group with an unsuccessful record of opposing biotech holds an extreme position on nanotechnology. Oooh, I'm scared!
This link found in the article is rather telling:With your subscription for the special introductory price of only $195 (a 67% discount off the cover price), you will receive 12 monthly hard-copy issues of the author's Nanotech Report delivered right to your door. No doubt each issue will be filled with screeching about nonexistent political threats to nanotechnology from powerful Canadians.
Lunar dust is reported to smell like exploded firecrackers, according to a 2002 interview with John Hirasaki, an Apollo recovery technician:
Google cache here.
This person purchased a domain name that is the company name and used it to slam a company (or hospital, whatever). Free speech is the right to take out an ad in the newspaper, not use a domain name that can be confused for an offical company website.
These two sentences conflict with each other. If you're slamming the company, isn't it going to be obvious that your site is not the company's own site? How could anyone be confused by that?
This is black mail, like if I have pictures of your wife naked and threaten to post them on the web unless you pay me $1000. What can a person do?
Post naked pictures of her yourself and send the link to the blackmailer. Nyaah nyaah nyaah.
Sending e-mails advertising a product is free speech. Flooding e-mail servers is akin to vandalism.
Free speech and vandalism are not mutually exclusive. Graffiti may carry a Constitutionally protected message, but the paint on the wall makes it vandalism no matter what the graffiti says.
I just had to repost this at +2:
Amendment I makes no distinction between political and commercial speech, and back when it was written, there was plenty of commercial speech.
Any judge who tries to make a distinction needs to be killed.
For supporting laws banning false or misleading advertising? This was a precedent set in 1942.
Even on Slashdot, these people are now getting so emboldened as to openly call for the assassination of judges.
The 1st amendment is about freedom of speech, which congress may not abridge, period. Any damn thing you want to say, no ifs ands or buts.
This is an absolutist view of "free speech" that is actually common on Slashdot, but doesn't make much sense in the real world. Think about what you're saying- any damn thing you want to say, no ifs and or buts. Such an interpretation would permit death threats. It would grant Constitutional protection to bribery and scams. It would undermine verbal contracts. It would prohibit laws against slander and libel. And it would grant Constitutional protection to spam- those idiots who post First Amendment arguments in every spam thread would have a point.
Which is ironic- such an absolutist definition of free speech is ahistorical for the US, to say the least.
So, all the crap about commercial and political speech has basically been tacked on illegally afterward, by a politically compliant judiciary, to allow the FedGov to "regulate" far beyond its defined remit.
This really part of a larger discussion about the two competing views of the Constitution: as a "living document" or a "dead document". The debate concerns how much to rely on "strict constructionism", which ostensibly relies on the original intent of the poeple who actually wrote the Constitution, versus relying on an understanding based on evolving values and meanings, as applied by case law. The "living document" view has prevailed over most of the past 200 years, but recently the "dead document" position has come into vogue, advanced principally by Scalia, and vigorously promoted by many who praise it for consistency- but who may in fact be aiming to remove power from the judiciary, the only remaining branch of government still not under their influence.
The US Constitution is a Case-Law Constitution. That gives it the advantage of flexibility. It is also a very brief Constitution. Its brevity is one of its greatest weaknesses, as well as a source of strength. For example it is the oldest Constitution for its age in the world. But the brevity requires significant interpretation. Courts are put in the position, for example, of having to determine whether the First Amendment protects nudie bar dancing. If you feel that a right should not exist unless it is specifically mentioned in the Constitution, or if you get upset about "liberal activist judges", you are probably sympathetic to the "dead document" interpretation. Nudie bars are mentioned nowhere on the actual parchment.
This view has certain advantages. First of all there is consistency. It removes discretion from individual judges, by forbidding the very function that Article III mandates that they do- interpret the Constitution. (Effectively, Congress would unofficially take over this job.)
However, it has the disadvantage of being false on its face. The mechanism for the citizenry to amend the Constitution is written right into it. As can be seen in contemporaneous writings, it was obvious that members of the Convention expected, and even hoped, that the Constitution would not be a static document, but that it would be amended by the people through legal means, sometimes as Constitutional amendments, and often as the result of judicial challenges (to refute the concept of "activist judges"). For example many members of the convention would obviously have been thrilled to see that there is no longer slavery in the US. This despite language in the Constitution explicitly discussing the international sale of slaves.
BTW, free speech isn't a right because of the constitution - it's in the constitution because it's a right!
Truer words never spoken.
Sorry to get offtopic, but no, it really doesn't. Spam has everything to do with volume and unsolicitedness and nothing with content; therefore, it has nothing to do with speech.
Spam does involve infringement on property rights. It screws up your servers, wastes your bandwidth, and consumes your time. But that shouldn't obscure the fact that the First Amendment protections that it does enjoy for being speech are in fact extremely limited by case law. It's advertising. Not only are they breaking laws by appropriating bandwidth and resources that aren't theirs, they're also breaking it if they make unsubstantiated commercial claims- like if they claim you can add an inch to your penis if you spend $50 for a book with "exercise instructions". There was a case last year where some perpetually-unendowed plaintiffs actually sued a spammer on exactly that basis and won.
Unsolicited email can still enjoy full First Amendment protection. If the spam had been political in nature, like a "Free So-and-So from jail" type thing, a suit like that would have been much more difficult to pursue. The only ones who could sue in that case would be the people whose time or bandwidth was wasted- they would still have a good property-rights suit.
Dang - I must have the abbreviated version of the First Amendment. All my copy says is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Naturally your copy, and that of our esteemed judiciary, must have the small print version many of us lack.
(Emphasis mine)
You are correct. Interpretation of the Constitution is the Federal Court's Constitutionally mandated role, as per Article III.
in other words, you have freedom of speech as long as you don't discuss politics? how long before i get my papers?
No. You can't be on the payroll of some politician or otherwise perform electioneering on his behalf without making it public that that's what you're doing.
Not all speech is protected by the First Amendment. Speech ranges from "I have a dream" to spam. The type of speech that enjoys First Amendment protection is politically protected speech. If you are spending money to sell a product, like turtle wax, that's commercial speech- which is subject to a limited set of restrictions. Examples are when they force pharmaceutical companies to mention the diarrhea and vomiting, or when weight loss ads are forced to put "ADVERTISEMENT" in the footer of real-looking news articles. Restrictions on commercial speech are perfectly constitutional as long as they are reasonable.
This business with campaigning is treading closer to politically protected speech, and overlapping with it, since the speech is primarily political rather than purely commercial in nature. The controversial campaign finance reform was controversial precisely because it attempted to regulate speech in this domain. But not all political speech is necessarily constitutionally protected political speech- depending on the circumstances, it may have a commercial character. I may be receiving money in response for saying what I'm saying. The campaign finance laws- however you feel about them- were part of an attempt to impose reasonable and legitimate regulation of speech in this domain. One of the main strategies that this legislation took was to enforce full disclosure of the commercial aspects of speech, and to make sure that commercial means were not used to escape political consequences of speech. That's why you hear "I approved this message".
This ordinance looks like a minor piece of accountability legislation. It says that if you spend more than $1000 in any venue performing electioneering for a candidate, you have to register. This is so that accurate information about election funding can be kept as part of the public record. That is all. This is a restriction in that you are forced to disclose this information to the public, but they're not preventing you from saying anything, and it only applies to the commercial component of your speech.
This is much ado about nothing. Political demonstrations and public gatherings are about the most protected form of political speech there is, but in the United States you have to remain inside designated fenced-in areas or they'll arrest you for leaving your "First Amendment Zone".
So it's been a week. How did the caffeine pill trick work out for you?
Ok, so, it works something like this.
1) You plug your car into the house.
2) Your house gets electricty from "somewhere."
3) That somewhere is a diesel fired power plant.
4) The electric company notifies the cops of your excessive electricity usage.
5) Armed narcotics agents arrive with a search warrant and ransack your house looking for a grow operation.
You'd have to be nuts to plug a car into the wall if you live in the United States.
And, AFAIK, this form of transportation is emmissionless.
At the point of use, maybe. How does the air get into the tank? A rough rule of thumb is that one kilowatt-hour translates to one pound of coal burned at a power plant.
This might be a good mechanism for a hybrid car- store the energy in a compressed air cylinder instead of a battery. You'd have a little gas or diesel engine continuously filling the tank at a steady rate while you drive around putting variable demands on the stored energy in the tank. Unfortunately when you compress the air you heat it, and once it's in the tank it will lose thermal energy to its surroundings. That also means the pressure in the tank goes down. To get near 100% efficiency from a pressurized gas cylinder as an energy storage mechanism, you have to wrap lots of insulation around it to prevent the heat from escaping. This is a problem that the French car undoubtedly has- even if it's plugged in, the air is heated as it enters the tank, and as the air cools to ambient temperature, you lose that energy for good- it's unavailable to the motor later on.
So far, two of you moderators just modded the idea for a AM/FM radio as insightful. I know the iPod was mentioned and you probably got excited but you guys need to focus man, focus.
It was Funny. It was also Insightful, but only because it was Funny in an Ironic way. Unfortunately it was too Subtle for some people to realize it was meant to be a joke, prompting several Clueless posts who have taken the liberty of explaining the punch line to the joke's author, mistaking his Insightfulness for their own. I hate when people do this to my own jokes. Recognizing something as being Funny without realizing it was meant to be Funny means you didn't get the joke!
And here I was ready to build on this Fiasco, by noting that if such a thing were invented today, it would surely be smothered under a swarm of intellectual property motions and lawyers, forced to incorporate scrambling, subscriptions, and licenses. They certainly knew how to innovate a century ago. Nowadays everything has to be against the law unless it Sucks.
It could provide a mechanism for shutting down spam relays in China.
This quote disturbs me though:If I am not standing on your neck, do I not deserve credit for everything you do?
I'm almost tempted to download this thing just to see how it renders Wikipedia's Xenu article.