You can do the taping from the inside, and in fact you only need to seal one part of the house. In most cases there would be no point in trying to seal of the entire house.
Suffocation is a risk for people who are foolish enough to seal their entire house well in advance of any attack, or warning. For those who are less foolish there is little risk - you only need to stay in the sealed area for a short period of time after the attack. Chemical weapons tend to disipate quite quickly.
Most cultures with a common land tradition also have a set of rules for governing land use that avoids such tragedies
A commons is a resource that everyone is free to use as they wish. What history really shows is that commons are (ha ha) relatively uncommon. Societies do not leave resources as commons because of the problems that result from doing so. Instead they come up with systems that limited what individuals could do with such resources. Sometimes that meant a system of private property, where individuals got to control some part of the resource, sometimes a system of collective property, where some collective body would control the resource, but in almost every case resources were not left as commons.
Of course you are right that western observers often failed to recognise the systems of management set up in other societies, especially when these did not resemble the kinds of systems that had arisen in Europe.
Not true. Napoleon's basic tactic was to draft soldiers and throw them at his enemy till he won. He managed to kill millions of his own french citizens. That more than stacks up with 20th century atrocities.
Conscription certainly played an important role in the Napoleon's strategy, but the idea of war by attrition did not. In WWI the number of dead in a single battle exceeded 1 million (battle of the Somme). No battle in the Napoleonic Wars even came close to lasting as long or causing as many deaths. Although Napoleon did lose hundreds of thousands of his men in the Russian campaign, this was in the course of a long and disaterous retreat, not in the course of executing a plan in which such casualties were expected.
Just consider the differences between the prevailing attitudes towards Napoleon's retreat from Russia, and the battle of the Somme. The retreat from Russia was widely regarded as a disaster for Napoleon that destroyed his reputation for invincibility and lost him the support of many of his allies. In stark contrast the battle of the Somme was claimed as a victory by the Allies, even though they lost 600,000 men, because estimates for German casualties were even higher.
So I stand by my original claim that the early 20th century marked a low point in the valuation of human life. Lots of people died in the Napoleonic wars, but no one on any side ever planned to win those wars simply by racking up a higher body count than everyone else.
why did the United States drop two atomic bombs are civilian targets in Japan? I do not understand why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targetted for these attacks.
Actually only Hiroshima was a civillian target. Although it contained some indistry that was useful to the war effort, it was no more important to the war effort than most other cities. Nagasaki however was the location of a major navel base and was primarily a military target.
The intentional bombing of civillian populations, as opposed to killing civillians while bombing primarily military targets, was a common feature of the strategies adopted by all of the main participants in WWII. Arguably Germany started the practice in the Spanish Civil war, and continued it with the bombing of civilian populations in the Battle of Britain. The allies later perfected the tactics of population bombing with the development of firebombing tactics and nuclear weapons.
At the time it was widely recognised that the outcome of a war depended less on what happened on any particular battlefield, and more on the economic power of each side. Thus the bombing of civillians, with the aim of reducing production capacity, was generally recognised as an acceptable strategy.
True enough, but surely an over-simplification. In the 19th century you can find lots of examples where human life was not sufficiently valued, but it is very hard to find the sorts of extreme examples, of human life being treated as entirely disposable, that you can find in the 20th century.
One of the really astounding features of attitudes towards the value of human life in the early 20th century is that even liberal democratic states often viewed their own citizens as disposable material. Consider the way that the British conducted war in WWI. Attrition was not just an accidental featrure of WWI, it was actually the strategy adopted by the British (and most other nations). Men would be flung at enemy defenses, just as artillery shells would be flung at the same defenses, until those defenses crumbled. The loss of human life was entirely acceptable, so long as the loss of human life on the other side exceeded the loss on your own side. Prior to WWI warfare had almost never reached such an extreme level of brutality, and had almost never produced such high casualty rates.
That is just one example taken from the policies of a relatively enlightened nation. If you look at some of the other things that went on between 1900 and 1960 you can find far worse - from the industrialised extermination of the holocaust to campaigns of mass starvation in Russia and China.
Attitudes towards the value of human life have had an up-and-down ride. I agree that the general trend has been up, but the first half of the 20th century marked a major departure from that trend.
Both are actually required as evidence in ongoing investigations. No doubt some bits of the WTC, at this very late stage, would not be of much use to anyone, but even the smallest fragment of the Columbia could be crucial to figuring out what happened. The US is hardly the only country that gets excited when people wander off with bits of evidence from crime scenes and crash investigations.
Unless this nazi regalia is actually needed for some continuing investigation into war crimes there is no real comparison here.
Free distribution in hardcopy to all public libraries would also serve the same purpose.
Although it would also be prohibitively expensive, especially if you wanted to include regulations as well as legislation. Most public libraries would not even have enough space to store a hardcopy of the law.
I am often struck by how the same issues come up again and again in history, and how often past struggles for liberty have to be repeated. This struggle has a pretty long history going back at least to 450 BC. In Rome at that time there was no publicly accessable writen law. Instead the law was preserved by the an upper class (the Patricians) mostly as an oral tradition. Needless to say this put the lower class (the Plebians) at a considerable disadvantage when they went into court. They had no ready way of knowing what the law actually said.
In about 450 BC the Plebians won one of the earliest and most significant victories for equality in the western legal tradition. They forced the publication of the laws. The laws were inscribed on twelve tablets and made accessable to all citizens. This established a pinciple which, has survived to this day, that the law ought to be published. (Twelve Tablets)
Even so there are several new and non-so-new developments that have really undermined this ancient victory for equality. The law has become so complex that no one really knows what all of it says, and only a privileged class of experts really know what any small part of it says. So we are again in a position where most people have no direct access to the law, and where there is a privileged class that serve as intermediaries between the people and the law. This new development of effectively copyrighting parts of the law, or limiting access to legal databases, is really just a continuation of this trend. It stengthens the hold that the wealthy have over access to the legal system.
An explicit arrangement like that would not work. If a US agency is not allowed to do something then typically they are not allowed to get someone else to do it for them. Of course if the British happened to be spying on US citizens, and they happened to come up with some useful intelligence, then they could share it.
Actually that isn't as bad as it might sound at first. Foreign governments do not have the same opportunities to spy on you, it is illegal for them to do so, so you can seek legal redress if they do, and intelligence gathered that way cannot be used as evidence against you in your own country. All things considered, if the Feds really wanted to know something about you then it would be easier just to get a search warrant.
Is therefore safe to assume the Pentagon feels entitled to surveil the rest of the worlds population on the off chance they may spot a terrorist at some point?
Yes they do feel entitled, and they have been doing it for some time - at least since the end of WWII. How do you think they get all those voice intercepts that have been playing at the UN recently?
Really it shouldn't be that surprising that the rights established by the US constitution, or US legislation, don't apply to non-citizens who are not in the US. It would be kinda weird if they did. The US is not the world government yet.
...get a consensus that this is flat-out unconstitutional and declare it as such, and make it clear that this kind of surveillance will never be allowed...
Only the Supreme Court can do that, and even they can change their minds about it.
So the US Government can't tap e-mails of suspected terrorists...
Not quite, it just means that they still need to get search warrants before they start reading their e-mail (inside the US anyway - once it leaves the US it's fair game for the NSA).
Adults also have a right to engage in (consensual) sex with whomever they want. Are you saying children should have that right?
Adults have a right to life. Are you saying that children should not have that right?
Now maybe you see why I didn't even claim that children have the same right to access information, but only a similar right. It is in fact very hard to generalise about which human rights are also children's rights. But what the hell, this is slashdot so why don't we try anyway.
No magical change takes place in a person between their last day of being 17 and their first day of being 18, which suggests that if a person has a whole bunch of human rights at 18, then that person probably had all the same human rights at 17. Typically we do not think that the government has an arbitrary power to determine who has rights and who does not, so if the government is constrained by the rights of an 18 year old, then the government is also constrained by the rights of a 17 year old.
Now it may be that there are good reasons for limiting the rights of children, and presumably those reasons look better the yonger the child is, but it is implausible to think that such reasons would lead to a sharp "on/off" difference between the rights of children and the rights of adults. Hence it is plausible to claim that children have rights that are similar to the rights of adults, and that the older a child is the less difference there is between the rights that he has and the rights of an adult.
What, are they scared of bombs and trade sanctions?
No, they are motivated by exactly the same thing that the US government is motivated by. About 85% of global spending on R&D is spent by just seven countries. One of those countries is the US. Another is japan. Guess where the other other five are. Like the US, the EU makes big piles of cash by exporting intellectual goods. That's why they are following the US lead in intellectual property law - when it comes to intellectual property they they have exactly the same interests that the US has, and they intend to persue them in exactly the same way.
With our current economic climate, the stance of those in charge, and how America currently looks on the global scale to our friends and neighbors, this could be the final straw in a tension build-up of global scale between America and the World.
At worst any dispute over the handling of Microsoft will be quite minor. No one in the EU is interested in starting any kind of trade war with the US because the two sides have too much in common. Take a quick look at the US/EU investment and trade figures:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/us/ in tro/
A trade war between the US and the EU would make about as much sense as a trade war between the East coast and the West coast of the US.
Maybe I just worry too much...
You do, and of course you are not alone in that. Right now relations between the US and parts of the EU are in the worst state that they have been in for years. Even so they are no where near as bad as they appear on the surface. Both sides are playing hardball while they try to move policy over Iraq in the direction that they want. But once the shooting actually starts those tactics will vanish.Just remember that this is all diplomacy - it has almost nothing to do with reality.
In any case what you can expect from the EU regarding Microsoft is just slightly harsher treatment than they got in the US. If the EU really decides that they want to cut into that monopoly they will not do it with the crude tools of anti-trust law. It would be too much easier to do it with government subsidies of open source alternatives.
not because of cute little legalities like that one, but because in the bible, God explicitly prohibits homosexual acts
The bible prohibits a whole lot more besides that. Take Lev 19:19 for example:
You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff.
So far I haven't seen too many christians getting upset about cotton-polyester mixes. Maybe you should take a look here:
This isn't about publishing porn, it's about access to it.
As I said in my first message it isn't about porn at all - except in so far as some of what gets published and then blocked is porn.
As to the distinction between the right to publish and the right to read what is published, the courts figured out long ago that these are two sides of the same coin. The right to publish is not the right to write stuff down and then hide it away where no one can see it. It is the right to write stuff down and give it to anyone who cares to read it. If the government can pick out some part of the population and prohibit them from reading what you publish, then there is nothing to stop them from prohibiting everyone from reading what you publish, which would effectively mean that your right to publish had been taken away.
Free speech means that you get to decide who you will talk to, not the government.
What p2p software needs is a login procedure where a message is displayed that expressly forbids certain classes of individuals from using the network. The classes should be carefully defined so that no mention is made of protected groups (of course) and so that absolutely everyone is covered. Something like "You may not access this network unless your bodyweight is either more than 1000 pounds or less than 10 pounds" would do. Anyone who logs on would be violating the law by gaining unauthorized access to a network.
At this point the proposal probably doesn't seem very promising, but here is the advantage:
Presumably people who were planning to break the law by trading copyrighted material wouldn't be scared of by the warning, but on the other hand, if the RIAA came along with evidence that someone on this network had violated copyright then that alone would be evidence that the RIAA had violated the law, or encouraged someone else to do so.
The internet is a big place, full of all sorts of people. It's a lot like a large city in that respect. Fantastic because it contains so much, but also dangerous because it contains some real wackos. I would not let my children wander the streets of New York at night by themselves, and for much the same reasons I would not let them wander the internet without supervision.
I am all for children learning as much as possible about how the world is, but for the time being I would prefer it if they did not talk to pedophiles about sex, or Nazi's about politics, or Christians about religion.
Of course I am also not going to let some idiot piece of censorware make these sorts of judgements about what they need to know and when. I do supervise my children when they use the web at home, and I expect their teachers to do the same thing at school. If I thought they were relying on censorware to do that job then I would find another school.
Blocking sites of prurient interest does not prevent anyone from accessing those sites, only at public libraries and public schools.
A fairly large segment of the adult US population does not have access to newspapers, books, or the internet, except through public libraries. A very large segment of the child population has no access to these things except through public libraries or through schools. Adults certainly have a 1st amendment right to such access, and children ought to have a similar right.
Even if this were just a matter of preventing access to porn there would be a reasonable 1st amendment argument here. As it happens there is a lot more at stake, and a very strong first amendment argument. The sort of software mandated by CIPA often blocks political sites and health information sites. The courts usually take a dim view of any law which makes it harder for people, especially poor people, to get this kind of information.
I think civil disobedience of copyrights whenever possible (like people are doing now)...
Right now the number of people engaging in civil disobedience is somewhere between zero and not very many. Civil disobedience is not just a matter of breaking the law and then telling yourself that its really ok because the law is bad. Civil disobedience is breaking the law, telling a policeman that you did it, going to court, getting sentenced, accepting your sentence, and going to prison. It works because it makes it obvious to everyone that reasonable people who otherwise respect the law are not able to accept this particular law. It works because it reveals, in a way that is painfully visible to everyone, how power is being abused to make people abide by a law that is immoral.
Back in the 50's and 60's a lot of whites thought that blacks really didn't mind segregation all that much, and that it didn't involve any real coercion. Civil disobedience made it clear that reasonable and law abiding citizens, white and black, did object to the law quite strongly, and that it was being maintained only by means of coercion.
Let me know when you find a few people who are willing to spend a year - or even a night - in jail for the sake of their fair use rights. Then we can talk about a campaign of civil disobedience.
Slashdot Mirror
You can do the taping from the inside, and in fact you only need to seal one part of the house. In most cases there would be no point in trying to seal of the entire house.
Suffocation is a risk for people who are foolish enough to seal their entire house well in advance of any attack, or warning. For those who are less foolish there is little risk - you only need to stay in the sealed area for a short period of time after the attack. Chemical weapons tend to disipate quite quickly.
Most cultures with a common land tradition also have a set of rules for governing land use that avoids such tragedies
A commons is a resource that everyone is free to use as they wish. What history really shows is that commons are (ha ha) relatively uncommon. Societies do not leave resources as commons because of the problems that result from doing so. Instead they come up with systems that limited what individuals could do with such resources. Sometimes that meant a system of private property, where individuals got to control some part of the resource, sometimes a system of collective property, where some collective body would control the resource, but in almost every case resources were not left as commons.
Of course you are right that western observers often failed to recognise the systems of management set up in other societies, especially when these did not resemble the kinds of systems that had arisen in Europe.
Not true. Napoleon's basic tactic was to draft soldiers and throw them at his enemy till he won. He managed to kill millions of his own french citizens. That more than stacks up with 20th century atrocities.
Conscription certainly played an important role in the Napoleon's strategy, but the idea of war by attrition did not. In WWI the number of dead in a single battle exceeded 1 million (battle of the Somme). No battle in the Napoleonic Wars even came close to lasting as long or causing as many deaths. Although Napoleon did lose hundreds of thousands of his men in the Russian campaign, this was in the course of a long and disaterous retreat, not in the course of executing a plan in which such casualties were expected.
Just consider the differences between the prevailing attitudes towards Napoleon's retreat from Russia, and the battle of the Somme. The retreat from Russia was widely regarded as a disaster for Napoleon that destroyed his reputation for invincibility and lost him the support of many of his allies. In stark contrast the battle of the Somme was claimed as a victory by the Allies, even though they lost 600,000 men, because estimates for German casualties were even higher.
So I stand by my original claim that the early 20th century marked a low point in the valuation of human life. Lots of people died in the Napoleonic wars, but no one on any side ever planned to win those wars simply by racking up a higher body count than everyone else.
Know yer history.
Sound advice.
why did the United States drop two atomic bombs are civilian targets in Japan? I do not understand why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targetted for these attacks.
Actually only Hiroshima was a civillian target. Although it contained some indistry that was useful to the war effort, it was no more important to the war effort than most other cities. Nagasaki however was the location of a major navel base and was primarily a military target.
The intentional bombing of civillian populations, as opposed to killing civillians while bombing primarily military targets, was a common feature of the strategies adopted by all of the main participants in WWII. Arguably Germany started the practice in the Spanish Civil war, and continued it with the bombing of civilian populations in the Battle of Britain. The allies later perfected the tactics of population bombing with the development of firebombing tactics and nuclear weapons.
At the time it was widely recognised that the outcome of a war depended less on what happened on any particular battlefield, and more on the economic power of each side. Thus the bombing of civillians, with the aim of reducing production capacity, was generally recognised as an acceptable strategy.
For similar reasons post-war Japanese nuclear weapons programs have also been largely ignored.
You can find a reasonably good summary of Japan's involvement with nuclear weapons technology here:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/japan/nuke/
Prior to the modern era, human life was cheap.
True enough, but surely an over-simplification. In the 19th century you can find lots of examples where human life was not sufficiently valued, but it is very hard to find the sorts of extreme examples, of human life being treated as entirely disposable, that you can find in the 20th century.
One of the really astounding features of attitudes towards the value of human life in the early 20th century is that even liberal democratic states often viewed their own citizens as disposable material. Consider the way that the British conducted war in WWI. Attrition was not just an accidental featrure of WWI, it was actually the strategy adopted by the British (and most other nations). Men would be flung at enemy defenses, just as artillery shells would be flung at the same defenses, until those defenses crumbled. The loss of human life was entirely acceptable, so long as the loss of human life on the other side exceeded the loss on your own side. Prior to WWI warfare had almost never reached such an extreme level of brutality, and had almost never produced such high casualty rates.
That is just one example taken from the policies of a relatively enlightened nation. If you look at some of the other things that went on between 1900 and 1960 you can find far worse - from the industrialised extermination of the holocaust to campaigns of mass starvation in Russia and China.
Attitudes towards the value of human life have had an up-and-down ride. I agree that the general trend has been up, but the first half of the 20th century marked a major departure from that trend.
bits of the WTC or Columbia on eBay
Both are actually required as evidence in ongoing investigations. No doubt some bits of the WTC, at this very late stage, would not be of much use to anyone, but even the smallest fragment of the Columbia could be crucial to figuring out what happened. The US is hardly the only country that gets excited when people wander off with bits of evidence from crime scenes and crash investigations.
Unless this nazi regalia is actually needed for some continuing investigation into war crimes there is no real comparison here.
Free distribution in hardcopy to all public libraries would also serve the same purpose.
Although it would also be prohibitively expensive, especially if you wanted to include regulations as well as legislation. Most public libraries would not even have enough space to store a hardcopy of the law.
I am often struck by how the same issues come up again and again in history, and how often past struggles for liberty have to be repeated. This struggle has a pretty long history going back at least to 450 BC. In Rome at that time there was no publicly accessable writen law. Instead the law was preserved by the an upper class (the Patricians) mostly as an oral tradition. Needless to say this put the lower class (the Plebians) at a considerable disadvantage when they went into court. They had no ready way of knowing what the law actually said.
In about 450 BC the Plebians won one of the earliest and most significant victories for equality in the western legal tradition. They forced the publication of the laws. The laws were inscribed on twelve tablets and made accessable to all citizens. This established a pinciple which, has survived to this day, that the law ought to be published. (Twelve Tablets)
Even so there are several new and non-so-new developments that have really undermined this ancient victory for equality. The law has become so complex that no one really knows what all of it says, and only a privileged class of experts really know what any small part of it says. So we are again in a position where most people have no direct access to the law, and where there is a privileged class that serve as intermediaries between the people and the law. This new development of effectively copyrighting parts of the law, or limiting access to legal databases, is really just a continuation of this trend. It stengthens the hold that the wealthy have over access to the legal system.
An explicit arrangement like that would not work. If a US agency is not allowed to do something then typically they are not allowed to get someone else to do it for them. Of course if the British happened to be spying on US citizens, and they happened to come up with some useful intelligence, then they could share it.
Actually that isn't as bad as it might sound at first. Foreign governments do not have the same opportunities to spy on you, it is illegal for them to do so, so you can seek legal redress if they do, and intelligence gathered that way cannot be used as evidence against you in your own country. All things considered, if the Feds really wanted to know something about you then it would be easier just to get a search warrant.
Is therefore safe to assume the Pentagon feels entitled to surveil the rest of the worlds population on the off chance they may spot a terrorist at some point?
Yes they do feel entitled, and they have been doing it for some time - at least since the end of WWII. How do you think they get all those voice intercepts that have been playing at the UN recently?
Really it shouldn't be that surprising that the rights established by the US constitution, or US legislation, don't apply to non-citizens who are not in the US. It would be kinda weird if they did. The US is not the world government yet.
...get a consensus that this is flat-out unconstitutional and declare it as such, and make it clear that this kind of surveillance will never be allowed...
Only the Supreme Court can do that, and even they can change their minds about it.
So the US Government can't tap e-mails of suspected terrorists...
Not quite, it just means that they still need to get search warrants before they start reading their e-mail (inside the US anyway - once it leaves the US it's fair game for the NSA).
So what?
So maybe you should think carefully about why you accept some of God's prohibitions, but not others.
Adults also have a right to engage in (consensual) sex with whomever they want. Are you saying children should have that right?
Adults have a right to life. Are you saying that children should not have that right?
Now maybe you see why I didn't even claim that children have the same right to access information, but only a similar right. It is in fact very hard to generalise about which human rights are also children's rights. But what the hell, this is slashdot so why don't we try anyway.
No magical change takes place in a person between their last day of being 17 and their first day of being 18, which suggests that if a person has a whole bunch of human rights at 18, then that person probably had all the same human rights at 17. Typically we do not think that the government has an arbitrary power to determine who has rights and who does not, so if the government is constrained by the rights of an 18 year old, then the government is also constrained by the rights of a 17 year old.
Now it may be that there are good reasons for limiting the rights of children, and presumably those reasons look better the yonger the child is, but it is implausible to think that such reasons would lead to a sharp "on/off" difference between the rights of children and the rights of adults. Hence it is plausible to claim that children have rights that are similar to the rights of adults, and that the older a child is the less difference there is between the rights that he has and the rights of an adult.
What, are they scared of bombs and trade sanctions?
No, they are motivated by exactly the same thing that the US government is motivated by. About 85% of global spending on R&D is spent by just seven countries. One of those countries is the US. Another is japan. Guess where the other other five are. Like the US, the EU makes big piles of cash by exporting intellectual goods. That's why they are following the US lead in intellectual property law - when it comes to intellectual property they they have exactly the same interests that the US has, and they intend to persue them in exactly the same way.
With our current economic climate, the stance of those in charge, and how America currently looks on the global scale to our friends and neighbors, this could be the final straw in a tension build-up of global scale between America and the World.
/ in tro/
At worst any dispute over the handling of Microsoft will be quite minor. No one in the EU is interested in starting any kind of trade war with the US because the two sides have too much in common. Take a quick look at the US/EU investment and trade figures:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/us
A trade war between the US and the EU would make about as much sense as a trade war between the East coast and the West coast of the US.
Maybe I just worry too much...
You do, and of course you are not alone in that. Right now relations between the US and parts of the EU are in the worst state that they have been in for years. Even so they are no where near as bad as they appear on the surface. Both sides are playing hardball while they try to move policy over Iraq in the direction that they want. But once the shooting actually starts those tactics will vanish.Just remember that this is all diplomacy - it has almost nothing to do with reality.
In any case what you can expect from the EU regarding Microsoft is just slightly harsher treatment than they got in the US. If the EU really decides that they want to cut into that monopoly they will not do it with the crude tools of anti-trust law. It would be too much easier to do it with government subsidies of open source alternatives.
not because of cute little legalities like that one, but because in the bible, God explicitly prohibits homosexual acts
The bible prohibits a whole lot more besides that. Take Lev 19:19 for example:
You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff.
So far I haven't seen too many christians getting upset about cotton-polyester mixes. Maybe you should take a look here:
http://www.ecwr.org/faqbible.htm
This isn't about publishing porn, it's about access to it.
As I said in my first message it isn't about porn at all - except in so far as some of what gets published and then blocked is porn.
As to the distinction between the right to publish and the right to read what is published, the courts figured out long ago that these are two sides of the same coin. The right to publish is not the right to write stuff down and then hide it away where no one can see it. It is the right to write stuff down and give it to anyone who cares to read it. If the government can pick out some part of the population and prohibit them from reading what you publish, then there is nothing to stop them from prohibiting everyone from reading what you publish, which would effectively mean that your right to publish had been taken away.
Free speech means that you get to decide who you will talk to, not the government.
What p2p software needs is a login procedure where a message is displayed that expressly forbids certain classes of individuals from using the network. The classes should be carefully defined so that no mention is made of protected groups (of course) and so that absolutely everyone is covered. Something like "You may not access this network unless your bodyweight is either more than 1000 pounds or less than 10 pounds" would do. Anyone who logs on would be violating the law by gaining unauthorized access to a network.
At this point the proposal probably doesn't seem very promising, but here is the advantage:
Presumably people who were planning to break the law by trading copyrighted material wouldn't be scared of by the warning, but on the other hand, if the RIAA came along with evidence that someone on this network had violated copyright then that alone would be evidence that the RIAA had violated the law, or encouraged someone else to do so.
The internet is a big place, full of all sorts of people. It's a lot like a large city in that respect. Fantastic because it contains so much, but also dangerous because it contains some real wackos. I would not let my children wander the streets of New York at night by themselves, and for much the same reasons I would not let them wander the internet without supervision.
I am all for children learning as much as possible about how the world is, but for the time being I would prefer it if they did not talk to pedophiles about sex, or Nazi's about politics, or Christians about religion.
Of course I am also not going to let some idiot piece of censorware make these sorts of judgements about what they need to know and when. I do supervise my children when they use the web at home, and I expect their teachers to do the same thing at school. If I thought they were relying on censorware to do that job then I would find another school.
I am willing to spend a night in jail if it will help protect the fair use rights of my fellow citizens. Just tell me what I have to do.
You could start by not posting anonymously. Joining the EFF would probably be a good next step.
Blocking sites of prurient interest does not prevent anyone from accessing those sites, only at public libraries and public schools.
A fairly large segment of the adult US population does not have access to newspapers, books, or the internet, except through public libraries. A very large segment of the child population has no access to these things except through public libraries or through schools. Adults certainly have a 1st amendment right to such access, and children ought to have a similar right.
Even if this were just a matter of preventing access to porn there would be a reasonable 1st amendment argument here. As it happens there is a lot more at stake, and a very strong first amendment argument. The sort of software mandated by CIPA often blocks political sites and health information sites. The courts usually take a dim view of any law which makes it harder for people, especially poor people, to get this kind of information.
I think civil disobedience of copyrights whenever possible (like people are doing now)...
Right now the number of people engaging in civil disobedience is somewhere between zero and not very many. Civil disobedience is not just a matter of breaking the law and then telling yourself that its really ok because the law is bad. Civil disobedience is breaking the law, telling a policeman that you did it, going to court, getting sentenced, accepting your sentence, and going to prison. It works because it makes it obvious to everyone that reasonable people who otherwise respect the law are not able to accept this particular law. It works because it reveals, in a way that is painfully visible to everyone, how power is being abused to make people abide by a law that is immoral.
Back in the 50's and 60's a lot of whites thought that blacks really didn't mind segregation all that much, and that it didn't involve any real coercion. Civil disobedience made it clear that reasonable and law abiding citizens, white and black, did object to the law quite strongly, and that it was being maintained only by means of coercion.
Let me know when you find a few people who are willing to spend a year - or even a night - in jail for the sake of their fair use rights. Then we can talk about a campaign of civil disobedience.
Tinfoil hats will soon be superceded by tinfoil longjohns and tinfoil wallpaper. Time to invest in aluminium futures I think.
Seriously though - this is too easy to beat for anyone who feels the need to.