So... exactly what information is these representatives of the US Government after? The fact that people search for porn? If they remove any identification of who, and thus what, the person is... what's going to tell them that any given search conducted by a wide-eyed innocent (queue Bush jokes) vs. a consenting adult?
IANAL, but.
The government has tried repeatedly to censor the Internet over the past decade. The stated intention is to prevent minors from accessing material deemed harmful to minors, and whenever the issue comes up, elected officials of both parties fall all over themselves to make it look like they're doing all they can to protect the children (won't somebody please think of the children?!?)
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) passed about 7-1/2 years ago; it set a penalty of $50,000 and/or six months imprisonment on anyone who, for commercial purposes, makes information available online deemed harmful to children, without performing adequate checks on a user's age (e.g. credit card verification or user certificate). The Supreme Court blocked enforcement of the act because it intruded on protected First Amendment speech and because the government had failed to prove that the intent of the law could not be achieved through less intrusive means than, say, commercial filtering products that parents can buy and install on their own computers.
I expect that the government's intention here is two-fold.
First, they want to demonstrate that the problem of material "harmful to minors" is so widespread that no filtering product can be effective in blocking access, thus reopening the door to punishments levied against Web publishers. They don't have evidence of that themselves, so they're trying to force Google to make the case for them.
Second, they're trying to shove the camel's nose into Google's tent--to set a precedent for future demands. If they can demand information on legal, constitutionally protected searches, they can demand it for anything. Google will become just another input into Bush's Orwellian data mining universe.
And you know, just because they went and tried to ask for the computers without a warrant doesn't mean they didn't have just cause to obtain one. Getting a warrant takes a bit of time, and it's not unreasonable to assume that they were merely trying to be expeditious and hoping the librarian would cooperate.
'Cause yeah, if you don't have anything to hide, why wouldn't you want the FBI seizing all your computers?
Sorry... There's plenty of information that's legal but none of the government's business. What do you want to see happen? "Well, this computer has nothing about the bomb threat on it...but the cache shows that two weeks ago, this guy here was lookin' at porn, let's keep an eye on him. And this woman here emailed a friend of hers a long rant about the Alito nomination--let's put both of them on a watch list, they could be a threat..."
People in this country are a bunch of pusillanimous cowards who start cowering in terror anytime someone with a tan and a black beard even looks at them, and are willing to lock themselves up and throw away the key in the hopes of keeping the big bad terrorists away. Anyone who allows police to conduct a warrantless search & seizure is betraying their own Constitutional birthright, and by fostering an atmosphere where warrantless searches & seizures are common, they betray anyone who insists on defending our rights by making us look suspicious. If the government's entitled to seize something, they'll have no problem getting a warrant. If they're not, why the hell would you let them?
>your solution is not to... not buy my hotdogs anymore
yes, because at the end of the day the only thing that will make Sony/MS/whoever change is if people stop buying their products.
Oh, I think giving the executives who conceived, approved, and managed the implementation of this scheme some nice long prison sentences of the kind the government gleefully metes out to run-of-the-mill malicious hackers would stop this bullshit in its tracks pretty damn quickly.
"Ding, dong, the witch is dead" was edited out of The Wizard of Oz? I don't get it. Why?
Hillary Clinton got offended.
HA! Oh my God, you are so funny!!! I have to go get a paper towel to wipe the coffee off my monitor now. Normally I just ignore any post with a score of less than 5, but I took a chance on this one and damn, did it pay off! Hillary Clinton! I mean, who could have seen something like that coming? I thought Rush Limbaugh had sucked the life out of any Hillary Clinton joke in the early '90s, but no, you found a way to breathe fresh new life into gratuitous Hillary bashing. Who knew that comic timing could be measured in decades? You, sir, are a comic genius. No, seriously. I don't think anyone in the world could possibly be funnier than you. Have you thought of sending this to anyone in Hollywood? You could be a writer for Jay Leno or somebody. Ahh...ha ha! Hillary Clinton. Brilliant! I think I just peed myself a little.
If your state is being "unfairly" (pshhh...) "losing" tax revenues to cheaper locales, then lower your taxes or find other ways to compete. It is not the responsibility of a business or individual in another state to prop up your state's failing business model.
Businesses aren't the ones paying these sales taxes; consumers (i.e., citizens) pay them. Businesses handle the collection because they keep records of their sales, and auditing those records is far easier than hunting down millions of people in the state to demand a full accounting of all their purchases. And complaints of the complexity of sales tax collection are bogus. Companies handle that kind of complexity all the time. I'm supposed to believe that Wal-Mart can collect sales tax at different rates on different products in every large, medium, and small town in America but can't work out how to do it for their online store? Or that amazon.com can maintain an inventory of millions of products in warehouses all across the country, but can't figure out how those products should be taxed?
And don't talk about "business models". Government isn't supposed to be run as a business, and usually operates at its worst when someone tries to impose such a model on it. If you don't like how you're taxed, call your state legislators and complain to them...but if you buy out of state to avoid taxes, you're just screwing your fellow citizens over by not paying your fair share for the services that you are taking advantage of.
I am ashamed of myself. But my last job was tech support and I made $9.75 and hour. Here I make about $28 an hour. As soon as I save enough for a down payment for a house I'm getting out of here.
Good, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. What you're doing--not AOL, the faceless corporate entity, but you, personally--is deliberate fraud. The fact that you feel shame means nothing as long as you keep doing it. If we lived in a just society, you, your coworkers, and the executives who've viewed this as acceptable business practices would all be rotting in jail for it. But we don't. So I can do is hope that whatever house you buy, with the stolen money you receive from the people you cheat, is always as cold and empty as your heart.
Of course, the insurance companies have a little secret that affects premiums as much or more than claims - the performance of market bonds. You see, they invest a large portion of you premiums in stable, liquid bonds in order to make a return on the reserve which they must keep to pay premiums. When the market is poor, such as it has been for the last 4-6 years, insurance rates rise significatnly. Why? They count on that return to add to their bottom line. If they anticipate making 8% on their portfolio each year, and the market gives them 3%, the "consumer" must make up the difference - hence higher premiums.
Right. Poor bond returns are the cause of skyrocketing insurance rates, and those bastards in Congress claim it's all the fault of bogus medical malpractice and product liability lawsuits, as a pretext for demanding anti-consumer tort "reform" laws.
Given that, what I have to wonder is, where's the incentive for a company to be successful if they are going to be punished for it later when a smaller competitor tries to enter the market?
I know...I mean, I slave away to build this astounding platform--er, well, actually, my employees slave away on it for a hundred hours a week or so. But I come up with these brilliant ideas--er, OK, I see my competitors coming up with them, so I swipe 'em and build 'em into my products. But people love my products, even though they only just sorta work. At least they seem to love them, because they keep buying them, not like they have much of a choice.
But then the government comes along and accuses me of criminal activities...and as a result of those, I actually end up making slightly smaller mountains of cash! And they said if I keep engaging in these so-called illegal activities, they'll tell me to stop again! I mean, jeez, sometimes I just spend a whole day sullenly bouncing up and down in my trampoline room wondering if all these billions are really worth it.
21% of the tax returns pay roughly 55.9% of the Federal Income Tax, the 6836 at the top, pay 3% of the Federal Income Tax
It's grossly unfair for the top n% of taxpayers to pay >n% of total taxes, and even these flat tax proposals going around don't adequately address this grotesque injustice. I suggest that instead of our current "progressive" system or any of these half-assed flat tax rate schemes, we just charge everyone a flat amount.
Obviously we can't charge children until we get rid of these antiquated child labor laws and make them productive members of society. But given a budget of about $2.5 trillion, that should work out to a ballpark figure of about $10,000 per worker.
Sure, it's a bitter pill for some people to swallow--it's roughly 100% of the gross salary of someone working full time for minimum wage. But hey, if that's not an incentive to work harder and find a better-paying job, then what is?
Your money is going to support molesters- The ACLU defends NAMBLA.
Yes, the ACLU does ensure that as odious as NAMBLA may be, their constitutionally guaranteed right to legal representation is honored.
You support molesters? You support their "rights"
Are NAMBLA molesters? I'm not up on their membership requirements; do applicants have to submit proof that they've actually buggered a 9-year-old before they're allowed to join? Oh, but I forgot...simply accusing someone of a crime makes them guilty of it. And demanding that the government follow the law in dealing with accused criminals is synonymous with advocating crime.
I do support NAMBLA's rights, sans sarcastic quotes, even though I find their views repugnant. There's nothing in the Constitution saying your legal rights are protected unless you're a really really bad person. You, on the other hand, assume that the accused are guilty until proven innocent, and you proclaim that due process rights should be preemptively denied to people whom you merely suspect belong to some arbitrary group you object to. You think your position is moral and righteous and just, but really, it's just craven and unprincipled. You would take away legal rights for molesters. Others would do the same for white supremacists, abortionists, illegal aliens, pornographers, homosexuals, Muslims, Democrats...and sooner or later, someone you approve of is getting hauled away for something, and you have no basis for complaining because you were cheering all along right up to the point where it started hitting close to home.
The Bill of Rights doesn't exist to defend what is popular or uncontroversial...it exists to protect the dangerous, the threatening, the outrageous. Because as bad as molesters are, the power of an out-of-control government stamping out everything it finds objectionable is infinitely worse.
Problem is, no one can oppose this bill. It'd be like the trouble Kerry got into x100
Fine. Then let it pass 55-0, with 45 abstentions. If the Republicans want something to pass, they can make it happen without a single Democratic vote. So why give them a single vote? Abstention sends the message that the Democrats refuse to go along with this cryptofascist agenda while at the same dodging the "my opponent voted against mom, apple pie, and the baby Jesus" crap.
I don't see this as being a real issue of concern, since in order to guarantee no judicial review, the Supreme Court would have to agree that Congress has the right to forbid judicial review. I seriously doubt that they would assent to that, especially since the Supreme Court gave themselves the right to review laws for constitutionality in the first place.
Unfortunately, although it has never (to my knowledge) done so, Congress does theoretically have the right to forbid judicial review under the Constitution. See Article III, Section 2, clause 2: "...the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."
I am opposed to gay marriage. I am not disturbed or in denial. I am a Christian.
The issue is the definition of marriage. It's not just a legal concept. If it were then Christians wouldn't care.
Of course they care. You say (putting it paraphrastically) that you have no problem with civil unions. But just about every anti-gay-marriage bill, law, or constitutional amendment out there attempts to prohibit not only same-sex marriage, but also civil unions, and often domestic partnerships or any other method for obtaining any of legal benefits of marriage through some other means.
It's not that the religious right simply wants to keep The Institution of Marriage under their control...they don't want gay people to have relationships, period, and do everything they can to keep them from deriving any tangible social benefit from doing so. (Presumably that's so they can keep saying how immoral gay people are because they're so promiscuous and they're incapable of having stable relationships.)
Sure it is. Anti-discrimination laws elevate specific classes of persons or their attributes to a protected status. That is, by definition, a "special right."
Anti-discrimination laws make no mention of a preferred class of people. They're written in a completely neutral way and apply equally to all, e.g. "it is illegal to fire someone on the basis of their race, gender, or sexual orientation"--not "it is illegal to fire someone for being black, female, or gay."
Why on earth would I (or anyone) use this? The entire point of email is communicating with people. If I got an "email 2.0" address, but nobody who needs to email me has one, what would be the point in me having it?
If that's really your attitude, then what are you doing posting to Slashdot instead to comp.mail.misc or something? Don't you feel like you're contributing to the balkanization of discussion forums on the Internet? If you want to converse, then USENET is the appropriate place to do it.
Why? Because if you did that, it'd just be you, the spammers, and the tumbleweeds. People moved on. Discussion sites like Yahoo! Groups, Slashdot, K5, blog comments, etc. may lack the uniform interface, anonymity, convenience, distributed architecture, etc. of USENET, but people were willing to sacrifice these, along with the ability to communicate with other USENET participants, just to get away from the spam. And if you think that people would forego an innovative new system that genuinely addressed the problems with existing email, just because they wouldn't be able to use it to communicate with everyone else in the world on Day 1, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of Internet history and your fellow Internet users. Personally, I think the existing system wouldn't last as long as Gopher did once HTTP came along.
I wish I had made more friends while in highschool / college. Instead i spent too much time alone. Either studying, playing videogames or chatting on irc. And now that I want to make new friends, I CAN'T. I work fulltime.
So, make sure you make friends in college. It might be your last chance.
I can see where you're coming from; I'm really introverted and have a hard time meeting new people. But I've got a small circle of really close friends and a much larger one of people to hang out with, all of whom I've met after college.
First of all, there's a fatalism in your attitude that you need to get over. As an adult, the only person who can tell you "you can't" is you. "I can't" is basically synonymous with "I don't want to," or at least "I don't want to badly enough." And as for something being "your last chance," that is, to put it bluntly, a load of crap. Unless somebody involved is at or near death, there's no such thing as a "last chance." If something is a priority for you, you find a way to do it. So you work full time...so what? A job is just a job. If it's not bringing you joy and it's interfering in what you want out of life, then you need to do something about that. It can be as drastic as quitting and finding something else, or as simple as adjusting your attitude to make sure you leave at a reasonable hour or making sure you take a vacation when you can instead of telling yourself you've got too much to do. (One day a few years ago, I was at work at 3 a.m. after putting in seventy hours in four days. Three hours later, I was in the hospital with a burst appendix. Since then, I've rarely stayed at work past 6 p.m. It's just not worth it.)
Secondly, you need to get out more. If you're stuck in a rut, you're going to stay there as long as you keep the same habits. The Internet may be a viable social venue for some (I managed to find a dozen of my closest friends there, including my husband), but if you haven't been able to put "chatting on IRC" and "finding friends" together, it's probably not for you. Put yourself in situations where you're forced to interact with other people with similar interests. Take a class in photography or cooking or painting. Find a local softball league. Get involved with some kind of organization that suits your interests. Whatever. You do have time; if you don't, and if you're serious about wanting to meet people, then make time.
Thirdly, keep your eyes, ears, and above all, mind open. Random opportunities will present themselves; don't be afraid to pursue new interests, even on a whim. (A friend of mine knew someone who was starting a snowboarding group; my friend wanted to try it and asked me if I was interested. I had never even considered it before, but decided to go, and I was hooked immediately. Today, the group has almost a hundred members, I'm the VP & webmaster, and I hang out with about one or two dozen people every other weekend.)
And I bet none of them were conservatives; so much for diversity.
Yeah, with Greg Mankiw on leave while he's off in Washington running the economy into the ground--er, providing wise counsel to our beloved president on economic matters, the lefties are having a field day on campus, making sure the quantum physicists and geneticists will all be useful drones within the Marxist hive mind of higher education.
Is there any way to acutallyprovethat a message is encrypted, as opposed to being just random garbage data that two people happened to mail to each other?
I realize that the chances of a judge buying this is going to be small, but is there a defense there? Wouldn't someone have to be able to produce the plaintext first, before they could claim that you were trying to send encrypted messages?
Depends. If you and your spy friends are using a one-time pad, there's no way to prove that a message is encrypted, or what the message is.
But if you're using PGP, no, you wouldn't need to produce the plaintext to prove that it's encrypted instead of purely random. PGP has a well-defined message format that includes not just encrypted data but also things like format version identifiers, subpacket identifiers and lengths, key IDs, algorithm identifiers, etc. (This goes beyond the "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----" delimiters, which are only included in text output, when the message is Base64 encoded.)
All a prosecutor would need to do is demonstrate the presence of such values embedded within the "random" data to show that it's encrypted.
We're the users. That's our right as users. If nobody questions the decision to remove features, then how does Google know what features we liked?
Many of us are also the authors. Google is doing us a wonderful service by providing access to this, but they don't generate the content, we do. And for us to question their removal of these features is no less valid than for authors to question a publisher's decision to remove the indexes for their books.
Glass Half Full?
Better that some good come of it than none.
i.e. "Sure, we may be throwing out the baby, but at least we're saving the bath water..."
Glass Half Empty? The political process is already totally undermined. The question is, do we want to fight to win, or fight to feel good about ourselves?
Depends. Some things call for compromise; others don't. When someone says "you have these rights; I want to take them away. But let's compromise and I'll only take away some...but in return, I'll give you a free Infocom game," well, sorry, but no deal.
We need work within the system but work to restore its integrity; we tolerate what we can, and fight what we must.
Glass Too Big Just because our pet senator puts a rider in doesn't mean he has to vote for the bill. That's the benefit of tacking it on to something that is stupidly popular, he can put the rider and then the idiots have to decide if their redneck constituency is more important than their corporate constituency.
To those politicians that capitalize on the Shi'ite Christian vote, corporate donations are all well and good, but in the end, constitutional fag-bashing registers higher in their supporters' consciousness than details of copyright law. You also run the risk of politicians who don't care one way or the other about a hot-button issue, but might see the copyright rider as an incentive to vote for the bill.
Besides, if the corporations get upset, you can just throw them some other bone, like a tax on all consumer sales of recordable media paid into an industry group.
If we could just get them to slip it in as a rider on some big noisy and unrelated bill. We should target something ridiculously popular, like the anti-gay marriage brigade or the anti-flag burning bozos. Tag a secret little rider for copyright reform onto one of their bills and we could turn a bad thing into a good one.
I think that's a deplorable idea--it combines undermining open political process with tolerance for repugnant social policies.
I'm an ardent supporter of copyright reform. I'm also a married gay person (yay Massachusetts). If you ask me to choose one or the other, what do you think my decision will be? And in the future, do you think I would remember you as someone who tried to make a bad law less bad, or someone who suported depriving me of my civil rights in order to promote your own agenda?
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but.
The government has tried repeatedly to censor the Internet over the past decade. The stated intention is to prevent minors from accessing material deemed harmful to minors, and whenever the issue comes up, elected officials of both parties fall all over themselves to make it look like they're doing all they can to protect the children (won't somebody please think of the children?!?)
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) passed about 7-1/2 years ago; it set a penalty of $50,000 and/or six months imprisonment on anyone who, for commercial purposes, makes information available online deemed harmful to children, without performing adequate checks on a user's age (e.g. credit card verification or user certificate). The Supreme Court blocked enforcement of the act because it intruded on protected First Amendment speech and because the government had failed to prove that the intent of the law could not be achieved through less intrusive means than, say, commercial filtering products that parents can buy and install on their own computers.
I expect that the government's intention here is two-fold.
First, they want to demonstrate that the problem of material "harmful to minors" is so widespread that no filtering product can be effective in blocking access, thus reopening the door to punishments levied against Web publishers. They don't have evidence of that themselves, so they're trying to force Google to make the case for them.
Second, they're trying to shove the camel's nose into Google's tent--to set a precedent for future demands. If they can demand information on legal, constitutionally protected searches, they can demand it for anything. Google will become just another input into Bush's Orwellian data mining universe.
'Cause yeah, if you don't have anything to hide, why wouldn't you want the FBI seizing all your computers?
Sorry... There's plenty of information that's legal but none of the government's business. What do you want to see happen? "Well, this computer has nothing about the bomb threat on it...but the cache shows that two weeks ago, this guy here was lookin' at porn, let's keep an eye on him. And this woman here emailed a friend of hers a long rant about the Alito nomination--let's put both of them on a watch list, they could be a threat..."
People in this country are a bunch of pusillanimous cowards who start cowering in terror anytime someone with a tan and a black beard even looks at them, and are willing to lock themselves up and throw away the key in the hopes of keeping the big bad terrorists away. Anyone who allows police to conduct a warrantless search & seizure is betraying their own Constitutional birthright, and by fostering an atmosphere where warrantless searches & seizures are common, they betray anyone who insists on defending our rights by making us look suspicious. If the government's entitled to seize something, they'll have no problem getting a warrant. If they're not, why the hell would you let them?
Oh, I think giving the executives who conceived, approved, and managed the implementation of this scheme some nice long prison sentences of the kind the government gleefully metes out to run-of-the-mill malicious hackers would stop this bullshit in its tracks pretty damn quickly.
Except that they didn't. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of your opinions or anything...
You could give every passenger and crew member a really nasty paper cut.
HA! Oh my God, you are so funny!!! I have to go get a paper towel to wipe the coffee off my monitor now. Normally I just ignore any post with a score of less than 5, but I took a chance on this one and damn, did it pay off! Hillary Clinton! I mean, who could have seen something like that coming? I thought Rush Limbaugh had sucked the life out of any Hillary Clinton joke in the early '90s, but no, you found a way to breathe fresh new life into gratuitous Hillary bashing. Who knew that comic timing could be measured in decades? You, sir, are a comic genius. No, seriously. I don't think anyone in the world could possibly be funnier than you. Have you thought of sending this to anyone in Hollywood? You could be a writer for Jay Leno or somebody. Ahh...ha ha! Hillary Clinton. Brilliant! I think I just peed myself a little.
Businesses aren't the ones paying these sales taxes; consumers (i.e., citizens) pay them. Businesses handle the collection because they keep records of their sales, and auditing those records is far easier than hunting down millions of people in the state to demand a full accounting of all their purchases. And complaints of the complexity of sales tax collection are bogus. Companies handle that kind of complexity all the time. I'm supposed to believe that Wal-Mart can collect sales tax at different rates on different products in every large, medium, and small town in America but can't work out how to do it for their online store? Or that amazon.com can maintain an inventory of millions of products in warehouses all across the country, but can't figure out how those products should be taxed?
And don't talk about "business models". Government isn't supposed to be run as a business, and usually operates at its worst when someone tries to impose such a model on it. If you don't like how you're taxed, call your state legislators and complain to them...but if you buy out of state to avoid taxes, you're just screwing your fellow citizens over by not paying your fair share for the services that you are taking advantage of.
Good, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. What you're doing--not AOL, the faceless corporate entity, but you, personally--is deliberate fraud. The fact that you feel shame means nothing as long as you keep doing it. If we lived in a just society, you, your coworkers, and the executives who've viewed this as acceptable business practices would all be rotting in jail for it. But we don't. So I can do is hope that whatever house you buy, with the stolen money you receive from the people you cheat, is always as cold and empty as your heart.
Right. Poor bond returns are the cause of skyrocketing insurance rates, and those bastards in Congress claim it's all the fault of bogus medical malpractice and product liability lawsuits, as a pretext for demanding anti-consumer tort "reform" laws.
I know...I mean, I slave away to build this astounding platform--er, well, actually, my employees slave away on it for a hundred hours a week or so. But I come up with these brilliant ideas--er, OK, I see my competitors coming up with them, so I swipe 'em and build 'em into my products. But people love my products, even though they only just sorta work. At least they seem to love them, because they keep buying them, not like they have much of a choice.
But then the government comes along and accuses me of criminal activities...and as a result of those, I actually end up making slightly smaller mountains of cash! And they said if I keep engaging in these so-called illegal activities, they'll tell me to stop again! I mean, jeez, sometimes I just spend a whole day sullenly bouncing up and down in my trampoline room wondering if all these billions are really worth it.
-- Bill
That's irrelevant. Borders doesn't pay the tax--their California customers do, i.e. the people who do benefit from those services.
It's grossly unfair for the top n% of taxpayers to pay >n% of total taxes, and even these flat tax proposals going around don't adequately address this grotesque injustice. I suggest that instead of our current "progressive" system or any of these half-assed flat tax rate schemes, we just charge everyone a flat amount.
Obviously we can't charge children until we get rid of these antiquated child labor laws and make them productive members of society. But given a budget of about $2.5 trillion, that should work out to a ballpark figure of about $10,000 per worker.
Sure, it's a bitter pill for some people to swallow--it's roughly 100% of the gross salary of someone working full time for minimum wage. But hey, if that's not an incentive to work harder and find a better-paying job, then what is?
Yes, the ACLU does ensure that as odious as NAMBLA may be, their constitutionally guaranteed right to legal representation is honored.
Are NAMBLA molesters? I'm not up on their membership requirements; do applicants have to submit proof that they've actually buggered a 9-year-old before they're allowed to join? Oh, but I forgot...simply accusing someone of a crime makes them guilty of it. And demanding that the government follow the law in dealing with accused criminals is synonymous with advocating crime.
I do support NAMBLA's rights, sans sarcastic quotes, even though I find their views repugnant. There's nothing in the Constitution saying your legal rights are protected unless you're a really really bad person. You, on the other hand, assume that the accused are guilty until proven innocent, and you proclaim that due process rights should be preemptively denied to people whom you merely suspect belong to some arbitrary group you object to. You think your position is moral and righteous and just, but really, it's just craven and unprincipled. You would take away legal rights for molesters. Others would do the same for white supremacists, abortionists, illegal aliens, pornographers, homosexuals, Muslims, Democrats...and sooner or later, someone you approve of is getting hauled away for something, and you have no basis for complaining because you were cheering all along right up to the point where it started hitting close to home.
The Bill of Rights doesn't exist to defend what is popular or uncontroversial...it exists to protect the dangerous, the threatening, the outrageous. Because as bad as molesters are, the power of an out-of-control government stamping out everything it finds objectionable is infinitely worse.
I feel fantastic, thanks.
Fine. Then let it pass 55-0, with 45 abstentions. If the Republicans want something to pass, they can make it happen without a single Democratic vote. So why give them a single vote? Abstention sends the message that the Democrats refuse to go along with this cryptofascist agenda while at the same dodging the "my opponent voted against mom, apple pie, and the baby Jesus" crap.
Unfortunately, although it has never (to my knowledge) done so, Congress does theoretically have the right to forbid judicial review under the Constitution. See Article III, Section 2, clause 2: "...the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."
Of course they care. You say (putting it paraphrastically) that you have no problem with civil unions. But just about every anti-gay-marriage bill, law, or constitutional amendment out there attempts to prohibit not only same-sex marriage, but also civil unions, and often domestic partnerships or any other method for obtaining any of legal benefits of marriage through some other means.
It's not that the religious right simply wants to keep The Institution of Marriage under their control...they don't want gay people to have relationships, period, and do everything they can to keep them from deriving any tangible social benefit from doing so. (Presumably that's so they can keep saying how immoral gay people are because they're so promiscuous and they're incapable of having stable relationships.)
Anti-discrimination laws make no mention of a preferred class of people. They're written in a completely neutral way and apply equally to all, e.g. "it is illegal to fire someone on the basis of their race, gender, or sexual orientation"--not "it is illegal to fire someone for being black, female, or gay."
If that's really your attitude, then what are you doing posting to Slashdot instead to comp.mail.misc or something? Don't you feel like you're contributing to the balkanization of discussion forums on the Internet? If you want to converse, then USENET is the appropriate place to do it.
Why? Because if you did that, it'd just be you, the spammers, and the tumbleweeds. People moved on. Discussion sites like Yahoo! Groups, Slashdot, K5, blog comments, etc. may lack the uniform interface, anonymity, convenience, distributed architecture, etc. of USENET, but people were willing to sacrifice these, along with the ability to communicate with other USENET participants, just to get away from the spam. And if you think that people would forego an innovative new system that genuinely addressed the problems with existing email, just because they wouldn't be able to use it to communicate with everyone else in the world on Day 1, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of Internet history and your fellow Internet users. Personally, I think the existing system wouldn't last as long as Gopher did once HTTP came along.
I can see where you're coming from; I'm really introverted and have a hard time meeting new people. But I've got a small circle of really close friends and a much larger one of people to hang out with, all of whom I've met after college.
First of all, there's a fatalism in your attitude that you need to get over. As an adult, the only person who can tell you "you can't" is you. "I can't" is basically synonymous with "I don't want to," or at least "I don't want to badly enough." And as for something being "your last chance," that is, to put it bluntly, a load of crap. Unless somebody involved is at or near death, there's no such thing as a "last chance." If something is a priority for you, you find a way to do it. So you work full time...so what? A job is just a job. If it's not bringing you joy and it's interfering in what you want out of life, then you need to do something about that. It can be as drastic as quitting and finding something else, or as simple as adjusting your attitude to make sure you leave at a reasonable hour or making sure you take a vacation when you can instead of telling yourself you've got too much to do. (One day a few years ago, I was at work at 3 a.m. after putting in seventy hours in four days. Three hours later, I was in the hospital with a burst appendix. Since then, I've rarely stayed at work past 6 p.m. It's just not worth it.)
Secondly, you need to get out more. If you're stuck in a rut, you're going to stay there as long as you keep the same habits. The Internet may be a viable social venue for some (I managed to find a dozen of my closest friends there, including my husband), but if you haven't been able to put "chatting on IRC" and "finding friends" together, it's probably not for you. Put yourself in situations where you're forced to interact with other people with similar interests. Take a class in photography or cooking or painting. Find a local softball league. Get involved with some kind of organization that suits your interests. Whatever. You do have time; if you don't, and if you're serious about wanting to meet people, then make time.
Thirdly, keep your eyes, ears, and above all, mind open. Random opportunities will present themselves; don't be afraid to pursue new interests, even on a whim. (A friend of mine knew someone who was starting a snowboarding group; my friend wanted to try it and asked me if I was interested. I had never even considered it before, but decided to go, and I was hooked immediately. Today, the group has almost a hundred members, I'm the VP & webmaster, and I hang out with about one or two dozen people every other weekend.)
Yeah, with Greg Mankiw on leave while he's off in Washington running the economy into the ground--er, providing wise counsel to our beloved president on economic matters, the lefties are having a field day on campus, making sure the quantum physicists and geneticists will all be useful drones within the Marxist hive mind of higher education.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Depends. If you and your spy friends are using a one-time pad, there's no way to prove that a message is encrypted, or what the message is.
But if you're using PGP, no, you wouldn't need to produce the plaintext to prove that it's encrypted instead of purely random. PGP has a well-defined message format that includes not just encrypted data but also things like format version identifiers, subpacket identifiers and lengths, key IDs, algorithm identifiers, etc. (This goes beyond the "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----" delimiters, which are only included in text output, when the message is Base64 encoded.)
All a prosecutor would need to do is demonstrate the presence of such values embedded within the "random" data to show that it's encrypted.
We're the users. That's our right as users. If nobody questions the decision to remove features, then how does Google know what features we liked?
Many of us are also the authors. Google is doing us a wonderful service by providing access to this, but they don't generate the content, we do. And for us to question their removal of these features is no less valid than for authors to question a publisher's decision to remove the indexes for their books.
i.e. "Sure, we may be throwing out the baby, but at least we're saving the bath water..."
Depends. Some things call for compromise; others don't. When someone says "you have these rights; I want to take them away. But let's compromise and I'll only take away some...but in return, I'll give you a free Infocom game," well, sorry, but no deal.
We need work within the system but work to restore its integrity; we tolerate what we can, and fight what we must.
To those politicians that capitalize on the Shi'ite Christian vote, corporate donations are all well and good, but in the end, constitutional fag-bashing registers higher in their supporters' consciousness than details of copyright law. You also run the risk of politicians who don't care one way or the other about a hot-button issue, but might see the copyright rider as an incentive to vote for the bill.
Besides, if the corporations get upset, you can just throw them some other bone, like a tax on all consumer sales of recordable media paid into an industry group.
I think that's a deplorable idea--it combines undermining open political process with tolerance for repugnant social policies.
I'm an ardent supporter of copyright reform. I'm also a married gay person (yay Massachusetts). If you ask me to choose one or the other, what do you think my decision will be? And in the future, do you think I would remember you as someone who tried to make a bad law less bad, or someone who suported depriving me of my civil rights in order to promote your own agenda?