It is appalling how corporations, mostly US based, have managed to get everybody working to protect their interests. Ofc, they could not have done that alone, they have the US Gov that throws its weight around if need arises.
I'm not sure that "US based" is a particularly meaningful distinction.
Anyone around the world can buy stock in corporations, and where the corporation technically has it's home may have little to do with who is really pulling the strings.
There are many individuals and organizations around the world with vast amounts of wealth, and it would be more reasonable to suppose that these wealthy individuals, or the individuals in charge of these wealthy organizations, collectively control the behavior of the major corporations, than to suppose this is some sort of US plot against the rest of the world.
Also, in all likelihood, most major corporations have citizens of many different countries working for them, which means the policies aren't necessarily being set by US citizens.
Rather than focusing on the "US based" concept, it is probably better to view this situation as involving a multi-nation problem of governments and corporations working together to infringe fundamental human rights, as well as a multi-nation problem with legal professionals choosing to not understand ethical conduct.
Measuring bad breath is a toy application. Some of the other applications sound more interesting and valuable to society.
Measuring (and warning users about) dangerous sound levels would be more useful, and easier to do.
Put an accurate and precise sound level meter on the IPhone, with history tracking and a mechanism to warn users when they are exposed to overly loud noise for too long.
Many nightclubs, restaurants, and bands in the USA play music way beyond the levels set by the USA federal government for unprotected workplace noise exposure, as indicated by my portable sound level meter. Making every IPhone capable of informing users of this situation with a reliable measurement (not trivial to do, it isn't just a matter of measuring the microphone input: there are good reasons professional sound level meters are as expensive as they are) would have real value to help increase public awareness about one of the generally unrecognized dangers of modern industrial society (one that, unlike bad breath, leads to permanent and irreversible damage).
Tying the measurement into the GPS system with some sort of secure storage might allow for reporting violators to law enforcement with some sort of difficult-to-forge electronic evidence that could then be used for prosecution.
Once we had this, detecting and reporting on dangerous gases would be a next logical step, but it's not the first thing we should be focusing on.
And for these reasons you outline, Alaska cannot AFFORD to secede, which was my point in talking about the $1.84/$1.00 (arguing against another poster's claim they might). It was not propaganda, to support an agenda, or evidence of lack of scruples.
I wasn't planning to imply that you were doing any of these things: I apologize for not being more careful about my wording. I was thinking of things I have seen in the past in other venues, and I should have been more clear about what I was referring to.
I suspect that the Alaskans would do quite well if they did secede. Alaska is rich in resources, and has a small and pretty self-sufficient population. They would have trouble growing enough food, but historically, and to this day, that has been true of many successful nations.
In the second case, I suggest that people who think they can use their guns successfully against their government, study the Boer Wars. Yes, it was not easy for the English to succeed, but succeed they finally did. It is just a case of planning, time and means. Then compare the former English army at the end of the 19th century with the current U.S. Army.
You make some good points, but on the whole, arguments of this kind have been rebutted many times on Slashdot. We really need a FAQ that that touches on some of these comments that keep getting raised, so we can refer people to them.
A major problem with your argument is the implicit "us" vs "them" assumption. There are many members of the U.S.A. military that have no interest in turning their weapons against their fellow citizens. Remember that the military swears an oath to the Constitution, not to any particular government. If anything, I think you'll find -- if you get to know some members of the U.S.A. military well -- that they are far more aware of civil rights issues than the average U.S.A civilian (perhaps this awareness develops in part because they give up so many of those rights, while having to risk their lives and work long hours in difficult conditions, for low pay and little thanks, to protect these same rights in others).
One of the lessons people are supposed to have learned from Nuremberg is that there are some laws that governments do not have a right to pass, and some orders that military personnel have a responsibility to refuse to follow, or even to actively oppose.
If the USA government continues to infringe more and more fundamental rights, and we reach a point where an insurrection is required, then it won't be a case of the civilians turning their arms against the government run military, but rather a mixture of folks from each group on each side (and the military personnel sticking with an abusive government will generally be the ones too stupid or self-centered to realize or care about the long-term harm they cause: stupid people and sociopaths are ever the tools of tyrants). A very different situation from the Boer Wars.
I don't know about your 99.99% figure, either. There were republics and independent cities in a number of places and times in European history, and these would have had troops of their own, not part of a noble's army.
Similarly (especially if we are going to draw from the history of the Middle Ages for inspiration), I think you'll find that private ownership of arms was quite common in many areas (such as the Danelaw part of England and other Viking areas). The Norwegians I have talked to have indicated that private holding of arms is still quite high in Norway.
For that matter, in WW2, it was a Norwegian shooting club (under the command of a military officer) that stopped the German paratroopers attempting to capture the Norwegian government (see Francois Kersaudy's book "Norway, 1940" for a brief description of this event).
Another thing to consider: given the incidence of piracy, armed merchant vessels were extremely common in the Middle Ages (and long afterwards), and few of these were part of any sort of "official" navy, nor were these armed ships designed primarily for war.
I have heard that Adolf Hitler passed a law outlawing private ownership of firearms, ostensibly to reduce crime, suggesting that firearm ownership in Germany was fairly high at that time (otherwise, why would there have been any need for such a law?).
All of these points suggest a somewhat different historical picture of firearm ownership for parts Europe, than the picture for the places and times that you have made a point of studying.
Your insinuation that only lawyers are entitled to an opinion on the application of copyright is misguided. Understanding copyright is everybody's business. Unless you never write a line of code or post to a blog or Twitter, copyright's ever-widening reach ensnares you, too. Know the basics, or risk finding yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit.
Aside from the risk of a lawsuit, there's an additional reason for non-lawyers to care about these issues: legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest -- as a class in society -- with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
If the rest of the population doesn't make it their business to keep an eye on the legal professionals, this conflict of interest will continue to perpetuate a legal system that benefits the legal professionals (and certain other interest groups) at the expense of society as a whole.
Expert consultation is one thing, and often a good idea, but we really don't want to be trusting people in a position of ethical conflict of interest to be deciding ethics matters regarding their profession.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty: this does not just refer to vigilance over government, but also vigilance over the legal profession. Unfortunately, our mainstream press doesn't really seem to understand this.
I guess you need to go to civics class. His description is precisely the process. Admittedly, the scenario is not likely to happen, but that is the process.
Subject, of course, to the 9th Amendment, which provides for rights "retained by the people", and the 10th Amendment, which provides for rights "reserved to the people", both of which all legislators and judges swear oaths to uphold.
Usually left out of civics classes, perhaps because because these particular amendments, which could be used to assert all manner of fundamental rights not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights, are rather inconvenient to certain parties.
By definition, rights retained by the people are, well, retained by the people. It is not within the legal authority of the Supreme Court to refuse to recognize such rights, and if they were to make a ruling that did this (arguably, many such rulings have been made throughout the history of the court), then the People would have every right to consider this oath-breaking and the ruling invalid (essentially what happened in the anti-slavery movement, and then, later, in the civil rights movement). Also a point missed in many civics classes, which often cover the history without discussing the deeper meaning of events.
Another thing to think about: the essence of the Nuremberg Precedent is a recognition that laws passed by governments, and even affirmed by the high courts in those governments, can still be determined to be in violation of fundamental human rights and thus be illegal laws. This gives further justification for recognizing limits to what the government can do.
Telling people to move somewhere else if they are unhappy with the illegal abuse of government power shows a remarkable lack of education. It's the sort of thing a person might say who either had a really bad civics class, or slept through most of the lectures.
As to Alaska, they are a welfare state, receiving $1.84 in federal money for every $1.00 they send.
While these sorts of comparisons are popular with some folks (primarily as a form of propaganda by groups with a particular political agenda and a lack of scruples), simple comparisons between federal money spent in a state versus the taxes paid by the residents of that state are meaningless. Sophisticated comparisons can have value, but the simple ones do not.
The reason for this has to do with the fact that Federal money supports many things, which often benefit multiple states. There is no reason why the taxpayer's of a given state should be expected to pay for things that have to be done in their state, but which provide primary benefit to other states. Without careful and detailed research, it is impossible to disentangle Federal spending, tax dollars generated, and the benefits obtained by different groups or populations.
For example, the federal government pays to maintain roads: the roads that carry traffic across a low-population state to a high population one may require a disproportionate amount of money to be spent in the low-population state, but can benefit the high population state far more than the low population state.
There are many resources that are frequently shipped long distances, such as food, water, wood, metals, gas, oil (particularly important for the Alaska example), and so forth. Federal funds are often spent on things like all the infrastructure needed to make development and transportation of these resources practical (or to reduce the cost), such as the interstate highway system and the various coastal waterways.
The locations where these resources are found, grown, or mined are often sparsely populated locations with difficult terrain and low populations, which means the infrastructure expenses can be surprisingly high (far higher than most city dweller can even begin to imagine, one of the reasons why the economic perspectives of folks who live their whole lives in urban environments tend to be badly skewed).
Of course, the federal government could simply let the free market handle all these expenses, but then the people in highly populated areas would be paying a lot more for everything.
Similarly, a lot of money may be spent in a particular location merely because that location has characteristics of value to the federal government, such as the large expanses of remote, mostly-empty land needed for the military. A place like this will tend to not generate much in the way of tax income, but will soak up a lot of federal dollars.
By the way, if the R's were to collapse (I'm not going to say whether that's desirable or not: I have no stake one way or the other), I think you'd find the D's would end up splitting into two new parties, each with their own agenda, and each of which would be as strongly opposed to each other as the current parties are.
The American Rule was created by (and is enforced by) legal professionals, who -- as a class in society -- are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the policies that govern the pay that legal professionals can receive.
It should not be surprising that -- in practice, whatever the theory behind the Rule may be -- this creates many problems.
This is part of a much bigger problem. Legal professionals -- as a class in society -- are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system. It is not an accident that the USA is known as the "Land of the Lawsuit", but the ethics-related problems are not only limited to abuse of Tort Law. Rather, the problems, like a cancer that has metastasized, have spread to many different areas of the legal system. The many issues that Slashdot readers have identified with the Patent and Copyright systems are just a small part of a much bigger set of problems that share ethical conflict of interest as a key driver.
Unfortunately, most people that study the law in sufficient depth to be aware of these issues are also the same people who are intending to make a living from the practice of law. It should not be surprising (disappointing, perhaps, but not surprising) that they have very little to say about ethical conflicts of interest affecting their profession.
Putting this in other terms, ethics problems are a primary source of pollution in the US legal environment, one which has been choking this country for a long time. Just as many old-time industrialists were too busy making a quick buck to worry about the harm done to the natural environment by their factories and mines, a large percentage of legal professionals are too busy making tons of money to worry about the harm done to the social and legal environment by how they do business.
Until we can raise public awareness of the ethics issues in the legal profession, it is unlikely that anything can be done about the many problems. We need an equivalent of the environmental movement, focused on cleaning up the US legal system and minimizing further pollution, so that future generations can live in a better world than we do.
Patents are to ensure that the proper credit goes to an inventor.
It's a nice theory. Doesn't work out that way very often in practice. In many areas of law, how the legal system SHOULD work and how it DOES work are two very different things. In quite a few of these cases, the differences ultimately come down to problems involving ethical conflict of interest.
The problems with the current patent system have been documented for decades. You might try reading the old position paper (1991) by the League for Programming Freedom to understand some of the issues.
I don't think the position paper sufficiently addresses the ethics issues associated with the current patent system, issues involving both conflict of interest on the part of the patent office, and on the part of the legal profession (as a class in society). But once you've read the position paper, hopefully a few minutes thought will allow you to figure out something about the nature of the ethics problem.
Another thing to read up on: Stigler's law.
Ironically, the problems with the patent system have only gotten worse since 1991, much like the national debt.
I don't think anyone here hates inventors. I do innovative or creative work many times a year, and that's probably true of many (even most) Slashdot readers: it tends to go with being a nerd.
Hating (or at least strongly disliking) unethical conduct and a broken legal system, on the other hand, is fairly common for the well-informed Slashdot reader.
Keynesian economics is all about smoothing out the boom bust cycle. The government uses deficit spending in bust years to reduce the magnitude of the downswing. The government uses a budget surplus to in the boom years to reduce the magnitude of the boom (and also to save the money it'll need for deficit spending later).
Smart corporations use things like variable pay to smooth out the boom bust cycle, which allows them to reduce the impact of most downswings, without having to go into debt. The variable pay is tied to an accounting measure which is well defined, and the plans can only be changed every so often to eliminate tinkering.
It would seem like the various levels of government could do something similar for some of their budget items (including pay). Doubtless there would be some details to work out, but why are we paying our legislators and executives if not to competently handle this sort of thing?
It should be a fundamental human right that unborn generations are not placed into debt as a result of the actions of the present generation.
In most situations there is no need to differentiate between privacy and anonymity if we view anonymity as simply one aspect of a more general concept of privacy.
Most articles that claim to be written on the topic of privacy are actually about anonymity - we in large civilizations have gotten used to being mostly anonymous in public. Not because it was ever really true, and certainly not because it was ever a right.
The wording of your statement is unclear, what is "it" referring to?
If you are claiming that privacy is not a right recognized by the legal system that simply isn't true: the Supreme Court recognized a limited right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). Further, there are ideas about privacy going way back in English Common Law: you can use the wikipedia page Privacy_laws_of_the_United_States as a starting point for getting references that discuss the older legal concepts.
If we view privacy as a broad general right, then we can treat anonymity is simply one aspect of privacy, and thus privacy, as a right recognized by the legal system, also covers anonymity.
It follows that there is no legal basis for preventing anyone (person or company) from collecting information from any legal sources, correlating it, building detailed profiles and behavioral models.
This also isn't true. James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to address two fundamental issues the Anti-Federalists had with the Constitution: 1) There was no list of fundamental rights that could be used to limit the power of government, and 2) any list would necessarily be incomplete. He dealt with the second issue by making the Bill of Rights open-ended: the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" and the 10th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "reserved to the people", allowing for rights to be asserted as needed at future times when it was discovered that the current list was incomplete.
Thus, rights not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights do have a legal basis, when we decide they arise under the 9th/10th Amendments (the 9th Amendment was explicitly mentioned in the Griswold v. Connecticut ruling). By asserting such a right, we can prevent someone from engaging in business practices that violate this right. This goes far beyond what can be achieved using mere contract or libel law, as a fundamental right can not be taken away by contract and the kinds of manipulative games unethical businesses engage in.
Lawyers (and judges) do what they are supposed to do: they make sure that the law is implemented as written.
In the legal tradition that the USA follows, this is not really how things work: legal professionals are not working from a written law text in the same way a software developer might work from a written specification. US law is based as much upon precedent and case history as upon what is actually written in the law. These precedents can be very complex, and can contradict what is actually written down.
Consider, for example, the written text of the first and second Amendments, versus the large body of current and historical laws (and precedents) that, in each case, have contradicted what is actually written down. Wherever one stands on the issue of private ownership of firearms and other weapons, the reality is that we have many laws that contradict the written text of the Bill of Rights.
The situation is further complicated by questions of jurisdiction and authority. It is often not clear which "law as written" (and associated body of case history) should govern in a particular situation. This has, in practice, changed quite a bit over the history of the USA and can be expected to keep changing in the future.
Another problem is ethical conflict of interest.
Most legislators are legal professionals. They can have many lawyers on their staffs as well, and these are often the people that end up writing the laws - legislators have been caught from time to time not even reading the laws their staff members wrote. The laws are then prosecuted, defended, and judged by other legal professionals, a situation that creates complex and often subtle conflicts of interest. The "law as written" is not necessarily valid from an ethics perspective.
As a result of this complexity, in practice, the legal professionals ARE in fact deciding what laws to follow and which to ignore. That's how things actually work, today, in the USA. However, our legal professionals are not necessarily unaccountable: they have sworn oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights, and whether or not those oaths mean anything is ultimately up to "we the people".
It is worth remembering WW2 and the events at Nuremberg, where it was decided that some laws governments do not have the authority to pass. A similar principle can be applied to US law. We can generalize this to say that not just are some laws invalid, but also some precedents (irregardless of the level at which they were created).
In other words, just as we would expect military personnel to refuse to obey orders that violate human rights, we should also expect legal personnel to refuse to recognize as valid the law as written, or the precedents created by judges, or executive orders, when these would lead to a situation where they will be violating fundamental rights. To make this work, it needs to be the people who are deciding what those rights are, not the lawyers.
So you want clear but short laws. That isn't possible, to make things clear legally so laws are not open to interpretation they need to be detailed and takes a lot of text.
You are over-simplifying this position. It's an excellent bit of sophistry for creating nice sound bites, but a poor technique for winning an argument by logic.
Different writers will achieve different levels of clarity. Some writers will use a lot of words to make their point, others can do it in many fewer words. Some writers will achieve clarity, others will not. As with any other form of writing, this can be done to some extent with the law.
Human language is inherently ambiguous: this is why formal logic systems are needed for specifying things like nuclear reactors where the software simply must work right (and even with formal logic, they sometimes screw up, because human beings are imperfect). The law will always have issues requiring interpretation.
However, this inherent imperfection that all legal systems will inevitably have shouldn't lead us to conclude that we can't achieve something much simpler and easier to understand than what we have at present.
For example, we could clearly separate law affecting persons engaged in business from that affecting ordinary people in the course of their day-to-day lives, for example. We could have every high school student learn a year of law-related content (perhaps the basic law that applies to most people, comparative law, history of law, a little bit of business law, and philosophy of law). We could insist that laws not be passed if those laws can reasonably be supposed to involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals. We could have a simple tax system. We could rewrite the laws that contradict one another, and remove the laws that simply don't make sense. We could more clearly state the basic rights, in modern language, to remove the confusion associated with the changes in English language from Colonial times to the present.
None of this requires moving to a Sharia country.
We could do all of these things, and many others, to improve the legal system, but there isn't any incentive for legal professionals to support any of this: it would reduce the long term demand for the services of their profession, and thus in the USA we're stuck with our current -- massively screwed up -- legal system.
You don't seem to understand the law of supply and demand. Prices for lawyers are high because there is a high demand for them and little supply. That's no accident, unlike you, they do actually understand basic economics.
Simplistic models of supply and demand from basic economics are a poor choice if you wish to understand the law business. The real world is often different from how basic economics predicts fictitious companies selling widgets to an ideal public will work.
There is a high demand for US lawyers because the demand has been artificially inflated on a massive scale. This is an inevitable consequence of having legal professionals write, judge, defend, and prosecute the laws: in ethics terms, this situation is known as "conflict of interest". It's a bad thing, and a matter of considerable concern that people are slowly starting to become aware of.
This is not to say that all US legal professionals are unethical. There are people in the profession that make a habit of doing the right thing in situations involving ethical conflict of interest. However, they seem to be outnumbered by those who choose to disregard the conflicts of interest, and these people are found throughout the profession, in all types of jobs, and at all levels.
The supply of lawyers is slow to adjust to changes. There are many practical reasons for this. Law schools generally need certification (the legal professionals removed the long existing practice of apprenticeship, presumably to reduce the supply of lawyers), there is only so much space in classrooms and so many parking spots, faculty are expensive, and so forth. Nor is it necessarily desirable to further increase the supply of legal professionals.
There are two big concerns that I am aware of with double taxation: the hidden tax aspect, and the fairness aspect.
In practice, double taxes often work out to be a form of hidden tax.
Some of us like the idea of knowing exactly how much of each year (what percentage) we spend working for the government, instead of working for ourselves. To know that we are living in a free country, one with strong individual rights, we should know this percentage, and the percentage really should be a low number.
Anything else means that one is really not living in a free country with strong individual rights: after all, if somebody else owns a large amount of your labor, then you are not a free individual.
A simple tax system, where there are no hidden taxes, is necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) to make this possible.
Further, it is in the interests of politicians to be able to hide taxes. Hidden taxes allow the government to increase its income in ways that are not easily visible to the public. There is an ethical conflict of interest here: having more money to spend on non-essentials (which is a lot of the budget of government at various levels, at least here in the USA) allows for a bigger pie that said politicians can then return to those that give the biggest bribes, er, I meant to say those who lobby the best.
From an ethics perspective, hidden taxes are bad, just as complex tax systems are bad.
There is also an issue of fairness: while life may not be fair, we have a right to expect our government and legal system to be reasonably so. Hidden taxes tend to be associated with some people paying more than their share, possibly without even realizing it, while others get away with paying almost nothing.
For that matter, hidden taxes are bad with respect to having general public oversight over government, as it makes it more difficult to understand what's going on.
Hidden taxes also potentially increase the percentage of society involved in overhead, as opposed to those directly producing. This occurs when the hidden taxes are part of a complex tax system that creates jobs for people who can help others avoid the hidden taxes. Not a good thing. A certain number of lawyers and accountants is necessary for any society we can currently envision, but having too many, or allowing these people to have too much influence over the government or the legal system, causes all sorts of ethics problems (as people are slowly starting to realize in the USA).
Ideally, the only taxes (aside from possible import taxes on items imported for business) should be individual income taxes, based upon a simple formula that most-everyone accepts and that doesn't change very often. It doesn't have to be a flat tax, but some simple formula should be possible.
Another issue with double taxes: people tend to see these as equivalent to being robbed not just once, but twice. That tends to make people cranky.
Getting caught breaking a law (which is what patent infringement is) is ALWAYS considerably more expensive than doing something legally.
Assuming of course, the law is legitimate.
There are strong doubts regarding the legitimacy of current US patent law. Some of these issues were pointed out more than 20 years ago by the League for Programming freedom in an excellent position paper. Further, these issues have been discussed numerous times on Slashdot.
Amongst other things, there are serious concerns about ethical conflict of interest on the part of both the patent office, and legal professionals (as a class in society) concerning the design and implementation of the patent system.
Unethical conduct is a bad thing for a legal system, and the best way to avoid it is to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Expecting government and legal professionals to behave accordingly is a fundamental right.
The 9th Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights to make it an open-ended document, allowing rights to be asserted as needed when the government or the legal profession gets out of line.
In its current form, it is appropriate to view patent law as an illegal body of law infringing fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment. We need to be refusing to even hear cases until the problems with the system are resolved in a rational way.
Freespace 2 open - exists because authors were benevolent enough to release it but it should be required by law that all game assets/source go into library an opened up after a fixed number of years so works can be fixed/updated to run on new platforms.
I'd assert a more general right: the right to long term oversight over business. For software, this would mean a requirement to have well documented, build-able source code available for review by third parties at some future date after the software is released. Some neutral third party could be responsible for certifying that the files met the requirement, then keeping these files secure until they became available. Doubtless some sort of incentive or penalty system could be set up to facilitate this.
Businesses have shown many times throughout history that they are willing to engage in all manner of inappropriate, illegal, even evil activities in the name of maximizing profits. Knowing this, the conclusion necessarily follows that some oversight (a reasonable amount, not an excessive amount) by the public is appropriate, just as some oversight over government is appropriate. This is just as true for software businesses as any other type.
The requirement for public scrutiny over software is especially important for business selling to the government, as both forms of oversight then come into play.
Fundamental rights not explicit in the Constitution are appropriately asserted under the authority of the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). Thus, we can reasonably assert that this right already exists, it just isn't being recognized.
That's not what congress or scotus or the executive wants to do, and we have almost zero control over any of them.
It's worse than that. Legal professionals benefit from having a messed up legal system, as this creates an artificial long-term demand for the services of their profession. It's not just the legal professionals in the government, but an unknown but probably large part of the profession that don't want change. There are some good people in that profession, but it seems like they are badly outnumbered.
And the public not only doesn't care, they don't even faintly grasp the problem.
This is what really suprises me. There is almost no intelligent coverage of these issues in the mainstream press. People make a lot of jokes about unethical lawyers, but have no concept just how many real, serious, and scary ethics issues are out there involving the various levels of government and the legal profession.
Far too many people are brainwashed into thinking that the problem is the Republicans, or the Democrats, or the Liberals, or the Conservatives, and so forth, and don't understand that many of the fundamental problems cross all of these boundaries.
Both of these factors, combined, contribute to our having almost zero control over our governments. If people don't know about the problems, or if they misunderstand the nature of the problems, it is very difficult to fix them.
There should be a constitutional requirement to press charges on the laws, so that bad laws are regularly purged from the books.
I'd say this requirement already exists, it simply isn't being acknowledged. A right to ethical conduct on the part of government and legal professionals is certainly a fundamental right, and would be a right that can be reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment as a right "retained by the people".
Such a right would be one of the more easily asserted rights that might be asserted under the 9th Amendment, as to deny it would be to say that it is ok for legal professionals to be unethical.
As the 9th Amendment, unlike the 1st Amendment, is not specifically limited to Congress, such a right would neccesarily apply to state and local government as well as federal. This only makes sense, as a requirement for ethical conduct would neccesarily be applicable at all levels of government.
Allowing bad laws to stay on the books, or having any laws that cause a legal system to be complex, confusing, or contradictory, or having any laws otherwise interfering with reasonable conduct, can appropriately be considered as unethical conduct on the part of legal professionals as a class in society.
After all, if ordinary people can't understand a reasonable portion of the legal system, this neccesarily forces them to hire a legal professional when they inevitably run into problems. A legal system for which this is true is a legal system that is designed to create an aritificial long term demand for the services of legal professionals.
We can't have a principle that ignorance of the law is not a defense unless the law is sufficiently simple and relevant so that almost everyone understands it! As with large software or hardware systems, complexity in a legal system needs to be managed intelligently!
Given that most legislators are legal professionals, it is thus unethical conduct to keep such laws on the books.
Not having to press charges means that DAs get to selectively enforce laws against people they do not like and that is terrible.
We could reasonably assert the equivalent of the Nuremberg Precedent as a right arising under the 9th Amendment.
Recall that German military personnel were required by law to obey the orders of their superiors. The events at Nuremberg show that there are some laws governments are not allowed to pass.
Much as we would expect military personnel to refuse to obey illegal orders, we can expect government personnel to refuse to obey illegal laws, which would of course include all these bad laws remaining on the books. Enforcement of such an illegal law would neccesarily be a violation of an officers or judges oath to uphold the law.
Similarly, bad precedents created by judges -- there are many of these -- in violation of fundamental rights would neccesarily be invalidated.
Some commercials are played at a significantly higher volume than the rest of the stuff being aired. Presumably to make damned sure you can hear the commercial.
It can be the difference between a comfortable listening volume and "WTF just happened". It's just the advertisers being asshats, and someone has finally told them they can't do it.
It's worse than that, actually.
Some of the hearing impaired will already be increasing the base volume to just be able to make out the words being said on their television, and in this situation the additional increase in volume due to the ads can potentially cause additional hearing damage, and can cause pain or other psychological discomfort (not much different from torture, really: remember the scene in the Empire Strikes Back where Chewbacca is tortured by the Empire playing loud audio in his cell?).
As people with hearing impairment often don't advertise their condition, many Slashdot readers are likely to be unfamiliar with what life is like for these people.
Children can lose some of their hearing from a number of illnesses, such as those that damage the portion of the nervous system connecting the ears to the brain, so this is not just a problem for the elderly.
Even with the current progress on cloning, we are very far away from being able to replace people's hearing mechanisms, so if damage occurs it will effectively be permanant and crippling.
Even should we someday get cloning for the cells in the ears, and some sort of reasonably safe surgery for replacement, those people with hearing impairment associated with damage to the nerves between the ears and the rest of the brain will be unable to benefit: fixing problems in that part of the body will likely be even more difficult than correcting problems in the ears themselves.
Just as we don't allow businesses to discriminate against people on the basis of sex or ethnicity, we shouldn't allow businesses to discriminate on the basis of medical conditions such as hearing impairment.
This is wrong. Loudness is NOT purely subjective: if it was, we wouldn't get real and permanant hearing damage from exposure to loud noises.
Psychoacoustics alone is not sufficient to understand the issues here: we must consider physiology and medical science, something your sound engineer friends may not be very familiar with (judging from the excessive sound effect and music volumes so commonly found in today's movies).
See my previous post for why this is an issue with respect to audio in commercials.
You gain the benefit of roads you can drive on, tap water that is available and safe to drink, house fires that get put out, an educated populace (you know, all those citizens who don't happen to be your son), and so on.
But what happens when the level of taxation vastly exceeds the level neccesary to achieve these things? At this point, if we wish to view this situation as involving a business law concept such as "contract", then we must also admit the business law idea known as fraud.
We would generally consider fraud to involve situations where a business or business transaction fails to deliver value for money by some reasonable standard: if we are going to use business law to justify government actions, we must apply similiar criteria to government.
More fundamentally, the human span is finite, and few of us will live long enough to achieve our full potential. For those not lucky enough to be born into wealth, it takes significant amounts of time to accumulate useful amounts of money. When a thief steals money from an individual, he or she is effectively robbing that person of a portion of their life. When the government over-taxes, the same thing happens. Thus, considering things in terms of the effects on human life, excessive-taxation is appropriately viewed as indistinguishable from robbery.
Get involved in regulations like these, you know, the ones where no rights are being violated?
You are completely wrong about no rights being violated.
In industrial societies (according to the professor of my class in human sensory systems: I don't remember which study he was citing) the average 18 year old already has suffered measureable and permanant hearing damage, relative to people of the same age in non-industrial societies.
Some people will have even more hearing loss by age 18, as a result of damage to the ears from many potential sources, for example, genetic issues, viral or bacterial meningitis, really loud music (such as is often found at concerts, nightclubs, cinemas, or restaurants), gunshots, explosions, some industrial equipment, and other sources of extreme hearing damage.
This hearing loss will increase over time.
By middle age, this hearing loss can be (and usually is) significant, even for those people lucky enough not to be exposed to problem noise sources.
As a result of this hearing damage, it becomes impossible for many people to watch television or movies that have mixed voice and non-voice sounds. Their hearing is no longer sufficiently good to pick out the words with the other audio (music and effects audio) mixed in using the typical stereo settings. These people generally will turn up the audio, and possibly adjust the frequency content, in an attempt to have some chance of making out the words. It's not much fun to watch a movie if you can't tell what they're saying: the music is optional but the words are not!
Sudden increases in the sound level -- when the volume has already been adjusted up to make it possible to hear the words -- can cause pain and further loss of hearing. This is especially a problem when switching between mostly-voice and mixed voice / music / effects, as the non-voice audio tends to be pretty loud relative to voice.
Having loud commercials is thus essentially just another form of assault, like punching somebody in the face. Actually, it's better to be punched in the face: that at least will heal, whereas hearing damage is both permanent and crippling.
(Incidentally, that the people coming up with the standards for DVDs and other digital audio have allowed the mixing of voice and non-voice audio into a single stream that cannot readily be separated back out again, is a colossal blunder and a terrible shame: this is yet another example of how engineers tend to develop technologies without having a clue how those technologies will have a negative impact on people in the real world!)
Actually the request is not to ban spam filters, it is to ban carriers from applying filters which filter out speech the carrier chooses.
You have to be really careful in reading these kinds of documents. Sometimes what they claim to be about is merely a cover for something else: illusion and misdirection are often the order of the day.
For example, they are not just talking about banning carriers. Consider the quote from page 10: "The Commission also could include a limited opt-out to avoid calls or texts from specific callers."
This sort of opt-out -- one that is based upon specific callers -- is a VERY different sort of right from one that allows people to be able to block entire categories of messages. And what are they trying to get away with when they further describe this rather weak right they're allowing as being "limited"?
Think about the games companies are currently playing with privacy rights. Yes, you can request SPECIFIC companies not to release information, but you end up having to do this for many different companies (and possibly multiple times as companies change hands). Further each of these companies has a policy that has to be very carefully read (many of these have all kinds of nasty little potential suprises hidden in the (deliberately?) ambiguous langauge). Sometimes, whatever opt-out options are provided are set up in such a way as to make it as inconvenient as possible to do this. In practice most of society does not actually get the privacy rights we're supposed to have because it's too time consuming to get these rights.
In all likelihood, these people will simply play the same game for unwanted political messages. Block one company? Fine, they'll use another. In this computerized age, they could easily create thousends of companies and automatically move the message from one to the next until they find one that is not blocked.
Not only do they talk about limiting "opting-out", they also want to prohibit policies that would require "opting-in": see pp. 7-8.
Legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system: we forget this at our peril.
Slashdot Mirror
It is appalling how corporations, mostly US based, have managed to get everybody working to protect their interests. Ofc, they could not have done that alone, they have the US Gov that throws its weight around if need arises.
I'm not sure that "US based" is a particularly meaningful distinction.
Anyone around the world can buy stock in corporations, and where the corporation technically has it's home may have little to do with who is really pulling the strings.
There are many individuals and organizations around the world with vast amounts of wealth, and it would be more reasonable to suppose that these wealthy individuals, or the individuals in charge of these wealthy organizations, collectively control the behavior of the major corporations, than to suppose this is some sort of US plot against the rest of the world.
Also, in all likelihood, most major corporations have citizens of many different countries working for them, which means the policies aren't necessarily being set by US citizens.
Rather than focusing on the "US based" concept, it is probably better to view this situation as involving a multi-nation problem of governments and corporations working together to infringe fundamental human rights, as well as a multi-nation problem with legal professionals choosing to not understand ethical conduct.
Measuring bad breath is a toy application. Some of the other applications sound more interesting and valuable to society.
Measuring (and warning users about) dangerous sound levels would be more useful, and easier to do.
Put an accurate and precise sound level meter on the IPhone, with history tracking and a mechanism to warn users when they are exposed to overly loud noise for too long.
Many nightclubs, restaurants, and bands in the USA play music way beyond the levels set by the USA federal government for unprotected workplace noise exposure, as indicated by my portable sound level meter. Making every IPhone capable of informing users of this situation with a reliable measurement (not trivial to do, it isn't just a matter of measuring the microphone input: there are good reasons professional sound level meters are as expensive as they are) would have real value to help increase public awareness about one of the generally unrecognized dangers of modern industrial society (one that, unlike bad breath, leads to permanent and irreversible damage).
Tying the measurement into the GPS system with some sort of secure storage might allow for reporting violators to law enforcement with some sort of difficult-to-forge electronic evidence that could then be used for prosecution.
Once we had this, detecting and reporting on dangerous gases would be a next logical step, but it's not the first thing we should be focusing on.
And for these reasons you outline, Alaska cannot AFFORD to secede, which was my point in talking about the $1.84/$1.00 (arguing against another poster's claim they might). It was not propaganda, to support an agenda, or evidence of lack of scruples.
I wasn't planning to imply that you were doing any of these things: I apologize for not being more careful about my wording. I was thinking of things I have seen in the past in other venues, and I should have been more clear about what I was referring to.
I suspect that the Alaskans would do quite well if they did secede. Alaska is rich in resources, and has a small and pretty self-sufficient population. They would have trouble growing enough food, but historically, and to this day, that has been true of many successful nations.
In the second case, I suggest that people who think they can use their guns successfully against their government, study the Boer Wars. Yes, it was not easy for the English to succeed, but succeed they finally did. It is just a case of planning, time and means. Then compare the former English army at the end of the 19th century with the current U.S. Army.
You make some good points, but on the whole, arguments of this kind have been rebutted many times on Slashdot. We really need a FAQ that that touches on some of these comments that keep getting raised, so we can refer people to them.
A major problem with your argument is the implicit "us" vs "them" assumption. There are many members of the U.S.A. military that have no interest in turning their weapons against their fellow citizens. Remember that the military swears an oath to the Constitution, not to any particular government. If anything, I think you'll find -- if you get to know some members of the U.S.A. military well -- that they are far more aware of civil rights issues than the average U.S.A civilian (perhaps this awareness develops in part because they give up so many of those rights, while having to risk their lives and work long hours in difficult conditions, for low pay and little thanks, to protect these same rights in others).
One of the lessons people are supposed to have learned from Nuremberg is that there are some laws that governments do not have a right to pass, and some orders that military personnel have a responsibility to refuse to follow, or even to actively oppose.
If the USA government continues to infringe more and more fundamental rights, and we reach a point where an insurrection is required, then it won't be a case of the civilians turning their arms against the government run military, but rather a mixture of folks from each group on each side (and the military personnel sticking with an abusive government will generally be the ones too stupid or self-centered to realize or care about the long-term harm they cause: stupid people and sociopaths are ever the tools of tyrants). A very different situation from the Boer Wars.
I don't know about your 99.99% figure, either. There were republics and independent cities in a number of places and times in European history, and these would have had troops of their own, not part of a noble's army.
Similarly (especially if we are going to draw from the history of the Middle Ages for inspiration), I think you'll find that private ownership of arms was quite common in many areas (such as the Danelaw part of England and other Viking areas). The Norwegians I have talked to have indicated that private holding of arms is still quite high in Norway.
For that matter, in WW2, it was a Norwegian shooting club (under the command of a military officer) that stopped the German paratroopers attempting to capture the Norwegian government (see Francois Kersaudy's book "Norway, 1940" for a brief description of this event).
Another thing to consider: given the incidence of piracy, armed merchant vessels were extremely common in the Middle Ages (and long afterwards), and few of these were part of any sort of "official" navy, nor were these armed ships designed primarily for war.
I have heard that Adolf Hitler passed a law outlawing private ownership of firearms, ostensibly to reduce crime, suggesting that firearm ownership in Germany was fairly high at that time (otherwise, why would there have been any need for such a law?).
All of these points suggest a somewhat different historical picture of firearm ownership for parts Europe, than the picture for the places and times that you have made a point of studying.
Your insinuation that only lawyers are entitled to an opinion on the application of copyright is misguided. Understanding copyright is everybody's business. Unless you never write a line of code or post to a blog or Twitter, copyright's ever-widening reach ensnares you, too. Know the basics, or risk finding yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit.
Aside from the risk of a lawsuit, there's an additional reason for non-lawyers to care about these issues: legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest -- as a class in society -- with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
If the rest of the population doesn't make it their business to keep an eye on the legal professionals, this conflict of interest will continue to perpetuate a legal system that benefits the legal professionals (and certain other interest groups) at the expense of society as a whole.
Expert consultation is one thing, and often a good idea, but we really don't want to be trusting people in a position of ethical conflict of interest to be deciding ethics matters regarding their profession.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty: this does not just refer to vigilance over government, but also vigilance over the legal profession. Unfortunately, our mainstream press doesn't really seem to understand this.
I guess you need to go to civics class. His description is precisely the process. Admittedly, the scenario is not likely to happen, but that is the process.
Subject, of course, to the 9th Amendment, which provides for rights "retained by the people", and the 10th Amendment, which provides for rights "reserved to the people", both of which all legislators and judges swear oaths to uphold.
Usually left out of civics classes, perhaps because because these particular amendments, which could be used to assert all manner of fundamental rights not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights, are rather inconvenient to certain parties.
By definition, rights retained by the people are, well, retained by the people. It is not within the legal authority of the Supreme Court to refuse to recognize such rights, and if they were to make a ruling that did this (arguably, many such rulings have been made throughout the history of the court), then the People would have every right to consider this oath-breaking and the ruling invalid (essentially what happened in the anti-slavery movement, and then, later, in the civil rights movement). Also a point missed in many civics classes, which often cover the history without discussing the deeper meaning of events.
Another thing to think about: the essence of the Nuremberg Precedent is a recognition that laws passed by governments, and even affirmed by the high courts in those governments, can still be determined to be in violation of fundamental human rights and thus be illegal laws. This gives further justification for recognizing limits to what the government can do.
Telling people to move somewhere else if they are unhappy with the illegal abuse of government power shows a remarkable lack of education. It's the sort of thing a person might say who either had a really bad civics class, or slept through most of the lectures.
As to Alaska, they are a welfare state, receiving $1.84 in federal money for every $1.00 they send.
While these sorts of comparisons are popular with some folks (primarily as a form of propaganda by groups with a particular political agenda and a lack of scruples), simple comparisons between federal money spent in a state versus the taxes paid by the residents of that state are meaningless. Sophisticated comparisons can have value, but the simple ones do not.
The reason for this has to do with the fact that Federal money supports many things, which often benefit multiple states. There is no reason why the taxpayer's of a given state should be expected to pay for things that have to be done in their state, but which provide primary benefit to other states. Without careful and detailed research, it is impossible to disentangle Federal spending, tax dollars generated, and the benefits obtained by different groups or populations.
For example, the federal government pays to maintain roads: the roads that carry traffic across a low-population state to a high population one may require a disproportionate amount of money to be spent in the low-population state, but can benefit the high population state far more than the low population state.
There are many resources that are frequently shipped long distances, such as food, water, wood, metals, gas, oil (particularly important for the Alaska example), and so forth. Federal funds are often spent on things like all the infrastructure needed to make development and transportation of these resources practical (or to reduce the cost), such as the interstate highway system and the various coastal waterways.
The locations where these resources are found, grown, or mined are often sparsely populated locations with difficult terrain and low populations, which means the infrastructure expenses can be surprisingly high (far higher than most city dweller can even begin to imagine, one of the reasons why the economic perspectives of folks who live their whole lives in urban environments tend to be badly skewed).
Of course, the federal government could simply let the free market handle all these expenses, but then the people in highly populated areas would be paying a lot more for everything.
Similarly, a lot of money may be spent in a particular location merely because that location has characteristics of value to the federal government, such as the large expanses of remote, mostly-empty land needed for the military. A place like this will tend to not generate much in the way of tax income, but will soak up a lot of federal dollars.
By the way, if the R's were to collapse (I'm not going to say whether that's desirable or not: I have no stake one way or the other), I think you'd find the D's would end up splitting into two new parties, each with their own agenda, and each of which would be as strongly opposed to each other as the current parties are.
The American Rule is crap. Get rid of it.
The American Rule was created by (and is enforced by) legal professionals, who -- as a class in society -- are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the policies that govern the pay that legal professionals can receive.
It should not be surprising that -- in practice, whatever the theory behind the Rule may be -- this creates many problems.
This is part of a much bigger problem. Legal professionals -- as a class in society -- are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system. It is not an accident that the USA is known as the "Land of the Lawsuit", but the ethics-related problems are not only limited to abuse of Tort Law. Rather, the problems, like a cancer that has metastasized, have spread to many different areas of the legal system. The many issues that Slashdot readers have identified with the Patent and Copyright systems are just a small part of a much bigger set of problems that share ethical conflict of interest as a key driver.
Unfortunately, most people that study the law in sufficient depth to be aware of these issues are also the same people who are intending to make a living from the practice of law. It should not be surprising (disappointing, perhaps, but not surprising) that they have very little to say about ethical conflicts of interest affecting their profession.
Putting this in other terms, ethics problems are a primary source of pollution in the US legal environment, one which has been choking this country for a long time. Just as many old-time industrialists were too busy making a quick buck to worry about the harm done to the natural environment by their factories and mines, a large percentage of legal professionals are too busy making tons of money to worry about the harm done to the social and legal environment by how they do business.
Until we can raise public awareness of the ethics issues in the legal profession, it is unlikely that anything can be done about the many problems. We need an equivalent of the environmental movement, focused on cleaning up the US legal system and minimizing further pollution, so that future generations can live in a better world than we do.
Patents are to ensure that the proper credit goes to an inventor.
It's a nice theory. Doesn't work out that way very often in practice. In many areas of law, how the legal system SHOULD work and how it DOES work are two very different things. In quite a few of these cases, the differences ultimately come down to problems involving ethical conflict of interest.
The problems with the current patent system have been documented for decades. You might try reading the old position paper (1991) by the League for Programming Freedom to understand some of the issues.
I don't think the position paper sufficiently addresses the ethics issues associated with the current patent system, issues involving both conflict of interest on the part of the patent office, and on the part of the legal profession (as a class in society). But once you've read the position paper, hopefully a few minutes thought will allow you to figure out something about the nature of the ethics problem.
Another thing to read up on: Stigler's law.
Ironically, the problems with the patent system have only gotten worse since 1991, much like the national debt.
I don't think anyone here hates inventors. I do innovative or creative work many times a year, and that's probably true of many (even most) Slashdot readers: it tends to go with being a nerd.
Hating (or at least strongly disliking) unethical conduct and a broken legal system, on the other hand, is fairly common for the well-informed Slashdot reader.
Keynesian economics is all about smoothing out the boom bust cycle. The government uses deficit spending in bust years to reduce the magnitude of the downswing. The government uses a budget surplus to in the boom years to reduce the magnitude of the boom (and also to save the money it'll need for deficit spending later).
Smart corporations use things like variable pay to smooth out the boom bust cycle, which allows them to reduce the impact of most downswings, without having to go into debt. The variable pay is tied to an accounting measure which is well defined, and the plans can only be changed every so often to eliminate tinkering.
It would seem like the various levels of government could do something similar for some of their budget items (including pay). Doubtless there would be some details to work out, but why are we paying our legislators and executives if not to competently handle this sort of thing?
It should be a fundamental human right that unborn generations are not placed into debt as a result of the actions of the present generation.
In most situations there is no need to differentiate between privacy and anonymity if we view anonymity as simply one aspect of a more general concept of privacy.
Most articles that claim to be written on the topic of privacy are actually about anonymity - we in large civilizations have gotten used to being mostly anonymous in public. Not because it was ever really true, and certainly not because it was ever a right.
The wording of your statement is unclear, what is "it" referring to?
If you are claiming that privacy is not a right recognized by the legal system that simply isn't true: the Supreme Court recognized a limited right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). Further, there are ideas about privacy going way back in English Common Law: you can use the wikipedia page Privacy_laws_of_the_United_States as a starting point for getting references that discuss the older legal concepts.
If we view privacy as a broad general right, then we can treat anonymity is simply one aspect of privacy, and thus privacy, as a right recognized by the legal system, also covers anonymity.
It follows that there is no legal basis for preventing anyone (person or company) from collecting information from any legal sources, correlating it, building detailed profiles and behavioral models.
This also isn't true. James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to address two fundamental issues the Anti-Federalists had with the Constitution: 1) There was no list of fundamental rights that could be used to limit the power of government, and 2) any list would necessarily be incomplete. He dealt with the second issue by making the Bill of Rights open-ended: the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" and the 10th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "reserved to the people", allowing for rights to be asserted as needed at future times when it was discovered that the current list was incomplete.
Thus, rights not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights do have a legal basis, when we decide they arise under the 9th/10th Amendments (the 9th Amendment was explicitly mentioned in the Griswold v. Connecticut ruling). By asserting such a right, we can prevent someone from engaging in business practices that violate this right. This goes far beyond what can be achieved using mere contract or libel law, as a fundamental right can not be taken away by contract and the kinds of manipulative games unethical businesses engage in.
Lawyers (and judges) do what they are supposed to do: they make sure that the law is implemented as written.
In the legal tradition that the USA follows, this is not really how things work: legal professionals are not working from a written law text in the same way a software developer might work from a written specification. US law is based as much upon precedent and case history as upon what is actually written in the law. These precedents can be very complex, and can contradict what is actually written down.
Consider, for example, the written text of the first and second Amendments, versus the large body of current and historical laws (and precedents) that, in each case, have contradicted what is actually written down. Wherever one stands on the issue of private ownership of firearms and other weapons, the reality is that we have many laws that contradict the written text of the Bill of Rights.
The situation is further complicated by questions of jurisdiction and authority. It is often not clear which "law as written" (and associated body of case history) should govern in a particular situation. This has, in practice, changed quite a bit over the history of the USA and can be expected to keep changing in the future.
Another problem is ethical conflict of interest.
Most legislators are legal professionals. They can have many lawyers on their staffs as well, and these are often the people that end up writing the laws - legislators have been caught from time to time not even reading the laws their staff members wrote. The laws are then prosecuted, defended, and judged by other legal professionals, a situation that creates complex and often subtle conflicts of interest. The "law as written" is not necessarily valid from an ethics perspective.
As a result of this complexity, in practice, the legal professionals ARE in fact deciding what laws to follow and which to ignore. That's how things actually work, today, in the USA. However, our legal professionals are not necessarily unaccountable: they have sworn oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights, and whether or not those oaths mean anything is ultimately up to "we the people".
It is worth remembering WW2 and the events at Nuremberg, where it was decided that some laws governments do not have the authority to pass. A similar principle can be applied to US law. We can generalize this to say that not just are some laws invalid, but also some precedents (irregardless of the level at which they were created).
In other words, just as we would expect military personnel to refuse to obey orders that violate human rights, we should also expect legal personnel to refuse to recognize as valid the law as written, or the precedents created by judges, or executive orders, when these would lead to a situation where they will be violating fundamental rights. To make this work, it needs to be the people who are deciding what those rights are, not the lawyers.
So you want clear but short laws. That isn't possible, to make things clear legally so laws are not open to interpretation they need to be detailed and takes a lot of text.
You are over-simplifying this position. It's an excellent bit of sophistry for creating nice sound bites, but a poor technique for winning an argument by logic.
Different writers will achieve different levels of clarity. Some writers will use a lot of words to make their point, others can do it in many fewer words. Some writers will achieve clarity, others will not. As with any other form of writing, this can be done to some extent with the law.
Human language is inherently ambiguous: this is why formal logic systems are needed for specifying things like nuclear reactors where the software simply must work right (and even with formal logic, they sometimes screw up, because human beings are imperfect). The law will always have issues requiring interpretation.
However, this inherent imperfection that all legal systems will inevitably have shouldn't lead us to conclude that we can't achieve something much simpler and easier to understand than what we have at present.
For example, we could clearly separate law affecting persons engaged in business from that affecting ordinary people in the course of their day-to-day lives, for example. We could have every high school student learn a year of law-related content (perhaps the basic law that applies to most people, comparative law, history of law, a little bit of business law, and philosophy of law). We could insist that laws not be passed if those laws can reasonably be supposed to involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals. We could have a simple tax system. We could rewrite the laws that contradict one another, and remove the laws that simply don't make sense. We could more clearly state the basic rights, in modern language, to remove the confusion associated with the changes in English language from Colonial times to the present.
None of this requires moving to a Sharia country.
We could do all of these things, and many others, to improve the legal system, but there isn't any incentive for legal professionals to support any of this: it would reduce the long term demand for the services of their profession, and thus in the USA we're stuck with our current -- massively screwed up -- legal system.
You don't seem to understand the law of supply and demand. Prices for lawyers are high because there is a high demand for them and little supply. That's no accident, unlike you, they do actually understand basic economics.
Simplistic models of supply and demand from basic economics are a poor choice if you wish to understand the law business. The real world is often different from how basic economics predicts fictitious companies selling widgets to an ideal public will work.
There is a high demand for US lawyers because the demand has been artificially inflated on a massive scale. This is an inevitable consequence of having legal professionals write, judge, defend, and prosecute the laws: in ethics terms, this situation is known as "conflict of interest". It's a bad thing, and a matter of considerable concern that people are slowly starting to become aware of.
This is not to say that all US legal professionals are unethical. There are people in the profession that make a habit of doing the right thing in situations involving ethical conflict of interest. However, they seem to be outnumbered by those who choose to disregard the conflicts of interest, and these people are found throughout the profession, in all types of jobs, and at all levels.
The supply of lawyers is slow to adjust to changes. There are many practical reasons for this. Law schools generally need certification (the legal professionals removed the long existing practice of apprenticeship, presumably to reduce the supply of lawyers), there is only so much space in classrooms and so many parking spots, faculty are expensive, and so forth. Nor is it necessarily desirable to further increase the supply of legal professionals.
There are two big concerns that I am aware of with double taxation: the hidden tax aspect, and the fairness aspect.
In practice, double taxes often work out to be a form of hidden tax.
Some of us like the idea of knowing exactly how much of each year (what percentage) we spend working for the government, instead of working for ourselves. To know that we are living in a free country, one with strong individual rights, we should know this percentage, and the percentage really should be a low number.
Anything else means that one is really not living in a free country with strong individual rights: after all, if somebody else owns a large amount of your labor, then you are not a free individual.
A simple tax system, where there are no hidden taxes, is necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) to make this possible.
Further, it is in the interests of politicians to be able to hide taxes. Hidden taxes allow the government to increase its income in ways that are not easily visible to the public. There is an ethical conflict of interest here: having more money to spend on non-essentials (which is a lot of the budget of government at various levels, at least here in the USA) allows for a bigger pie that said politicians can then return to those that give the biggest bribes, er, I meant to say those who lobby the best.
From an ethics perspective, hidden taxes are bad, just as complex tax systems are bad.
There is also an issue of fairness: while life may not be fair, we have a right to expect our government and legal system to be reasonably so. Hidden taxes tend to be associated with some people paying more than their share, possibly without even realizing it, while others get away with paying almost nothing.
For that matter, hidden taxes are bad with respect to having general public oversight over government, as it makes it more difficult to understand what's going on.
Hidden taxes also potentially increase the percentage of society involved in overhead, as opposed to those directly producing. This occurs when the hidden taxes are part of a complex tax system that creates jobs for people who can help others avoid the hidden taxes. Not a good thing. A certain number of lawyers and accountants is necessary for any society we can currently envision, but having too many, or allowing these people to have too much influence over the government or the legal system, causes all sorts of ethics problems (as people are slowly starting to realize in the USA).
Ideally, the only taxes (aside from possible import taxes on items imported for business) should be individual income taxes, based upon a simple formula that most-everyone accepts and that doesn't change very often. It doesn't have to be a flat tax, but some simple formula should be possible.
Another issue with double taxes: people tend to see these as equivalent to being robbed not just once, but twice. That tends to make people cranky.
Getting caught breaking a law (which is what patent infringement is) is ALWAYS considerably more expensive than doing something legally.
Assuming of course, the law is legitimate.
There are strong doubts regarding the legitimacy of current US patent law. Some of these issues were pointed out more than 20 years ago by the League for Programming freedom in an excellent position paper. Further, these issues have been discussed numerous times on Slashdot.
Amongst other things, there are serious concerns about ethical conflict of interest on the part of both the patent office, and legal professionals (as a class in society) concerning the design and implementation of the patent system.
Unethical conduct is a bad thing for a legal system, and the best way to avoid it is to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Expecting government and legal professionals to behave accordingly is a fundamental right.
The 9th Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights to make it an open-ended document, allowing rights to be asserted as needed when the government or the legal profession gets out of line.
In its current form, it is appropriate to view patent law as an illegal body of law infringing fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment. We need to be refusing to even hear cases until the problems with the system are resolved in a rational way.
Freespace 2 open - exists because authors were benevolent enough to release it but it should be required by law that all game assets/source go into library an opened up after a fixed number of years so works can be fixed/updated to run on new platforms.
I'd assert a more general right: the right to long term oversight over business. For software, this would mean a requirement to have well documented, build-able source code available for review by third parties at some future date after the software is released. Some neutral third party could be responsible for certifying that the files met the requirement, then keeping these files secure until they became available. Doubtless some sort of incentive or penalty system could be set up to facilitate this.
Businesses have shown many times throughout history that they are willing to engage in all manner of inappropriate, illegal, even evil activities in the name of maximizing profits. Knowing this, the conclusion necessarily follows that some oversight (a reasonable amount, not an excessive amount) by the public is appropriate, just as some oversight over government is appropriate. This is just as true for software businesses as any other type.
The requirement for public scrutiny over software is especially important for business selling to the government, as both forms of oversight then come into play.
Fundamental rights not explicit in the Constitution are appropriately asserted under the authority of the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). Thus, we can reasonably assert that this right already exists, it just isn't being recognized.
That's not what congress or scotus or the executive wants to do, and we have almost zero control over any of them.
It's worse than that. Legal professionals benefit from having a messed up legal system, as this creates an artificial long-term demand for the services of their profession. It's not just the legal professionals in the government, but an unknown but probably large part of the profession that don't want change. There are some good people in that profession, but it seems like they are badly outnumbered.
And the public not only doesn't care, they don't even faintly grasp the problem.
This is what really suprises me. There is almost no intelligent coverage of these issues in the mainstream press. People make a lot of jokes about unethical lawyers, but have no concept just how many real, serious, and scary ethics issues are out there involving the various levels of government and the legal profession.
Far too many people are brainwashed into thinking that the problem is the Republicans, or the Democrats, or the Liberals, or the Conservatives, and so forth, and don't understand that many of the fundamental problems cross all of these boundaries.
Both of these factors, combined, contribute to our having almost zero control over our governments. If people don't know about the problems, or if they misunderstand the nature of the problems, it is very difficult to fix them.
There should be a constitutional requirement to press charges on the laws, so that bad laws are regularly purged from the books.
I'd say this requirement already exists, it simply isn't being acknowledged. A right to ethical conduct on the part of government and legal professionals is certainly a fundamental right, and would be a right that can be reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment as a right "retained by the people".
Such a right would be one of the more easily asserted rights that might be asserted under the 9th Amendment, as to deny it would be to say that it is ok for legal professionals to be unethical.
As the 9th Amendment, unlike the 1st Amendment, is not specifically limited to Congress, such a right would neccesarily apply to state and local government as well as federal. This only makes sense, as a requirement for ethical conduct would neccesarily be applicable at all levels of government.
Allowing bad laws to stay on the books, or having any laws that cause a legal system to be complex, confusing, or contradictory, or having any laws otherwise interfering with reasonable conduct, can appropriately be considered as unethical conduct on the part of legal professionals as a class in society.
After all, if ordinary people can't understand a reasonable portion of the legal system, this neccesarily forces them to hire a legal professional when they inevitably run into problems. A legal system for which this is true is a legal system that is designed to create an aritificial long term demand for the services of legal professionals.
We can't have a principle that ignorance of the law is not a defense unless the law is sufficiently simple and relevant so that almost everyone understands it! As with large software or hardware systems, complexity in a legal system needs to be managed intelligently!
Given that most legislators are legal professionals, it is thus unethical conduct to keep such laws on the books.
Not having to press charges means that DAs get to selectively enforce laws against people they do not like and that is terrible.
We could reasonably assert the equivalent of the Nuremberg Precedent as a right arising under the 9th Amendment.
Recall that German military personnel were required by law to obey the orders of their superiors. The events at Nuremberg show that there are some laws governments are not allowed to pass.
Much as we would expect military personnel to refuse to obey illegal orders, we can expect government personnel to refuse to obey illegal laws, which would of course include all these bad laws remaining on the books. Enforcement of such an illegal law would neccesarily be a violation of an officers or judges oath to uphold the law.
Similarly, bad precedents created by judges -- there are many of these -- in violation of fundamental rights would neccesarily be invalidated.
Some commercials are played at a significantly higher volume than the rest of the stuff being aired. Presumably to make damned sure you can hear the commercial.
It can be the difference between a comfortable listening volume and "WTF just happened". It's just the advertisers being asshats, and someone has finally told them they can't do it.
It's worse than that, actually.
Some of the hearing impaired will already be increasing the base volume to just be able to make out the words being said on their television, and in this situation the additional increase in volume due to the ads can potentially cause additional hearing damage, and can cause pain or other psychological discomfort (not much different from torture, really: remember the scene in the Empire Strikes Back where Chewbacca is tortured by the Empire playing loud audio in his cell?).
As people with hearing impairment often don't advertise their condition, many Slashdot readers are likely to be unfamiliar with what life is like for these people.
Children can lose some of their hearing from a number of illnesses, such as those that damage the portion of the nervous system connecting the ears to the brain, so this is not just a problem for the elderly.
Even with the current progress on cloning, we are very far away from being able to replace people's hearing mechanisms, so if damage occurs it will effectively be permanant and crippling.
Even should we someday get cloning for the cells in the ears, and some sort of reasonably safe surgery for replacement, those people with hearing impairment associated with damage to the nerves between the ears and the rest of the brain will be unable to benefit: fixing problems in that part of the body will likely be even more difficult than correcting problems in the ears themselves.
Just as we don't allow businesses to discriminate against people on the basis of sex or ethnicity, we shouldn't allow businesses to discriminate on the basis of medical conditions such as hearing impairment.
loudness is purely subjective
This is wrong. Loudness is NOT purely subjective: if it was, we wouldn't get real and permanant hearing damage from exposure to loud noises.
Psychoacoustics alone is not sufficient to understand the issues here: we must consider physiology and medical science, something your sound engineer friends may not be very familiar with (judging from the excessive sound effect and music volumes so commonly found in today's movies).
See my previous post for why this is an issue with respect to audio in commercials.
You gain the benefit of roads you can drive on, tap water that is available and safe to drink, house fires that get put out, an educated populace (you know, all those citizens who don't happen to be your son), and so on.
But what happens when the level of taxation vastly exceeds the level neccesary to achieve these things? At this point, if we wish to view this situation as involving a business law concept such as "contract", then we must also admit the business law idea known as fraud.
We would generally consider fraud to involve situations where a business or business transaction fails to deliver value for money by some reasonable standard: if we are going to use business law to justify government actions, we must apply similiar criteria to government.
More fundamentally, the human span is finite, and few of us will live long enough to achieve our full potential. For those not lucky enough to be born into wealth, it takes significant amounts of time to accumulate useful amounts of money. When a thief steals money from an individual, he or she is effectively robbing that person of a portion of their life. When the government over-taxes, the same thing happens. Thus, considering things in terms of the effects on human life, excessive-taxation is appropriately viewed as indistinguishable from robbery.
I'm not a geologist, but it seems like it would be hard to predict what the damage would be.
To give an extreme example, what if the asteroid struck the Yellowstone super-volcano, causing it to blow?
Presumably there are other vulnerable points on the planet.
Get involved in regulations like these, you know, the ones where no rights are being violated?
You are completely wrong about no rights being violated.
In industrial societies (according to the professor of my class in human sensory systems: I don't remember which study he was citing) the average 18 year old already has suffered measureable and permanant hearing damage, relative to people of the same age in non-industrial societies.
Some people will have even more hearing loss by age 18, as a result of damage to the ears from many potential sources, for example, genetic issues, viral or bacterial meningitis, really loud music (such as is often found at concerts, nightclubs, cinemas, or restaurants), gunshots, explosions, some industrial equipment, and other sources of extreme hearing damage.
This hearing loss will increase over time.
By middle age, this hearing loss can be (and usually is) significant, even for those people lucky enough not to be exposed to problem noise sources.
As a result of this hearing damage, it becomes impossible for many people to watch television or movies that have mixed voice and non-voice sounds. Their hearing is no longer sufficiently good to pick out the words with the other audio (music and effects audio) mixed in using the typical stereo settings. These people generally will turn up the audio, and possibly adjust the frequency content, in an attempt to have some chance of making out the words. It's not much fun to watch a movie if you can't tell what they're saying: the music is optional but the words are not!
Sudden increases in the sound level -- when the volume has already been adjusted up to make it possible to hear the words -- can cause pain and further loss of hearing. This is especially a problem when switching between mostly-voice and mixed voice / music / effects, as the non-voice audio tends to be pretty loud relative to voice.
Having loud commercials is thus essentially just another form of assault, like punching somebody in the face. Actually, it's better to be punched in the face: that at least will heal, whereas hearing damage is both permanent and crippling.
(Incidentally, that the people coming up with the standards for DVDs and other digital audio have allowed the mixing of voice and non-voice audio into a single stream that cannot readily be separated back out again, is a colossal blunder and a terrible shame: this is yet another example of how engineers tend to develop technologies without having a clue how those technologies will have a negative impact on people in the real world!)
Actually the request is not to ban spam filters, it is to ban carriers from applying filters which filter out speech the carrier chooses.
You have to be really careful in reading these kinds of documents. Sometimes what they claim to be about is merely a cover for something else: illusion and misdirection are often the order of the day.
For example, they are not just talking about banning carriers. Consider the quote from page 10: "The Commission also could include a limited opt-out to avoid calls or texts from specific callers."
This sort of opt-out -- one that is based upon specific callers -- is a VERY different sort of right from one that allows people to be able to block entire categories of messages. And what are they trying to get away with when they further describe this rather weak right they're allowing as being "limited"?
Think about the games companies are currently playing with privacy rights. Yes, you can request SPECIFIC companies not to release information, but you end up having to do this for many different companies (and possibly multiple times as companies change hands). Further each of these companies has a policy that has to be very carefully read (many of these have all kinds of nasty little potential suprises hidden in the (deliberately?) ambiguous langauge). Sometimes, whatever opt-out options are provided are set up in such a way as to make it as inconvenient as possible to do this. In practice most of society does not actually get the privacy rights we're supposed to have because it's too time consuming to get these rights.
In all likelihood, these people will simply play the same game for unwanted political messages. Block one company? Fine, they'll use another. In this computerized age, they could easily create thousends of companies and automatically move the message from one to the next until they find one that is not blocked.
Not only do they talk about limiting "opting-out", they also want to prohibit policies that would require "opting-in": see pp. 7-8.
Legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system: we forget this at our peril.