I used to maintain that there were 4 communications rights, only one of which enjoys support at a fundamental constitutional level...
Actually, any of these four can be asserted at the constitutional level, as rights retained by the people under the 9th Amendment.
Historically, it has been inconvenient for legal professionals to acknowledge this. There are ethical conflicts of interest that can be reasonably supposed to account for this reluctance.
Unfortunately, until we the people decide to stop letting the lawyers dictate the laws, we will continue to get bad laws and bad court precedents resulting from these ethical conflicts of interest.
It's fortunate the open access activists haven't succeeded yet. Let thank these publishers that protect national security by erecting a paywall between taxpayer funded research and the public.
I'd say there's a fundamental right of public access to any research where even one dollar of public funds gets spent, with a few reasonable exceptions (detailed information on building weapons of mass destruction, privacy). This article, as it is being published in Nature, can be reasonably supposed to not qualify for either exception.
This right arises as part of a more general right to long term public oversight over government.
This doesn't mean journels can't have a right to initial publication, with full public access perhaps delayed a year. Full public access could be implemented by the researcher maintaining a web site for the article, or by some sort of collective web site, or even a library web site. It should be viewed as an obligation a researcher cheerfully accepts in return for the funding.
So WTF is this doing on/. anyway? This just seems like it is here because it's a typical lawsuit but a computer is involved
Abuse (or potential abuse) of the tort system is part of a much bigger problem in the US legal system. Most of our laws are written by legal professionals, prosecuted by legal professionals, and judged by legal professionals. Our presidents, governors, and legislators are almost all legal professionals.
This causes legal professionals, as a class in society, to be able to have enormous influence over the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
Is this a problem? Well, do you believe it is an accident that the USA is known as the "Land of the Lawsuit"? Do you believe that the interests of legal professionals as a class in society will necessarily align with the interests of the rest of society?
A legal system that is complex, confusing, scary, or contradictory to ordinary people, or to us Slashdot nerds, massively increases the long term demand for the services of legal professionals. Hence, legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
Very few people outside of the legal profession are aware of these conflicts of interest, aside from the law nerds.
These ethical conflicts of interest have implications for contract law (which affects all nerds that are not self-employed), for copyright and patent law (with obvious implications for nerds), and many other areas of law (some of which will affect us nerds).
Like a cancer that has metastasized, these ethics problems can potentially affect any part of the body of law.
Also, ethics problems within the legal profession can greatly impact the cost and availability of technology.
Further, the ethics problems in the US legal system aren't covered very well in the mainstream press (which is presumably too busy covering sports and scandals), which means these issues can only be addressed in other forums, such as here.
I have no personal knowledge of this case, and thus don't actually know whether or not the case does involve abuse of the tort system or ethics problems, but it is certainly appropriate to be discussing it here.
You've pretty accurately characterized the single most important problem with the US legal system today.
Most legislators and top government executives (such as Governers of states, and the President) are legal professionals. Legal professonials write, prosecute, and judge the laws.
A legal system that is (or is merely perceived to be) scary, complex, confusing, or contradictory creates long term business for legal professionals as a class in society. These same people write the laws and create the precedents.
Hence, as a class within society, legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
I call this the single most important problem because it underlies or impacts the majority of issues with the legal system, such as abuse of the tort system, infringement of civil liberties, the broken patent and copyright systems, or abuses of contract law (such as represented by most or all "shrink-wrap" contracts).
While this ethics problem rarely results in lost lives, the consequences of legal practices and policies that involve conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals can be enormously expensive to companies, to society, and to individuals, which does in some cases result in destroyed lives.
The (many) court rulings I've read (including Supreme Court rulings) have not given me any real confidence that this issue will ever be addressed by legal professionals without some serious pushing from people outside the profession.
Right. Instead of spending locally we spend online tax free. This is a problem and hopefully this bill fixes that.
You haven't put any thought into this. Suppose one lives near the border of some government jurisdiction, such as a state. The nearest shopping area in 5 minutes over the border. The nearest shopping area in your own state is 1 hour away.
Any reasonable person under such circumstances will go over the border to do a lot of their shopping.
A government requirement that one keep track of all out-of-state purchases in order to pay taxes on them would involve massive bookkeeping on the part of this individual. This person would have to keep track of every purchase (potentially throughout their entire life), with sufficient information to determine whether the purchase was made in state or out.
Clearly, this violates fundamental human rights, such as rights not to be subject to excessive government, not to be subject to excessive bureaucracy, or to not have ones time wasted. In the USA, such rights can reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment as rights "retained by the people" or the 10th Amendment as rights "reserved to the people".
With the internet, technology has effectively moved these borders next to all of us: we are all in the same situation as the person living next to the border wherever we happen to live.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that no legitimate government has any business taxing the sale of lifetime learning materials, such as non-fiction books and dvds. Lifetime learning is how the people learn enough about the world they live in to not be brainwashed by corrupt officials or by political parties. The power to tax is the power to destroy: no government should be able to tax the very materials that ultimately determine the ability of people to control that government. We have far too many ignorant people as it is, people who think that a college degree somehow satisfies their obligation to society to be educated. Sales taxes in many jurisdictions are overly broad: if anything, we should be limiting the scope of these taxes.
The legislators attempting to pass these laws are violating their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights. There are legitimate ways for governments to obtain money pay for their operations: this is not one of them.
I always had an issue with philosophical and extremely popular notion of passing debt onto the next generation. Thankfully under most circumstances, for individuals, debts are null and void when an estate is settled. But not for governments. Tax revenue shortfalls have been solved by inflating the money supply and borrowing. We have a huge debt that will eventually come due. The last handful of generations have known this and done very little to do with it.
Ultimately, I'd say this comes down to a question of fundamental human rights. The children of one generation have a right to not be born into debt as a result of the actions of the previous generation. Debt slavery is just as illegal as any other form of slavery.
There are very few exceptions. If the Earth was about to be destroyed by an asteroid, sure, the government can go into debt to try to stop it. Anything less serious than that, no. A war or a police action is not a justification for going into long term debt.
As a fundamental right, in the USA, we can then assert this right under the 9th Amendment, as a right retained by the people. Persons in governments -- whether State, City, or Federal -- that create economic policies that lead to long term debt infringe this right are thus violating their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights. As such, they disqualify themselves from holding any position of public trust or responsibility.
We need to be converting most or all public retirement systems into private ones such as the 401k system, with appropriate rules on investments to ensure stupid people can't hurt themselves too badly.
Contract law is the bread-and-butter of the legal profession. Unfortunately, this means that legal professionals as a class in society are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the scope of contract law.
In other words, the greater the extent to which contracts can be used to infringe fundamental rights, the more money legal professionals can expect to make over their careers from those organizations with lots of money and interests that require or benefit from infringing those rights.
As a result of this conflict of interest, in recent decades, there have been all sorts of attempts by legal professionals to take contract law to places it should never have gone.
This is very evident to those of us who actually read contracts and licenses, such as some of the absurd "shrink-wrap" licenses that come with software. If you actually read some of these, you'll see some very ugly things.
For example, you might reasonably expect to be able to treat a software package like a used book, delete it from your computer, and sell it to somebody else. The idea that this should be allowed naturally follows from the concept of strong property rights, which naturally allows one to sell one's property. We can think of this as a "Right to Transfer". Many "shrink-wrap" contracts attempt to infringe these kinds of basic rights.
Large numbers of people nevertheless sell used software, which demonstrates that the lawyers as a class in society and the rest of the population have very different ideas about what constitutes reasonable conduct. Ethical conflicts of interest are a bad thing for society.
Officially, we're not cattle. So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?
Some people will argue that since advertising isn't explicitly mentioned in the Bill of Rights, it isn't relevant to this issue. You'll probably hear this argument many times from people making money off advertisements and their lawyers.
Historically, many of the practices associated with the slave system involved infringing fundamental human rights for economic gain and went far beyond what was actually authorized by the original Constitution. From a modern perspective, of course, the basic concept of slavery is intrinsically a massive violation of fundamental rights.
When we look at current times, we quickly find that the current US legal system is riddled with violations of fundamental rights, even when those rights are explicitly mentioned in the Bill of Rights.
For example, there are many, many, many laws that involve violations of rights that can reasonably be asserted under the 1st Amendment "no law" and the 2nd Amendment "may not be infringed" text present in the Bill of Rights.
The presence of laws that violate explicit rights can be reasonably supposed to result from legal professionals "making a buck" off unnecessary complexity, confusion, and contradictions within the legal system (all of which increases the demand for the services of their profession). In other words, ethical conflict of interest.
Thus, the answer to your question -- regarding how long has it been since we started allowing people's rights to be infringed for someone else's economic gain -- is: "A Very Long Time", or "It's Always Been That Way".
Our professional news services seem to be too busy chasing scandals to be cognizant of this.
I'd say that one good way to view the ad-blocker issue is to recognize that freedom of speech does not just imply rights on the part of the speaker, but must necessarily imply rights on the part of the audience, viewers, or listeners.
The rights we give to the audience (we might refer to these as "Audience Rights") must include the right not to be forced to participate or listen or view any particular communication, or even to have to take time out of their lives to deal with unwanted intrusions. This disallows being sent unsolicited ad mailings (whether through email or surface mail), it disallows ads on highway billboards, it means that television programs must be available in an ad-free format for those who are willing to pay a bit more, it bars unsolicited phone calls regarding products, surveys, or political campaigns, and it prevents advertisers from having any say over the use of ad-blockers.
If a certain subset of marketing professionals has a problem with this, we can encourage them to find an honest way to make a living.
And I have to disagree strongly with you about the role of Christianity in Civil Rights. There was simply no rational reason, none at all, for a white majority to end slavery and to embrace civil rights. With slavery the prompting to end it came from the churches - in particular the most fundamentalist churches with the most radical beliefs.
The white majority in the North didn't practice slavery. Similarly, the white majority in England (which didn't have those radical fundamentalist churches) outlawed it much sooner than the USA. Was this entirely or even primarily done for religious reasons? I think that you would have a tough time showing that.
There were numerous attempts by clergy in the North to force the Erie Canal to close on Sundays. Every one failed. This shows that economic issues (and perhaps an awareness of fundamental freedom) trumped religion in the North even in those days. Thus, we can not ascribe the lack of slavery in the North solely or even primarily to the influence of religion.
There are a number of secular reasons to oppose slavery. For example, history shows that what goes around often comes around. If we permit one minority group to be enslaved today, then we open the door for the current majority to themselves become victims later when things change.
Another consideration: slavery (or discrimination based upon race) is inconsistent with the ideas instrumental to the founding of the USA and which we cherish to this day, such the idea that all persons are created equal, or the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There are strong secular reasons to desire consistency in the legal system. Many colonists of the USA were fleeing the inconsistencies of the English legal system (consider the long history of "peasant" revolts in England), so I think many people would have been aware of this on some level.
Similarly, being reasonably open to immigration is one of the great strengths of America: many of our greatest have been immigrants. Open policies towards immigration are inconsistent with enslaving minorities. Many of those immigrants that were discriminated against (such as the Irish, once upon a time) would likely have been sympathetic towards others experiencing the same thing.
Enslavement of African-Americans was also inconsistent with scientific rationalism: it is very obvious that African-Americans, given the right opportunities and growing up in the right environment, are every bit as intelligent as anyone else, sometimes considerably more intelligent, and for those with a rational scientific worldview (or even just a sense of fairness and honesty) we simply can not justify not treating these people with the respect their intelligence deserves.
A sense of fairness and honesty in themselves work against slavery or discrimination: most people can figure out that if they treat others badly, they'll be treated the same way in return. While this is in accord with certain religious teachings, it's also a conclusion one can come to through simple life experience without any religious beliefs entering into consideration.
Probably the strongest secular reason for not having slavery for the average person is that slavery permits immense concentration of wealth into the hands of a tiny minority of society, which in turn greatly limits opportunities for most of the population. This is shown both by the history of ancient Rome and by what happened in the US South.
In one case I knew a physics student failed his oral exams because he was too confident. In another case, for a music degree, a professor didn't like the student because he didn't take enough notes in his class. The student complained to other professors, and the answer he got was, "Yeah, it's not fair, but we have to live and work with him, we don't have to deal with you, so we're not going to do anything about it."
I had a prof who said 'I know what it takes to be a real physicist, and none of you have it' and failed the entire class.
We were all asked to leave after appealing.
The rewards system in academia is set up to reward people for being good at research. Things like tenure, raises, titles, access to funding, and so forth all flow from this. It's called "publish or perish".
All this means that if you actually want to be successful, you need to be good at research. In many cases, this means that you need to be able to get grants, which means spending a lot of time selling your research.
Things are complicated by the 30% or so "tax" that the typical university applies to research funding, ostensively to support overhead associated with your research (typically these taxpayer dollars are laundered into the university budget to make it impossible to trace the manner in which the funds are actually being used). Thus, considerably MORE money is actually needed than is required to do the job.
In some specialties, things are even worse, such as certain areas of medical research. Here, almost nobody gets tenure and the average professor doesn't even get PAID unless they get research grants: these people have to use their grants to pay their OWN salaries. Of course, this only happens in unimportant areas of research, such as infectious diseases.
In short, the University system -- typically -- is set up to create huge conflicts of interest on the part of professors. As a result of these conflicts of interest, the skills of University professors at teaching or at interacting with people are often disappointing. After all, why bother to invest huge amounts of time at mastering difficult skills when those skills aren't strongly relevant to one's long term success?
This results in situations like the ones described above, where professors do unethical and / or incompetent things because being ethical and competent isn't really part of success for them. Being able to create the illusion that one is ethical or competent often matters, but the substance doesn't. It's a lot like how the legal profession works.
Having said this, and in spite of the system, about 20% of professors end up being really good teachers, so a large part of being a successful student (assuming one is motivated and disciplined) is finding the right instructors...
Probably not. As a guess you are required to agree to the code of conduct as condition of your admission.
Think of it as the moral equivalent of shrink-wrap licensing where you have to open the package to read the license and by opening the package you agree to the license.
Many legal professionals would certainly like to have people believe this. After all, contract-related work is the bread-and-butter of the legal profession. If they can convince the credulous and short-sighted that it makes sense to let contracts infringe fundamental rights, then that creates an artificial, long-term, and very potent demand for their services on the part of entities with large amounts of money to spend and interests that conflict with those same fundamental rights.
In ethics terms, this is known as "conflict of interest", and it is the bane of freedom in many places in the modern world, not just in universities.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing is quite common.
For example, many legal matters are settled "out-of-court", which means that not only do we not get to find out whether a party (whether accusor or accused) actually engaged in wrong-doing (often, this infringes the long term right to public oversight over businesses and over the legal profession), but also the parties will sign a contract agreeing to never again talk about the matter or otherwise infringing fundamental rights in return for the settlement.
If you don't want to sign, oh well, you'll get to go to court for many, many years, and even if you win, you'll end up paying the associated legal expenses for the rest of your life. To make matters worse, the average person in this situation will lose the court case because they don't have the money to pay for it.
Judges being legal professionals themselves, there isn't really any incentive to fix the system.
This is just one of a number of very serious ethics problems with how law is practiced in the USA. It is not an accident that we are known as the "land of the lawsuit".
Except that "separation of church and state" is a Supreme Court issue not a Constitutional issue. While the Court has mentioned "separation of church and state" many times, the Constitution mentions it zero times.
The Court has mentioned separation of church and state many times because the judges are familiar with history, and the writings of the Founding Fathers.
Don't forget that the period in which the American Revolution happened is the period now known as the Enlightenment, a period in which scientific, rational thinking started replacing blind faith. Many of the Founding Fathers, men such as Jefferson and Franklin, were deeply immersed in the Enlightenment, and the concept of "separation of church and state" flowed in large part from that.
You can look in the usual places for more information on this: the Wikipedia pages on "separation of church and state" and "the Enlightenment" are a good place to start.
The phrase "separation of church and state" actually comes directly from Jefferson's writing.
Many of the Founding Fathers were careful students of history, and were well aware of the problems caused by interference between religion and the state, not just in Colonial America, but throughout history.
You can read up on some of issues yourself. For example, the Byzantine empire -- which lasted for a thousand years -- ultimately lost to Islam in large part because of an attempt to impose a state religion (a particular version of Christianity) upon the peoples of the empire (many of whom, ironically, shared the overall Christian faith except for what to us today seem minor details, for example Egyptian and Syrian Monophysitism). This, of course, was heavily responsible for shaping the geography of the modern world and creating the current Islamic dominance in the Middle-East.
Yet another historical area it is good to be familiar with to understand this topic is the Protestant Reformation and the many years of religious wars and conflict that were associated with it (the 30 Year's War is a good starting point).
English history, in particular, was heavily affected by the conflicts between Protestant and Catholic beliefs, and had many problems associated with mixing church and state, a point the Founding Fathers would have been especially aware of.
All of these things happened well before the American revolution.
Madison wrote the Bill of Rights in order to address objections posed by the anti-Federalists that a) the Constitution didn't posses a Bill of Rights, and b) any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. Many references exist on the writing of the Bill of Rights if you wish more information on this.
The text of the 9th Amendment, and part of the 10th Amendment (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people) were specifically written to address the second objection: these make the Bill of Rights open-ended. So arguments of the form that "the Constitution doesn't say this or that or mentions issue x 0 times" are invalid and meaningless: an open-ended Bill of Rights means that we can raise issues at the Constitutional level without those issues being explicitly mentioned.
Having a spiritual side can be healthy for many individuals, but there is a difference between individual pursuit of spirituality and imposing one's religious beliefs on others.
Regarding your other comments, it is far from clear that religion or religious belief was the primary reason for either the existence or success of the Civil Rights movement, or that Americans will not be able to handle democracy without religion (nor does separation of church and state require abolishing religion: to separate is not to abolish).
Prohibition, which certainly inspired by religion, was a disaster. Ending child labor was not necessarily driven by religion: for example, in England, at least one of the early laws against child labor (Manchester, 1802, source: Edmund Robertson, Encyclopedia Britannica) was immediately
Not to mention that ethical conflicts of interest within the US legal profession and the government -- a major and arguably primary contributor to the problems with the patent system -- is (or should be) a major concern not just to us nerds, but to every thinking person in the USA.
The problems with the patent system form a subset of a much larger set of problems within many different areas of law and government, all sharing the characteristics that a) strong conflicts of interest exist on the part of the people building or maintaining the legal system, b) they cause serious long-term problems for society, and c) they are not being acknowledged by our legal professionals.
This affects programmers, engineers, scientists, and nerds in general in so many ways that go beyond mere patents, but looking at the problems with the patent system may be a good way to start trying to solve the more general problem.
It's a divide and conquer approach, much as we use when writing software or designing other engineering systems.
Lot's of people died in fires in those kinds of conditions and yelling fire was all but guaranteed to cause a stampede to the exit leaving people injured and dead. That is what the supreme court ruled was not protected, using speech in such a way that you know will cause harm and death to other people. And they had to argue that all the way to the supreme court to get a final decision: now think how easily our rights are eroded today and compare.
There is no doubt that yelling fire in a crowded theater SHOULD be treated as wrongful conduct. However, there is a HUGE problem with the Supreme Court decision that most people miss, which in turn leads directly to the way in which rights are eroded today.
The Bill of Rights, 1st Amendment, refers to 'no law'. It is also only limited to Congress (and hence not the State or local government), but we'll use the 14th Amendment to apply it to all levels of government, so that's a non-issue.
By the Supreme Court authorizing laws that make this -- clearly wrongful -- conduct illegal, the Court is creating a contradiction in the legal system between the "no law" text in the Bill of Rights and the presence of laws created at lower levels of government.
Legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system. A legal system that is perceived as being complex, confusing, scary, or contradictory (the key item in this particular case) by ordinary people will naturally create a strong long-term demand for the services of legal professionals.
Allowing these kinds of contradictions to exist is a very bad idea on many levels. From a nerd perspective, this is like a designer having a requirement or specificiation and choosing to ignore it without getting approval from the customer. The Constitution was barely approved as it was, and the Bill of Rights was ultimately neccesarily to the continuation of the Constitution: therefore, disregarding it in this manner was at miniumum, foolish and short sighted, and arguably a violation of the oaths of office taken by the judges.
Every time the Supreme Court authorizes these kinds of laws (there have been many occasions), that just opens the door wider to more and more contradictions. That in turn is largely responsible for the current erosion of rights.
We have a similiar situation with respect to the 2nd Amendment and the "may not be infringed text".
What the Court SHOULD have done was to say, "Yes, this is wrongful conduct. But, to pass such laws, an Amendment is first needed, and that is the responsibility of a Constitutional Convention and beyond the power of this court."
Sex for money should not be illegal. It is an overreach of local government in my opinion. It is between two consenting adults.
That's a reasonable position to take, but should it be constitutionally protected?
From a historical perspective, "no sex for money" within the USA is really an expression of religious belief of certain mainstream religious traditions within the USA. The history channel had a series ("The History of Sex") that covered this in considerable detail (apparently, the FBI was initially created as the nation's sex police).
In brief, the Protestant religions disliked the openness of some earlier Christian leaders to this practice, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation changed Catholic views on the subject as well.
Asian and even Western "Pagan" religions have treated this subject (and the whole subject of human sexuality) very differently from the Christian world (as those who are familiar with religous and secular practices in the Greek and Roman world will be quite aware).
Therefore, there definitely is a Constitutional issue here. It's called separation of church and state, something the USA is far behind Europe in achieving. It's not neccesarily a major issue, but the issue exists.
There may also be an issue with legal ethics, as anytime the legal system interferes with behavior that will be viewed as reasonable by many ordinary people, that can be considered a situation involving conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals as a class in society. Given that prostitution is legal in a number of Western countries, the "reasonable" part is easy to show.
In practice, whatever the laws may say, I'd expect you can find "sex for money" in any city in the USA.
You have established a correlation between a particular mathematical quantity (the difference between tax income and federal spending) and how states voted.
Correlation is not causation.
By itself this data is meaningless, although apparently appealing to those who spend mod points to support their political party affiliation (instead of being nerds and actually examining what is being said).
Within a state that voted for Romney, it is entirely possible that most of the federal funding goes to districts that voted for Obama, and vice-versa. Without a more careful analysis of the data, you can't say one way or the other.
There are strong differences between the political views of rural and urban populations in many jurisdictions, and sometimes may be strong differences in which of these locations receive the lion's share of the amount of funds. Even when these numbers is known, the analysis of benefit is not simple as receiving a larger dollar value does not neccesarily translate to receiving more benefit.
As a first step in understanding federal spending, you will almost certainly have to break the spending into categories, and consider who benefits within each state, and this in itself is a complex task, as the categories may overlap. Further, how do you determine who benefits from a particular spending decision? Is it one group, or are there multiple groups? Are there both direct and indirect benefits, and how do we quantify these? There is no algorithm for doing any of this, so, considerable thought and careful analysis is required.
Federal spending goes to many different things, and different (sometimes overlapping) groups benefit from each. Some examples of federal spending include military-related spending, maintaining the national transportation network, and education.
Some states with smaller populations get a disproportionate amount of money due to the need to maintain certain military bases. Bases may exist in a particular location either for strategic purposes, or perhaps because huge amounts of suitable land (e.g. land that supports training year round) is readily available, or even because of historical reasons and inertia.
Some federal funds are spent to take resources such as water out of one state and send it to another, which may benefit the receiving state more than the sending state.
Other federal funds are spend to support the transport of goods across the state. Movement of goods across a state may or may not result in significant benefit to the state: the benefit to the state from this spending may vary considerably, especially in comparison to the benefit to the states receiving those goods.
Consider the importance of having forests to provide lumber to build houses, and having a transportation network to move the wood to the house sites. Not all types of wood are equally suitable for any particular use, and those that are suitable may not grow in every state.
Educational spending is an enormously complex topic in and of itself.
Details like these need to be considered before you can draw political conclusions from looking at where federal funds are spent. Without such an analysis you can't hope to determine which political party actually benefits the most from particular federal spending.
At present, no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from the numbers you present. This is Slashdot. Please put more thought into this matter.
Incorrect. A patent owner is under no obligation to license. In fact, the whole point of the patent is to give a limited term monopoly. The revenue source of a patent troll is through legal actions based on forced licensing or settlements of patents it has acquired.
The legal professionals running the legal system have chosen to implement certain text in the Constitution in this fashion. Just because the legal professionals running the legal system have chosen to implement a certain part of the Constitution in a particular way, does not mean that they necessarily have the legitimate authority to do so.
Recall that once upon a time, legal professionals in parts of the USA authorized children of African-Americans to be enslaved: do we wish to consider this an act that these legal professionals had the legitimate authority to do? Was it a legitimate act of government to create the "separate-but-not-actually-equal" system that endured for so many years?
The current system specifies that a patent owner has no obligation to license, permits the existence of patent trolls, and has many other problems, but we do not have to accept this situation.
Recall the extremely strong opposition the Anti-Federalists mounted in many states, and how difficult it was to get the Constitution ratified at all.
A number of states refused to ratify the Constitution without a Bill of Rights. In other states, it was the case that people whose honor and integrity were trusted (such as James Madison) promised to add a Bill of Rights and this was the key determinant in these states accepting the Constitution. Whatever words may have been used in this acceptance, it was well known that this acceptance was conditional, as a matter of practical politics. These states knew that they could back out if they found it necessarily, and at the time it was neither militarily nor politically possible for the other states to force compliance if such an event happened.
This history shows that the Bill of Right supersedes the text of the Constitution, including the text that has been used to justify the current patent system.
The oaths that legal professionals swear require them to accept this. Those that refuse to do so are violating these oaths.
James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to address two arguments posed by the Anti-Federalists: 1. The Constitution had no Bill of Rights, and 2, any Bill of Rights would be incomplete. The 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people) were written to deal with the second issue.
Rights retained by the people are by definition retained by the people. If we the people decide that the current patent system is invalid, or aspects of that system, are invalid, then we can force change under the Bill of Rights.
The patent system, as currently implemented, infringes a number of fundamental rights, a point that has been discussed many times on Slashdot. It is long past time we threw it out and came up with something better.
If it has a legitimate subpoena, it can get almost any information it wants to about you, and legal "fishing expeditions" are not that hard to mount.... They'll always going to have the power to subpoena your information...They will always be able to violate your privacy...
We should not treat all subpoenas as being the same. That power can be used as part of a criminal investigation (this is sometimes referred to as an aspect of the "police power of government"), but it can also can be used by legal professionals (most of whom are not "in the government" as most people would view these things, although they may be technically considered "officers of the court") in civil cases, and this power can also be used by legislative bodies and their agents in various ways (recall Ken Starr, an agent appointed by a legislative body, using the subpoena power to threaten Monica Lewinsky's mother, to try to force her to testify against her daughter?).
In all of these situations, the subpoena power can be used legitimately or not legitimately, with respect to whether not fundamental human rights are being infringed. "Fishing expeditions" can and do occur outside the context of the police power of government.
A part of the desire to see privacy recognized as a fundamental right is not just about limiting the government's ability to use the police power in inappropriate ways, but also limiting what is allowed in these other situations, something Scott Adams completely overlooks in his blog.
There are also legitimate privacy concerns with respect to businesses collecting information about specific individuals, with respect to the relationship between employers and employees, and with respect to freedom of the press.
There is also a concern with the increasing use of "arbitration", and how that practice can potentially infringe fundamental rights, including the right to privacy.
The desire to see privacy recognized as a fundamental right (asserting this under the 9th Amendment would be appropriate) is something many people would like to see to ensure that their children grow up in a reasonably free country.
If we the people successfully assert privacy as a fundamental right -- and we certainly should, there might be some quibbling over details to make sure we can go after the sociopaths, but the basic concept is sound -- then that in turn will block most "fishing expeditions" and many of the inappropriate subpoena's associated with non-criminal investigations.
Asserting privacy as a basic right may also limit abuses of the police power. It is not necessarily always going to be the case that "They" will always have the power to subpoena information, any more than it is the case that "They" will always have the power to enslave people on the basis of race, or that "They" will always have the power for segregate African-Americans. Change is possible.
Scott Adam's blog suggests that he doesn't believe privacy with respect to government is actually possible, however, he makes a logical error in his argument. His argument essentially works as follows: he comes up with a long list of situations where, at present, he claims we do not have privacy with respect to the government, and based upon this he concludes that privacy with respect to the government is not possible. Even if his claims are correct that we do not have privacy with respect to the items in this list at present (a dubious claim at best, given the many different legal jurisdictions in this country, each with its own set of rules: it is not "your government" as he claims, but rather many governments), it still does not necessarily follow that we will never have privacy with respect to some of these items in the future. Further, the concept of privacy is not necessarily limited to or determined by the items he listed, and thus he is inappropriately generalizing (yes, he did attempt to minimize this, but ineffectually). His argument als
I don't think the ACLU cares if you have a Western mindset or Eastern mindset, I think they see their values like freedom of the press as a universal human right (as I happen to as well). And when you start to challenge universal human rights, that's the point in time where I throw your politics and socialism/capitalism crap right out the window and tell you you're wrong.
Calling freedom of the press a "universal human right" has a lot of potential for creating nice sound bites, but, to me, seems like sloppy thinking. How do you define freedom? How do you define "press"?
For example, advertising is often treated as a form of press activity. After all, the ad mailings that are sent to people's homes are certainly being printed on presses. If we accept that advertising is a form of press activitiy, then should publishing false advertisements be allowed as freedom of the press? What about misleading-but-not-actually-false advertisement? What about touching up the faces of women in advertisement photos? That's certainly showing a false view of people (after all, they don't actually look like that) but is it something that should be considered false advertising? Where is the boundry between false advertising and fraud?
What about sending unsolicited advertisements to people's homes, otherwise known as junk mail? What about making unsolicited phone calls to publish a particular political party's views prior to an election? Should these be a legitimate form of press activity, or should a more fundamental human right, such as a right to not have one's time wasted or a right to not have unwanted intrusions into one's castle (home), apply?
Do people need to be members of some officially recognized group that we call the "press", and if so, who determines membership, or can anyone be a member? When do we allow people who are engaging in some sort of press activity to bypass police lines or enter areas the government has set off limits? Should these people be subject to search, or other limitations of entry into such areas?
Then there's the issue of taking people's statements out of context: should there be limits as to when is that reasonable? For example, should there be limits on the attacks politicians are allowed make on opponents, especially during campaigns, or should some sort of rules of courtesy and honorable conduct apply? Should we allow lobbying to be concealed as a form of press activity (for example, using "publication" of a book as a means to transfer money from group A to group B by having group B publish a book and having group A buy many copies of the book -- without any actual intention of reading them -- as a means of disguising a money transfer aka bribe)?
Should there be trademark, copyright, or patent laws, and if so, to what extent do we permit these to interfere with freedom of the press? The creation of open source software is certainly a form of publication, but if we allow patent law to interfere with this than we also are permitting patent law to interfere with freedom of the press: is this ever reasonable?
Should criminals be able to publish their life stories and make money from doing so? What about libel or slander?
To what extent and when does freedom of the press apply in, or with respect to activities of, the courtroom? Do we allow judges to throw people in jail on a theory of "contempt of court", for expressing their views on Facebook? Do we allow judges to physically sequester people to prevent them from talking to the press?
To what extent should the press be able to report on military matters or police investigations? What about press organizations that are funded by foreign intelligence agencies for the express purpose of attempting to overthrow or undermine a government or nation?
Then there's the issue of how privacy rights interact with freedom of the press. To what extent do we allow public oversight over government, or businesses, or the legal profession? Long term oversight of all
Perhaps you would benefit from reading the references.
Ultimately, the "revisions" that are happening in our knowledge of WW2 are primarily coming from Russian authors, who are now free to research these issues with direct access to the archives in Russia. For example, you might wish to look up M.N. Suprin, Boris Sokolov, and Viktor Suvorov.
You might also want to look up the "Ushakov medal" for bravery, awarded by the Russian government in recent years as thanks to those that participated in the extremely dangerous convoys that carried supplies to Russia.
Some Americans are doubtless dumb enough to claim WW2 was all about them, but -- if you'll recall -- nothing like that was said or even implied in the post that you are responding to. There are dumb people in every country. I mentioned that WW2 was a team effort, and gave credit to people from many other nations.
The role of Britain in WW2 was very important and substantial, but here, as with Russia, US industrial aid was important even early in the war due to limitations in the British industrial system. The British had the engineering skills to design superb advanced technology (such as the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters, and especially the excellent Merlin engine), but not the industrial capability to produce the parts needed to build these in sufficient quantities to make up for losses. See, for example, British military historian Corelli Barnett's classic book "The Audit of War" for some of the reasons why this was so and for specific details on this issue.
It is worth noting that Britain provided many forms of aid to the USA, partly in terms of knowledge and experience, but also in the form of advanced technology, so the transfer of aid was not by any means one-sided.
US direct military participation was also important to Britain. This is true not just for the air force commitment, as mentioned in the previous post, but also the presence of large numbers of ground troops, due to the heavy casualties the British took early in the war.
Suvorov's work suggests that many of the heavy casualties Russia took in the early part of the war were due to a mistake made by Stalin and his adviser's. Casualties alone do not determine who plays the "main part" in war. I'll let you read up on the details.
As far as pay goes, Albert Week's book estimates the dollar value of the total Lend-Lease aid to be $42-50 Billion, of which the Soviet share was roughly 1/3. Of this, it seems likely that $300 Million will be repaid and the rest forgiven.
You also have a very Europe-centric view (perhaps even bias) towards the war. If you look at the numbers of troops, ships, and equipment committed to the Pacific theater by Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, the USA, and others, you'll realize it doesn't make sense to say the Europeans were playing the main part in the war. Say instead that winning the war was a team effort by the peoples of many nations.
It is important and valuable to look at the lessons history teaches, but you haven't done the research to be able to do that with authority here.
The US role in WW2 does not in any way justify current day incompetence by some US government officials in some circumstances, but spreading misinformation is not going to help solve that kind of problem.
Thank you for providing some intelligent information to contradict that earlier absurd claim. Some slashdot moderators seem to be more interested in making anti-USA attacks than in objectivity.
The Soviet Union was indeed responsible for most of the land warfare that defeated Germany
True, in the sense of putting people on the battlefield. However, the USA provided enormous quantities of supplies to the Soviet Union, with substantial assistance from the British (particularly the navy and merchant marine) and with help from the other Allies as well.
During the Soviet era, it was customary to deny this, because it reflected poorly on the Communist system. However, since the Cold War ended, Russian authors have been much more willing to acknowledge this. For discussions on this in English, and references to the Russian sources, a good starting point is the books by Weeks or Van Tuyll.
The supplies provided included staggering quantities of food, and cold weather gear, allowing the Soviets (who had a serious manpower shortage after the disastrous early defeats) not just to feed and clothe their troops, but also to move former farmers and tailors into the battle lines. The supplies also included chemicals and equipment needed to turn raw gasoline into high quality aviation fuel (affecting perhaps 70% of the aviation fuel produced in Russia during the war), over 100,000 machine tools to help the Russian factories to produce weapons and munitions, plus roughly 90% of the ball bearings needed during the war for things like tanks, planes, artillery, machinery of all kinds, and so forth (basically anything with rotating parts). Also, over 645,000 vehicles were shipped to the Soviets, crucial for moving ammunition and food from the rail heads to the troops. Did I forget to mention huge amounts of rail equipment was also shipped to make up for deficiencies in Russia's rail network?
According to Viktor Suvorov's post-Cold War book on Stalin, the Soviets lost large numbers of factories (and their equipment) during the German advance (contrary to what is often presented in older histories), so the role of the industrial parts may have been far more important then ever previously suspected.
It's hard for an army to fight a modern war without weapons, ammunition, tanks, and planes. Even if you have these things available somewhere in your country, it has been known since the end of the 19th Century (see van Creveld's book on logistics) that substantial amounts of both rail and non-rail transport is needed to keep the troops at the front supplied, given the voracious rate at which supplies are consumed during modern warfare.
Another key consideration: over 1 million Germans were involved in the air defense of the Reich against the combined British and American air attack (with other nations participating as well). This effort shattered the Luftwaffe, one of the most potent weapons the Germans had in the wide open spaces of the Eastern front. It also diverted a substantial part of Germany's resources and production capability to the production of aircraft, ammunition, and anti-aircraft weapons (particularly high-altitude anti-aircraft weapons, which, incidentally, just happened to make great anti-tank weapons that were thus not available for use on the Eastern front), not to mention all the aviation fuel expended.
Without all this aid, in all likelihood the Soviet effort would have catastrophically collapsed, in spite of their often excellent equipment and some very capable military leaders, and this conclusion is valid even taking into account the frequent Nazi blundering and stupidity.
It is worth remembering that more US military personnel died during the air assault on Germany than in any other part of the war (as well as many British personnel). Large numbers of US and British civilian sailors also died during the effort to get these supplies to Russia. The Soviets lost more people, but quite a few non-Russians died during the effort to keep a homeland not their own alive, and those of us that enjoy not living in a Nazi world should appreciate that.
The historical existence of the Declaration of Independence, and the fact that the American Revolution occurred, demonstrates to any competent thinker (i.e. those not being led astray by conflict of interest, ignorance, or brainwashing) that there are limits to the authority of government.
In rebelling against the government, the Founding Fathers refused to accept the authority of the King's government to pass certain laws, or the authority of the King's judges to enforce those laws. This establishes that there are limits both to what legislative or executive branches of government (Parliament, and the King) may do, and to what judicial branches of government (the King's judges) may do. The Declaration of Independence provided a list, specific but not exclusive, of some things governments may not legitimately do.
The existence of the Bill of Rights repeats this lesson. Once again, it is established that there are limits to the authority of government. It follows that it is not within the legal authority of government to pass incompetent laws, stupid laws, or laws that otherwise infringe fundamental rights. Recall that a number of states refused to ratify the Constitution without a Bill of Rights added, and that in those states that did ratify it, it was typically the case that promises were made by men of honor whose integrity (such as James Madison) to add a Bill of Rights. As a matter of practical politics, even those states that did ratify knew they could leave the new nation at any time if these promises were not kept: at the time, it was neither militarily nor politically practical for any state to force another to participate.
This history demonstrates that the entities defined by the Constitution (the Congress, Senate, Presidency, and Supreme Court), and the granted powers, such as the treaty power or the power to regulate interstate commerce, were not trusted to be free from abuse. As such, we necessarily must conclude that the Bill of Rights supersedes the authority of the original Constitution in all respects.
The Bill of Rights also was intended to supersede the authority of the state governments, as is clear from Madison's original text (recall his earlier -- successful -- battle to prevent Virginia from violating its own Bill of Rights): even after the document passed through the Senate, the only amendment that was specifically written to limit Congress was the 1st Amendment. The only reason this has ever been subject to question is that the slave states found it inconvenient.
For a more modern perspective on these issues, we can look to the lessons of Nuremberg. German military personnel were required by LAW to obey the orders of their superiors. In rejecting this defense, the judges at Nuremberg once again affirmed that there are limits to the laws governments may pass: some laws are not legitimate, and persons acting under the supposed authority of those laws may be both violating fundamental human rights and engaging in illegal conduct.
Even a seemingly innocuous law, such as a law requiring military personnel to obey the orders of their superiors, which on its face has nothing to do with civil liberties, can be an illegal law.
A nation whose government respects fundamental rights is a nation whose government will be strongly supported by its people, and will have very strong resistance to the efforts of anarchists or terrorists to destroy that nation.
In the USA, Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to deal with two objections to the Constitution: 1. There was no Bill of Rights, and 2. Any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. The 9th and 10th Amendments were written to deal with the second objection, which was so important that it gets repeated in two separate Amendments by retaining rights to the people (9th Amendment) and reserving rights to the people (10th Amendment).
If the text in the previous post is in fact an existing NJ statute, then that statute exists in violation of fundamental rights which are appropriately asser
It is never good to have a goverment ordering people to say or write things they don't actually believe. This is called "Freedom of Conscience."
This is an excellent point with respect to limiting what government can do to people. However, it's not clear to me that corporations (and other businesses) should be considered people.
For one thing, there is lots of historical evidence (e.g. rats in peanut butter, toxic waste) that shows a reasonable degree of public oversight over corporations (and other businesses) is both neccesary and highly desirable. In many ways, the need for public oversight over corporations parallels the need for public oversight over government or over legal systems.
It would not be good to permit the same level and types of oversight over individuals in their private lives as we have a right to expect over businesses.
Abuse of patent and copyright by businesses are both things that would probably be reduced by greater public awareness of just how many things are wrong with the current systems. The judge's action in the current case might be viewed as a small step in that direction. I don't know enough about English law to know if he can do more.
There are strong conflicts of interest that perpetuate the current abuses of intellectual property law. It may be that small victories are all we can expect at present.
The real danger is that some people will view this sort of thing as setting a precedent that governments can do the same things to people as they can do businesses.
I'd like to see school funding be set by need rather than local property taxes, but THAT truly would be a waste of political capital, trying to take funding away from rich suburban schools and divert them to poorer schools.
The first part is something I agree with. It would help to undo some of the remaining harm done as a result of so many years of racist policies, and make the nation as a whole stronger. Parents that are well off financially are also likely to have more time to supplement what the schools do, or the money to pay for private schools, so wealthy districts have less need for extra money.
It's not really clear this would be a waste of political capital, or impossible to achieve. That probably would depend on the approach taken. It certainly would take a long time, which is always difficult in the American system.
Property taxes should really only be used to be for emergency services, such as fire departments. Everything else could be paid for by income taxes. In some places, the property taxes are so high they essentially force people to rent their homes from the government, which undermines the strong property rights so neccesary for a country to be free.
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I used to maintain that there were 4 communications rights, only one of which enjoys support at a fundamental constitutional level...
Actually, any of these four can be asserted at the constitutional level, as rights retained by the people under the 9th Amendment.
Historically, it has been inconvenient for legal professionals to acknowledge this. There are ethical conflicts of interest that can be reasonably supposed to account for this reluctance.
Unfortunately, until we the people decide to stop letting the lawyers dictate the laws, we will continue to get bad laws and bad court precedents resulting from these ethical conflicts of interest.
It's fortunate the open access activists haven't succeeded yet. Let thank these publishers that protect national security by erecting a paywall between taxpayer funded research and the public.
I'd say there's a fundamental right of public access to any research where even one dollar of public funds gets spent, with a few reasonable exceptions (detailed information on building weapons of mass destruction, privacy). This article, as it is being published in Nature, can be reasonably supposed to not qualify for either exception.
This right arises as part of a more general right to long term public oversight over government.
This doesn't mean journels can't have a right to initial publication, with full public access perhaps delayed a year. Full public access could be implemented by the researcher maintaining a web site for the article, or by some sort of collective web site, or even a library web site. It should be viewed as an obligation a researcher cheerfully accepts in return for the funding.
So WTF is this doing on /. anyway? This just seems like it is here because it's a typical lawsuit but a computer is involved
Abuse (or potential abuse) of the tort system is part of a much bigger problem in the US legal system. Most of our laws are written by legal professionals, prosecuted by legal professionals, and judged by legal professionals. Our presidents, governors, and legislators are almost all legal professionals.
This causes legal professionals, as a class in society, to be able to have enormous influence over the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
Is this a problem? Well, do you believe it is an accident that the USA is known as the "Land of the Lawsuit"? Do you believe that the interests of legal professionals as a class in society will necessarily align with the interests of the rest of society?
A legal system that is complex, confusing, scary, or contradictory to ordinary people, or to us Slashdot nerds, massively increases the long term demand for the services of legal professionals. Hence, legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
Very few people outside of the legal profession are aware of these conflicts of interest, aside from the law nerds.
These ethical conflicts of interest have implications for contract law (which affects all nerds that are not self-employed), for copyright and patent law (with obvious implications for nerds), and many other areas of law (some of which will affect us nerds).
Like a cancer that has metastasized, these ethics problems can potentially affect any part of the body of law.
Also, ethics problems within the legal profession can greatly impact the cost and availability of technology.
Further, the ethics problems in the US legal system aren't covered very well in the mainstream press (which is presumably too busy covering sports and scandals), which means these issues can only be addressed in other forums, such as here.
I have no personal knowledge of this case, and thus don't actually know whether or not the case does involve abuse of the tort system or ethics problems, but it is certainly appropriate to be discussing it here.
You've pretty accurately characterized the single most important problem with the US legal system today.
Most legislators and top government executives (such as Governers of states, and the President) are legal professionals. Legal professonials write, prosecute, and judge the laws.
A legal system that is (or is merely perceived to be) scary, complex, confusing, or contradictory creates long term business for legal professionals as a class in society. These same people write the laws and create the precedents.
Hence, as a class within society, legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
I call this the single most important problem because it underlies or impacts the majority of issues with the legal system, such as abuse of the tort system, infringement of civil liberties, the broken patent and copyright systems, or abuses of contract law (such as represented by most or all "shrink-wrap" contracts).
While this ethics problem rarely results in lost lives, the consequences of legal practices and policies that involve conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals can be enormously expensive to companies, to society, and to individuals, which does in some cases result in destroyed lives.
The (many) court rulings I've read (including Supreme Court rulings) have not given me any real confidence that this issue will ever be addressed by legal professionals without some serious pushing from people outside the profession.
Right. Instead of spending locally we spend online tax free. This is a problem and hopefully this bill fixes that.
You haven't put any thought into this. Suppose one lives near the border of some government jurisdiction, such as a state. The nearest shopping area in 5 minutes over the border. The nearest shopping area in your own state is 1 hour away.
Any reasonable person under such circumstances will go over the border to do a lot of their shopping.
A government requirement that one keep track of all out-of-state purchases in order to pay taxes on them would involve massive bookkeeping on the part of this individual. This person would have to keep track of every purchase (potentially throughout their entire life), with sufficient information to determine whether the purchase was made in state or out.
Clearly, this violates fundamental human rights, such as rights not to be subject to excessive government, not to be subject to excessive bureaucracy, or to not have ones time wasted. In the USA, such rights can reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment as rights "retained by the people" or the 10th Amendment as rights "reserved to the people".
With the internet, technology has effectively moved these borders next to all of us: we are all in the same situation as the person living next to the border wherever we happen to live.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that no legitimate government has any business taxing the sale of lifetime learning materials, such as non-fiction books and dvds. Lifetime learning is how the people learn enough about the world they live in to not be brainwashed by corrupt officials or by political parties. The power to tax is the power to destroy: no government should be able to tax the very materials that ultimately determine the ability of people to control that government. We have far too many ignorant people as it is, people who think that a college degree somehow satisfies their obligation to society to be educated. Sales taxes in many jurisdictions are overly broad: if anything, we should be limiting the scope of these taxes.
The legislators attempting to pass these laws are violating their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights. There are legitimate ways for governments to obtain money pay for their operations: this is not one of them.
Simple comparisons of what goes into and out of any given state are meaningless, for reasons discussed here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3247559&cid=41976963.
I always had an issue with philosophical and extremely popular notion of passing debt onto the next generation. Thankfully under most circumstances, for individuals, debts are null and void when an estate is settled. But not for governments. Tax revenue shortfalls have been solved by inflating the money supply and borrowing. We have a huge debt that will eventually come due. The last handful of generations have known this and done very little to do with it.
Ultimately, I'd say this comes down to a question of fundamental human rights. The children of one generation have a right to not be born into debt as a result of the actions of the previous generation. Debt slavery is just as illegal as any other form of slavery.
There are very few exceptions. If the Earth was about to be destroyed by an asteroid, sure, the government can go into debt to try to stop it. Anything less serious than that, no. A war or a police action is not a justification for going into long term debt.
As a fundamental right, in the USA, we can then assert this right under the 9th Amendment, as a right retained by the people. Persons in governments -- whether State, City, or Federal -- that create economic policies that lead to long term debt infringe this right are thus violating their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights. As such, they disqualify themselves from holding any position of public trust or responsibility.
We need to be converting most or all public retirement systems into private ones such as the 401k system, with appropriate rules on investments to ensure stupid people can't hurt themselves too badly.
Contract law is the bread-and-butter of the legal profession. Unfortunately, this means that legal professionals as a class in society are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the scope of contract law.
In other words, the greater the extent to which contracts can be used to infringe fundamental rights, the more money legal professionals can expect to make over their careers from those organizations with lots of money and interests that require or benefit from infringing those rights.
As a result of this conflict of interest, in recent decades, there have been all sorts of attempts by legal professionals to take contract law to places it should never have gone.
This is very evident to those of us who actually read contracts and licenses, such as some of the absurd "shrink-wrap" licenses that come with software. If you actually read some of these, you'll see some very ugly things.
For example, you might reasonably expect to be able to treat a software package like a used book, delete it from your computer, and sell it to somebody else. The idea that this should be allowed naturally follows from the concept of strong property rights, which naturally allows one to sell one's property. We can think of this as a "Right to Transfer". Many "shrink-wrap" contracts attempt to infringe these kinds of basic rights.
Large numbers of people nevertheless sell used software, which demonstrates that the lawyers as a class in society and the rest of the population have very different ideas about what constitutes reasonable conduct. Ethical conflicts of interest are a bad thing for society.
Officially, we're not cattle. So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?
Some people will argue that since advertising isn't explicitly mentioned in the Bill of Rights, it isn't relevant to this issue. You'll probably hear this argument many times from people making money off advertisements and their lawyers.
Historically, many of the practices associated with the slave system involved infringing fundamental human rights for economic gain and went far beyond what was actually authorized by the original Constitution. From a modern perspective, of course, the basic concept of slavery is intrinsically a massive violation of fundamental rights.
When we look at current times, we quickly find that the current US legal system is riddled with violations of fundamental rights, even when those rights are explicitly mentioned in the Bill of Rights.
For example, there are many, many, many laws that involve violations of rights that can reasonably be asserted under the 1st Amendment "no law" and the 2nd Amendment "may not be infringed" text present in the Bill of Rights.
The presence of laws that violate explicit rights can be reasonably supposed to result from legal professionals "making a buck" off unnecessary complexity, confusion, and contradictions within the legal system (all of which increases the demand for the services of their profession). In other words, ethical conflict of interest.
Thus, the answer to your question -- regarding how long has it been since we started allowing people's rights to be infringed for someone else's economic gain -- is: "A Very Long Time", or "It's Always Been That Way".
Our professional news services seem to be too busy chasing scandals to be cognizant of this.
I'd say that one good way to view the ad-blocker issue is to recognize that freedom of speech does not just imply rights on the part of the speaker, but must necessarily imply rights on the part of the audience, viewers, or listeners.
The rights we give to the audience (we might refer to these as "Audience Rights") must include the right not to be forced to participate or listen or view any particular communication, or even to have to take time out of their lives to deal with unwanted intrusions. This disallows being sent unsolicited ad mailings (whether through email or surface mail), it disallows ads on highway billboards, it means that television programs must be available in an ad-free format for those who are willing to pay a bit more, it bars unsolicited phone calls regarding products, surveys, or political campaigns, and it prevents advertisers from having any say over the use of ad-blockers.
If a certain subset of marketing professionals has a problem with this, we can encourage them to find an honest way to make a living.
And I have to disagree strongly with you about the role of Christianity in Civil Rights. There was simply no rational reason, none at all, for a white majority to end slavery and to embrace civil rights. With slavery the prompting to end it came from the churches - in particular the most fundamentalist churches with the most radical beliefs.
The white majority in the North didn't practice slavery. Similarly, the white majority in England (which didn't have those radical fundamentalist churches) outlawed it much sooner than the USA. Was this entirely or even primarily done for religious reasons? I think that you would have a tough time showing that.
There were numerous attempts by clergy in the North to force the Erie Canal to close on Sundays. Every one failed. This shows that economic issues (and perhaps an awareness of fundamental freedom) trumped religion in the North even in those days. Thus, we can not ascribe the lack of slavery in the North solely or even primarily to the influence of religion.
There are a number of secular reasons to oppose slavery. For example, history shows that what goes around often comes around. If we permit one minority group to be enslaved today, then we open the door for the current majority to themselves become victims later when things change.
Another consideration: slavery (or discrimination based upon race) is inconsistent with the ideas instrumental to the founding of the USA and which we cherish to this day, such the idea that all persons are created equal, or the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There are strong secular reasons to desire consistency in the legal system. Many colonists of the USA were fleeing the inconsistencies of the English legal system (consider the long history of "peasant" revolts in England), so I think many people would have been aware of this on some level.
Similarly, being reasonably open to immigration is one of the great strengths of America: many of our greatest have been immigrants. Open policies towards immigration are inconsistent with enslaving minorities. Many of those immigrants that were discriminated against (such as the Irish, once upon a time) would likely have been sympathetic towards others experiencing the same thing.
Enslavement of African-Americans was also inconsistent with scientific rationalism: it is very obvious that African-Americans, given the right opportunities and growing up in the right environment, are every bit as intelligent as anyone else, sometimes considerably more intelligent, and for those with a rational scientific worldview (or even just a sense of fairness and honesty) we simply can not justify not treating these people with the respect their intelligence deserves.
A sense of fairness and honesty in themselves work against slavery or discrimination: most people can figure out that if they treat others badly, they'll be treated the same way in return. While this is in accord with certain religious teachings, it's also a conclusion one can come to through simple life experience without any religious beliefs entering into consideration.
Probably the strongest secular reason for not having slavery for the average person is that slavery permits immense concentration of wealth into the hands of a tiny minority of society, which in turn greatly limits opportunities for most of the population. This is shown both by the history of ancient Rome and by what happened in the US South.
In one case I knew a physics student failed his oral exams because he was too confident. In another case, for a music degree, a professor didn't like the student because he didn't take enough notes in his class. The student complained to other professors, and the answer he got was, "Yeah, it's not fair, but we have to live and work with him, we don't have to deal with you, so we're not going to do anything about it."
I had a prof who said 'I know what it takes to be a real physicist, and none of you have it' and failed the entire class.
We were all asked to leave after appealing.
The rewards system in academia is set up to reward people for being good at research. Things like tenure, raises, titles, access to funding, and so forth all flow from this. It's called "publish or perish".
All this means that if you actually want to be successful, you need to be good at research. In many cases, this means that you need to be able to get grants, which means spending a lot of time selling your research.
Things are complicated by the 30% or so "tax" that the typical university applies to research funding, ostensively to support overhead associated with your research (typically these taxpayer dollars are laundered into the university budget to make it impossible to trace the manner in which the funds are actually being used). Thus, considerably MORE money is actually needed than is required to do the job.
In some specialties, things are even worse, such as certain areas of medical research. Here, almost nobody gets tenure and the average professor doesn't even get PAID unless they get research grants: these people have to use their grants to pay their OWN salaries. Of course, this only happens in unimportant areas of research, such as infectious diseases.
In short, the University system -- typically -- is set up to create huge conflicts of interest on the part of professors. As a result of these conflicts of interest, the skills of University professors at teaching or at interacting with people are often disappointing. After all, why bother to invest huge amounts of time at mastering difficult skills when those skills aren't strongly relevant to one's long term success?
This results in situations like the ones described above, where professors do unethical and / or incompetent things because being ethical and competent isn't really part of success for them. Being able to create the illusion that one is ethical or competent often matters, but the substance doesn't. It's a lot like how the legal profession works.
Having said this, and in spite of the system, about 20% of professors end up being really good teachers, so a large part of being a successful student (assuming one is motivated and disciplined) is finding the right instructors ...
I suspect that runs afoul of contract law.
Probably not. As a guess you are required to agree to the code of conduct as condition of your admission.
Think of it as the moral equivalent of shrink-wrap licensing where you have to open the package to read the license and by opening the package you agree to the license.
Many legal professionals would certainly like to have people believe this. After all, contract-related work is the bread-and-butter of the legal profession. If they can convince the credulous and short-sighted that it makes sense to let contracts infringe fundamental rights, then that creates an artificial, long-term, and very potent demand for their services on the part of entities with large amounts of money to spend and interests that conflict with those same fundamental rights.
In ethics terms, this is known as "conflict of interest", and it is the bane of freedom in many places in the modern world, not just in universities.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing is quite common.
For example, many legal matters are settled "out-of-court", which means that not only do we not get to find out whether a party (whether accusor or accused) actually engaged in wrong-doing (often, this infringes the long term right to public oversight over businesses and over the legal profession), but also the parties will sign a contract agreeing to never again talk about the matter or otherwise infringing fundamental rights in return for the settlement.
If you don't want to sign, oh well, you'll get to go to court for many, many years, and even if you win, you'll end up paying the associated legal expenses for the rest of your life. To make matters worse, the average person in this situation will lose the court case because they don't have the money to pay for it.
Judges being legal professionals themselves, there isn't really any incentive to fix the system.
This is just one of a number of very serious ethics problems with how law is practiced in the USA. It is not an accident that we are known as the "land of the lawsuit".
Except that "separation of church and state" is a Supreme Court issue not a Constitutional issue. While the Court has mentioned "separation of church and state" many times, the Constitution mentions it zero times.
The Court has mentioned separation of church and state many times because the judges are familiar with history, and the writings of the Founding Fathers.
Don't forget that the period in which the American Revolution happened is the period now known as the Enlightenment, a period in which scientific, rational thinking started replacing blind faith. Many of the Founding Fathers, men such as Jefferson and Franklin, were deeply immersed in the Enlightenment, and the concept of "separation of church and state" flowed in large part from that.
You can look in the usual places for more information on this: the Wikipedia pages on "separation of church and state" and "the Enlightenment" are a good place to start.
The phrase "separation of church and state" actually comes directly from Jefferson's writing.
Many of the Founding Fathers were careful students of history, and were well aware of the problems caused by interference between religion and the state, not just in Colonial America, but throughout history.
You can read up on some of issues yourself. For example, the Byzantine empire -- which lasted for a thousand years -- ultimately lost to Islam in large part because of an attempt to impose a state religion (a particular version of Christianity) upon the peoples of the empire (many of whom, ironically, shared the overall Christian faith except for what to us today seem minor details, for example Egyptian and Syrian Monophysitism). This, of course, was heavily responsible for shaping the geography of the modern world and creating the current Islamic dominance in the Middle-East.
Yet another historical area it is good to be familiar with to understand this topic is the Protestant Reformation and the many years of religious wars and conflict that were associated with it (the 30 Year's War is a good starting point).
English history, in particular, was heavily affected by the conflicts between Protestant and Catholic beliefs, and had many problems associated with mixing church and state, a point the Founding Fathers would have been especially aware of.
All of these things happened well before the American revolution.
Madison wrote the Bill of Rights in order to address objections posed by the anti-Federalists that a) the Constitution didn't posses a Bill of Rights, and b) any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. Many references exist on the writing of the Bill of Rights if you wish more information on this.
The text of the 9th Amendment, and part of the 10th Amendment (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people) were specifically written to address the second objection: these make the Bill of Rights open-ended. So arguments of the form that "the Constitution doesn't say this or that or mentions issue x 0 times" are invalid and meaningless: an open-ended Bill of Rights means that we can raise issues at the Constitutional level without those issues being explicitly mentioned.
Having a spiritual side can be healthy for many individuals, but there is a difference between individual pursuit of spirituality and imposing one's religious beliefs on others.
Regarding your other comments, it is far from clear that religion or religious belief was the primary reason for either the existence or success of the Civil Rights movement, or that Americans will not be able to handle democracy without religion (nor does separation of church and state require abolishing religion: to separate is not to abolish).
Prohibition, which certainly inspired by religion, was a disaster. Ending child labor was not necessarily driven by religion: for example, in England, at least one of the early laws against child labor (Manchester, 1802, source: Edmund Robertson, Encyclopedia Britannica) was immediately
Not to mention that ethical conflicts of interest within the US legal profession and the government -- a major and arguably primary contributor to the problems with the patent system -- is (or should be) a major concern not just to us nerds, but to every thinking person in the USA.
The problems with the patent system form a subset of a much larger set of problems within many different areas of law and government, all sharing the characteristics that a) strong conflicts of interest exist on the part of the people building or maintaining the legal system, b) they cause serious long-term problems for society, and c) they are not being acknowledged by our legal professionals.
This affects programmers, engineers, scientists, and nerds in general in so many ways that go beyond mere patents, but looking at the problems with the patent system may be a good way to start trying to solve the more general problem.
It's a divide and conquer approach, much as we use when writing software or designing other engineering systems.
Lot's of people died in fires in those kinds of conditions and yelling fire was all but guaranteed to cause a stampede to the exit leaving people injured and dead. That is what the supreme court ruled was not protected, using speech in such a way that you know will cause harm and death to other people. And they had to argue that all the way to the supreme court to get a final decision: now think how easily our rights are eroded today and compare.
There is no doubt that yelling fire in a crowded theater SHOULD be treated as wrongful conduct. However, there is a HUGE problem with the Supreme Court decision that most people miss, which in turn leads directly to the way in which rights are eroded today.
The Bill of Rights, 1st Amendment, refers to 'no law'. It is also only limited to Congress (and hence not the State or local government), but we'll use the 14th Amendment to apply it to all levels of government, so that's a non-issue.
By the Supreme Court authorizing laws that make this -- clearly wrongful -- conduct illegal, the Court is creating a contradiction in the legal system between the "no law" text in the Bill of Rights and the presence of laws created at lower levels of government.
Legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system. A legal system that is perceived as being complex, confusing, scary, or contradictory (the key item in this particular case) by ordinary people will naturally create a strong long-term demand for the services of legal professionals.
Allowing these kinds of contradictions to exist is a very bad idea on many levels. From a nerd perspective, this is like a designer having a requirement or specificiation and choosing to ignore it without getting approval from the customer. The Constitution was barely approved as it was, and the Bill of Rights was ultimately neccesarily to the continuation of the Constitution: therefore, disregarding it in this manner was at miniumum, foolish and short sighted, and arguably a violation of the oaths of office taken by the judges.
Every time the Supreme Court authorizes these kinds of laws (there have been many occasions), that just opens the door wider to more and more contradictions. That in turn is largely responsible for the current erosion of rights.
We have a similiar situation with respect to the 2nd Amendment and the "may not be infringed text".
What the Court SHOULD have done was to say, "Yes, this is wrongful conduct. But, to pass such laws, an Amendment is first needed, and that is the responsibility of a Constitutional Convention and beyond the power of this court."
Sex for money should not be illegal. It is an overreach of local government in my opinion. It is between two consenting adults.
That's a reasonable position to take, but should it be constitutionally protected?
From a historical perspective, "no sex for money" within the USA is really an expression of religious belief of certain mainstream religious traditions within the USA. The history channel had a series ("The History of Sex") that covered this in considerable detail (apparently, the FBI was initially created as the nation's sex police).
In brief, the Protestant religions disliked the openness of some earlier Christian leaders to this practice, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation changed Catholic views on the subject as well.
Asian and even Western "Pagan" religions have treated this subject (and the whole subject of human sexuality) very differently from the Christian world (as those who are familiar with religous and secular practices in the Greek and Roman world will be quite aware).
Therefore, there definitely is a Constitutional issue here. It's called separation of church and state, something the USA is far behind Europe in achieving. It's not neccesarily a major issue, but the issue exists.
There may also be an issue with legal ethics, as anytime the legal system interferes with behavior that will be viewed as reasonable by many ordinary people, that can be considered a situation involving conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals as a class in society. Given that prostitution is legal in a number of Western countries, the "reasonable" part is easy to show.
In practice, whatever the laws may say, I'd expect you can find "sex for money" in any city in the USA.
You have established a correlation between a particular mathematical quantity (the difference between tax income and federal spending) and how states voted.
Correlation is not causation.
By itself this data is meaningless, although apparently appealing to those who spend mod points to support their political party affiliation (instead of being nerds and actually examining what is being said).
Within a state that voted for Romney, it is entirely possible that most of the federal funding goes to districts that voted for Obama, and vice-versa. Without a more careful analysis of the data, you can't say one way or the other.
There are strong differences between the political views of rural and urban populations in many jurisdictions, and sometimes may be strong differences in which of these locations receive the lion's share of the amount of funds. Even when these numbers is known, the analysis of benefit is not simple as receiving a larger dollar value does not neccesarily translate to receiving more benefit.
As a first step in understanding federal spending, you will almost certainly have to break the spending into categories, and consider who benefits within each state, and this in itself is a complex task, as the categories may overlap. Further, how do you determine who benefits from a particular spending decision? Is it one group, or are there multiple groups? Are there both direct and indirect benefits, and how do we quantify these? There is no algorithm for doing any of this, so, considerable thought and careful analysis is required.
Federal spending goes to many different things, and different (sometimes overlapping) groups benefit from each. Some examples of federal spending include military-related spending, maintaining the national transportation network, and education.
Some states with smaller populations get a disproportionate amount of money due to the need to maintain certain military bases. Bases may exist in a particular location either for strategic purposes, or perhaps because huge amounts of suitable land (e.g. land that supports training year round) is readily available, or even because of historical reasons and inertia.
Some federal funds are spent to take resources such as water out of one state and send it to another, which may benefit the receiving state more than the sending state.
Other federal funds are spend to support the transport of goods across the state. Movement of goods across a state may or may not result in significant benefit to the state: the benefit to the state from this spending may vary considerably, especially in comparison to the benefit to the states receiving those goods.
Consider the importance of having forests to provide lumber to build houses, and having a transportation network to move the wood to the house sites. Not all types of wood are equally suitable for any particular use, and those that are suitable may not grow in every state.
Educational spending is an enormously complex topic in and of itself.
Details like these need to be considered before you can draw political conclusions from looking at where federal funds are spent. Without such an analysis you can't hope to determine which political party actually benefits the most from particular federal spending.
At present, no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from the numbers you present. This is Slashdot. Please put more thought into this matter.
Incorrect. A patent owner is under no obligation to license. In fact, the whole point of the patent is to give a limited term monopoly. The revenue source of a patent troll is through legal actions based on forced licensing or settlements of patents it has acquired.
The legal professionals running the legal system have chosen to implement certain text in the Constitution in this fashion. Just because the legal professionals running the legal system have chosen to implement a certain part of the Constitution in a particular way, does not mean that they necessarily have the legitimate authority to do so.
Recall that once upon a time, legal professionals in parts of the USA authorized children of African-Americans to be enslaved: do we wish to consider this an act that these legal professionals had the legitimate authority to do? Was it a legitimate act of government to create the "separate-but-not-actually-equal" system that endured for so many years?
The current system specifies that a patent owner has no obligation to license, permits the existence of patent trolls, and has many other problems, but we do not have to accept this situation.
Recall the extremely strong opposition the Anti-Federalists mounted in many states, and how difficult it was to get the Constitution ratified at all.
A number of states refused to ratify the Constitution without a Bill of Rights. In other states, it was the case that people whose honor and integrity were trusted (such as James Madison) promised to add a Bill of Rights and this was the key determinant in these states accepting the Constitution. Whatever words may have been used in this acceptance, it was well known that this acceptance was conditional, as a matter of practical politics. These states knew that they could back out if they found it necessarily, and at the time it was neither militarily nor politically possible for the other states to force compliance if such an event happened.
This history shows that the Bill of Right supersedes the text of the Constitution, including the text that has been used to justify the current patent system.
The oaths that legal professionals swear require them to accept this. Those that refuse to do so are violating these oaths.
James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to address two arguments posed by the Anti-Federalists: 1. The Constitution had no Bill of Rights, and 2, any Bill of Rights would be incomplete. The 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people) were written to deal with the second issue.
Rights retained by the people are by definition retained by the people. If we the people decide that the current patent system is invalid, or aspects of that system, are invalid, then we can force change under the Bill of Rights.
The patent system, as currently implemented, infringes a number of fundamental rights, a point that has been discussed many times on Slashdot. It is long past time we threw it out and came up with something better.
If it has a legitimate subpoena, it can get almost any information it wants to about you, and legal "fishing expeditions" are not that hard to mount. ... They'll always going to have the power to subpoena your information ...They will always be able to violate your privacy ...
We should not treat all subpoenas as being the same. That power can be used as part of a criminal investigation (this is sometimes referred to as an aspect of the "police power of government"), but it can also can be used by legal professionals (most of whom are not "in the government" as most people would view these things, although they may be technically considered "officers of the court") in civil cases, and this power can also be used by legislative bodies and their agents in various ways (recall Ken Starr, an agent appointed by a legislative body, using the subpoena power to threaten Monica Lewinsky's mother, to try to force her to testify against her daughter?).
In all of these situations, the subpoena power can be used legitimately or not legitimately, with respect to whether not fundamental human rights are being infringed. "Fishing expeditions" can and do occur outside the context of the police power of government.
A part of the desire to see privacy recognized as a fundamental right is not just about limiting the government's ability to use the police power in inappropriate ways, but also limiting what is allowed in these other situations, something Scott Adams completely overlooks in his blog.
There are also legitimate privacy concerns with respect to businesses collecting information about specific individuals, with respect to the relationship between employers and employees, and with respect to freedom of the press.
There is also a concern with the increasing use of "arbitration", and how that practice can potentially infringe fundamental rights, including the right to privacy.
The desire to see privacy recognized as a fundamental right (asserting this under the 9th Amendment would be appropriate) is something many people would like to see to ensure that their children grow up in a reasonably free country.
If we the people successfully assert privacy as a fundamental right -- and we certainly should, there might be some quibbling over details to make sure we can go after the sociopaths, but the basic concept is sound -- then that in turn will block most "fishing expeditions" and many of the inappropriate subpoena's associated with non-criminal investigations.
Asserting privacy as a basic right may also limit abuses of the police power. It is not necessarily always going to be the case that "They" will always have the power to subpoena information, any more than it is the case that "They" will always have the power to enslave people on the basis of race, or that "They" will always have the power for segregate African-Americans. Change is possible.
Scott Adam's blog suggests that he doesn't believe privacy with respect to government is actually possible, however, he makes a logical error in his argument. His argument essentially works as follows: he comes up with a long list of situations where, at present, he claims we do not have privacy with respect to the government, and based upon this he concludes that privacy with respect to the government is not possible. Even if his claims are correct that we do not have privacy with respect to the items in this list at present (a dubious claim at best, given the many different legal jurisdictions in this country, each with its own set of rules: it is not "your government" as he claims, but rather many governments), it still does not necessarily follow that we will never have privacy with respect to some of these items in the future. Further, the concept of privacy is not necessarily limited to or determined by the items he listed, and thus he is inappropriately generalizing (yes, he did attempt to minimize this, but ineffectually). His argument als
I don't think the ACLU cares if you have a Western mindset or Eastern mindset, I think they see their values like freedom of the press as a universal human right (as I happen to as well). And when you start to challenge universal human rights, that's the point in time where I throw your politics and socialism/capitalism crap right out the window and tell you you're wrong.
Calling freedom of the press a "universal human right" has a lot of potential for creating nice sound bites, but, to me, seems like sloppy thinking. How do you define freedom? How do you define "press"?
For example, advertising is often treated as a form of press activity. After all, the ad mailings that are sent to people's homes are certainly being printed on presses. If we accept that advertising is a form of press activitiy, then should publishing false advertisements be allowed as freedom of the press? What about misleading-but-not-actually-false advertisement? What about touching up the faces of women in advertisement photos? That's certainly showing a false view of people (after all, they don't actually look like that) but is it something that should be considered false advertising? Where is the boundry between false advertising and fraud?
What about sending unsolicited advertisements to people's homes, otherwise known as junk mail? What about making unsolicited phone calls to publish a particular political party's views prior to an election? Should these be a legitimate form of press activity, or should a more fundamental human right, such as a right to not have one's time wasted or a right to not have unwanted intrusions into one's castle (home), apply?
Do people need to be members of some officially recognized group that we call the "press", and if so, who determines membership, or can anyone be a member? When do we allow people who are engaging in some sort of press activity to bypass police lines or enter areas the government has set off limits? Should these people be subject to search, or other limitations of entry into such areas?
Then there's the issue of taking people's statements out of context: should there be limits as to when is that reasonable? For example, should there be limits on the attacks politicians are allowed make on opponents, especially during campaigns, or should some sort of rules of courtesy and honorable conduct apply? Should we allow lobbying to be concealed as a form of press activity (for example, using "publication" of a book as a means to transfer money from group A to group B by having group B publish a book and having group A buy many copies of the book -- without any actual intention of reading them -- as a means of disguising a money transfer aka bribe)?
Should there be trademark, copyright, or patent laws, and if so, to what extent do we permit these to interfere with freedom of the press? The creation of open source software is certainly a form of publication, but if we allow patent law to interfere with this than we also are permitting patent law to interfere with freedom of the press: is this ever reasonable?
Should criminals be able to publish their life stories and make money from doing so? What about libel or slander?
To what extent and when does freedom of the press apply in, or with respect to activities of, the courtroom? Do we allow judges to throw people in jail on a theory of "contempt of court", for expressing their views on Facebook? Do we allow judges to physically sequester people to prevent them from talking to the press?
To what extent should the press be able to report on military matters or police investigations? What about press organizations that are funded by foreign intelligence agencies for the express purpose of attempting to overthrow or undermine a government or nation?
Then there's the issue of how privacy rights interact with freedom of the press. To what extent do we allow public oversight over government, or businesses, or the legal profession? Long term oversight of all
Perhaps you would benefit from reading the references.
Ultimately, the "revisions" that are happening in our knowledge of WW2 are primarily coming from Russian authors, who are now free to research these issues with direct access to the archives in Russia. For example, you might wish to look up M.N. Suprin, Boris Sokolov, and Viktor Suvorov.
You might also want to look up the "Ushakov medal" for bravery, awarded by the Russian government in recent years as thanks to those that participated in the extremely dangerous convoys that carried supplies to Russia.
Some Americans are doubtless dumb enough to claim WW2 was all about them, but -- if you'll recall -- nothing like that was said or even implied in the post that you are responding to. There are dumb people in every country. I mentioned that WW2 was a team effort, and gave credit to people from many other nations.
The role of Britain in WW2 was very important and substantial, but here, as with Russia, US industrial aid was important even early in the war due to limitations in the British industrial system. The British had the engineering skills to design superb advanced technology (such as the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters, and especially the excellent Merlin engine), but not the industrial capability to produce the parts needed to build these in sufficient quantities to make up for losses. See, for example, British military historian Corelli Barnett's classic book "The Audit of War" for some of the reasons why this was so and for specific details on this issue.
It is worth noting that Britain provided many forms of aid to the USA, partly in terms of knowledge and experience, but also in the form of advanced technology, so the transfer of aid was not by any means one-sided.
US direct military participation was also important to Britain. This is true not just for the air force commitment, as mentioned in the previous post, but also the presence of large numbers of ground troops, due to the heavy casualties the British took early in the war.
Suvorov's work suggests that many of the heavy casualties Russia took in the early part of the war were due to a mistake made by Stalin and his adviser's. Casualties alone do not determine who plays the "main part" in war. I'll let you read up on the details.
As far as pay goes, Albert Week's book estimates the dollar value of the total Lend-Lease aid to be $42-50 Billion, of which the Soviet share was roughly 1/3. Of this, it seems likely that $300 Million will be repaid and the rest forgiven.
You also have a very Europe-centric view (perhaps even bias) towards the war. If you look at the numbers of troops, ships, and equipment committed to the Pacific theater by Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, the USA, and others, you'll realize it doesn't make sense to say the Europeans were playing the main part in the war. Say instead that winning the war was a team effort by the peoples of many nations.
It is important and valuable to look at the lessons history teaches, but you haven't done the research to be able to do that with authority here.
The US role in WW2 does not in any way justify current day incompetence by some US government officials in some circumstances, but spreading misinformation is not going to help solve that kind of problem.
Thank you for providing some intelligent information to contradict that earlier absurd claim. Some slashdot moderators seem to be more interested in making anti-USA attacks than in objectivity.
The Soviet Union was indeed responsible for most of the land warfare that defeated Germany
True, in the sense of putting people on the battlefield. However, the USA provided enormous quantities of supplies to the Soviet Union, with substantial assistance from the British (particularly the navy and merchant marine) and with help from the other Allies as well.
During the Soviet era, it was customary to deny this, because it reflected poorly on the Communist system. However, since the Cold War ended, Russian authors have been much more willing to acknowledge this. For discussions on this in English, and references to the Russian sources, a good starting point is the books by Weeks or Van Tuyll.
The supplies provided included staggering quantities of food, and cold weather gear, allowing the Soviets (who had a serious manpower shortage after the disastrous early defeats) not just to feed and clothe their troops, but also to move former farmers and tailors into the battle lines. The supplies also included chemicals and equipment needed to turn raw gasoline into high quality aviation fuel (affecting perhaps 70% of the aviation fuel produced in Russia during the war), over 100,000 machine tools to help the Russian factories to produce weapons and munitions, plus roughly 90% of the ball bearings needed during the war for things like tanks, planes, artillery, machinery of all kinds, and so forth (basically anything with rotating parts). Also, over 645,000 vehicles were shipped to the Soviets, crucial for moving ammunition and food from the rail heads to the troops. Did I forget to mention huge amounts of rail equipment was also shipped to make up for deficiencies in Russia's rail network?
According to Viktor Suvorov's post-Cold War book on Stalin, the Soviets lost large numbers of factories (and their equipment) during the German advance (contrary to what is often presented in older histories), so the role of the industrial parts may have been far more important then ever previously suspected.
It's hard for an army to fight a modern war without weapons, ammunition, tanks, and planes. Even if you have these things available somewhere in your country, it has been known since the end of the 19th Century (see van Creveld's book on logistics) that substantial amounts of both rail and non-rail transport is needed to keep the troops at the front supplied, given the voracious rate at which supplies are consumed during modern warfare.
Another key consideration: over 1 million Germans were involved in the air defense of the Reich against the combined British and American air attack (with other nations participating as well). This effort shattered the Luftwaffe, one of the most potent weapons the Germans had in the wide open spaces of the Eastern front. It also diverted a substantial part of Germany's resources and production capability to the production of aircraft, ammunition, and anti-aircraft weapons (particularly high-altitude anti-aircraft weapons, which, incidentally, just happened to make great anti-tank weapons that were thus not available for use on the Eastern front), not to mention all the aviation fuel expended.
Without all this aid, in all likelihood the Soviet effort would have catastrophically collapsed, in spite of their often excellent equipment and some very capable military leaders, and this conclusion is valid even taking into account the frequent Nazi blundering and stupidity.
It is worth remembering that more US military personnel died during the air assault on Germany than in any other part of the war (as well as many British personnel). Large numbers of US and British civilian sailors also died during the effort to get these supplies to Russia. The Soviets lost more people, but quite a few non-Russians died during the effort to keep a homeland not their own alive, and those of us that enjoy not living in a Nazi world should appreciate that.
World War 2 was a team effort.
The historical existence of the Declaration of Independence, and the fact that the American Revolution occurred, demonstrates to any competent thinker (i.e. those not being led astray by conflict of interest, ignorance, or brainwashing) that there are limits to the authority of government.
In rebelling against the government, the Founding Fathers refused to accept the authority of the King's government to pass certain laws, or the authority of the King's judges to enforce those laws. This establishes that there are limits both to what legislative or executive branches of government (Parliament, and the King) may do, and to what judicial branches of government (the King's judges) may do. The Declaration of Independence provided a list, specific but not exclusive, of some things governments may not legitimately do.
The existence of the Bill of Rights repeats this lesson. Once again, it is established that there are limits to the authority of government. It follows that it is not within the legal authority of government to pass incompetent laws, stupid laws, or laws that otherwise infringe fundamental rights. Recall that a number of states refused to ratify the Constitution without a Bill of Rights added, and that in those states that did ratify it, it was typically the case that promises were made by men of honor whose integrity (such as James Madison) to add a Bill of Rights. As a matter of practical politics, even those states that did ratify knew they could leave the new nation at any time if these promises were not kept: at the time, it was neither militarily nor politically practical for any state to force another to participate.
This history demonstrates that the entities defined by the Constitution (the Congress, Senate, Presidency, and Supreme Court), and the granted powers, such as the treaty power or the power to regulate interstate commerce, were not trusted to be free from abuse. As such, we necessarily must conclude that the Bill of Rights supersedes the authority of the original Constitution in all respects.
The Bill of Rights also was intended to supersede the authority of the state governments, as is clear from Madison's original text (recall his earlier -- successful -- battle to prevent Virginia from violating its own Bill of Rights): even after the document passed through the Senate, the only amendment that was specifically written to limit Congress was the 1st Amendment. The only reason this has ever been subject to question is that the slave states found it inconvenient.
For a more modern perspective on these issues, we can look to the lessons of Nuremberg. German military personnel were required by LAW to obey the orders of their superiors. In rejecting this defense, the judges at Nuremberg once again affirmed that there are limits to the laws governments may pass: some laws are not legitimate, and persons acting under the supposed authority of those laws may be both violating fundamental human rights and engaging in illegal conduct.
Even a seemingly innocuous law, such as a law requiring military personnel to obey the orders of their superiors, which on its face has nothing to do with civil liberties, can be an illegal law.
A nation whose government respects fundamental rights is a nation whose government will be strongly supported by its people, and will have very strong resistance to the efforts of anarchists or terrorists to destroy that nation.
In the USA, Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to deal with two objections to the Constitution: 1. There was no Bill of Rights, and 2. Any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. The 9th and 10th Amendments were written to deal with the second objection, which was so important that it gets repeated in two separate Amendments by retaining rights to the people (9th Amendment) and reserving rights to the people (10th Amendment).
If the text in the previous post is in fact an existing NJ statute, then that statute exists in violation of fundamental rights which are appropriately asser
It is never good to have a goverment ordering people to say or write things they don't actually believe. This is called "Freedom of Conscience."
This is an excellent point with respect to limiting what government can do to people. However, it's not clear to me that corporations (and other businesses) should be considered people.
For one thing, there is lots of historical evidence (e.g. rats in peanut butter, toxic waste) that shows a reasonable degree of public oversight over corporations (and other businesses) is both neccesary and highly desirable. In many ways, the need for public oversight over corporations parallels the need for public oversight over government or over legal systems.
It would not be good to permit the same level and types of oversight over individuals in their private lives as we have a right to expect over businesses.
Abuse of patent and copyright by businesses are both things that would probably be reduced by greater public awareness of just how many things are wrong with the current systems. The judge's action in the current case might be viewed as a small step in that direction. I don't know enough about English law to know if he can do more.
There are strong conflicts of interest that perpetuate the current abuses of intellectual property law. It may be that small victories are all we can expect at present.
The real danger is that some people will view this sort of thing as setting a precedent that governments can do the same things to people as they can do businesses.
I'd like to see school funding be set by need rather than local property taxes, but THAT truly would be a waste of political capital, trying to take funding away from rich suburban schools and divert them to poorer schools.
The first part is something I agree with. It would help to undo some of the remaining harm done as a result of so many years of racist policies, and make the nation as a whole stronger. Parents that are well off financially are also likely to have more time to supplement what the schools do, or the money to pay for private schools, so wealthy districts have less need for extra money.
It's not really clear this would be a waste of political capital, or impossible to achieve. That probably would depend on the approach taken. It certainly would take a long time, which is always difficult in the American system.
Property taxes should really only be used to be for emergency services, such as fire departments. Everything else could be paid for by income taxes. In some places, the property taxes are so high they essentially force people to rent their homes from the government, which undermines the strong property rights so neccesary for a country to be free.