Great. Taking your rule to its logical conclusion, I look forward to the day when teacher's unions no longer make campaign contributions to local school board members, too.
Not a bad idea, actually. Let the teachers make those contributions, as individuals. Don't allow organizations to make donations, or anyone to make a donation of behalf of somebody else. Have all funds donated be traceable to the specific individual and be public (i.e. no anonymous donations). Have money go to specific individuals and not to organizations. Don't allow politicians to keep unspent contributions. Don't allow donations from persons living outside of a jurisdiction.
In short, there's lots of room for improvement in how we handle political campaign contributions.
The best possible thing for the safety of civilians is to ensure both sides wear uniforms, as required by just about every treaty since the idea of uniforms happened.
That isn't quite what the Laws of Land Warfare require, according to the US Army, but the sentiment is good.
"64b. Distinctive Sign.
The second condition, relative to the possession of a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance is satisfied by the wearing of military uniform, but less than the complete uniform will suffice. A helmet or headdress which would make the silhouette of the individual readily distinguishable from that of an ordinary civilian would satisfy this requirement. It is also desirable that the individual member of the militia or volunteer corps wear a badge or brassard permanently affixed to his clothing. It is not necessary to inform the enemy of the distinctive sign, although it may be desirable to do so in order to avoid misunderstanding."
-- The Law of Land Warfare, FM 27-10, Appendix A-17
Unfortunately, since terrorists are sociopaths, they don't tend to have much interest in following the rules.
The government would actually be the best suited to pensions since they can build up enough of a buffer over time
The logic here isn't clear at all.
Government can pass and enforce laws that limit how private companies can handle pension plans, including requiring insurance for those plans, and protecting them from being plundered (for example, look at ERISA, although that has some loopholes that were presumably bought and paid for by various private interests).
However, governments (at least in the US) have a poor history with respect to following laws that limit their power.
Further, governments have very serious problems with running things efficiently and providing good customer service.
If anything, I'd expect a government to be the worst suited to be running such plans.
A very "American" sentiment, approximately equivalent to the "thinking" that led to the US marked inferiority in decryption and signals intelligence in the 1930's which in turn allowed Pear[l] Harbour to happen.
Pearl Harbour happened because the Japanese were underestimated. By the standards of the day, US signals intelligence was probably as good as one could reasonably expect. Peacetime military organizations have their limits.
Everybody important in naval circles would certainly have been aware of the highly successful British air raid on the Italian fleet in the port of Taranto on the night of 11 November 1940, over a year before the Pearl Harbour raid.
The US Navy's air-dropped torpedoes couldn't work reliably in shallow water such as that found in Pearl Harbour. It was reasonably believed that the fleet in port would not be vulnerable to torpedoes, which -- in general -- are a far greater threat to warships than bombs (aside from the occasional critical hit).
The Japanese managed to engineer air-dropped torpedoes that would work in the shallow water of the harbour.
Racism may have played a role as well. The USA of that age was a more more racist society than today, and the views many Americans had of the Japanese (which don't bear repeating here) were stupid and short-sighted. It is not clear to what extent this affected thinking at command levels, but there is no doubt that in at least some respects the US military was a racist organization (consider the segregation of African-Americans).
Incidentally, had the fleet been at sea when it engaged the Japanese carrier force, or their main surface fleet, the same underestimation could easily have led to a far worse disaster. It was easier for sailors to escape from sinking ships in harbour than it would have been in the open sea. Also, most of the ships at Pearl were able to be raised from the shallow water, and returned to fight later in the war.
For comparison, look at the Battle of Savo Island. This was a complete disaster for the US Navy, again largely caused because the Japanese were massively under-estimated, and it didn't occur in peacetime!
In short, it is easy to over-estimate the importance of signals intelligence.
The main scene of the Nazi's downfall may have been the Soviet Union, but the evidence that the Soviets would have collapsed completely without massive amounts of foreign aid is overwhelming. Something else military historians have always known, but which largely escapes popular treatments of the war, apparently including that by the NY times.
For example, just about everything that rotates requires anti-friction bearings, otherwise known as ball bearings. Hence, your WW2 era tanks, artillery pieces, planes, and so forth, plus the machine tools needed to make these, all depended on high quality ball bearings. Guess where the Soviets got the vast majority of their ball bearings?
Then we have the additives and processing equipment needed to make high quality aviation fuel. Without this, you don't have an air force capable of competing with the enemy, since you can't get the needed performance out of your engines. Ever wonder who supplied this stuff to the Soviets?
Similarly, WW2 era warfare depended massively upon huge amounts of supplies being able to be shipped to the troops at the front from the factories. Minor things like ammunition, food, and medical supplies. Guess where the Soviets got most of their trucks and trains from (over 600,000 vehicles), after the Germans destroyed or captured most of their vehicles (and, despite myths to the contrary, many of their factories) in the early days of the invasion?
Then we have the 100,000+ machine tools supplied to Soviet factories. Hard to work metal without machine tools.
Also, the Soviets had a massive manpower problem. This was caused by the enormous losses of people and territory in the first few months of the German invasion (or, if you prefer, pre-emptive strike). They needed to free up people from working in a wide variety of industries such as food and textiles in order to send them off to the front. Guess who made up the slack, supplying massive amounts of food and clothing (including quite a bit of winter clothing)?
Think about what would have happened in the famous campaigns if the Soviets didn't have most of their tanks, airplanes, guns, and ammunition, not to mention a smaller (and starving) army. Despite the high quality of some of their technology, they simply wouldn't have had enough to win against opponents as dangerous as the German army and air force proved themselves to be (even taking into account massive Nazi blundering).
WW2 was a team effort, but if anything, the current trend is to under-estimate the US role simply because most casual commentators don't understand military logistics, how things actually work, and the process of manufacturing them.
Germany had a militarist tradition and was a very militarist country.
This is a somewhat misleading statement. When considering WWI, it's worth remembering that many of the earlier histories were written by the "winners". Some of these contained substantial amounts of propaganda, or highly prejudicial descriptions and interpretations of events, and others were based on rather sloppy research. The myths propagated by these earlier "histories" continue to persist in the face of more recent scholarship.
What we think of today as "Germany" was actually formed from a number of different smaller states (27?), only united in the mid to late 19th Century. These smaller states had very different cultures and even significant language differences, and this was reflected in the attitude towards warfare of their people. There were many times in WWI where German units -- usually those from particular backgrounds -- did very little to pursue the war, even going so far as to adopt an unofficial but very real truce with their Allied counterparts across the lines, essentially a live and let live approach, or "you don't bother us, we won't bother you".
The units from Alsace-Lorraine were especially notorious for having little enthusiasm for the war, not surprising considering how many of these people had both French and German relatives, but were certainly not the only group in this situation.
The Prussians had a reputation for militarism, but were only one of the German states. You may be thinking of them. Even there, things are far more complex than most people suppose.
John Mosier notes in his book "The Myth of the Great War" that in 1900 Germany had a little over a half million people in uniform, while France and Russia had nearly two million. The French appropriated far more money to their military, and had a far larger percentage of their population involved in mandatory military training (about 85%) whereas less than half of the eligible Germans had military training and the numbers were even smaller in Austrian (Hapsburg) lands. These numbers changed by 1914, but even then the Russian and the French armies together significantly outnumbered the supposedly "ultra-militaristic" Germans.
As far as the causes of WWI go, the situation is far more complex than most people realize. Some of the older histories, still influential, seem to neglect German-language written sources (perhaps the authors couldn't be bothered to learn German?), which show that there were considerable differences in opinion concerning the desirability of war. Kaiser Wilhelm, for example, did not want a war.
Mosier notes "As in France, the [German] military didn't determine foreign policy, it simply tried to win whatever war the government had forced it to fight. In this, both General Staffs were alike." (pp 50)
I am not sure I would give the US too much credit regarding early slavery fights.
As usual, the history is more complex than most people realize.
Gouverneur Morris of NY spoke out at length against slavery during the US Constitutional Convention (according to James Madison's notes, details taken from Epps book on the 14th Amendment, admittedly a secondary source):
"Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation?... That proposal comes to this: that an inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages; shall have more votes in a Government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind than the Citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with laudable horror so nefarious a practice. Not only did slavery risk calling down God's judgement on those who maintained it, but the institution had warped the new Constitution almost beyond redemption. He would sooner submit himself to a tax for paying for all the negros in the United States than saddle posterity with such a Constitution."
Ben Franklin (President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery) once said that the American Revolution was necessary because the British Empire would never give up slavery on its own.
To gain some insight into his position, it is worth noting that the vast majority of slaves shipped via the triangle trade went NOT to North America, but rather to the Caribbean and Central and South America, to work in the sugar plantations owned by the British, the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and a few other European nations.
Conditions on these plantations were frequently horrific, resulting in very high rates of death (this is why so many more slaves were shipped to this region instead of to North America, i.e. to replace losses) but the profits involved were so immense that it seemed highly unlikely the British and the other Europeans would ever outlaw slavery. Ironic, given how things turned out. It goes to show the power a few individuals (such as Wilberforce and his supporters) can have to shape history, even in the face of entrenched commercial interests, something that's worth remembering even as we note the repeated failures of those individuals fighting slavery in the USA.
The exact numbers of slaves shipped to various destinations are not known with any certainty, but the Wikipedia page on the Atlantic Slave Trade gives some estimates. The percentage of slaves shipped to British North America is estimated to have been 6-7% of the total (French North America, i.e. Louisiana, would also have to be counted to determine the totals for North America, but I haven't found any clear numbers on that). The average life span for a slave on a Caribbean sugar plantation has been estimated as 5-7 years.
Privacy really requires an attempt to keep something private.
This is an arbitrary, narrow, and very limiting definition. There is no reason we cannot develop a definition of privacy that DOES provide protection to individuals, even in supposedly "public" places. Alternately, we could simply redefine "public", as the definitions of "private" and "public" are fundamentally connected.
For example, we might decide that one is in "public" only when a) one has consented to an interview, and b) a visible camera is present, and c) the camera is known to be on. In any other circumstance, some privacy rights will apply with respect to recording the individual. The nature of those rights will vary from circumstance to circumstance, with the strongest possible rights applying when one is on land that is primarily a home, or inside a home.
For example, with such a definition, if one steps behind some trees and "uses the facilities" while hiking on public lands, this is nevertheless a private act and it would be reasonable to have civil or even criminal penalties apply to somebody that knowingly and deliberately attempted to take a video, or to distribute the footage from such a video.
Similarly, a person taking off their clothes to go swimming at a seemingly empty beach would be protected from the hidden photographer attempting to take pictures of them.
Also, while we might allow businesses to have surveillance cameras, we can put very strict limits on what can be done with the video from such cameras.
Government officials, and executives of large organizations, will necessarily have a lessor right to privacy in any action connected with their official duties.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
The whole statement of Article 12 is actually riddled with problems.
What constitutes "interference"? The only precise definition of this concept I am familiar with applies to optics, surely they don't mean that?
When is "interference", whatever that is, "arbitrary"? Many of the actions taken by federal, state, and local governments in recent years have certainly been wrong, but have they been "arbitrary"? What criteria do we use to determine when something is "arbitrary"?
(I suspect most US legal professionals would say that anything authorized by law is not arbitrary, but US legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system, and hence not to be trusted with respect to such questions.)
Why is "interference", whatever that is, bad with respect to only the four items listed (privacy,family,home,correspondence)? What about interfering with somebody's life without directly interfering with any of those four items? Shouldn't that be bad, also? For example, should we attempt to construe a threat to sue someone "interference" (the threat to sue the Oatmeal comes to mind) with one of these four items, or are there items missing from the list?
When is an action an "interference" with somebody's family? If I arbitrarily decide to drive to the beach on a sunny day, I am contributing to traffic that makes it take longer for other families to get to the beach? Would that not constitute "arbitrary interference" with another person's family?
Any action that increases negative stress in a person's life will have a (presumably) negative impact on their family, as this form of stress has direct physiological consequences eventually leading to medical bills, time in the hospital, even death. Does this mean that any action taken that causes somebody to get angry, or upset, no matter how stupid or misinformed they may be, is therefore wrong?
Is all "interference" bad, or are there situations when "interference" is justified, even if some people call it "arbitrary"?
When is an action an "attack" and thus, presumably, bad?
Similarly, are there situations when attacks on the honour or reputation of a person justified? For example, what about somebody that chooses to enforce a law that infringes fundamental human rights (the Aaron Swartz case comes to mind)? Can we not attack them, at least with words? If we argue that someone has violated their oath to uphold the Bill of Rights, and attempt to get them removed from public office, is that an "attack" and therefore prohibited?
What about somebody that has behaved dishonourably, does this mean that we can't do anything that might be construed as an attack on them? What exactly do we mean by "honour"?
How long does such protection last? If I say bad things about somebody like Hitler or Stalin, is that an attack on their reputation?
How do we enforce all this? What is justified, and who can take action?
Many people criticize the US Founding Fathers for their oversights and for unclear language in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, but it appears that the folks who put together the UN Declaration -- with more than 150 years of history between the two documents, history that could provide numerous lessons to show them what not to do -- didn't do much better.
How about a right to reasonably clear, well documented laws (and documents that serve as a basis for law)? If we accept the UN Declaration as a valid basis for law, than are we implicitly accepting that we don't have such a right, as it certainly doesn't meet that criteria? Good for the legal professionals, who probably played a big role in writing the document, but is this good for society as a whole?
It's been my observation that the vast majority of adults, even engineers and scientists, aren't particularly good at learning. How many people, for example, are committed to a lifetime learning program and read one or more textbooks every year after leaving college? How many engineers rigorously educate themselves in all those subjects they didn't have time for while in college, such as literature, humanities, art, the social sciences, and history, as well as educating themselves in areas of physical science that go beyond their own specialization? How many will bother to learn a foreign language? I know very few who even try to do this, and even within that group most don't seem to be particularly good at it.
I suspect most people in US society will spend most of their post-college lives in front of their television sets watching entertainment programs with little or no educational content, or will spend most of their lives playing computer games, instead of engaging in lifetime learning. We are not a society that is good at learning.
Within the college setting, it has been my observation that there are vast differences in both the efficiency of learning and in what students retain over the long term, comparing their experiences with the top 20% or so of instructors (the ones that actually care about teaching and are good at it) versus the research-first herd (the other 80%, otherwise known as the "I have a PhD, therefore I don't have not know how to teach" group).
As a teaching assistant in many different computer science and engineering classes, I worked with quite a few struggling students. In the vast majority of cases, it was not the case that the student needed to be spoon fed, rather it was the case that I needed to correct deficiencies in how the instructor was teaching the material with otherwise intelligent and motivated students.
And many math problems are known to be intractable. For example, the Halting problem.
The halting problem is not intractable: all programs will halt. Entropy ensures this. In a modern semiconductor-based computer system, any program will eventually halt due to mechanisms such as hot electron injection, traps, room temperature diffusion, and so forth, that destroy the semiconductor structure which creates the logic gates the program depends upon.
While other types of computer systems are possible, there is no reason at this time to suppose they will not have their own entropy-related mechanisms.
It is only possible to have a program whose halting status is uncertain if you first postulate a mathematical fantasy world in which that program will run without real-world considerations such as entropy. In short, the "intractable" status of this "problem" results from the manner in which the problem is set up.
This, of course, is the big difference between mathematics and engineering. Mathematicians love to complain that engineering is all about approximations, while engineers recognize that this is necessary if one is not living and working in a fantasy world.
The first amendment says that if I find something out about you legally you have no right to stop me from telling everyone else about it.
No, it doesn't. The 1st amendment specifically only limits Congress from passing certain types of laws. It says nothing about the state governments being unable to pass laws protecting a right to privacy. This is a common misconception. The 14th Amendment can, in some circumstances, extend the restrictions placed on Congress to also limit state government, but the text of the 14th amendment itself is not specific as to what those circumstances are.
Privacy rights can reasonably be asserted as arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). A violation of privacy is, of course, a violation of these rights. It is thus wrongful conduct whether or not explicit laws exist to make it so. In fact, there is no need for Congress to pass a law recognizing a right to privacy and the 1st Amendment limitation of the ability of Congress to pass certain types of law doesn't come into play with respect to making a violation of privacy wrongful conduct.
In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court recognized a right to privacy arising under the 9th Amendment, the details of which were left rather vague.
State laws that define blackmail and extortion as crimes can be viewed as one way in which the states historically have recognized a right to privacy that supersedes freedom of the press, but this does not preclude other (stronger) ways of protecting privacy from being developed in the future. These laws, of course, have always been accepted by the Supreme Court.
Historically, privacy was less of an issue in the past, so whether or when the 14th brings the 1st into play with respect to this right is not particularly well resolved, and the conflict between the 9th / 10th Amendment privacy rights and the 1st/14th Amendment press and speech rights has never been thoroughly addressed by any court I am familiar with.
There are many situations where the rights protected under the 1st Amendment are superseded by other rights. In fact, we can go further and state that the 1st Amendment is long overdue for revision, given how many laws there already are that can reasonably be viewed as contradicting it, such as laws on industrial espionage, military espionage, libel/slander (some privacy rights here), the do-not-call list (another privacy right), false advertising, and the laws regulating insider knowledge in public corporations. This creates a major mess and a big problem within US law, since contradictions in the legal system can reasonably be viewed as involving ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession (such contradictions create an artificial demand for their services of legal professionals, hence the conflict of interest with respect to the presence of contradictions in the legal system). Similar problems exist with respect to the 2nd Amendment, and many other rights that can reasonably be asserted as arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments. It's a situation that badly needs to be resolved in a clean way.
Commercial press organizations have a powerful conflict of interest here, which means that any ruling providing overly broad freedom of the press at the expense of privacy rights could be considered ethically suspect (i.e. were the judges bribed to support the press at the expense of the public?) and hence invalid (legal ethics being another fundamental right). Hence, to the limited extent that existing precedents apply to this area and provide freedom of the press at the expense of privacy, those precedents are ethically problematic. Also, precedents that fail to recognize the role of the 9th Amendment right to privacy can be considered violations of the oaths the judges took to uphold the Bill of Rights.
In short, we can summarize the current situation with respect to privacy rights by saying "it's a mess".
No, this court, like any other, would work within the law. The problem is that without the appropriate clearance, judges are not legally allowed to hear the evidence in the case so judicial oversight is not possible right now. All this would be is a court where the judges have the clearance to hear the cases and the evidence. The evidence in the cases as well as most of the information about the cases could be kept secret so these cases could go to court without damaging national security or the government using that as an excuse to keep the cases from ever being heard.
This type of court arrangement is also known as a "Star Chamber". It goes back to the 15th Century. Like many other things, what initially seemed like a good idea (a means of providing a check and balance on the upper ranks of the nobility) quickly went bad (notoriously so).
Once upon a time, Americans were very determined to prevent this kind of thing, which is why you find negative references to "Star Chamber Sessions" in the old Perry Mason books from the 1930's and 1940's. The average modern reader of these books probably has never heard this term.
Long term public oversight of government is certainly one of the fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment ("rights retained by the people") and the 10th Amendment ("rights reserved by the people"). Exactly what constitutes "long term" is subject to some discussion, but given the time scale on which trials occur there is no legitimate reason to keep things secret. It follows that any laws or precedents to the contrary are in violation of the Bill of Rights.
The US legal profession -- being in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to recognizing the 9th Amendment -- can be expected to do its best not to acknowledge such a right. Regrettable, but until people outside the profession start paying attention to legal ethics that's not likely to change. Entropy in a closed system increases unless reversed by energy from an outside source.
Given the extremely negative history associated with secret courts, there really isn't any legitimate basis for doing this sort of thing today. Have the trial and declassify things as needed, or forego the trial. If somebody in the government is under trial, the latter is not an option, otherwise the government would simply classify everything to protect its members from the consequences of illegal conduct.
Yes, doing things this way makes some tasks harder for the government -- but that's the way things have to be for a society to be free.
I really wish we had a "Use it or Lose it" clause in our copyright laws. After X number of years of the product not being marketed, it falls into public domain. Software for even shorter periods.
Presumably by "being marketed" you mean "being sold" or something similar: just advertising something should not be enough to keep the copyright. Even with "being sold" we would need to put some thought into specifying what that means, or unscrupulous copyright holders would get their buddies to "buy" a copy with money the copyright holder lends to them or similar nonsense. But, given the need to work through some details, this is definitely a good idea.
Another possibility would be to give the first option to publish as per the current system for some period of time, then if that option is not continually exercised we could return control to the creative author(s) for an additional period of time, who can either self-publish or try to find another publisher.
In other words, a publisher that has taken the copyright from the author via contract loses it back to the author(s) if the work is not kept in print.
Finally, after an additional period of time, if the author doesn't keep the work in print, we allow anyone to publish with a provision that a portion of the gross (if any) must be provided to the author(s) and with criminal penalties for failing to pay in a reasonable time under reasonable circumstances. Handling bundles (where works of multiple authors are combined, such as magazines) would take some thought. This is a little more complex, but does ensure that nobody is making money off something without the author(s) getting a share.
After yet another period of time, the work goes into the public domain. Author's moral rights can be protected for a longer period than the commercial rights.
In the case of software, we not only need shorter periods, we need well documented source code to be made available to enable long term public oversight over business. As technology gets more and more complex such oversight becomes harder and harder, and part of the cost of doing business in any area of complex technology should be spending a reasonable amount of effort to facilitate oversight.
For source code in law enforcement systems, the documentation should be made available immediately as soon as those systems are purchased or start being used (and documentation for the hardware and firmware in these systems should also be made available) , otherwise we can expect to end up with disasters similar to those various jurisdictions have experienced with respect to DUI systems. Part of the cost of doing business with the government in law enforcement technology should be the inability to keep trade secrets.
I am aware that Congress is bought by Disney and the Supreme court is stacked with pro corporatists. That doesn't make what's being done legal, moral, or ethical, it just makes it crooked.
The justices of the Supreme Court are required to swear oaths to uphold the Constitution. Historically speaking, had the Founding Fathers been prepared to trust the Supreme Court (or for that matter, any of the entities defined in the pre-"Bill of Rights" portion of the Constitution, taken individually or collectively), there would have been no need for a Bill of Rights. We not only have a Bill of Rights, we have an open-ended Bill of Rights (James Madison implemented this by means of the 9th and 10th Amendments, which provide for unspecified rights "retained by the people" and rights "reserved to the people").
This raises the possibility that some Supreme Courts will choose to make rulings that, by contradicting either the explicit rights, or by contradicting rights reasonably asserted under the open-ended portions of the Constitution (non-explicit rights), violate the oaths the justices took to uphold the Constitution.
Rights retained by the people are, after all, "retained by the people". The phrase "retained by the people" does not mean the same thing as "steal-able by the Supreme Court": if the Supreme Court could steal such rights, they would no longer be retained (proof by contradiction).
Given these considerations, determining what is the "law of the land" is not nearly as simple as some folks would attempt to manipulate us into believing, or as simple as some folks have been brain-washed into believing. Unfortunately, when children are taught about US government, the material is often dumbed down to exclude these important considerations (which makes the study of decisions like Roe vs. Wade especially difficult).
Naturally, one of the foremost rights that might reasonably be asserted as a right "retained by the people" would be something equivalent to the Nuremberg precedent, applying not just to military hierarchy, but also to the civil hierarchy, including the judicial hierarchy. This may require, in some circumstances, that government professionals recognize certain laws, orders, precedents, or even traditional approaches to the practice of law, as being invalid and contrary to fundamental rights. Unfortunately, the kind of moral courage required to do this is rare, especially once something becomes "official", and especially amongst those who have something to gain by not doing this (such as many legal professionals).
Historically, there have been many aspects of US law that violate fundamental rights, and thus there have been many laws appropriately viewed as being illegal laws, whether or not the Supreme Court "officially" approved of them. Many of the worst abuses of the slave system, or the later "separate-but-not-actually-equal" system, fall into this category. Many actions taken under such laws were not only illegal, but should have been treated as criminal.
There are aspects of current copyright and patent law that fall into this category (particularly with respect to violations of a 9th Amendment right to ethical legal practice, another one of the foremost rights reasonably asserted). So, in a sense, things have gotten better: we're no longer fighting over really horrible stuff like slavery and discrimination. On the other hand, since the problems are now less obvious, it may be harder to fix things (and it took many decades to fix the earlier problems!). Plus, saying that things are "not as bad" does not mean that people aren't having their lives destroyed from abuses in the current legal system (Aaron Schwartz comes to mind as one of the more recent examples).
In other words, your position is quite correct. What's being done is not legal, moral, or ethical.
The legal tradition known as the "Law of Agency" makes a person or organization responsible for the acts of their agents. "Agent" here is a generic term, it does not refer to just spies or secret agents, but rather to any person or organization acting on behalf of another.
This is a philosophical concept. It is implemented in different ways in different legal jurisdictions, usually associated with (but not limited to) commercial law.
It would not be unreasonable to assert that something along the same lines applies to government as a right arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). As such, it is no more legal for the government to violate fundamental rights by working through a 3rd party then it is to do so directly. Whether or not that third party in located within this country is irrelevant.
Thus, the government, for example, could not sell land to private owners and then pass laws allowing those land owners to infringe fundamental rights the government had an interest in infringing, as the private land owners would be acting as agents of the government.
In practice, this idea, like almost anything else one might assert under the 9th or 10th Amendment (and in spite of precedents like Roe vs. Wade, the most famous case to assert a 9th Amendment argument), is routinely ignored.
People, for example, see nothing wrong with a private land-owner infringing the right to travel (one of the rights that also arises under the 9th Amendment, and has been recognized by at least one high court as being subject to "strict scrutiny", another legal concept) across land that isn't a home, and isn't even in use, by means of fences or no trespassing signs. To make matters worse, the police will generally arrest those that cross such land for "trespassing". In such cases the private land-owner, by means of the trespassing laws, is effectively acting as an agent of the government with respect to infringing the right to travel, and the arresting police officers are actually in violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
(To be fair, most private land-owners fence off their land not through the intention of infringing the right to travel -- though the decision certainly has that effect, whatever their intentions -- but rather to protect themselves from the routine abuse of Tort law the US legal profession engages in).
Similarly, if a Federal Agency is prohibited by law from keeping certain data, it is not unheard of for such agencies to merely hire a third party to keep that data on behalf of the agency.
Some of the rights that might reasonably be asserted under the 9th and 10th Amendments are not in the interests of the legal profession as a class in society, which probably accounts for the unwillingness of courts to recognize it except in those rare cases where public option is massively contrary to the existing law (the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and the effect it had on overturning all the "separate but not actually equal" laws -- all of which massively violated the Bill of Rights -- comes to mind as a good example of one of those "rare cases" where the legal profession is actually forced to do the right thing in spite of conflicts of interest).
As an engineer, I won't deny that most psychology majors are very weak on math compared to myself and my engineering colleagues. The point, however, is that NOT all are. At the engineering school RPI, for example, the dual major in math and psychology is one of the six recommended dual majors for the mathematics department, along with more familiar ones such as math and physics or math and computer science. Some of the statistical techniques used in modern social science research have gotten very complicated, and people with this background are needed to help the rest of their colleagues understand the techniques (which is not necessarily the same thing as being able to work the techniques by hand).
Regarding your other point, very few people will be good at social, leadership, management, or people skills, or understanding group and cultural dynamics, just from the act of going out and talking with people. This is necessary but not (typically) sufficient. Most people benefit from training in these areas.
Even those that appear to be successful in their interactions with others often are making all kinds of mistakes and not realizing it. This tends to be particularly common amongst the young and beautiful, who fail to realize how much of their social "success" is due to their appearance and to how much our society overvalues appearance. Some of the most efficient learning human beings are capable of happens as a result of people making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. If a person does not realize they are making mistakes, due to the illusion that they are being successful, then they will typically be very poor at learning. Training can help with this by making people aware of problematic behaviours.
Unfortunately, this is a point very few scientists or engineers seem to be able to grasp until they finally get this kind of training, at which point they tend to have many regrets about not being smart enough to figure this out earlier in their lives.
I have yet to meet a research psychologist that actually uses statistics correctly.
I've known a few research psychologists who really understood the ins and outs of using statistics (and, in fact, had a far better knowledge of some aspects of this field, such as the non-parametric methods, than the vast majority of physical scientists!). In at least one university, I have known non-psych professors who routinely send their graduate students over to the statistics classes taught by psych, simply because the teaching there is higher quality than in their own department or school. Good psychology classes focus as much on the limitations of statistics in the real world as they do in learning the mechanics.
On the other hand, the Full Professor of Mathematics I had for junior level probability was a useless idiot. He had all the proofs memorized but didn't understand anything that couldn't be expressed as a proof or lemma and had no idea that a proof and an explanation are not at all the same thing. We engineering students all ended up teaching ourselves the subject (something that seems to happen a lot more than it should in engineering and math classes -- it's a terribly inefficient process compared to having an instructor that actually knows how to teach these subjects).
But psychology, sociology, etc., hell no!
I have seen seemingly endless examples of otherwise brilliant engineers and scientists screwing up massively in social or leadership situations, in large part because they had the same attitude. We might even say that people from these backgrounds often screw up "by the numbers" in these situations, in deference to the importance of numbers for those with a hard science background.
The really awful thing is that even a really basic exposure to people skills would prevent the vast majority of the gaffes: the mistakes being made are usually discussed right at the beginning of "self-help" books on these topics. The power of arrogance and ignorance to cause otherwise intelligent people to do dumb things is truly remarkable.
This issue contributes significantly to the problems engineering professors have in being effective teachers, and the problems engineers and physical scientists in being effective managers and leaders when running a research team or when leading a group in industry.
Of course, formal courses in the social sciences don't always cover these subjects effectively, in large part because they require moving beyond the traditional domain of science (in other words, humanities). That's a loss to the folks who do take the social science classes, of course, and something that should be improved. On the other hand, the formal classes help quite a bit with understanding the limitations of what is known (and how it is known), which helps in assessing the merits of material from other sources (something which is badly needed as a counter-point to the often inflated claims and over-generalizations).
An analogy may help make the point clear. Studying the muscular system of the human body is interesting and useful, but the body is far too complex for someone to actually expect to be be good at movement without extensive study and practice, much of which relies on working with simplified models that are often quite far removed from the science. To understand this better, take a look at the complexity of the muscles and muscular connections in the vicinity of the hip, pelvis, and back. It's astonishing! Merely memorizing these muscles would not help you all that much with learning to coordinate your core with the rest of your body. In other words, the physical science fails you. Simpler models of how things work, on the other hand (exactly the kinds of mental models that one gets comfortable using in humanities classes), work quite well, as you would find out if you were to take a good martial arts or dance class. The same kind of thing applies in social and leadership situations: what you can
I'd like to see more open source projects following Tor's lead.
It's not just open source projects that should be doing this. There should be a legal requirement that all software companies eventually make their source code available in a well documented form that can be built with readily available tools to exactly match the released binaries.
Long term public oversight over business is an important public goal in its own right (consider all the environmental disasters that businesses have been involved in when this oversight didn't happen), and also something that arises as part of the right to long term public oversight over government. Historically, governments that have not been able to do certain things directly have hired (or even coerced) third parties -- such as businesses -- into doing the very thing the government is not allowed to do, in an attempt to do an "end-run" around the rules. This sort of thing can result in serious violations of fundamental rights, and public oversight over business is neccesary to prevent it from happening (or to catch the government in the act). For software companies, oversight to be practical must take the form of examining the source code.
It is for this reason, of course, that software companies who put clauses in their licenses prohibiting disassembly or reverse engineering are acting contrary to the public interest. In this USA, such clauses are appropriately considered to violate fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people).
I agree. The true problem is not the plea bargain system, its the fact that the badly and loosely drafted CFAA passed by politicians allowed the prosecutor to file so many ridiculous charges against Aaron in the first place.
No, this isn't the true problem either. You're mistaking the symptoms for the disease. The true problem is legal ethics: the US legal system is riddled with policies and laws resulting from bad decisions in situations involving ethical conflict on interest on the part of the legal profession (we can treat the legal profession as a special interest group within society). Badly or loosely drafted laws are merely a symptom of the problem.
A badly or loosely drafted law creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals, hence legal professionals (who make up most of the legislators, judges, district attorneys, legislative staffers, etc) are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the drafting of laws. Large numbers of loosely or badly drafted laws create a long term demand for the services of legal professionals on a massive scale. Judicial precedents that create contradictions within the legal system (we have LOTS of these) just make things worse.
CFAA is too loosely drafted, provides for punishments grossly exceeding the nature of the crime, with no sense of proportionality and is abusive. That is the real problem.
Similarly, punishments that grossly exceed the nature of the crime create an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals to protect people from the abuses of their own legal system. The legal ethics issue is the real problem here.
If there is any right that can reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) or the 10th Amendment (rights retained by the people), it certainly must be the right to ethical government and ethical legal practice. Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible.
We should be treating any law (or order, or precedent) whose passage or existence or contents, in whole or in part, can reasonably be supposed to involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession as an unconstitutional law.
In other words, the whole point of the Bill of Rights is to permit Americans to live in a free country. That isn't possible with an excessive or abusive legal system.
Fixing the issue involves two things: 1) we need to recognize that there is an ethics problem (something the legal profession has traditionally been very slow to acknowledge), and 2) we need to go after the legal professionals who choose not to act appropriately in situations where an ethical conflict of interest exists.
Federal Judges swear oaths to uphold the Constitution, which includes (and is superseded by) the Bill of Rights.
James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be open-ended, in order to address the objections of the Anti-Federalists that any Bill of Rights would necessarily miss many important rights. This is implemented by means of the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). It's such an important principle that it appears TWICE.
Hence, Federal Judges are required NOT just to consider the law as written, but also any and all unspecified rights NOT written that might reasonably be asserted. This is where we get things like the right to privacy and the right to travel. Anything else is not only a violation of their oaths, but unethical practice of law (the legal profession, as a class in society, being in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to a number of key 9th Amendment rights).
Recognition of these rights happened in Roe vs Wade, and a few other high court cases, but it seldom happens today. This negative trend is what needs to be reversed. We need to be recognizing that federal officials who refuse to recognize these rights are in violation of their oaths to uphold the Constitution and they are acting illegally. In fact, those oaths being preconditions for holding those offices, they're actually impersonating members of government.
We can assert the equivalent of the Nuremberg Precedent as one of the rights arising under the 9th Amendment. Just as we would expect military government officials to refuse to follow laws (or court orders, or executive orders, or judicial precedents) that require them to violate fundamental rights, so too we also expect civil government officials (at all levels, not just the federal) to act appropriately even when the laws as written would have them do otherwise.
In a free country, it's SUPPOSED to be hard for the government to go after criminals, because otherwise the criminals end up controlling the government, and you no longer have a free society, in which case the harm done to innocents vastly exceeds that which the occasional non-government criminal can accomplish. 20th Century history demonstrates this beyond any possible doubt.
They are right when they make a decision (because our constitution pretty much pronounces that to be the case) and they are just as right when they overturn their prior decisions, as they frequently do.
It's not really clear that our Constitution actually says that "the Supreme Court is always right". There are two considerations that seem relevant:
First, Supreme Court judges are required to swear oaths to uphold the Constitution. The oath of office is appropriately viewed as an invariant for holding office: should it ever be violated, the person or persons doing so become disqualified for office. One obvious problem with this situation is that the Constitution does not spell out how to determine when this oath is violated, or who can take action in that situation, or how we remove such oath-breakers from office. Oops! What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they wrote (or failed to write) that???
This oversight by the writers of the Constitution is probably one of the reasons the Anti-Federalists expressed such strong disapproval of the pre-Bill of Rights Constitution. After all, if they were prepared to trust the Presidency, the Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, individually or collectively, they would not have disapproved of the original document. It follows that they didn't trust these groups, individually or collectively, and wanted a mechanism in place by which an action taken by any or all of these groups could be overturned by a response short of armed revolution.
We can therefore infer, by the acceptance of the Bill of Rights by the Anti-Federalists, that they were recognizing in this document a mechanism sufficient to overturn the powers of any or all of the above by means short of war. This conclusion stands contrary to claims that the "Constitution says the Supreme Court is always right".
Second, in making the Bill of Rights open-ended, James Madison retained unspecified rights to the people (9th Amendment) and reserved unspecified rights to the people (10th Amendment). By definition, rights retained by the people are retained by the people. If we assume the Supreme Court can steal these rights, they would no longer be retained by the people, but that contradicts the written text of the Bill of Rights. It, again, follows (essentially a proof by contradiction) that there ARE limits to the authority of the court.
Or, in other words, the fact that the Bill of Rights post-dates the Constitution and was required for acceptance means that it overrides the authority of the original text, and thus can limit items such as the authority of the Supreme Court to judge cases arising under the Constitution.
We can think of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's as an example of a situation where the people, in expressing their displeasure at the "separate-but-not-actually-equal" system, were actually asserting one or more rights "retained by the people", such as the right not to be discriminate against on the basis of one's skin color. Consequently, we can also assert that the Supreme Court justices who for so many years permitted the "separate-but-equal" system to exist were acting contrary to fundamental rights protected under the 9th and 10th Amendment, and therefore were in violation of their oaths to uphold the Constitution.
They will get blown out of the first court. That's the norm.
In other words, as this issue could reasonably be supposed to violate fundamental rights protected under the Bill of Rights (certainly the 9th Amendment, if nothing else), then you are saying that violations of the oaths of office of federal judges (such oaths requiring these persons to uphold the Bill of Rights) are commonplace.
However, what makes you think that the people who get selected for the Supreme Court will be any better? After all, to get to that position, they've probably had to make many rulings over the years. If we suppose we have a badly screwed up legal system -- something that could reasonably be inferred from the fact that there is any dispute over this issue at all -- then many of these earlier rulings are likely to involve a judge ignoring an ethical conflict of interest and/or otherwise violating his or her oath. This line of reasoning seems to imply that we can not trust the integrity of persons selected for the Supreme Court (individually, or collectively). After all, there is no reason to suppose a person who fails to show integrity in a lower office would suddenly gain it when appointed to a higher one.
Further, the selection process for the Supreme Court is a process run by politicians. If we suppose that corruption and incompetence are widespread amongst our politicians -- and given that the politicians passed laws permitting this conduct in the first place, I imagine most Slashdot readers would take that as a given -- then why would we suppose a selection process overseen by corrupt and incompetent people would produce a competent and ethical Supreme Court?
Clearly then the NDA I signed on my first day of work is unconstitutional as it violates my first amendment rights as I clearly have the right to go to the local media and spill my guts as to what my employer is building in secret (all legal projects, just not yet publically known).
Actually, there's nothing at all silly about this. If the legal profession wants to extend contract law to be able to infringe freedom of speech, the only ethical way to do so is by mean of an Amendment to the Constitution. Anything else creates a contradiction in the legal system, between freedom of speech (the "no law" portion of which applies to the states via the 14 the Amendment) and contract law (which is a law, hence contradicting "no law").
Contradiction makes it difficult for non-legal professionals to understand the legal system, thus artificially increasing the demand for the services of the legal profession. If people are scared of something, they'll naturally tend to want somebody to protect them, and having contradictions in the legal system makes people scared.
I'm not disputing that employers should be able to ask their employees to keep secrets, the point here is that there are ethical and unethical ways of making that happen within the US legal system.
The issue of when it is legitimate for a contract to provide for non-disclosure is actually a fairly tricky issue in itself, as a long term right of public oversight over business can be asserted under the 9th Amendment, and any NDA that fails to acknowledge this should be viewed as illegal.
Christianity was part of the cause of the downfall.
Another argument against that idea is that while the Western Empire fell in the 5th century, the Eastern Empire, which was just as Christian, continued for another 1000 years.
To the contrary, the history of the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire provides a superb example, when studied in detail, to show why separation of church and state is a really good idea.
There were very serious religous divisions within the eastern empire, particularly relating to the rift between the mainstream (and state sponsored) Orthodox faith with the Monophysite versions of Christianity. Much of the success of Islam in conquering places like Egypt and Syria resulted from this rift: the persecution of Christians by other Christians (frequently state-sponsored) had gotten so bad that many people in these regions had no loyalty to the Byzantine state.
To their credit, at that time in history, the followers of Islam tolerated other faiths and permitted them to practice their beliefs within conquered regions (although at a higher tax rate). This policy, of course, made it easier for Christians to leave the Byzantine state. The current dominance of Islam over the Middle East didn't happen for centuries after the original conquests.
Also, there were endless problems arising from disputes between the western church and the eastern (or "Orthodox") church. The best known incident resulting -- at least in part -- from these problems is the sack of Constantinople during the 4th Crusade, in which Christian crusaders conquered and looted the Christian city, then placed a Venetian prelate in charge of religion in the city. This conquest essentially shattered the Byzantine state: even though the city would eventually be regained, what remained thereafter (and lingered for many years) was a very small remnant of its former glory.
While more was involved in these incidents than just religious dispute -- the human tendency towards greed, stupidity, short-sightedness, and arrogance should never be underestimated -- there is no doubt that Christianity played a role in the downfall of the Roman state, whether Eastern or Western.
It also played a role in the glory of that state, witness Hagia Sophia and the other superb art and architecture created over many centuries.
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Great. Taking your rule to its logical conclusion, I look forward to the day when teacher's unions no longer make campaign contributions to local school board members, too.
Not a bad idea, actually. Let the teachers make those contributions, as individuals. Don't allow organizations to make donations, or anyone to make a donation of behalf of somebody else. Have all funds donated be traceable to the specific individual and be public (i.e. no anonymous donations). Have money go to specific individuals and not to organizations. Don't allow politicians to keep unspent contributions. Don't allow donations from persons living outside of a jurisdiction.
In short, there's lots of room for improvement in how we handle political campaign contributions.
The best possible thing for the safety of civilians is to ensure both sides wear uniforms, as required by just about every treaty since the idea of uniforms happened.
That isn't quite what the Laws of Land Warfare require, according to the US Army, but the sentiment is good.
"64b. Distinctive Sign.
The second condition, relative to the possession of a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance is satisfied by the wearing of military uniform, but less than the complete uniform will suffice. A helmet or headdress which would make the silhouette of the individual readily distinguishable from that of an ordinary civilian would satisfy this requirement. It is also desirable that the individual member of the militia or volunteer corps wear a badge or brassard permanently affixed to his clothing. It is not necessary to inform the enemy of the distinctive sign, although it may be desirable to do so in order to avoid misunderstanding."
-- The Law of Land Warfare, FM 27-10, Appendix A-17
Unfortunately, since terrorists are sociopaths, they don't tend to have much interest in following the rules.
The government would actually be the best suited to pensions since they can build up enough of a buffer over time
The logic here isn't clear at all.
Government can pass and enforce laws that limit how private companies can handle pension plans, including requiring insurance for those plans, and protecting them from being plundered (for example, look at ERISA, although that has some loopholes that were presumably bought and paid for by various private interests).
However, governments (at least in the US) have a poor history with respect to following laws that limit their power.
Further, governments have very serious problems with running things efficiently and providing good customer service.
If anything, I'd expect a government to be the worst suited to be running such plans.
A very "American" sentiment, approximately equivalent to the "thinking" that led to the US marked inferiority in decryption and signals intelligence in the 1930's which in turn allowed Pear[l] Harbour to happen.
Pearl Harbour happened because the Japanese were underestimated. By the standards of the day, US signals intelligence was probably as good as one could reasonably expect. Peacetime military organizations have their limits.
Everybody important in naval circles would certainly have been aware of the highly successful British air raid on the Italian fleet in the port of Taranto on the night of 11 November 1940, over a year before the Pearl Harbour raid.
The US Navy's air-dropped torpedoes couldn't work reliably in shallow water such as that found in Pearl Harbour. It was reasonably believed that the fleet in port would not be vulnerable to torpedoes, which -- in general -- are a far greater threat to warships than bombs (aside from the occasional critical hit).
The Japanese managed to engineer air-dropped torpedoes that would work in the shallow water of the harbour.
Racism may have played a role as well. The USA of that age was a more more racist society than today, and the views many Americans had of the Japanese (which don't bear repeating here) were stupid and short-sighted. It is not clear to what extent this affected thinking at command levels, but there is no doubt that in at least some respects the US military was a racist organization (consider the segregation of African-Americans).
Incidentally, had the fleet been at sea when it engaged the Japanese carrier force, or their main surface fleet, the same underestimation could easily have led to a far worse disaster. It was easier for sailors to escape from sinking ships in harbour than it would have been in the open sea. Also, most of the ships at Pearl were able to be raised from the shallow water, and returned to fight later in the war.
For comparison, look at the Battle of Savo Island. This was a complete disaster for the US Navy, again largely caused because the Japanese were massively under-estimated, and it didn't occur in peacetime!
In short, it is easy to over-estimate the importance of signals intelligence.
The main scene of the Nazi's downfall may have been the Soviet Union, but the evidence that the Soviets would have collapsed completely without massive amounts of foreign aid is overwhelming. Something else military historians have always known, but which largely escapes popular treatments of the war, apparently including that by the NY times.
For example, just about everything that rotates requires anti-friction bearings, otherwise known as ball bearings. Hence, your WW2 era tanks, artillery pieces, planes, and so forth, plus the machine tools needed to make these, all depended on high quality ball bearings. Guess where the Soviets got the vast majority of their ball bearings?
Then we have the additives and processing equipment needed to make high quality aviation fuel. Without this, you don't have an air force capable of competing with the enemy, since you can't get the needed performance out of your engines. Ever wonder who supplied this stuff to the Soviets?
Similarly, WW2 era warfare depended massively upon huge amounts of supplies being able to be shipped to the troops at the front from the factories. Minor things like ammunition, food, and medical supplies. Guess where the Soviets got most of their trucks and trains from (over 600,000 vehicles), after the Germans destroyed or captured most of their vehicles (and, despite myths to the contrary, many of their factories) in the early days of the invasion?
Then we have the 100,000+ machine tools supplied to Soviet factories. Hard to work metal without machine tools.
Also, the Soviets had a massive manpower problem. This was caused by the enormous losses of people and territory in the first few months of the German invasion (or, if you prefer, pre-emptive strike). They needed to free up people from working in a wide variety of industries such as food and textiles in order to send them off to the front. Guess who made up the slack, supplying massive amounts of food and clothing (including quite a bit of winter clothing)?
Think about what would have happened in the famous campaigns if the Soviets didn't have most of their tanks, airplanes, guns, and ammunition, not to mention a smaller (and starving) army. Despite the high quality of some of their technology, they simply wouldn't have had enough to win against opponents as dangerous as the German army and air force proved themselves to be (even taking into account massive Nazi blundering).
WW2 was a team effort, but if anything, the current trend is to under-estimate the US role simply because most casual commentators don't understand military logistics, how things actually work, and the process of manufacturing them.
Germany had a militarist tradition and was a very militarist country.
This is a somewhat misleading statement. When considering WWI, it's worth remembering that many of the earlier histories were written by the "winners". Some of these contained substantial amounts of propaganda, or highly prejudicial descriptions and interpretations of events, and others were based on rather sloppy research. The myths propagated by these earlier "histories" continue to persist in the face of more recent scholarship.
What we think of today as "Germany" was actually formed from a number of different smaller states (27?), only united in the mid to late 19th Century. These smaller states had very different cultures and even significant language differences, and this was reflected in the attitude towards warfare of their people. There were many times in WWI where German units -- usually those from particular backgrounds -- did very little to pursue the war, even going so far as to adopt an unofficial but very real truce with their Allied counterparts across the lines, essentially a live and let live approach, or "you don't bother us, we won't bother you".
The units from Alsace-Lorraine were especially notorious for having little enthusiasm for the war, not surprising considering how many of these people had both French and German relatives, but were certainly not the only group in this situation.
The Prussians had a reputation for militarism, but were only one of the German states. You may be thinking of them. Even there, things are far more complex than most people suppose.
John Mosier notes in his book "The Myth of the Great War" that in 1900 Germany had a little over a half million people in uniform, while France and Russia had nearly two million. The French appropriated far more money to their military, and had a far larger percentage of their population involved in mandatory military training (about 85%) whereas less than half of the eligible Germans had military training and the numbers were even smaller in Austrian (Hapsburg) lands. These numbers changed by 1914, but even then the Russian and the French armies together significantly outnumbered the supposedly "ultra-militaristic" Germans.
As far as the causes of WWI go, the situation is far more complex than most people realize. Some of the older histories, still influential, seem to neglect German-language written sources (perhaps the authors couldn't be bothered to learn German?), which show that there were considerable differences in opinion concerning the desirability of war. Kaiser Wilhelm, for example, did not want a war.
Mosier notes "As in France, the [German] military didn't determine foreign policy, it simply tried to win whatever war the government had forced it to fight. In this, both General Staffs were alike." (pp 50)
I am not sure I would give the US too much credit regarding early slavery fights.
As usual, the history is more complex than most people realize.
Gouverneur Morris of NY spoke out at length against slavery during the US Constitutional Convention (according to James Madison's notes, details taken from Epps book on the 14th Amendment, admittedly a secondary source):
"Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? ... That proposal comes to this: that an inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages; shall have more votes in a Government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind than the Citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with laudable horror so nefarious a practice. Not only did slavery risk calling down God's judgement on those who maintained it, but the institution had warped the new Constitution almost beyond redemption. He would sooner submit himself to a tax for paying for all the negros in the United States than saddle posterity with such a Constitution."
Ben Franklin (President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery) once said that the American Revolution was necessary because the British Empire would never give up slavery on its own.
To gain some insight into his position, it is worth noting that the vast majority of slaves shipped via the triangle trade went NOT to North America, but rather to the Caribbean and Central and South America, to work in the sugar plantations owned by the British, the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and a few other European nations.
Conditions on these plantations were frequently horrific, resulting in very high rates of death (this is why so many more slaves were shipped to this region instead of to North America, i.e. to replace losses) but the profits involved were so immense that it seemed highly unlikely the British and the other Europeans would ever outlaw slavery. Ironic, given how things turned out. It goes to show the power a few individuals (such as Wilberforce and his supporters) can have to shape history, even in the face of entrenched commercial interests, something that's worth remembering even as we note the repeated failures of those individuals fighting slavery in the USA.
The exact numbers of slaves shipped to various destinations are not known with any certainty, but the Wikipedia page on the Atlantic Slave Trade gives some estimates. The percentage of slaves shipped to British North America is estimated to have been 6-7% of the total (French North America, i.e. Louisiana, would also have to be counted to determine the totals for North America, but I haven't found any clear numbers on that). The average life span for a slave on a Caribbean sugar plantation has been estimated as 5-7 years.
Privacy really requires an attempt to keep something private.
This is an arbitrary, narrow, and very limiting definition. There is no reason we cannot develop a definition of privacy that DOES provide protection to individuals, even in supposedly "public" places. Alternately, we could simply redefine "public", as the definitions of "private" and "public" are fundamentally connected.
For example, we might decide that one is in "public" only when a) one has consented to an interview, and b) a visible camera is present, and c) the camera is known to be on. In any other circumstance, some privacy rights will apply with respect to recording the individual. The nature of those rights will vary from circumstance to circumstance, with the strongest possible rights applying when one is on land that is primarily a home, or inside a home.
For example, with such a definition, if one steps behind some trees and "uses the facilities" while hiking on public lands, this is nevertheless a private act and it would be reasonable to have civil or even criminal penalties apply to somebody that knowingly and deliberately attempted to take a video, or to distribute the footage from such a video.
Similarly, a person taking off their clothes to go swimming at a seemingly empty beach would be protected from the hidden photographer attempting to take pictures of them.
Also, while we might allow businesses to have surveillance cameras, we can put very strict limits on what can be done with the video from such cameras.
Government officials, and executives of large organizations, will necessarily have a lessor right to privacy in any action connected with their official duties.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
The whole statement of Article 12 is actually riddled with problems.
What constitutes "interference"? The only precise definition of this concept I am familiar with applies to optics, surely they don't mean that?
When is "interference", whatever that is, "arbitrary"? Many of the actions taken by federal, state, and local governments in recent years have certainly been wrong, but have they been "arbitrary"? What criteria do we use to determine when something is "arbitrary"?
(I suspect most US legal professionals would say that anything authorized by law is not arbitrary, but US legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system, and hence not to be trusted with respect to such questions.)
Why is "interference", whatever that is, bad with respect to only the four items listed (privacy,family,home,correspondence)? What about interfering with somebody's life without directly interfering with any of those four items? Shouldn't that be bad, also? For example, should we attempt to construe a threat to sue someone "interference" (the threat to sue the Oatmeal comes to mind) with one of these four items, or are there items missing from the list?
When is an action an "interference" with somebody's family? If I arbitrarily decide to drive to the beach on a sunny day, I am contributing to traffic that makes it take longer for other families to get to the beach? Would that not constitute "arbitrary interference" with another person's family?
Any action that increases negative stress in a person's life will have a (presumably) negative impact on their family, as this form of stress has direct physiological consequences eventually leading to medical bills, time in the hospital, even death. Does this mean that any action taken that causes somebody to get angry, or upset, no matter how stupid or misinformed they may be, is therefore wrong?
Is all "interference" bad, or are there situations when "interference" is justified, even if some people call it "arbitrary"?
When is an action an "attack" and thus, presumably, bad?
Similarly, are there situations when attacks on the honour or reputation of a person justified? For example, what about somebody that chooses to enforce a law that infringes fundamental human rights (the Aaron Swartz case comes to mind)? Can we not attack them, at least with words? If we argue that someone has violated their oath to uphold the Bill of Rights, and attempt to get them removed from public office, is that an "attack" and therefore prohibited?
What about somebody that has behaved dishonourably, does this mean that we can't do anything that might be construed as an attack on them? What exactly do we mean by "honour"?
How long does such protection last? If I say bad things about somebody like Hitler or Stalin, is that an attack on their reputation?
How do we enforce all this? What is justified, and who can take action?
Many people criticize the US Founding Fathers for their oversights and for unclear language in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, but it appears that the folks who put together the UN Declaration -- with more than 150 years of history between the two documents, history that could provide numerous lessons to show them what not to do -- didn't do much better.
How about a right to reasonably clear, well documented laws (and documents that serve as a basis for law)? If we accept the UN Declaration as a valid basis for law, than are we implicitly accepting that we don't have such a right, as it certainly doesn't meet that criteria? Good for the legal professionals, who probably played a big role in writing the document, but is this good for society as a whole?
It's been my observation that the vast majority of adults, even engineers and scientists, aren't particularly good at learning. How many people, for example, are committed to a lifetime learning program and read one or more textbooks every year after leaving college? How many engineers rigorously educate themselves in all those subjects they didn't have time for while in college, such as literature, humanities, art, the social sciences, and history, as well as educating themselves in areas of physical science that go beyond their own specialization? How many will bother to learn a foreign language? I know very few who even try to do this, and even within that group most don't seem to be particularly good at it.
I suspect most people in US society will spend most of their post-college lives in front of their television sets watching entertainment programs with little or no educational content, or will spend most of their lives playing computer games, instead of engaging in lifetime learning. We are not a society that is good at learning.
Within the college setting, it has been my observation that there are vast differences in both the efficiency of learning and in what students retain over the long term, comparing their experiences with the top 20% or so of instructors (the ones that actually care about teaching and are good at it) versus the research-first herd (the other 80%, otherwise known as the "I have a PhD, therefore I don't have not know how to teach" group).
As a teaching assistant in many different computer science and engineering classes, I worked with quite a few struggling students. In the vast majority of cases, it was not the case that the student needed to be spoon fed, rather it was the case that I needed to correct deficiencies in how the instructor was teaching the material with otherwise intelligent and motivated students.
And many math problems are known to be intractable. For example, the Halting problem.
The halting problem is not intractable: all programs will halt. Entropy ensures this. In a modern semiconductor-based computer system, any program will eventually halt due to mechanisms such as hot electron injection, traps, room temperature diffusion, and so forth, that destroy the semiconductor structure which creates the logic gates the program depends upon.
While other types of computer systems are possible, there is no reason at this time to suppose they will not have their own entropy-related mechanisms.
It is only possible to have a program whose halting status is uncertain if you first postulate a mathematical fantasy world in which that program will run without real-world considerations such as entropy. In short, the "intractable" status of this "problem" results from the manner in which the problem is set up.
This, of course, is the big difference between mathematics and engineering. Mathematicians love to complain that engineering is all about approximations, while engineers recognize that this is necessary if one is not living and working in a fantasy world.
The first amendment says that if I find something out about you legally you have no right to stop me from telling everyone else about it.
No, it doesn't. The 1st amendment specifically only limits Congress from passing certain types of laws. It says nothing about the state governments being unable to pass laws protecting a right to privacy. This is a common misconception. The 14th Amendment can, in some circumstances, extend the restrictions placed on Congress to also limit state government, but the text of the 14th amendment itself is not specific as to what those circumstances are.
Privacy rights can reasonably be asserted as arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). A violation of privacy is, of course, a violation of these rights. It is thus wrongful conduct whether or not explicit laws exist to make it so. In fact, there is no need for Congress to pass a law recognizing a right to privacy and the 1st Amendment limitation of the ability of Congress to pass certain types of law doesn't come into play with respect to making a violation of privacy wrongful conduct.
In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court recognized a right to privacy arising under the 9th Amendment, the details of which were left rather vague.
State laws that define blackmail and extortion as crimes can be viewed as one way in which the states historically have recognized a right to privacy that supersedes freedom of the press, but this does not preclude other (stronger) ways of protecting privacy from being developed in the future. These laws, of course, have always been accepted by the Supreme Court.
Historically, privacy was less of an issue in the past, so whether or when the 14th brings the 1st into play with respect to this right is not particularly well resolved, and the conflict between the 9th / 10th Amendment privacy rights and the 1st/14th Amendment press and speech rights has never been thoroughly addressed by any court I am familiar with.
There are many situations where the rights protected under the 1st Amendment are superseded by other rights. In fact, we can go further and state that the 1st Amendment is long overdue for revision, given how many laws there already are that can reasonably be viewed as contradicting it, such as laws on industrial espionage, military espionage, libel/slander (some privacy rights here), the do-not-call list (another privacy right), false advertising, and the laws regulating insider knowledge in public corporations. This creates a major mess and a big problem within US law, since contradictions in the legal system can reasonably be viewed as involving ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession (such contradictions create an artificial demand for their services of legal professionals, hence the conflict of interest with respect to the presence of contradictions in the legal system). Similar problems exist with respect to the 2nd Amendment, and many other rights that can reasonably be asserted as arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments. It's a situation that badly needs to be resolved in a clean way.
Commercial press organizations have a powerful conflict of interest here, which means that any ruling providing overly broad freedom of the press at the expense of privacy rights could be considered ethically suspect (i.e. were the judges bribed to support the press at the expense of the public?) and hence invalid (legal ethics being another fundamental right). Hence, to the limited extent that existing precedents apply to this area and provide freedom of the press at the expense of privacy, those precedents are ethically problematic. Also, precedents that fail to recognize the role of the 9th Amendment right to privacy can be considered violations of the oaths the judges took to uphold the Bill of Rights.
In short, we can summarize the current situation with respect to privacy rights by saying "it's a mess".
Freedom of t
No, this court, like any other, would work within the law. The problem is that without the appropriate clearance, judges are not legally allowed to hear the evidence in the case so judicial oversight is not possible right now. All this would be is a court where the judges have the clearance to hear the cases and the evidence. The evidence in the cases as well as most of the information about the cases could be kept secret so these cases could go to court without damaging national security or the government using that as an excuse to keep the cases from ever being heard.
This type of court arrangement is also known as a "Star Chamber". It goes back to the 15th Century. Like many other things, what initially seemed like a good idea (a means of providing a check and balance on the upper ranks of the nobility) quickly went bad (notoriously so).
Once upon a time, Americans were very determined to prevent this kind of thing, which is why you find negative references to "Star Chamber Sessions" in the old Perry Mason books from the 1930's and 1940's. The average modern reader of these books probably has never heard this term.
Long term public oversight of government is certainly one of the fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment ("rights retained by the people") and the 10th Amendment ("rights reserved by the people"). Exactly what constitutes "long term" is subject to some discussion, but given the time scale on which trials occur there is no legitimate reason to keep things secret. It follows that any laws or precedents to the contrary are in violation of the Bill of Rights.
The US legal profession -- being in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to recognizing the 9th Amendment -- can be expected to do its best not to acknowledge such a right. Regrettable, but until people outside the profession start paying attention to legal ethics that's not likely to change. Entropy in a closed system increases unless reversed by energy from an outside source.
Given the extremely negative history associated with secret courts, there really isn't any legitimate basis for doing this sort of thing today. Have the trial and declassify things as needed, or forego the trial. If somebody in the government is under trial, the latter is not an option, otherwise the government would simply classify everything to protect its members from the consequences of illegal conduct.
Yes, doing things this way makes some tasks harder for the government -- but that's the way things have to be for a society to be free.
I really wish we had a "Use it or Lose it" clause in our copyright laws. After X number of years of the product not being marketed, it falls into public domain. Software for even shorter periods.
Presumably by "being marketed" you mean "being sold" or something similar: just advertising something should not be enough to keep the copyright. Even with "being sold" we would need to put some thought into specifying what that means, or unscrupulous copyright holders would get their buddies to "buy" a copy with money the copyright holder lends to them or similar nonsense. But, given the need to work through some details, this is definitely a good idea.
Another possibility would be to give the first option to publish as per the current system for some period of time, then if that option is not continually exercised we could return control to the creative author(s) for an additional period of time, who can either self-publish or try to find another publisher.
In other words, a publisher that has taken the copyright from the author via contract loses it back to the author(s) if the work is not kept in print.
Finally, after an additional period of time, if the author doesn't keep the work in print, we allow anyone to publish with a provision that a portion of the gross (if any) must be provided to the author(s) and with criminal penalties for failing to pay in a reasonable time under reasonable circumstances. Handling bundles (where works of multiple authors are combined, such as magazines) would take some thought. This is a little more complex, but does ensure that nobody is making money off something without the author(s) getting a share.
After yet another period of time, the work goes into the public domain. Author's moral rights can be protected for a longer period than the commercial rights.
In the case of software, we not only need shorter periods, we need well documented source code to be made available to enable long term public oversight over business. As technology gets more and more complex such oversight becomes harder and harder, and part of the cost of doing business in any area of complex technology should be spending a reasonable amount of effort to facilitate oversight.
For source code in law enforcement systems, the documentation should be made available immediately as soon as those systems are purchased or start being used (and documentation for the hardware and firmware in these systems should also be made available) , otherwise we can expect to end up with disasters similar to those various jurisdictions have experienced with respect to DUI systems. Part of the cost of doing business with the government in law enforcement technology should be the inability to keep trade secrets.
I am aware that Congress is bought by Disney and the Supreme court is stacked with pro corporatists. That doesn't make what's being done legal, moral, or ethical, it just makes it crooked.
The justices of the Supreme Court are required to swear oaths to uphold the Constitution. Historically speaking, had the Founding Fathers been prepared to trust the Supreme Court (or for that matter, any of the entities defined in the pre-"Bill of Rights" portion of the Constitution, taken individually or collectively), there would have been no need for a Bill of Rights. We not only have a Bill of Rights, we have an open-ended Bill of Rights (James Madison implemented this by means of the 9th and 10th Amendments, which provide for unspecified rights "retained by the people" and rights "reserved to the people").
This raises the possibility that some Supreme Courts will choose to make rulings that, by contradicting either the explicit rights, or by contradicting rights reasonably asserted under the open-ended portions of the Constitution (non-explicit rights), violate the oaths the justices took to uphold the Constitution.
Rights retained by the people are, after all, "retained by the people". The phrase "retained by the people" does not mean the same thing as "steal-able by the Supreme Court": if the Supreme Court could steal such rights, they would no longer be retained (proof by contradiction).
Given these considerations, determining what is the "law of the land" is not nearly as simple as some folks would attempt to manipulate us into believing, or as simple as some folks have been brain-washed into believing. Unfortunately, when children are taught about US government, the material is often dumbed down to exclude these important considerations (which makes the study of decisions like Roe vs. Wade especially difficult).
Naturally, one of the foremost rights that might reasonably be asserted as a right "retained by the people" would be something equivalent to the Nuremberg precedent, applying not just to military hierarchy, but also to the civil hierarchy, including the judicial hierarchy. This may require, in some circumstances, that government professionals recognize certain laws, orders, precedents, or even traditional approaches to the practice of law, as being invalid and contrary to fundamental rights. Unfortunately, the kind of moral courage required to do this is rare, especially once something becomes "official", and especially amongst those who have something to gain by not doing this (such as many legal professionals).
Historically, there have been many aspects of US law that violate fundamental rights, and thus there have been many laws appropriately viewed as being illegal laws, whether or not the Supreme Court "officially" approved of them. Many of the worst abuses of the slave system, or the later "separate-but-not-actually-equal" system, fall into this category. Many actions taken under such laws were not only illegal, but should have been treated as criminal.
There are aspects of current copyright and patent law that fall into this category (particularly with respect to violations of a 9th Amendment right to ethical legal practice, another one of the foremost rights reasonably asserted). So, in a sense, things have gotten better: we're no longer fighting over really horrible stuff like slavery and discrimination. On the other hand, since the problems are now less obvious, it may be harder to fix things (and it took many decades to fix the earlier problems!). Plus, saying that things are "not as bad" does not mean that people aren't having their lives destroyed from abuses in the current legal system (Aaron Schwartz comes to mind as one of the more recent examples).
In other words, your position is quite correct. What's being done is not legal, moral, or ethical.
The legal tradition known as the "Law of Agency" makes a person or organization responsible for the acts of their agents. "Agent" here is a generic term, it does not refer to just spies or secret agents, but rather to any person or organization acting on behalf of another.
This is a philosophical concept. It is implemented in different ways in different legal jurisdictions, usually associated with (but not limited to) commercial law.
It would not be unreasonable to assert that something along the same lines applies to government as a right arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). As such, it is no more legal for the government to violate fundamental rights by working through a 3rd party then it is to do so directly. Whether or not that third party in located within this country is irrelevant.
Thus, the government, for example, could not sell land to private owners and then pass laws allowing those land owners to infringe fundamental rights the government had an interest in infringing, as the private land owners would be acting as agents of the government.
In practice, this idea, like almost anything else one might assert under the 9th or 10th Amendment (and in spite of precedents like Roe vs. Wade, the most famous case to assert a 9th Amendment argument), is routinely ignored.
People, for example, see nothing wrong with a private land-owner infringing the right to travel (one of the rights that also arises under the 9th Amendment, and has been recognized by at least one high court as being subject to "strict scrutiny", another legal concept) across land that isn't a home, and isn't even in use, by means of fences or no trespassing signs. To make matters worse, the police will generally arrest those that cross such land for "trespassing". In such cases the private land-owner, by means of the trespassing laws, is effectively acting as an agent of the government with respect to infringing the right to travel, and the arresting police officers are actually in violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
(To be fair, most private land-owners fence off their land not through the intention of infringing the right to travel -- though the decision certainly has that effect, whatever their intentions -- but rather to protect themselves from the routine abuse of Tort law the US legal profession engages in).
Similarly, if a Federal Agency is prohibited by law from keeping certain data, it is not unheard of for such agencies to merely hire a third party to keep that data on behalf of the agency.
Some of the rights that might reasonably be asserted under the 9th and 10th Amendments are not in the interests of the legal profession as a class in society, which probably accounts for the unwillingness of courts to recognize it except in those rare cases where public option is massively contrary to the existing law (the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and the effect it had on overturning all the "separate but not actually equal" laws -- all of which massively violated the Bill of Rights -- comes to mind as a good example of one of those "rare cases" where the legal profession is actually forced to do the right thing in spite of conflicts of interest).
As an engineer, I won't deny that most psychology majors are very weak on math compared to myself and my engineering colleagues. The point, however, is that NOT all are. At the engineering school RPI, for example, the dual major in math and psychology is one of the six recommended dual majors for the mathematics department, along with more familiar ones such as math and physics or math and computer science. Some of the statistical techniques used in modern social science research have gotten very complicated, and people with this background are needed to help the rest of their colleagues understand the techniques (which is not necessarily the same thing as being able to work the techniques by hand).
Regarding your other point, very few people will be good at social, leadership, management, or people skills, or understanding group and cultural dynamics, just from the act of going out and talking with people. This is necessary but not (typically) sufficient. Most people benefit from training in these areas.
Even those that appear to be successful in their interactions with others often are making all kinds of mistakes and not realizing it. This tends to be particularly common amongst the young and beautiful, who fail to realize how much of their social "success" is due to their appearance and to how much our society overvalues appearance. Some of the most efficient learning human beings are capable of happens as a result of people making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. If a person does not realize they are making mistakes, due to the illusion that they are being successful, then they will typically be very poor at learning. Training can help with this by making people aware of problematic behaviours.
Unfortunately, this is a point very few scientists or engineers seem to be able to grasp until they finally get this kind of training, at which point they tend to have many regrets about not being smart enough to figure this out earlier in their lives.
I have yet to meet a research psychologist that actually uses statistics correctly.
I've known a few research psychologists who really understood the ins and outs of using statistics (and, in fact, had a far better knowledge of some aspects of this field, such as the non-parametric methods, than the vast majority of physical scientists!). In at least one university, I have known non-psych professors who routinely send their graduate students over to the statistics classes taught by psych, simply because the teaching there is higher quality than in their own department or school. Good psychology classes focus as much on the limitations of statistics in the real world as they do in learning the mechanics.
On the other hand, the Full Professor of Mathematics I had for junior level probability was a useless idiot. He had all the proofs memorized but didn't understand anything that couldn't be expressed as a proof or lemma and had no idea that a proof and an explanation are not at all the same thing. We engineering students all ended up teaching ourselves the subject (something that seems to happen a lot more than it should in engineering and math classes -- it's a terribly inefficient process compared to having an instructor that actually knows how to teach these subjects).
But psychology, sociology, etc., hell no!
I have seen seemingly endless examples of otherwise brilliant engineers and scientists screwing up massively in social or leadership situations, in large part because they had the same attitude. We might even say that people from these backgrounds often screw up "by the numbers" in these situations, in deference to the importance of numbers for those with a hard science background.
The really awful thing is that even a really basic exposure to people skills would prevent the vast majority of the gaffes: the mistakes being made are usually discussed right at the beginning of "self-help" books on these topics. The power of arrogance and ignorance to cause otherwise intelligent people to do dumb things is truly remarkable.
This issue contributes significantly to the problems engineering professors have in being effective teachers, and the problems engineers and physical scientists in being effective managers and leaders when running a research team or when leading a group in industry.
Of course, formal courses in the social sciences don't always cover these subjects effectively, in large part because they require moving beyond the traditional domain of science (in other words, humanities). That's a loss to the folks who do take the social science classes, of course, and something that should be improved. On the other hand, the formal classes help quite a bit with understanding the limitations of what is known (and how it is known), which helps in assessing the merits of material from other sources (something which is badly needed as a counter-point to the often inflated claims and over-generalizations).
An analogy may help make the point clear. Studying the muscular system of the human body is interesting and useful, but the body is far too complex for someone to actually expect to be be good at movement without extensive study and practice, much of which relies on working with simplified models that are often quite far removed from the science. To understand this better, take a look at the complexity of the muscles and muscular connections in the vicinity of the hip, pelvis, and back. It's astonishing! Merely memorizing these muscles would not help you all that much with learning to coordinate your core with the rest of your body. In other words, the physical science fails you. Simpler models of how things work, on the other hand (exactly the kinds of mental models that one gets comfortable using in humanities classes), work quite well, as you would find out if you were to take a good martial arts or dance class. The same kind of thing applies in social and leadership situations: what you can
I'd like to see more open source projects following Tor's lead.
It's not just open source projects that should be doing this. There should be a legal requirement that all software companies eventually make their source code available in a well documented form that can be built with readily available tools to exactly match the released binaries.
Long term public oversight over business is an important public goal in its own right (consider all the environmental disasters that businesses have been involved in when this oversight didn't happen), and also something that arises as part of the right to long term public oversight over government. Historically, governments that have not been able to do certain things directly have hired (or even coerced) third parties -- such as businesses -- into doing the very thing the government is not allowed to do, in an attempt to do an "end-run" around the rules. This sort of thing can result in serious violations of fundamental rights, and public oversight over business is neccesary to prevent it from happening (or to catch the government in the act). For software companies, oversight to be practical must take the form of examining the source code.
It is for this reason, of course, that software companies who put clauses in their licenses prohibiting disassembly or reverse engineering are acting contrary to the public interest. In this USA, such clauses are appropriately considered to violate fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people).
I agree. The true problem is not the plea bargain system, its the fact that the badly and loosely drafted CFAA passed by politicians allowed the prosecutor to file so many ridiculous charges against Aaron in the first place.
No, this isn't the true problem either. You're mistaking the symptoms for the disease. The true problem is legal ethics: the US legal system is riddled with policies and laws resulting from bad decisions in situations involving ethical conflict on interest on the part of the legal profession (we can treat the legal profession as a special interest group within society). Badly or loosely drafted laws are merely a symptom of the problem.
A badly or loosely drafted law creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals, hence legal professionals (who make up most of the legislators, judges, district attorneys, legislative staffers, etc) are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the drafting of laws. Large numbers of loosely or badly drafted laws create a long term demand for the services of legal professionals on a massive scale. Judicial precedents that create contradictions within the legal system (we have LOTS of these) just make things worse.
CFAA is too loosely drafted, provides for punishments grossly exceeding the nature of the crime, with no sense of proportionality and is abusive. That is the real problem.
Similarly, punishments that grossly exceed the nature of the crime create an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals to protect people from the abuses of their own legal system. The legal ethics issue is the real problem here.
If there is any right that can reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) or the 10th Amendment (rights retained by the people), it certainly must be the right to ethical government and ethical legal practice. Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible.
We should be treating any law (or order, or precedent) whose passage or existence or contents, in whole or in part, can reasonably be supposed to involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession as an unconstitutional law.
In other words, the whole point of the Bill of Rights is to permit Americans to live in a free country. That isn't possible with an excessive or abusive legal system.
Fixing the issue involves two things: 1) we need to recognize that there is an ethics problem (something the legal profession has traditionally been very slow to acknowledge), and 2) we need to go after the legal professionals who choose not to act appropriately in situations where an ethical conflict of interest exists.
Federal Judges have to look at the law as written
Federal Judges swear oaths to uphold the Constitution, which includes (and is superseded by) the Bill of Rights.
James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be open-ended, in order to address the objections of the Anti-Federalists that any Bill of Rights would necessarily miss many important rights. This is implemented by means of the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). It's such an important principle that it appears TWICE.
Hence, Federal Judges are required NOT just to consider the law as written, but also any and all unspecified rights NOT written that might reasonably be asserted. This is where we get things like the right to privacy and the right to travel. Anything else is not only a violation of their oaths, but unethical practice of law (the legal profession, as a class in society, being in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to a number of key 9th Amendment rights).
Recognition of these rights happened in Roe vs Wade, and a few other high court cases, but it seldom happens today. This negative trend is what needs to be reversed. We need to be recognizing that federal officials who refuse to recognize these rights are in violation of their oaths to uphold the Constitution and they are acting illegally. In fact, those oaths being preconditions for holding those offices, they're actually impersonating members of government.
We can assert the equivalent of the Nuremberg Precedent as one of the rights arising under the 9th Amendment. Just as we would expect military government officials to refuse to follow laws (or court orders, or executive orders, or judicial precedents) that require them to violate fundamental rights, so too we also expect civil government officials (at all levels, not just the federal) to act appropriately even when the laws as written would have them do otherwise.
In a free country, it's SUPPOSED to be hard for the government to go after criminals, because otherwise the criminals end up controlling the government, and you no longer have a free society, in which case the harm done to innocents vastly exceeds that which the occasional non-government criminal can accomplish. 20th Century history demonstrates this beyond any possible doubt.
They are right when they make a decision (because our constitution pretty much pronounces that to be the case) and
they are just as right when they overturn their prior decisions, as they frequently do.
It's not really clear that our Constitution actually says that "the Supreme Court is always right". There are two considerations that seem relevant:
First, Supreme Court judges are required to swear oaths to uphold the Constitution. The oath of office is appropriately viewed as an invariant for holding office: should it ever be violated, the person or persons doing so become disqualified for office. One obvious problem with this situation is that the Constitution does not spell out how to determine when this oath is violated, or who can take action in that situation, or how we remove such oath-breakers from office. Oops! What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they wrote (or failed to write) that???
This oversight by the writers of the Constitution is probably one of the reasons the Anti-Federalists expressed such strong disapproval of the pre-Bill of Rights Constitution. After all, if they were prepared to trust the Presidency, the Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, individually or collectively, they would not have disapproved of the original document. It follows that they didn't trust these groups, individually or collectively, and wanted a mechanism in place by which an action taken by any or all of these groups could be overturned by a response short of armed revolution.
We can therefore infer, by the acceptance of the Bill of Rights by the Anti-Federalists, that they were recognizing in this document a mechanism sufficient to overturn the powers of any or all of the above by means short of war. This conclusion stands contrary to claims that the "Constitution says the Supreme Court is always right".
Second, in making the Bill of Rights open-ended, James Madison retained unspecified rights to the people (9th Amendment) and reserved unspecified rights to the people (10th Amendment). By definition, rights retained by the people are retained by the people. If we assume the Supreme Court can steal these rights, they would no longer be retained by the people, but that contradicts the written text of the Bill of Rights. It, again, follows (essentially a proof by contradiction) that there ARE limits to the authority of the court.
Or, in other words, the fact that the Bill of Rights post-dates the Constitution and was required for acceptance means that it overrides the authority of the original text, and thus can limit items such as the authority of the Supreme Court to judge cases arising under the Constitution.
We can think of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's as an example of a situation where the people, in expressing their displeasure at the "separate-but-not-actually-equal" system, were actually asserting one or more rights "retained by the people", such as the right not to be discriminate against on the basis of one's skin color. Consequently, we can also assert that the Supreme Court justices who for so many years permitted the "separate-but-equal" system to exist were acting contrary to fundamental rights protected under the 9th and 10th Amendment, and therefore were in violation of their oaths to uphold the Constitution.
They will get blown out of the first court. That's the norm.
In other words, as this issue could reasonably be supposed to violate fundamental rights protected under the Bill of Rights (certainly the 9th Amendment, if nothing else), then you are saying that violations of the oaths of office of federal judges (such oaths requiring these persons to uphold the Bill of Rights) are commonplace.
However, what makes you think that the people who get selected for the Supreme Court will be any better? After all, to get to that position, they've probably had to make many rulings over the years. If we suppose we have a badly screwed up legal system -- something that could reasonably be inferred from the fact that there is any dispute over this issue at all -- then many of these earlier rulings are likely to involve a judge ignoring an ethical conflict of interest and/or otherwise violating his or her oath. This line of reasoning seems to imply that we can not trust the integrity of persons selected for the Supreme Court (individually, or collectively). After all, there is no reason to suppose a person who fails to show integrity in a lower office would suddenly gain it when appointed to a higher one.
Further, the selection process for the Supreme Court is a process run by politicians. If we suppose that corruption and incompetence are widespread amongst our politicians -- and given that the politicians passed laws permitting this conduct in the first place, I imagine most Slashdot readers would take that as a given -- then why would we suppose a selection process overseen by corrupt and incompetent people would produce a competent and ethical Supreme Court?
Clearly then the NDA I signed on my first day of work is unconstitutional as it violates my first amendment rights as I clearly have the right to go to the local media and spill my guts as to what my employer is building in secret (all legal projects, just not yet publically known).
Actually, there's nothing at all silly about this. If the legal profession wants to extend contract law to be able to infringe freedom of speech, the only ethical way to do so is by mean of an Amendment to the Constitution. Anything else creates a contradiction in the legal system, between freedom of speech (the "no law" portion of which applies to the states via the 14 the Amendment) and contract law (which is a law, hence contradicting "no law").
Contradiction makes it difficult for non-legal professionals to understand the legal system, thus artificially increasing the demand for the services of the legal profession. If people are scared of something, they'll naturally tend to want somebody to protect them, and having contradictions in the legal system makes people scared.
I'm not disputing that employers should be able to ask their employees to keep secrets, the point here is that there are ethical and unethical ways of making that happen within the US legal system.
The issue of when it is legitimate for a contract to provide for non-disclosure is actually a fairly tricky issue in itself, as a long term right of public oversight over business can be asserted under the 9th Amendment, and any NDA that fails to acknowledge this should be viewed as illegal.
Christianity was part of the cause of the downfall.
Another argument against that idea is that while the Western Empire fell in the 5th century, the Eastern Empire, which was just as Christian, continued for another 1000 years.
To the contrary, the history of the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire provides a superb example, when studied in detail, to show why separation of church and state is a really good idea.
There were very serious religous divisions within the eastern empire, particularly relating to the rift between the mainstream (and state sponsored) Orthodox faith with the Monophysite versions of Christianity. Much of the success of Islam in conquering places like Egypt and Syria resulted from this rift: the persecution of Christians by other Christians (frequently state-sponsored) had gotten so bad that many people in these regions had no loyalty to the Byzantine state.
To their credit, at that time in history, the followers of Islam tolerated other faiths and permitted them to practice their beliefs within conquered regions (although at a higher tax rate). This policy, of course, made it easier for Christians to leave the Byzantine state. The current dominance of Islam over the Middle East didn't happen for centuries after the original conquests.
Also, there were endless problems arising from disputes between the western church and the eastern (or "Orthodox") church. The best known incident resulting -- at least in part -- from these problems is the sack of Constantinople during the 4th Crusade, in which Christian crusaders conquered and looted the Christian city, then placed a Venetian prelate in charge of religion in the city. This conquest essentially shattered the Byzantine state: even though the city would eventually be regained, what remained thereafter (and lingered for many years) was a very small remnant of its former glory.
While more was involved in these incidents than just religious dispute -- the human tendency towards greed, stupidity, short-sightedness, and arrogance should never be underestimated -- there is no doubt that Christianity played a role in the downfall of the Roman state, whether Eastern or Western.
It also played a role in the glory of that state, witness Hagia Sophia and the other superb art and architecture created over many centuries.