So the record companies have likely succeeded in their task of making music piracy (or backups) slightly more complicated for the legitimate CD owner.
Excellent point. On the subject, I wonder what percentage of all music "piracy" is perpetrated by individual buyers through CD duplication. Does it constitute even 5% of their revenue "loss"?
Then, any company with a sufficent number of POPs would be able to eliminate the bulk of long-distance costs, as the calls themselves could simply be routed over the Internet.
One word. Latency. It'd be a great idea within a single LAN, though. My company has an expensive dedicated digital telephone network in house, and I can't imagine that it does anything that a standard Ethernet couldn't. And when low-latency QoS services are available from the backbone providers, cheap long-distance'll follow. With residential broadband QoS and a VPN, you could have an office extension in your house in no time.
What bugs me about this phone is the dumb-client design. I can picture banks of these phones lying around with blank screens because of a server crash. There's no good reason for this design, other than a futile desire to come up with a service for AT&T to sell. Some centralized storage for a group of phones to tap into, sure. A centralized network gateway to interface with POTS phone lines, that makes sense. But making the phone nothing more than a remote display is sort of silly.
The re-centralization of the decentralized U.S. phone industry. Any surprise that this is being propounded by AT&T?
Any surprise that it's not going to work that way? I see the only serious buyer for this technology being business, which generally already uses centralized systems.
In any case, I think this technology is pretty nifty (more so if it included a small camera.) The client-server GUI architecure is unnecessary, though. It'/\fer2=[h
Laws should be in place to keep us from killing each other, they should not be in place merely to advance one particular group's world-view.
There are plenty of societies that don't guarantee freedom of speech or religion, or provide measures to prevent unreasonable search and siezure. Many of those societies seem to get by ok (in the sense that people aren't slaughtering each other.) In fact, if the yardstick of civilization is personal safety, than many of them are doing better than the US.
In this country, on the other hand, we strive for something a little bit better than the simple right to exist. And we use laws to achieve this goal. It'd be easy to write this off as just another group's "world-view", and if that's what it is... Then I've got nothing against laws being used in this manner. Let's agree to disagree.
PS I'm just responding to your statement above. If I've misconstrued what you're saying, I apologize in advance.
A naive system will not stand up to statistical analysis of many messages. For example, you might think that coding messages in the first characters of each word would be undetectable. Hardly--just look for anomalies in the letter frequencies of the first letters.
Bin Laden's people have apparently used courier transfers of Zip disks to transmit messages in the past. One could imagine physical transfers of One Time Pad CD-ROMs. That would result in messages that are virtually indistinguishable from white noise. There's very little good statistical analysis can do against white noise, if it's incorporated properly. There are some details to work out, but I highly doubt that any mandatory encryption will stop this sort of transmission.
My guess is that the long-term goal of this law is to slow and even eliminate private crypto research, and the development of new cryptosystems. With the hope that the existing systems will someday succumb to routine attacks.
This may not be the headline of the legislation, but I'll bet there'll be strong new restrictions on crypto research somewhere in the bill. This could eventually (say, 10 years from now) render terrorists' existing technology breakable. Although to make this ban effective, we would have to have cooperation from the rest of the world, and that's a little bit scary to think about. It'll be a nightmare for industry, as well. I hope some of the lobbyists get to work soon.
This seems like a reasonable tradeoff - more secure email for daily use, but law enforcement access with a wiretapping subpeona.
But it's 180 degrees from where Congress wants to go: reducing the use of all encryption, or making it all hackable. Under our current system, the vast majority of email is unencrypted. This is great for law enforcement, as Carnivore can keyword-search through oodles of it without spending a lot of cycles decrypting. It is absolutely not in the gov'ts interest to promote any encryption standard unless they're prepared to make it the only standard.
See, that's what I don't get. If you want to get third graders in seats, make a Pokemon movie. It's a whole lot cheaper. On the other hand, if you've got a $100+ million budget and practically the every American 14-40 years old ready to see it five times, take advantage of it fer chrissake. Make a movie that appeals to the kiddies, but doesn't sicken the older types.
Particularly if you've got two more sequels to sell... Third graders can only generate so much hype.
Only the people who want to use Microsoft software and agree to the license terms are bound by them. It doesn't affect the rest of the world.
In a general sense, it does affect the rest of the world. I don't like the idea of corporations adding anti-speech clauses to their standard contracts. I sign dozens of contracts every month just to get by; everything from credit card slips to delivery receipts to click-throughs on web pages. Often, we don't read the fine print of these documents, and they're getting longer and more common.
So you don't use Microsoft products. Imagine if your credit card company/phone company/electric company/ISP added anti-speech clauses to their TOS. You may be one of those rare few who always reads the whole page before you sign, or doesn't rely on modern conveniences, but most people aren't like that. That's why we ought to be concerned about issues like this, even if we don't use this particular piece of software.
since it would be the government that would have to enforce that contract, then the government would be restricting the speech.
Sorry... Why would the government have to restrict speech? If I put a "no-talking-nasty-about-me" clause into a contract, the clause simply becomes unenforceable when it's taken to court. Nobody swoops in and prevents me from writing the clause.
Gosh, you're right! Let's get rid of all laws and let society degenerate into barbaric feudalism. Then we'll all be completely free!
Jeez, lemox, it's not always the case that simplicity == freedom. This seems to trip up a lot of really hard-core libertarians. (I'm not saying you're necessarily one of them, by the way.) Just by living in close proximity to each other, we limit each others' freedom. If we didn't have a gov't and a bill of rights, you would appreciate that fact a great deal more.
It would be a virtual web server. For people who want to host something, but can't afford the bandwidth in case it gets hosed.
In order to participate, you install the package on your machine and allow to to cache other people's stuff along with your own. If your stuff gets popular, it'll get cached by other servers. There are a few issues, like how do users find your content, how does it get distributed, and how do you avoid having a central point of failure.
There are answers to most of these questions. None of them are particularly original... They borrow from Freenet, Gnutella, Akamai. But I've never any Open Source packages that perform this particular function (I suppose Freenet could, but doesn't update quickly enough.) Am I missing one?
Yes, we're going to lose certain civil liberties, especially if there are more attacks. And we probably have no choice but to accept that, in the name of security.
But it's important that we think about each liberty, each law that goes through Congress, instead of writing a blank check for the gov't to cash. Some things make sense; wiretap procedure could be cleaned up slightly. On the other hand, there are issues like the potential ban on strong (un-backdoored) crypto. How does a single country banning this tech hurt the terrorists, and is it anything more than a knee-jerk reaction?
I'm not worried about compromising on a few areas, especially when they make sense. I am concerned that we're going to give the green light to every sort of incursion on our freedoms, even if it does little to stop terrorism.
Proxy style web cache-ing + #1! This system would save bandwidth for content providers, keep pages from being altered and keep the server from getting the 'slashdot sickness'.
Yes. Although what you describe sounds something like what Akamai does, it would be really nice to see some Open Source packages that could do this. Particularly during last Tuesday's site-killing traffic surge, it would have been useful if anyone w/ bandwidth could have made their machine into a constantly-updated mirror, quickly and automatically.
There would obviously have to be some mechanism for users to locate the mirrors, which could come and go with some frequency. I'm not sure if DNS is ideal for this, as it still has a single point of failure. Other issues have to do with interactivity, which might be all but impossible in such a distributed environment.
Re:Tracking encrypted communications
on
A New Kind of War
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· Score: 1
Traffic analysis can be deceived, if you know what you're doing. As an axample, I've read about systems in which a message is passed in a chain from person to person. The intended recipient of the message is not at the end of the chain, he is somewhere in the middle. This person then passes the message along in order to throw off suspicion.
I think RMS should have kept his tone down. Perhaps saying that Bush's election was "controversial" would have been a better way to get the point across. The unfortunate thing about decisions made by the Supreme Court is that there's no appeal to a higher power. The SC can do just about anything, and it's "legal". That's why it's so important for us to think about what happened last November, regardless of whether we supported Bush or Gore. Bush is the president, nothing's going to change that, so wem shouldn't be afraid to think. We might avoid another (non-electoral) travesty of justice.
You make it sound like they are out to get us. Do you really believe that they are doing this so that they can rat you out to your wife if you cheat on her, or to prevent you from having an anti government conference call?
Do they intend to do this now? No, of course not. Is it possible that they may do things like this later on, once the infrastructure is in place and the restrictions are gone? Nah, our government'd never abuse their power and persecute ordinary citizens... for something as simple as their alleged political beliefs. It's completely unlikely that a key figure with the FBI would use his agency to collect information on people not under investigation.
I mean, it's not like any of this has happened in the past fifty years, even.
I can tell you something now, though. If these attacks continue, I would hate to be a peaceful Arab American. If the morons don't harrass you, you can bet that the government will.
Once and for all, don't think that the Florida Supreme Court's actions justify what the US Supreme Court did. If the Florida Supreme court did wrong, it was the US Supreme Court's job to a) vacate the decision and send it back (as many times as necessary) OR b) hand down a final decision on the matter. It was not the US Supreme Court's job to assign an arbitrary deadline that took effect two hours after handing down their decision, which virtually guaranteed that the Florida Supreme Court (and the State of Florida itself) would not have a chance to obey its own laws.
Although it would seem appropriate to some that the SCOTUS should be dealing out vigilante justice in just this way, it's not legal or appropriate. The Florida Court could have been a bunch of raving liberal commies advocating mass-murder, and the SCOTUS still would not have been justified in inventing arbitrary new deadlines.
I don't know where to start with your post. I won't argue politics because there are so many inaccuracies. I suggest you do some reading before posting what other people have told you:
The Constitution does NOT provide for the congress being a mediator in disputes.
Of course Congress wouldn't be involved with resolving the particulars of Florida's dispute! But anyone who remembers the case also remembers that as a part of the decision in Bush vs. Gore, the SC placed a deadline on Florida's counting process (remember the midnight deadline?) That deadline was in no way absolute, according to existing Federal laws. Had Florida submitted a revised slate of electors, it would have been up to Congress to decide which slate was valid. By promoting this deadline as absolute, the court short-circuited both Florida and the US Congress's ability to choose and count electors. The open justification given by the majority was that this would help "avoid a constitutional crisis." But Congress had procedures in place for dealing with this very crisis; had they been forced to employ them, the decision would at least have been made by elected officials with some responsibility to their constituents. In other words, even if the SCOTUS's decision was correct, Florida should have had a chance to rectify the situation. Here's a quote from an article on the subject by Stephen Giller:
The infamous Title 3, Section 5 of the U.S. Code says that if a state certifies its electors six days before the electors vote in their state capitals on Dec. 18, the certification "shall be conclusive" when Congress counts the electoral votes on Jan. 6. The victor is then inaugurated on Jan. 20. Everyone now seems to agree that Section 5 is a promise Congress makes to the states -- as the Supreme Court said last week, Section 5 is a "safe harbor."
It's nice to have a safe harbor. It means that a state can be sure that Congress won't reject its votes but instead will count them as certified. But federal law does not obligate a state to rely on the safe harbor.
Should there have been a recount? Of course! And there were! Five recounts completed. Every one of which had Bush as the winner.
Would that this were true. Two "complete" recounts were undertaken, both performed by machines. The difference between the two totals was relatively huge (300 something vs. 1700 something.) There's clearly something wrong if counting exactly the same ballots can erode a candidate's lead by 80%. After this point, there it's pretty silly to say that "five recounts were completed", as though all of the numbers were counted five times. This never happened. Several partial counts were begun, a couple of them were even included in the total. To call this "five complete recounts" is pretty silly. Several of those recounts simply weren't completed. Others involved a tiny portion of the state. It resulted in several "new" totals, but these recounts were no more complete than, say, recounting the money in your wallet constitutes a complete recalculation of your net worth.
The only recount that was not finished was the statewide recount, which was started after the cutoff date for recounts as specified in Florida law.
Actually, a good memory will recall that there were two conflicting statutes. One provided for a mandatory cutoff date, the other made the date optional. Both laws were passed well before the election. This is why the Florida courts became involved-- in the case where the legislature passes two different and conflicting laws, the courts are the only vehicle for resolution. It was determined by the court (quite rightly, I think) that the mandatory 7-day cutoff makes recounts all but impossible. Given that both statutes were the same except for this one discrepancy, and recounts are extensively provided for under Florida law, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which one is applicable.
1. GWB is president. Nothing is going to change that, come hell or high water. It's ok to admit that things weren't kosher with the SCOTUS decision-- Bush'll still be president and we'll all feel a little better.
2. The Constitution places responsibility for presidential elections with the state legislature. When the legislature produces pairs of conflicting laws, it's the job of the legal system to resolve the confusion. I'm sorry you don't like the Florida court or its decision, but saying "Gore brought the courts in first" doesn't justify the SCOTUS's actions, which essentially took away the state's ability to determine its own elections on some very shaky grounds (equal protection which never existed, and a deadline that was not absolute.)
3. Bush getting more votes doesn't excuse the SCOTUS's actions. Had the court simply allowed the recounts to take place, Bush might have won fair and square. Had the courts provided a uniform standard for the recounts, there would have been no worry about abuses. Had the issue gone before Congress, a bunch of elected representatives would have been able to decide the issue. By entering the arena and essentially shutting the state of FL out of its own election, the SCOTUS muddied what could have been a close but legitimate election.
Now that it's all a moot point, I think it's important that everyone think more thoroughly about the case. A case so unprecedented that it... didn't set precedent! Maybe in twenty or fifty years it'll make interesting reading for high school history students, and they'll all wonder what the hell the court was thinking. It'd be nice if we could be detached enough to ponder the answer to that question ourselves.
And this justified an injunction based on harm to the Bush campaign? Followed by a decision that gave the Florida courts exactly two hours to rectify the situation before imposing an arbitrary deadline? We have a well-defined system to handle electoral entries that come in after the date that the SCOTUS specified.
As to the Florida SC violating its own state law... There was some question as to what the Florida law was. The FL SC resolved it. Bust them for making the wrong decision if you want (and you might be right), but there was no justification for shutting the entire process down. And don't get me started on equal protection, when none existed at the polling places to begin with.
Let's face it. On close examination, the case is lousy. It was so lousy that nobody wanted their name on the decision. I wish its defenders would just realize that Bush is president and nothing is going to change that. Then we could all detach emotionally a bit and try to make sure that something like this never happens again. Because next time it could go the other way.
Please do not whitewash what is a truly unpleasant incident in our electoral history. Regardless of whether Bush would have won (and I think he would have) after recounts, or in Congress, the behavior of the Supreme Court is inexcusable. The problem is not so much the party-lines decision, it's the justification for the decision itself. There was no good reason that the court needed to take the case, and it badly short circuited a system that the planners had built to provide for exactly this sort of situation.
I can only hope it never happens again, for either a Democrat or a Republican.
I think the point is that the electoral votes were never properly counted. The federal gov't is not (constitutionally) supposed to control the granting of electoral votes. There are clear constitutional procedures for handling uncertain elections, and they do not involve the Supreme Court.
The problem is that the electoral votes were never properly granted. A federal body (an unelected federal body) short-circuited a process that is constitutionally delegated to the states. I think that Bush would have won either way (if recounts had been concluded, or if it had gone to Congress.) The point is that both of those methods are provided for in the constitution, while the method by which Bush reached office is not. Unfortunately, the only authority in the land that can do anything about it is the Supreme Court.
Yup. But the popular vote isn't what elects presidents. Go read your constitution.
But the Supreme Court is not [supposed] to elect presidents, either. Whether Bush won or not, his presidency is tainted by the SCOTUS decision. Even if the decision had been the same, it would have been far better if the recounts had continued, or if the matter had been settled in Congress, by elected representatives.
Whether you disagree with the Bush-bashers or not, they will always be correct in their criticism of the process by which Bush reached office.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point. On the subject, I wonder what percentage of all music "piracy" is perpetrated by individual buyers through CD duplication. Does it constitute even 5% of their revenue "loss"?
One word. Latency. It'd be a great idea within a single LAN, though. My company has an expensive dedicated digital telephone network in house, and I can't imagine that it does anything that a standard Ethernet couldn't. And when low-latency QoS services are available from the backbone providers, cheap long-distance'll follow. With residential broadband QoS and a VPN, you could have an office extension in your house in no time.
What bugs me about this phone is the dumb-client design. I can picture banks of these phones lying around with blank screens because of a server crash. There's no good reason for this design, other than a futile desire to come up with a service for AT&T to sell. Some centralized storage for a group of phones to tap into, sure. A centralized network gateway to interface with POTS phone lines, that makes sense. But making the phone nothing more than a remote display is sort of silly.
Any surprise that it's not going to work that way? I see the only serious buyer for this technology being business, which generally already uses centralized systems.
In any case, I think this technology is pretty nifty (more so if it included a small camera.) The client-server GUI architecure is unnecessary, though. It'/\fer2=[h
There are plenty of societies that don't guarantee freedom of speech or religion, or provide measures to prevent unreasonable search and siezure. Many of those societies seem to get by ok (in the sense that people aren't slaughtering each other.) In fact, if the yardstick of civilization is personal safety, than many of them are doing better than the US.
In this country, on the other hand, we strive for something a little bit better than the simple right to exist. And we use laws to achieve this goal. It'd be easy to write this off as just another group's "world-view", and if that's what it is... Then I've got nothing against laws being used in this manner. Let's agree to disagree.
PS I'm just responding to your statement above. If I've misconstrued what you're saying, I apologize in advance.
Bin Laden's people have apparently used courier transfers of Zip disks to transmit messages in the past. One could imagine physical transfers of One Time Pad CD-ROMs. That would result in messages that are virtually indistinguishable from white noise. There's very little good statistical analysis can do against white noise, if it's incorporated properly. There are some details to work out, but I highly doubt that any mandatory encryption will stop this sort of transmission.
This may not be the headline of the legislation, but I'll bet there'll be strong new restrictions on crypto research somewhere in the bill. This could eventually (say, 10 years from now) render terrorists' existing technology breakable. Although to make this ban effective, we would have to have cooperation from the rest of the world, and that's a little bit scary to think about. It'll be a nightmare for industry, as well. I hope some of the lobbyists get to work soon.
But it's 180 degrees from where Congress wants to go: reducing the use of all encryption, or making it all hackable. Under our current system, the vast majority of email is unencrypted. This is great for law enforcement, as Carnivore can keyword-search through oodles of it without spending a lot of cycles decrypting. It is absolutely not in the gov'ts interest to promote any encryption standard unless they're prepared to make it the only standard.
See, that's what I don't get. If you want to get third graders in seats, make a Pokemon movie. It's a whole lot cheaper. On the other hand, if you've got a $100+ million budget and practically the every American 14-40 years old ready to see it five times, take advantage of it fer chrissake. Make a movie that appeals to the kiddies, but doesn't sicken the older types.
Particularly if you've got two more sequels to sell... Third graders can only generate so much hype.
In a general sense, it does affect the rest of the world. I don't like the idea of corporations adding anti-speech clauses to their standard contracts. I sign dozens of contracts every month just to get by; everything from credit card slips to delivery receipts to click-throughs on web pages. Often, we don't read the fine print of these documents, and they're getting longer and more common.
So you don't use Microsoft products. Imagine if your credit card company/phone company/electric company/ISP added anti-speech clauses to their TOS. You may be one of those rare few who always reads the whole page before you sign, or doesn't rely on modern conveniences, but most people aren't like that. That's why we ought to be concerned about issues like this, even if we don't use this particular piece of software.
Sorry... Why would the government have to restrict speech? If I put a "no-talking-nasty-about-me" clause into a contract, the clause simply becomes unenforceable when it's taken to court. Nobody swoops in and prevents me from writing the clause.
Jeez, lemox, it's not always the case that simplicity == freedom. This seems to trip up a lot of really hard-core libertarians. (I'm not saying you're necessarily one of them, by the way.) Just by living in close proximity to each other, we limit each others' freedom. If we didn't have a gov't and a bill of rights, you would appreciate that fact a great deal more.
In order to participate, you install the package on your machine and allow to to cache other people's stuff along with your own. If your stuff gets popular, it'll get cached by other servers. There are a few issues, like how do users find your content, how does it get distributed, and how do you avoid having a central point of failure.
There are answers to most of these questions. None of them are particularly original... They borrow from Freenet, Gnutella, Akamai. But I've never any Open Source packages that perform this particular function (I suppose Freenet could, but doesn't update quickly enough.) Am I missing one?
But it's important that we think about each liberty, each law that goes through Congress, instead of writing a blank check for the gov't to cash. Some things make sense; wiretap procedure could be cleaned up slightly. On the other hand, there are issues like the potential ban on strong (un-backdoored) crypto. How does a single country banning this tech hurt the terrorists, and is it anything more than a knee-jerk reaction?
I'm not worried about compromising on a few areas, especially when they make sense. I am concerned that we're going to give the green light to every sort of incursion on our freedoms, even if it does little to stop terrorism.
Yes. Although what you describe sounds something like what Akamai does, it would be really nice to see some Open Source packages that could do this. Particularly during last Tuesday's site-killing traffic surge, it would have been useful if anyone w/ bandwidth could have made their machine into a constantly-updated mirror, quickly and automatically.
There would obviously have to be some mechanism for users to locate the mirrors, which could come and go with some frequency. I'm not sure if DNS is ideal for this, as it still has a single point of failure. Other issues have to do with interactivity, which might be all but impossible in such a distributed environment.
Traffic analysis can be deceived, if you know what you're doing. As an axample, I've read about systems in which a message is passed in a chain from person to person. The intended recipient of the message is not at the end of the chain, he is somewhere in the middle. This person then passes the message along in order to throw off suspicion.
End of offtopic rant.
Do they intend to do this now? No, of course not. Is it possible that they may do things like this later on, once the infrastructure is in place and the restrictions are gone? Nah, our government'd never abuse their power and persecute ordinary citizens... for something as simple as their alleged political beliefs. It's completely unlikely that a key figure with the FBI would use his agency to collect information on people not under investigation.
I mean, it's not like any of this has happened in the past fifty years, even.
I can tell you something now, though. If these attacks continue, I would hate to be a peaceful Arab American. If the morons don't harrass you, you can bet that the government will.
Although it would seem appropriate to some that the SCOTUS should be dealing out vigilante justice in just this way, it's not legal or appropriate. The Florida Court could have been a bunch of raving liberal commies advocating mass-murder, and the SCOTUS still would not have been justified in inventing arbitrary new deadlines.
The Constitution does NOT provide for the congress being a mediator in disputes.
Of course Congress wouldn't be involved with resolving the particulars of Florida's dispute! But anyone who remembers the case also remembers that as a part of the decision in Bush vs. Gore, the SC placed a deadline on Florida's counting process (remember the midnight deadline?) That deadline was in no way absolute, according to existing Federal laws. Had Florida submitted a revised slate of electors, it would have been up to Congress to decide which slate was valid. By promoting this deadline as absolute, the court short-circuited both Florida and the US Congress's ability to choose and count electors. The open justification given by the majority was that this would help "avoid a constitutional crisis." But Congress had procedures in place for dealing with this very crisis; had they been forced to employ them, the decision would at least have been made by elected officials with some responsibility to their constituents. In other words, even if the SCOTUS's decision was correct, Florida should have had a chance to rectify the situation. Here's a quote from an article on the subject by Stephen Giller:
Should there have been a recount? Of course! And there were! Five recounts completed. Every one of which had Bush as the winner.
Would that this were true. Two "complete" recounts were undertaken, both performed by machines. The difference between the two totals was relatively huge (300 something vs. 1700 something.) There's clearly something wrong if counting exactly the same ballots can erode a candidate's lead by 80%. After this point, there it's pretty silly to say that "five recounts were completed", as though all of the numbers were counted five times. This never happened. Several partial counts were begun, a couple of them were even included in the total. To call this "five complete recounts" is pretty silly. Several of those recounts simply weren't completed. Others involved a tiny portion of the state. It resulted in several "new" totals, but these recounts were no more complete than, say, recounting the money in your wallet constitutes a complete recalculation of your net worth.
The only recount that was not finished was the statewide recount, which was started after the cutoff date for recounts as specified in Florida law.
Actually, a good memory will recall that there were two conflicting statutes. One provided for a mandatory cutoff date, the other made the date optional. Both laws were passed well before the election. This is why the Florida courts became involved-- in the case where the legislature passes two different and conflicting laws, the courts are the only vehicle for resolution. It was determined by the court (quite rightly, I think) that the mandatory 7-day cutoff makes recounts all but impossible. Given that both statutes were the same except for this one discrepancy, and recounts are extensively provided for under Florida law, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which one is applicable.
1. GWB is president. Nothing is going to change that, come hell or high water. It's ok to admit that things weren't kosher with the SCOTUS decision-- Bush'll still be president and we'll all feel a little better.
2. The Constitution places responsibility for presidential elections with the state legislature. When the legislature produces pairs of conflicting laws, it's the job of the legal system to resolve the confusion. I'm sorry you don't like the Florida court or its decision, but saying "Gore brought the courts in first" doesn't justify the SCOTUS's actions, which essentially took away the state's ability to determine its own elections on some very shaky grounds (equal protection which never existed, and a deadline that was not absolute.)
3. Bush getting more votes doesn't excuse the SCOTUS's actions. Had the court simply allowed the recounts to take place, Bush might have won fair and square. Had the courts provided a uniform standard for the recounts, there would have been no worry about abuses. Had the issue gone before Congress, a bunch of elected representatives would have been able to decide the issue. By entering the arena and essentially shutting the state of FL out of its own election, the SCOTUS muddied what could have been a close but legitimate election.
Now that it's all a moot point, I think it's important that everyone think more thoroughly about the case. A case so unprecedented that it... didn't set precedent! Maybe in twenty or fifty years it'll make interesting reading for high school history students, and they'll all wonder what the hell the court was thinking. It'd be nice if we could be detached enough to ponder the answer to that question ourselves.
As to the Florida SC violating its own state law... There was some question as to what the Florida law was. The FL SC resolved it. Bust them for making the wrong decision if you want (and you might be right), but there was no justification for shutting the entire process down. And don't get me started on equal protection, when none existed at the polling places to begin with.
Let's face it. On close examination, the case is lousy. It was so lousy that nobody wanted their name on the decision. I wish its defenders would just realize that Bush is president and nothing is going to change that. Then we could all detach emotionally a bit and try to make sure that something like this never happens again. Because next time it could go the other way.
I can only hope it never happens again, for either a Democrat or a Republican.
I think the point is that the electoral votes were never properly counted. The federal gov't is not (constitutionally) supposed to control the granting of electoral votes. There are clear constitutional procedures for handling uncertain elections, and they do not involve the Supreme Court.
The problem is that the electoral votes were never properly granted. A federal body (an unelected federal body) short-circuited a process that is constitutionally delegated to the states. I think that Bush would have won either way (if recounts had been concluded, or if it had gone to Congress.) The point is that both of those methods are provided for in the constitution, while the method by which Bush reached office is not. Unfortunately, the only authority in the land that can do anything about it is the Supreme Court.
But the Supreme Court is not [supposed] to elect presidents, either. Whether Bush won or not, his presidency is tainted by the SCOTUS decision. Even if the decision had been the same, it would have been far better if the recounts had continued, or if the matter had been settled in Congress, by elected representatives.
Whether you disagree with the Bush-bashers or not, they will always be correct in their criticism of the process by which Bush reached office.