How about "US v. Morrison" -- in May 15, 2000 SCOTUS affirmed an US Court of Appeals ruling striking down 42 USC 13981 on the basis that the Constitution did/not/ give Congress the ability to legislate on the matter covered, and explicitly stating that the Commerce Clause could/not/ be stretched as ludicrously far as Congress and the President had wanted.
For one thing the 10th ammendment should trump the commerce clause anyway. It requires a strange reading of the document to ignore an ammendment.
The ruling even states, "Every law enacted by Congress must be based on one or more of its powers enumerated in the Constitution",
If this needs to be stated then there is a big problem with the US Congress.
Unfortuantely, "We the people" have allowed our Governement to become the overseers, and we have shirked our responsibility as the government's overseer.
Thing is that most Americans don't even appear to understand this. Governments can be, like fire, good servents or bad masters.
I have the feeling that as a whole, Americans are a bunch of spoiled children. Americans don't want to be responsible or to work. There are exceptions, but the majority seems to prefer that the government act as a parent. There is moaning and complaining, but no action is taken to make things different.
Some of the moaning and complaining being along the line of complaining about too much government interference in some way or other at the same time demanding that government "do something" in some other area.
There is a balance between free speech and responsible speech. In an oppressive government, there is certainly an interest in having anonymous speech be protected.
There probably isn't any such thing as a non-oppressive government. Just about any government has something they'd rather was kept secret. Also governments are made up of people, there might be things these individuals do not want known or investigated.
But in most western governments, IMO the potential for abuse of anonymous speech (e.g., false accusations) outweighs the value of anonymous speech.
False accusations can be made without anonymity. All anonymity does is prevent the person making the accusation from being cross examined. If the accusation is false and you have freedom of speach then it can be refuted.
In other words, you have very little fear in the United States for being prosecuted by the government for your beliefs.
Probably best not to hold Islamic religious beliefs, Russian citizenship and visit the US to give a speach of computer security then:)
every society on earth has had to deal with terrorists at some time or another.
Probably not every society and certainly to different extents
There is no easy way to stop the threat that someone could unleash some plague, detonate some bomb or shoot unarmed people.
Avoiding deliberatly making enemies tends to help though.
The solution that the US has decided on seems to be surveilance of its own citizens and of anyone new comming into the country.
Combined with bombing people all over the world, most recently in Yemen, and continuing to persue the foreign policies which make the US so disliked in the first place.
Saying that your not a terrorist and that the FBI should not be monitering you doesn't work, how are the authorities supposed to know what you are thinking?
Why should they have to know in the first place?
What you are planning to do? Investigation seems to be a way that this can be accomplished but it means throwing away all the rights that the American people have lived so long with and have fought so hard to preserve,
Investigation is not the same thing as mass surveillance (with the risk of creating a class of people not subject to surveillance.)
Its a dicey issue to be certian, balancing rights with the need for the authorities to protect Americans from their enemies.
How do you know that the "authorities" are not your "ememies"? The US Constitution is far more concerned with limiting the power of government than anything else.
They already have shown they have enough information, but their problem is a lack of digestion and comprehention.
Which just adding more information won't help one little bit. The problem with mass surveilance is that the signal to noise ratio is awful.
Perhaps some of the Arabs and muslims they so actively alienate could be of assistance...
Of course holding people without trial, kidnapping people from halfway around the world and making support of Zionism more important than people's welfare and even lives will really avoid alienating people. Not!
Actually, whats even scarier than the computer monitoring is the SEVIS requirements in the patriot act which require universities to be able to communicate with federal computers so the feds can track foreign students to be sure their visa's are valid.
This appears highly over complex. The only thing which would make sense is for US universities to require either proof of US citizenship or to see a visa and INS stamp when students register.
Presently they just require schools to enter the necessary information by hand, but the full plan calls for the feds to be able to interact with and get whatever student information they believe they are entitled to from the universities' computer systems.
Should they be storing visa details in the first place, isn't that the job of the INS and/or state department? If the US has borders so insecure that people can enroll in university without going through a border checkpoint then it might be better to worry about who might be entering the US illegally and doing things less obvious than attending school.
Freedom of speech, sure, your freedom to talk your head off on any issue. Seems the First Amendment is bypassed, though, by the current regime. You may have the right to speak, but they reserve the right to keep track of what you say and who listens to you.
Typically the "they" get very upset when private citizens want to track and record what they are up to. e.g. videotaping police assaulting someone.
Fine MS pull all their products out of the EU, no-one in europe can legally buy or own any microsoft products.
Microsoft have no power to say what is and isn't legal to do with their software in the EU. If they were to stop selling Windows within the EU they can't suddenly wave a magic wand to make all their software disappear.
Downsides:
1: Had to redo Publisher docs in OO.org Draw
Publisher is a pain in the neck, about the only program which will open publisher documents with any degree of reliability is the same
version of publisher they were created with. As well as having a strange mode where it will refuse to save.
2: Old MS Office docs come out mangled on OO.org if anything beyond text,tables and pics are used.
You can't be sure that they wouldn't come out mangled with a different version of Word, sometimes even one with a different default printer setting can cause the most strange manglings.
If one looks at the entire history of Airbus, or the more recent histories of the Eurofigher and the A400M projects, it isn't much of a stretch to conclude that those who direct the EU do not want their agglomeration to be dependent on the United States in any way for critical technology.
Doubt the US would want to make itself dependent upon the EU either.
And that that they are willing to pay (or have their taxpayers pay) a substantial price to avoid that dependence.
Hardly unique to the EU. IIRC the US Congress just decided that it would be a good idea to lease some brand new aircraft from Boeing to the USAF. Even though the USAF dosn't actually need them and it's a "buyers market" for second hand wide bodied jets right now.
The A400M is particularly instructive: the required capabilities are available today, off-the-shelf, at lower cost, in the form of the C-17 and C-130J.
Or for that matter from the Ukraine. It's more a case of not being dependent on those outside of the EU than anything else.
The entire world can switch to Open Office and never even notice except for a tiny tiny TINY few that actually use that stupid scripting built into MS office.
But think of those poor macro virus writers:)
and then it's only going to annoy the morons that have too much time on their hands making a tool that is not designed for a certian job work (word and excel are NOT data collection apps.. and idiots use them that way with OLE)
Nor is Access a multi-user database for storing vital data. Idiots try and do that too.
If microsoft word was removed from every PC in your office and replaced with OO.o I guarentee that productivity will remain at it's current levels and nobody will really care..
Possibly productivity would be better. Since there are quite a few things which are easier to do in Star/Open Office than in Word.
M$ is not an corporation from an EU country, there is no direct economic advantage to the EU of supporting M$'s illegal activities.
Probably quite an economic advantage to be rid of Microsoft. Since their net economic contribution is to suck money across the Atlantic.
The powerful EU officials are not directly elected by the populace; so they are not quite so easy to buy.
There are far more political parties in EU member states than in the US.
A change of administration in one EU country is not so far reaching as the change in a single country (ie the US).
There arn't trans-Europe political parties. Even if these were to come into existance there would probably be more than two of them. It's a lot easier to buy off political parties when you only need to do it with two. When it comes to political parties and voting systems the US and the EU are very different.
Yeah, that makes it really easy to send Word forms and to revise and edit the documents, and send them back to the owner.
In many cases word documents are sent as attachments as an alternative to printing and putting in an envelope or feeding to a fax machine. Converting to PDF makes no practical difference. If people want to send word files back and forth for editing between different organisations then there are all sorts of gotchas they need to be careful to avoid.
Many companies are looking at the upgrade license terms & fees, and deciding that what they have is good enough. They don't lose functionality by not upgrading, they just don't get the new features.
Many of the new "features" can easily fit in the "bells and whistles" catagory. Problems come if they have to handle files from outside or can no longer get licences for the old software. (Possibly with Microsoft's new model they could force the use of only the "latest and greatest".)
IBM has been renting software for 30+ years. Big whoop. In the real world, software leasing is acceptable.
The difference is that IBM always made it clear that they were leasing, be it hardware or software. They didn't play "bait and switch", initially claiming they were selling something.
That is the first mistake that people make when trying to understand Microsoft. They don't sell software but, rather, they sell you the right to use it for a preset amount of time.
It's a little more sneaky in that they pretend they are selling software, as though it a physical product, then hide in the small print (the EULA) that they are really giving restricted permission to use.
Businesses do not have the right to transfer licenses - we saw that with the Kmart fiasco. Now that the licenses are tied to hardware, consumers do not have the right to keep their MS software when they buy a new PC.
Different licences say different things here. Also the clauses often have not been, most likely will never be, tested in court.
So really, one can only rent the software. This is where the DOJ went wrong - they need to force MS to license users and not hardware or legal entities.
That would cause just as many problems as the current situation. What happens if a person goes bankrupt, can a software licence be part of their estate and so on.
What if we got vendors to offer PCs with Linux pre-installed?
It depends what type of vendors you are talking about. If they are a small shop selling their own brand then they pay X amount for each copy of Windows. Supplying a machine without Windows means they can knock X of the price. When it comes to the likes of Dell and Gateway (or their resellers) then Microsoft gives them a special deal on Windows. Subject to the condition that they only sell Windows machines.
What if a vendor would offer it not as a special option, but just as their regular line of products? A customer walks in, says they want a computer to do this, this, this, and this. The vendor looks and says, hey here are two models that do everything that the customer wants. But one costs $200 less than the other. Why? Because one is running MS windows and the other is running insert your favorite distribution here Linux. Which one will the consumer take?
The likes of Dell cannot do this because either they would have to still pay for Windows with every machine they ship (thus making Windows appear free) or they would lose their special deal on Windows pricing.
If I'm a white-box OEM I have to pay ~$65 for XP Home or ~$105 for XP Pro at _miniumum_. This is for a sticker only. No CD, Manual, nothing. Office SBE is ~$150 and office pro is ~$250. Lets say some random person wants a $650 PC, for general purposes and working at home. The Microsoft tax is 33% of the purchase price. I'd hardly call that giving away!!
On top of that Microsoft expect you to provide support on their software.
Except that Microsoft has, for all intents and purposes, given away its operating system to everyone who bought a brand name computer in the last 10 years. For new computer buyers, this is a net change of essentially zero.
It only appeared that way when the cost of Windows was a minor part of the total cost. Whilst the cost of the hardware has been comming down the cost of Windows has been going up. To the point that Windows can be 20-30% of the purchase price.
The Mozilla browser was a complete rewrite from the ground up. Why? Because the Netscape code was a convoluted mess of spaghetti. It was badly designed and hard to enhance or maintain.
It might have been no worst that a typical piece of proprietary software. Since people don't typically get to see the source for these it's difficult to tell.
First, "free as in speech" has its uses, too. Even non-developers benefit from having lots of programmers' eyeballs available to find bugs, backdoors. There is also the advantage of not having EULAs that have things like "phone-home" clauses buried in the legalese, or having to keep track of just how many legal copies one has.
Not having EULAs to worry about at all. Having the source means that software users cannot be tied to a specific supplier or maintainer. Effectivly what open source can do is change software from being a psudo secondary industry into a tertiary industry. Where demand for new features is user/customer lead.
Actually, here, the "free as in speech" thing ties back into the trust issue. With Open Source, one can audit the code if one is truly paranoid. Trust isn't as necessary. With MS closed-source stuff, one has to take MS at its word that it is kosher.
There's still a trust issue, but you are choosing who to trust, from your own employees or contractors you are paying. If you pay someone to do a job they don't come with an EULA saying you can't sue them if they don't do a decent job.
OEMs were not forced by Microsoft to ship a copy of Windows on every machine. It is you that is naive. Microsoft has an OEM arrangement that gives OEMs an incentive to buy a license for each PC sold. That those OEMs choose to do so is a result of the fact that 90% of their customers ask for Windows to be pre-installed.
Many corporate customers probably couldn't care one way or the other about anything being pre-installed. Since they will never run whatever might have been pre-installed in the first place.
Order a new PC. You get to choose what kind of monitor you want. Choose what video card you want. Choose how large a hard drive you want. How much RAM. Some OEM's let you make more choices than others. But one choice they don't let you make is what OS to run. (You can have any OS you want as long as you pay Microsoft.)
About a year ago I saw an article of the form what will X amount of money buy you from various suppliers. The article commented on how much choice they had found, completly ignoring that not only did all the machines come with MS Windows they all came with the same version of Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
How about "US v. Morrison" -- in May 15, 2000 SCOTUS affirmed an US Court of Appeals ruling striking down 42 USC 13981 on the basis that the Constitution did /not/ give Congress the ability to legislate on the matter covered, and explicitly stating that the Commerce Clause could /not/ be stretched as ludicrously far as Congress and the President had wanted.
For one thing the 10th ammendment should trump the commerce clause anyway. It requires a strange reading of the document to ignore an ammendment.
The ruling even states, "Every law enacted by Congress must be based on one or more of its powers enumerated in the Constitution",
If this needs to be stated then there is a big problem with the US Congress.
Unfortuantely, "We the people" have allowed our Governement to become the overseers, and we have shirked our responsibility as the government's overseer.
Thing is that most Americans don't even appear to understand this. Governments can be, like fire, good servents or bad masters.
I have the feeling that as a whole, Americans are a bunch of spoiled children. Americans don't want to be responsible or to work. There are exceptions, but the majority seems to prefer that the government act as a parent. There is moaning and complaining, but no action is taken to make things different.
Some of the moaning and complaining being along the line of complaining about too much government interference in some way or other at the same time demanding that government "do something" in some other area.
There is a balance between free speech and responsible speech. In an oppressive government, there is certainly an interest in having anonymous speech be protected.
:)
There probably isn't any such thing as a non-oppressive government. Just about any government has something they'd rather was kept secret. Also governments are made up of people, there might be things these individuals do not want known or investigated.
But in most western governments, IMO the potential for abuse of anonymous speech (e.g., false accusations) outweighs the value of anonymous speech.
False accusations can be made without anonymity. All anonymity does is prevent the person making the accusation from being cross examined. If the accusation is false and you have freedom of speach then it can be refuted.
In other words, you have very little fear in the United States for being prosecuted by the government for your beliefs.
Probably best not to hold Islamic religious beliefs, Russian citizenship and visit the US to give a speach of computer security then
every society on earth has had to deal with terrorists at some time or another.
Probably not every society and certainly to different extents
There is no easy way to stop the threat that someone could unleash some plague, detonate some bomb or shoot unarmed people.
Avoiding deliberatly making enemies tends to help though.
The solution that the US has decided on seems to be surveilance of its own citizens and of anyone new comming into the country.
Combined with bombing people all over the world, most recently in Yemen, and continuing to persue the foreign policies which make the US so disliked in the first place.
Saying that your not a terrorist and that the FBI should not be monitering you doesn't work, how are the authorities supposed to know what you are thinking?
Why should they have to know in the first place?
What you are planning to do? Investigation seems to be a way that this can be accomplished but it means throwing away all the rights that the American people have lived so long with and have fought so hard to preserve,
Investigation is not the same thing as mass surveillance (with the risk of creating a class of people not subject to surveillance.)
Its a dicey issue to be certian, balancing rights with the need for the authorities to protect Americans from their enemies.
How do you know that the "authorities" are not your "ememies"? The US Constitution is far more concerned with limiting the power of government than anything else.
They already have shown they have enough information, but their problem is a lack of digestion and comprehention.
Which just adding more information won't help one little bit. The problem with mass surveilance is that the signal to noise ratio is awful.
Perhaps some of the Arabs and muslims they so actively alienate could be of assistance...
Of course holding people without trial, kidnapping people from halfway around the world and making support of Zionism more important than people's welfare and even lives will really avoid alienating people. Not!
Actually, whats even scarier than the computer monitoring is the SEVIS requirements in the patriot act which require universities to be able to communicate with federal computers so the feds can track foreign students to be sure their visa's are valid.
This appears highly over complex. The only thing which would make sense is for US universities to require either proof of US citizenship or to see a visa and INS stamp when students register.
Presently they just require schools to enter the necessary information by hand, but the full plan calls for the feds to be able to interact with and get whatever student information they believe they are entitled to from the universities' computer systems.
Should they be storing visa details in the first place, isn't that the job of the INS and/or state department? If the US has borders so insecure that people can enroll in university without going through a border checkpoint then it might be better to worry about who might be entering the US illegally and doing things less obvious than attending school.
Freedom of speech, sure, your freedom to talk your head off on any issue. Seems the First Amendment is bypassed, though, by the current regime. You may have the right to speak, but they reserve the right to keep track of what you say and who listens to you.
Typically the "they" get very upset when private citizens want to track and record what they are up to. e.g. videotaping police assaulting someone.
Fine MS pull all their products out of the EU, no-one in europe can legally buy or own any microsoft products.
Microsoft have no power to say what is and isn't legal to do with their software in the EU. If they were to stop selling Windows within the EU they can't suddenly wave a magic wand to make all their software disappear.
Downsides:
1: Had to redo Publisher docs in OO.org Draw
Publisher is a pain in the neck, about the only program which will open publisher documents with any degree of reliability is the same version of publisher they were created with.
As well as having a strange mode where it will refuse to save.
2: Old MS Office docs come out mangled on OO.org if anything beyond text,tables and pics are used.
You can't be sure that they wouldn't come out mangled with a different version of Word, sometimes even one with a different default printer setting can cause the most strange manglings.
If one looks at the entire history of Airbus, or the more recent histories of the Eurofigher and the A400M projects, it isn't much of a stretch to conclude that those who direct the EU do not want their agglomeration to be dependent on the United States in any way for critical technology.
Doubt the US would want to make itself dependent upon the EU either.
And that that they are willing to pay (or have their taxpayers pay) a substantial price to avoid that dependence.
Hardly unique to the EU. IIRC the US Congress just decided that it would be a good idea to lease some brand new aircraft from Boeing to the USAF. Even though the USAF dosn't actually need them and it's a "buyers market" for second hand wide bodied jets right now.
The A400M is particularly instructive: the required capabilities are available today, off-the-shelf, at lower cost, in the form of the C-17 and C-130J.
Or for that matter from the Ukraine. It's more a case of not being dependent on those outside of the EU than anything else.
The entire world can switch to Open Office and never even notice except for a tiny tiny TINY few that actually use that stupid scripting built into MS office.
:)
But think of those poor macro virus writers
and then it's only going to annoy the morons that have too much time on their hands making a tool that is not designed for a certian job work (word and excel are NOT data collection apps.. and idiots use them that way with OLE)
Nor is Access a multi-user database for storing vital data. Idiots try and do that too.
If microsoft word was removed from every PC in your office and replaced with OO.o I guarentee that productivity will remain at it's current levels and nobody will really care..
Possibly productivity would be better. Since there are quite a few things which are easier to do in Star/Open Office than in Word.
M$ is not an corporation from an EU country, there is no direct economic advantage to the EU of supporting M$'s illegal activities.
Probably quite an economic advantage to be rid of Microsoft. Since their net economic contribution is to suck money across the Atlantic.
The powerful EU officials are not directly elected by the populace; so they are not quite so easy to buy.
There are far more political parties in EU member states than in the US.
A change of administration in one EU country is not so far reaching as the change in a single country (ie the US).
There arn't trans-Europe political parties. Even if these were to come into existance there would probably be more than two of them. It's a lot easier to buy off political parties when you only need to do it with two.
When it comes to political parties and voting systems the US and the EU are very different.
Yeah, that makes it really easy to send Word forms and to revise and edit the documents, and send them back to the owner.
In many cases word documents are sent as attachments as an alternative to printing and putting in an envelope or feeding to a fax machine. Converting to PDF makes no practical difference.
If people want to send word files back and forth for editing between different organisations then there are all sorts of gotchas they need to be careful to avoid.
Many companies are looking at the upgrade license terms & fees, and deciding that what they have is good enough. They don't lose functionality by not upgrading, they just don't get the new features.
Many of the new "features" can easily fit in the "bells and whistles" catagory.
Problems come if they have to handle files from outside or can no longer get licences for the old software. (Possibly with Microsoft's new model they could force the use of only the "latest and greatest".)
Linux gets improved by huge numbers of people willing to work on it. But without the source for Windows, no one could work on Windows.
How many people would work on Windows even with the source code. You'd simply end up with a bigger version of Mozilla
IBM has been renting software for 30+ years. Big whoop. In the real world, software leasing is acceptable.
The difference is that IBM always made it clear that they were leasing, be it hardware or software. They didn't play "bait and switch", initially claiming they were selling something.
That is the first mistake that people make when trying to understand Microsoft. They don't sell software but, rather, they sell you the right to use it for a preset amount of time.
It's a little more sneaky in that they pretend they are selling software, as though it a physical product, then hide in the small print (the EULA) that they are really giving restricted permission to use.
Businesses do not have the right to transfer licenses - we saw that with the Kmart fiasco. Now that the licenses are tied to hardware, consumers do not have the right to keep their MS software when they buy a new PC.
Different licences say different things here. Also the clauses often have not been, most likely will never be, tested in court.
So really, one can only rent the software. This is where the DOJ went wrong - they need to force MS to license users and not hardware or legal entities.
That would cause just as many problems as the current situation.
What happens if a person goes bankrupt, can a software licence be part of their estate and so on.
What if we got vendors to offer PCs with Linux pre-installed?
It depends what type of vendors you are talking about. If they are a small shop selling their own brand then they pay X amount for each copy of Windows. Supplying a machine without Windows means they can knock X of the price.
When it comes to the likes of Dell and Gateway (or their resellers) then Microsoft gives them a special deal on Windows. Subject to the condition that they only sell Windows machines.
What if a vendor would offer it not as a special option, but just as their regular line of products? A customer walks in, says they want a computer to do this, this, this, and this. The vendor looks and says, hey here are two models that do everything that the customer wants. But one costs $200 less than the other. Why? Because one is running MS windows and the other is running insert your favorite distribution here Linux. Which one will the consumer take?
The likes of Dell cannot do this because either they would have to still pay for Windows with every machine they ship (thus making Windows appear free) or they would lose their special deal on Windows pricing.
If I'm a white-box OEM I have to pay ~$65 for XP Home or ~$105 for XP Pro at _miniumum_. This is for a sticker only. No CD, Manual, nothing. Office SBE is ~$150 and office pro is ~$250. Lets say some random person wants a $650 PC, for general purposes and working at home. The Microsoft tax is 33% of the purchase price. I'd hardly call that giving away!!
On top of that Microsoft expect you to provide support on their software.
Except that Microsoft has, for all intents and purposes, given away its operating system to everyone who bought a brand name computer in the last 10 years. For new computer buyers, this is a net change of essentially zero.
It only appeared that way when the cost of Windows was a minor part of the total cost. Whilst the cost of the hardware has been comming down the cost of Windows has been going up. To the point that Windows can be 20-30% of the purchase price.
The Mozilla browser was a complete rewrite from the ground up. Why? Because the Netscape code was a convoluted mess of spaghetti. It was badly designed and hard to enhance or maintain.
It might have been no worst that a typical piece of proprietary software. Since people don't typically get to see the source for these it's difficult to tell.
First, "free as in speech" has its uses, too. Even non-developers benefit from having lots of programmers' eyeballs available to find bugs, backdoors. There is also the advantage of not having EULAs that have things like "phone-home" clauses buried in the legalese, or having to keep track of just how many legal copies one has.
Not having EULAs to worry about at all. Having the source means that software users cannot be tied to a specific supplier or maintainer. Effectivly what open source can do is change software from being a psudo secondary industry into a tertiary industry. Where demand for new features is user/customer lead.
Actually, here, the "free as in speech" thing ties back into the trust issue. With Open Source, one can audit the code if one is truly paranoid. Trust isn't as necessary. With MS closed-source stuff, one has to take MS at its word that it is kosher.
There's still a trust issue, but you are choosing who to trust, from your own employees or contractors you are paying. If you pay someone to do a job they don't come with an EULA saying you can't sue them if they don't do a decent job.
The usual opinion seems to be that MS will eventually bring itself down because of oppressive licensing tactics, etc.
More likely they will come down because of their dodgy accounting tricks. No company can have an ever increasing profit long term.
OEMs were not forced by Microsoft to ship a copy of Windows on every machine. It is you that is naive. Microsoft has an OEM arrangement that gives OEMs an incentive to buy a license for each PC sold. That those OEMs choose to do so is a result of the fact that 90% of their customers ask for Windows to be pre-installed.
Many corporate customers probably couldn't care one way or the other about anything being pre-installed. Since they will never run whatever might have been pre-installed in the first place.
Order a new PC. You get to choose what kind of monitor you want. Choose what video card you want. Choose how large a hard drive you want. How much RAM. Some OEM's let you make more choices than others. But one choice they don't let you make is what OS to run. (You can have any OS you want as long as you pay Microsoft.)
About a year ago I saw an article of the form what will X amount of money buy you from various suppliers. The article commented on how much choice they had found, completly ignoring that not only did all the machines come with MS Windows they all came with the same version of Windows.