The first currency based on a backing with e-gold is Plats, found at a MUD called Dark Castle. I have not played, but if 'net-longevity is anything, it's been around for a WHILE and users don't complain about it to me.
JMR
I need you to contact me immediately. Wired will face an immediate law
suit by e-gold unless the headline of your article is changed
immediately, this does not go out in print and you print a retraction to
Oh gods. What a day/week to be slashdotted (finally). Also, I wish that wired and/. headline writers respectively would either read the actual story they're referring to, or share their drug stashes with everyone else. *sigh*
Ok, I'll start with my standard offer of a small spend to any slashdotter interested in creating an e-gold account & sending me the number (goodbye promotional account balance!). I'll also try to answer any questions sent to me (but please poke around on the site and find out about us first, the concept of grams as money can be a bit strange but it's fun to discover). Alright...
So far, law enforcement AFAIK (and I'd know....) has not contacted either e-gold or OmniPay regarding this case. I am in touch with Parker, and he has set up an e-gold account with a publicly viewable balance at: http://www.e-gold.com/pub-bal.asp?pubid=280478
I doubt the SS will do anything like what you say, the experience of my friend, the artist J.S.G. Boggs (who is the yin to e-gold's yang, IMO) speaks to that, although Parker's isn't a counterfeiting case (and neither was that one IMO). Both are political. It's sad, frankly.
JMR
Agreed, the competition was much more real-world than just "destroy the other guy" this year, and you could see that the teams worked really hard (Cordzilla and others had very entertaining cheering sections, as well). See my other post for a link to some pics (possibly including one of Cordzilla!) taken by my friend Jay W. I will probably be at the Disney World championships this year, too. Good luck!
JMR
Here is a link to some pictures/movies taken by my friend Jay at a recent highschool robotics match we attended recently. It was held near the Rocket Garden (the well-maintained one on the Nasa side, not the dilapidated but cooler one on the Airforce side) of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, FL. Only bad part was the price of a (lousy) beer at the concessions ($4+!) but overall a very cool time. Yes, it's pretty nice living in Melbourne.:)
JMR
are greatly exagerated. There is, however, a dearth of reports about payment systems advanced enough to support micropayments, but if any/. reader wants to see a micropayment today, one with low fees, immediate settlement, automation, no payment repudiation, bi-directionality, and backing by a substance scarce enough to make rational folks everywhere want to hold it rather than instantly get rid of it, just email me with an e-gold account number.
It's amazing how clueless even smart folks can be when they try to talk about money...Everyone wants the issue to be simple, but simple means you're saddled with legacy systems and bad technology the internet promised we'd escape. A currency is a contract, like it or not, and these days not many people know it, let alone like it. IMO.
JMR
... that is, that it went to the content creator and not an agent, distributor, middleman, or some other breed of fuckwit five-percenter
As a (hopefully) non-fuckwit (but definitely) less-than-five-percenter, let me suggest that you consider using my favorite currency (e-gold) and others that don't rely on making any merchant/consumer distinction. If you want choice on where your money goes to, that's got to be what you want, whether it's us, PayPal, or whoever fails next -- (probably Amazon's little scheme, if you ask me).
I'm hoping that sites like www.fairtunes.com catch on soon for more than just music, and I can simply put a free e-gold tipjar anywhere with www.two-cents-worth.com (but I've gotta go now!).
JMR
Kruggerands are a good brand of coin if you like bullion, rather than numismatic value. e-gold Ltd. is a Nevis, BWI corporation, and OmniPay (the company I work for) is in the USA. So far, there has not been a government objection (knock on fake-wood) from either, AFAIK. I know that Alan Greenspan has said some nice things about privately-issued currencies, even.
Internal security is one of those things I can't discuss much, but I agree that's a nice OS and a very interesting site for future development and thought. Obviously, we try very hard not to let systems be compromised, and as I'm sure you're all aware, "security is a process." I tend to spend a lot of my time trying to educate e-gold users regarding their own computers' security, and I occasionally click "bugs bounty" grams to the kind folks who point out flaws. Thanks for your comments.
JMR
For a good look at the contracts that made up older currencies, see the book Money, from Principia Publishing, Inc.
Whether or not you agree with the conclusions of the book, the definitions and photographs make it worth reading. It turns out the contract on US currency, for example, was quite a bit simpler and more honest back when you could trade paper for metal, and this honesty apparently was unpopular with the political class because you can't inflate gold as easily as you can inflate paper "tokens."
JMR
Interesting thoughts. I frankly would not trust South Africa as much as I'd trust e-gold Ltd. (aside from being biased as hell because I get paid in the stuff) because governments are more likely than corporations to get into wars or enact unrealistic social programs than corporations are to violate contracts (and any currency is, in the end, simply a contract IMO) but having said that...
e-gold is kind of the older, more-secular branch of the e-metal family of currency. You see, it turns out that if one actually READS the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran, gold and silver get mentioned all the time in all these books. Well, some folks decided to take things seriously, so now we have e-dinar. (It turns out the Prophet used gold and silver coins which were somewhat standardized by weight, and these folks are using the e-gold database and the old version of the system, with different terminology, to bring it back.)
These folks (thank God!) also started with minting coins, which brings me further from the bullion coin business (we like bars now, not coins, so it's advantageous to have folks selling bullion coins for e-metal as not everyone has 400 ounces to redeem). I've met them, and they're quite serious businessmen who have established ties with the governments of both Indonesia and the UAE (Dubai). There's more on their pages, and I even have some of the Dinar & Dirham coins.
All of this makes a pretty-good news story IMO (there's more, too) but for the fact that we don't spend much of anything on advertising (I'm an exception) and instead rely on viral marketing (combined with hiring much-smarter nerds, our secret weapon). The news media are not too thrilled with our stinginess, I've gathered, but occasionally we're covered (albeit not in proportion to the quantity of business we do compared to the overhyped & in-the-red). I guess it's also strange for them to cover an ecommerce company that not only eschews hype, but also has the temerity not to locate in any of the "hot" (read: expensive and not-worth-it compared to central Florida) internet startup areas like the Bay area of San Francisco.
JMR
Well, not ALL capital is based on imaginary stuff. There's a small but growing market for the real thing, too. (And just so this doesn't descend into absolute-shameless-plug-land, e-gold just got some competition, called Goldmoney that's also based on grams of the filthy yellow metal). I've spent the last few years of my life studying the subject of Money pretty closely, and I'm still learning a lot. I think that electronic privately issued currencies (not just gold-backed ones, either) will change the world rapidly, and I hope Mr. DeSoto is right about helping the poor.
As more folks get used to it, I predict "grams of gold" will be the currency of the future on the internet if-and-when the dollar ever falters. As usual, anyone on Slashdot who wants can contact me and try a small spot of e-gold, as I want to encourage programmers to play with it (and the competition, even, but I can't give theirs away!). Thanks.
JMR
is hardly "a first," for a number of reasons, and Katz knows it. Wilful ignorance like that might be what makes you so infuriating to some folks, Jon.
JMR
Speaking ONLY for myself, of course...
election day should be on April 16th. It's totally unacceptable that they can waste tax dollars in this unaccountable way, but here they are getting away with it instead of swinging from lamp-posts for trying to implement the stupidest idea in a long time.
JMR
(no, I don't care about "karma" here, I just call 'em as I see 'em.)
Re:Use encryption needlessly, constantly! [MUCH MO
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm. Seems like you may not have finished that last thought, but you earlier said,
People like us need to start to devote some time to serious personal, grass roots activism, to widen the pool of people using encryption.
and I couldn't agree more, but I want to add a few ideas.
Convince a minor political activist group that protection against "dirty tricks" on the internet entails using the strong authentication function of good encryption, or talk to people about privacy. Maybe even try to convince them of the (occasional) value of anonymous speech, and tell them about the folks who give their valuable time to do things like run anonymous remailers or write free privacy-enhancing software. Try to get them to support EFF or one of the other groups if you can.
JMR
Of course not, plastic will rule the world, a simple solution like pcs.e-gold.com (oops, I mentioned it) just can't be found! We have to trust Sony and the giant corps instead!
It's been out there since Xmas, the media ignored it. It works using the currency I sell, and I'd very much like to see musicians and fans be able to "cut out the middleman," and it seems like I sell the technology to do so every day (standing offer to let/. users try e-gold here, just email me an account number) but so far, nobody has done anything much. Oh well.
JMR
(The same way as since 1996, but nobody wants to notice fundamentals in an age of Internet hype) is by using good ol' e-gold. I can prove it to anyone who sends me an account number and says they saw this on/.. Someday, the music business will notice our growth, I hope...
JMR
...the US Constitution should contain a guarantee of privacy....
(NOTE: Mine is a minority view of the constitution which is not generally accepted by legal professionals, even though I'm obviously right and nobody likes debating me much anyway, especially law professors.)
You're correct to say that the Constitution does not mention any right to privacy, but that doesn't mean the right to privacy isn't there. The framers of the constitution (and especially the bill of rights) were concerned with the protection of rights (such as self-defense and free speech) which pre-existed any concept of government, and did not wish to be put in a position of trying to list every such right they were trying to protect.
The Ninth Amendment says: "The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." IOW, 'We've listed some individual rights here, but it's not an exhaustive list, and if we forgot about any particular right (think "privacy" here) that's no big deal because we meant to include it.' I propose that this nation do one of the following:
1. Repeal the Ninth Amendment (ain't gonna happen, repealing it would require at least briefly paying attention to it, and legal 'professionals' have avoided that for DECADES).
2. (This is the tough one...) Start paying attention to the Ninth Amendment, which Thomas Jefferson called a "magnificent generality." Despite the beauty of the wording of the Ninth (or perhaps because of it!) this is very unlikely. In fact, I've been trying for years to start a debate, but those who would support repeal of the Ninth find ignoring it much more convenient than debating me.
It is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, that Supreme
Court justices and other constitutional interpreters have typically
fled from the hard moral judgments called for by the Ninth
Amendment." -- Steven Macedo, _The New Right v. The
Constitution_ p. 7.
Amen. (Professor Macedo is a rare law-professor exception, who shares my broader view of the Ninth and writes good books.) The judgments called for are hard moral judgments with grey areas and lines to draw. Can you have a tax-and-spend drug-war and have a Ninth Amendment? Can you outlaw abortions (early or late-term) and have a Ninth Amendment? Can you outlaw prostitution and have a Ninth Amendment? Can you outlaw gambling and have a Ninth Amendment? Why do most law professors say that the Ninth Amendment isn't important? Is it up to them to deem what is and isn't worth thinking about in the constitution? Don't they sow the seeds of (even more) ignorance in the judiciary by not being honest about the Ninth and why it's there in the first place? (Well, obviously I think they do.)
Now, I look at what I've said above and think, "Voila, slam dunk argument for a Constitutional Ninth Amendment right to privacy -- and I'm not even relying on ten-dollar words like 'penumbra,' I'm using plain, ordinary English!" (Maybe that's what law professors disliked about me...) Anyway, IANAL, and despite my argument above making sense it's not the law of the land in the USA, so use it at your own risk.
JMR
These are my own opinions and have nothing to do with any employer. I am Chairman and CEO of the Ninth Amendment Foundation, which I'll probably someday use to make political trouble...
Ways I've heard of (nah, I'd never do this, especially number three!) to deface "Just Say No!" signs include:
1. If you've got room, make it "Just Say NoRML!" (NORML being the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws).
2. If less room/time, try for "Just Say KNoW!" -- adding the "K" and "W" which drug-warriors find refreshingly-annoying.
3. (My personal favorite, and there's probably some sort of HTML-god way I could do this, but I don't even feel like trying.) This takes the least space/time, and involves merely quickly adding a tiny, subscript "2" below the "N" in "NO," thus revealing the odd admonition to "Just Say Nitrous-Oxide!" but only to those of us who are chemically-initiated, and we generally tend to snicker and leave it there. Nitrous Oxide, or "laughing gas," is one of the most powerful (legal) mind-altering substances available, but few drug-warriors seem to know its chemical symbol.
JMR
Note: While "just saying nitrous" may keep one out of trouble with law-enforcement authorities better than experimentation with other substances such as cannabis, nitrous oxide has a number of dangerous properties which limit its safety and therefore its usefulness as a recreational drug. (Weed's safer, IOW.) The short-duration of nitrous IS a convenient feature, and brings to mind features one would ask for in an "ideal" recreational drug (unless that's Viagra!).
I'm not sure Bush and Gore really want musicians paid (but I found both of their answers to the Napster question pretty evasive). I'm not sure what they want to do, besides use government power to please large political contributors -- a set of people more likely to include RIAA members than musicians, IMO.
What I want to see is a "pot of gold" that helps musicians via a tipjar. There's plenty of talk of "cutting out the middleman" between consumers & musicians, but precious little gets done about it. e-gold isn't perfect, but it works. Now. I encourage/. readers to try it out, email me and I'll provide a bit to start. Thanks.
JMR
...
Gore was instrumental in securing lots of funding for networking in the 80s between Universitites that really poised the 'net to take off. ...
While this statement is true, what it essentially says is "this Democrat was instrumental in voting for lots of spending for domestic, non-military stuff in the 80s that (in completely unplanned ways) poised the 'net (which might have taken off a decade earlier with lower taxes instead of higher spending) to take off." WooHoo -- A Democrat votes for more domestic spending! Next hot news item: a Republican votes to increase the military budget! Let's face it, members of both parties are unlikely to read what they vote for so they tend to vote on autopilot frequently, and chances are that Gore was fortunate to have an aide who was into technology at the time.
Anyway, what I'm trying to get across in my little screed is that I'll bet it takes very little research to find cases where AlGore voted for wasteful programs like the United States Helium Repository (yes, there was one...) during that period, and we don't hear that Al somehow "took the initiative in creating the Goodyear blimp" because he voted for that bit of pork! Face it, if the US government throws money around enough, eventually some of it is bound to hit a useful target (case in point: NASA in the '60s and '70s) but that doesn't mean that the US government should be the only way to do things (case in point: space exploration today). IMO.
JMR
Slashdot Mirror
The first currency based on a backing with e-gold is Plats, found at a MUD called Dark Castle. I have not played, but if 'net-longevity is anything, it's been around for a WHILE and users don't complain about it to me.
JMR
Hi Michael, thanks for changing the headline to reflect reality.
i d=002401000001). The News section at http://www.e-gold.com/news.html might also be interesting to some of you. Thanks.
click on "market makers" at http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/links.htm and you'll see the description "independent exchange providers" -- which hopefully clears things up. I can send anyone who wants it info on becoming one, it's an interesting job, and was even before Parker's SS troubles, which didn't begin with the SS but with trying to accept plastic (see his words at: http://www.themestream.com/articles/310965.html?p
JMR
I need you to contact me immediately. Wired will face an immediate law
suit by e-gold unless the headline of your article is changed
immediately, this does not go out in print and you print a retraction to
this extremely damaging headline.
Barry K. Downey
U.S. Counsel to e-gold Ltd.
Oh gods. What a day/week to be slashdotted (finally). Also, I wish that wired and /. headline writers respectively would either read the actual story they're referring to, or share their drug stashes with everyone else. *sigh*
Ok, I'll start with my standard offer of a small spend to any slashdotter interested in creating an e-gold account & sending me the number (goodbye promotional account balance!). I'll also try to answer any questions sent to me (but please poke around on the site and find out about us first, the concept of grams as money can be a bit strange but it's fun to discover). Alright...
So far, law enforcement AFAIK (and I'd know....) has not contacted either e-gold or OmniPay regarding this case. I am in touch with Parker, and he has set up an e-gold account with a publicly viewable balance at: http://www.e-gold.com/pub-bal.asp?pubid=280478
I doubt the SS will do anything like what you say, the experience of my friend, the artist J.S.G. Boggs (who is the yin to e-gold's yang, IMO) speaks to that, although Parker's isn't a counterfeiting case (and neither was that one IMO). Both are political. It's sad, frankly.
JMR
Agreed, the competition was much more real-world than just "destroy the other guy" this year, and you could see that the teams worked really hard (Cordzilla and others had very entertaining cheering sections, as well). See my other post for a link to some pics (possibly including one of Cordzilla!) taken by my friend Jay W. I will probably be at the Disney World championships this year, too. Good luck!
JMR
Here is a link to some pictures/movies taken by my friend Jay at a recent highschool robotics match we attended recently. It was held near the Rocket Garden (the well-maintained one on the Nasa side, not the dilapidated but cooler one on the Airforce side) of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, FL. Only bad part was the price of a (lousy) beer at the concessions ($4+!) but overall a very cool time. Yes, it's pretty nice living in Melbourne. :)
JMR
are greatly exagerated. There is, however, a dearth of reports about payment systems advanced enough to support micropayments, but if any /. reader wants to see a micropayment today, one with low fees, immediate settlement, automation, no payment repudiation, bi-directionality, and backing by a substance scarce enough to make rational folks everywhere want to hold it rather than instantly get rid of it, just email me with an e-gold account number.
It's amazing how clueless even smart folks can be when they try to talk about money...Everyone wants the issue to be simple, but simple means you're saddled with legacy systems and bad technology the internet promised we'd escape. A currency is a contract, like it or not, and these days not many people know it, let alone like it. IMO.
JMR
Sounds like www.fairtunes.com to me.
JMR
... that is, that it went to the content creator and not an agent, distributor, middleman, or some other breed of fuckwit five-percenter
As a (hopefully) non-fuckwit (but definitely) less-than-five-percenter, let me suggest that you consider using my favorite currency (e-gold) and others that don't rely on making any merchant/consumer distinction. If you want choice on where your money goes to, that's got to be what you want, whether it's us, PayPal, or whoever fails next -- (probably Amazon's little scheme, if you ask me).
I'm hoping that sites like www.fairtunes.com catch on soon for more than just music, and I can simply put a free e-gold tipjar anywhere with www.two-cents-worth.com (but I've gotta go now!).
JMR
Kruggerands are a good brand of coin if you like bullion, rather than numismatic value. e-gold Ltd. is a Nevis, BWI corporation, and OmniPay (the company I work for) is in the USA. So far, there has not been a government objection (knock on fake-wood) from either, AFAIK. I know that Alan Greenspan has said some nice things about privately-issued currencies, even.
Internal security is one of those things I can't discuss much, but I agree that's a nice OS and a very interesting site for future development and thought. Obviously, we try very hard not to let systems be compromised, and as I'm sure you're all aware, "security is a process." I tend to spend a lot of my time trying to educate e-gold users regarding their own computers' security, and I occasionally click "bugs bounty" grams to the kind folks who point out flaws. Thanks for your comments.
JMR
For a good look at the contracts that made up older currencies, see the book Money, from Principia Publishing, Inc.
Whether or not you agree with the conclusions of the book, the definitions and photographs make it worth reading. It turns out the contract on US currency, for example, was quite a bit simpler and more honest back when you could trade paper for metal, and this honesty apparently was unpopular with the political class because you can't inflate gold as easily as you can inflate paper "tokens."
JMR
Interesting thoughts. I frankly would not trust South Africa as much as I'd trust e-gold Ltd. (aside from being biased as hell because I get paid in the stuff) because governments are more likely than corporations to get into wars or enact unrealistic social programs than corporations are to violate contracts (and any currency is, in the end, simply a contract IMO) but having said that...
e-gold is kind of the older, more-secular branch of the e-metal family of currency. You see, it turns out that if one actually READS the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran, gold and silver get mentioned all the time in all these books. Well, some folks decided to take things seriously, so now we have e-dinar. (It turns out the Prophet used gold and silver coins which were somewhat standardized by weight, and these folks are using the e-gold database and the old version of the system, with different terminology, to bring it back.)
These folks (thank God!) also started with minting coins, which brings me further from the bullion coin business (we like bars now, not coins, so it's advantageous to have folks selling bullion coins for e-metal as not everyone has 400 ounces to redeem). I've met them, and they're quite serious businessmen who have established ties with the governments of both Indonesia and the UAE (Dubai). There's more on their pages, and I even have some of the Dinar & Dirham coins.
All of this makes a pretty-good news story IMO (there's more, too) but for the fact that we don't spend much of anything on advertising (I'm an exception) and instead rely on viral marketing (combined with hiring much-smarter nerds, our secret weapon). The news media are not too thrilled with our stinginess, I've gathered, but occasionally we're covered (albeit not in proportion to the quantity of business we do compared to the overhyped & in-the-red). I guess it's also strange for them to cover an ecommerce company that not only eschews hype, but also has the temerity not to locate in any of the "hot" (read: expensive and not-worth-it compared to central Florida) internet startup areas like the Bay area of San Francisco.
JMR
Well, not ALL capital is based on imaginary stuff. There's a small but growing market for the real thing, too. (And just so this doesn't descend into absolute-shameless-plug-land, e-gold just got some competition, called Goldmoney that's also based on grams of the filthy yellow metal). I've spent the last few years of my life studying the subject of Money pretty closely, and I'm still learning a lot. I think that electronic privately issued currencies (not just gold-backed ones, either) will change the world rapidly, and I hope Mr. DeSoto is right about helping the poor.
As more folks get used to it, I predict "grams of gold" will be the currency of the future on the internet if-and-when the dollar ever falters. As usual, anyone on Slashdot who wants can contact me and try a small spot of e-gold, as I want to encourage programmers to play with it (and the competition, even, but I can't give theirs away!). Thanks.
JMR
One example (among many, no doubt) exists at http://www.waterken.com/.
JMR
2001-03-07 17:42:11
If I win, I'll be surprised.
JMR
is hardly "a first," for a number of reasons, and Katz knows it. Wilful ignorance like that might be what makes you so infuriating to some folks, Jon. JMR Speaking ONLY for myself, of course...
election day should be on April 16th. It's totally unacceptable that they can waste tax dollars in this unaccountable way, but here they are getting away with it instead of swinging from lamp-posts for trying to implement the stupidest idea in a long time.
JMR
(no, I don't care about "karma" here, I just call 'em as I see 'em.)
Hmmm. Seems like you may not have finished that last thought, but you earlier said,
People like us need to start to devote some time to serious personal, grass roots activism, to widen the pool of people using encryption.
and I couldn't agree more, but I want to add a few ideas.
Convince a minor political activist group that protection against "dirty tricks" on the internet entails using the strong authentication function of good encryption, or talk to people about privacy. Maybe even try to convince them of the (occasional) value of anonymous speech, and tell them about the folks who give their valuable time to do things like run anonymous remailers or write free privacy-enhancing software. Try to get them to support EFF or one of the other groups if you can.
JMR
Of course not, plastic will rule the world, a simple solution like pcs.e-gold.com (oops, I mentioned it) just can't be found! We have to trust Sony and the giant corps instead!
Ok, so I'm sarcastic today.
JMR
http://pcs.e-gold.com/demo.html
/. users try e-gold here, just email me an account number) but so far, nobody has done anything much. Oh well.
It's been out there since Xmas, the media ignored it. It works using the currency I sell, and I'd very much like to see musicians and fans be able to "cut out the middleman," and it seems like I sell the technology to do so every day (standing offer to let
JMR
(The same way as since 1996, but nobody wants to notice fundamentals in an age of Internet hype) is by using good ol' e-gold. I can prove it to anyone who sends me an account number and says they saw this on /.. Someday, the music business will notice our growth, I hope...
JMR
...the US Constitution should contain a guarantee of privacy....
(NOTE: Mine is a minority view of the constitution which is not generally accepted by legal professionals, even though I'm obviously right and nobody likes debating me much anyway, especially law professors.)
You're correct to say that the Constitution does not mention any right to privacy, but that doesn't mean the right to privacy isn't there. The framers of the constitution (and especially the bill of rights) were concerned with the protection of rights (such as self-defense and free speech) which pre-existed any concept of government, and did not wish to be put in a position of trying to list every such right they were trying to protect.
The Ninth Amendment says: "The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." IOW, 'We've listed some individual rights here, but it's not an exhaustive list, and if we forgot about any particular right (think "privacy" here) that's no big deal because we meant to include it.' I propose that this nation do one of the following:
1. Repeal the Ninth Amendment (ain't gonna happen, repealing it would require at least briefly paying attention to it, and legal 'professionals' have avoided that for DECADES).
2. (This is the tough one...) Start paying attention to the Ninth Amendment, which Thomas Jefferson called a "magnificent generality." Despite the beauty of the wording of the Ninth (or perhaps because of it!) this is very unlikely. In fact, I've been trying for years to start a debate, but those who would support repeal of the Ninth find ignoring it much more convenient than debating me.
It is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, that Supreme
Court justices and other constitutional interpreters have typically
fled from the hard moral judgments called for by the Ninth
Amendment." -- Steven Macedo, _The New Right v. The
Constitution_ p. 7.
Amen. (Professor Macedo is a rare law-professor exception, who shares my broader view of the Ninth and writes good books.) The judgments called for are hard moral judgments with grey areas and lines to draw. Can you have a tax-and-spend drug-war and have a Ninth Amendment? Can you outlaw abortions (early or late-term) and have a Ninth Amendment? Can you outlaw prostitution and have a Ninth Amendment? Can you outlaw gambling and have a Ninth Amendment? Why do most law professors say that the Ninth Amendment isn't important? Is it up to them to deem what is and isn't worth thinking about in the constitution? Don't they sow the seeds of (even more) ignorance in the judiciary by not being honest about the Ninth and why it's there in the first place? (Well, obviously I think they do.)
Now, I look at what I've said above and think, "Voila, slam dunk argument for a Constitutional Ninth Amendment right to privacy -- and I'm not even relying on ten-dollar words like 'penumbra,' I'm using plain, ordinary English!" (Maybe that's what law professors disliked about me...) Anyway, IANAL, and despite my argument above making sense it's not the law of the land in the USA, so use it at your own risk.
JMR
These are my own opinions and have nothing to do with any employer. I am Chairman and CEO of the Ninth Amendment Foundation, which I'll probably someday use to make political trouble...
Ways I've heard of (nah, I'd never do this, especially number three!) to deface "Just Say No!" signs include:
1. If you've got room, make it "Just Say NoRML!" (NORML being the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws).
2. If less room/time, try for "Just Say KNoW!" -- adding the "K" and "W" which drug-warriors find refreshingly-annoying.
3. (My personal favorite, and there's probably some sort of HTML-god way I could do this, but I don't even feel like trying.) This takes the least space/time, and involves merely quickly adding a tiny, subscript "2" below the "N" in "NO," thus revealing the odd admonition to "Just Say Nitrous-Oxide!" but only to those of us who are chemically-initiated, and we generally tend to snicker and leave it there. Nitrous Oxide, or "laughing gas," is one of the most powerful (legal) mind-altering substances available, but few drug-warriors seem to know its chemical symbol.
JMR
Note: While "just saying nitrous" may keep one out of trouble with law-enforcement authorities better than experimentation with other substances such as cannabis, nitrous oxide has a number of dangerous properties which limit its safety and therefore its usefulness as a recreational drug. (Weed's safer, IOW.) The short-duration of nitrous IS a convenient feature, and brings to mind features one would ask for in an "ideal" recreational drug (unless that's Viagra!).
I'm not sure Bush and Gore really want musicians paid (but I found both of their answers to the Napster question pretty evasive). I'm not sure what they want to do, besides use government power to please large political contributors -- a set of people more likely to include RIAA members than musicians, IMO.
/. readers to try it out, email me and I'll provide a bit to start. Thanks.
What I want to see is a "pot of gold" that helps musicians via a tipjar. There's plenty of talk of "cutting out the middleman" between consumers & musicians, but precious little gets done about it. e-gold isn't perfect, but it works. Now. I encourage
JMR
...
Gore was instrumental in securing lots of funding for networking in the 80s between Universitites that really poised the 'net to take off.
...
While this statement is true, what it essentially says is "this Democrat was instrumental in voting for lots of spending for domestic, non-military stuff in the 80s that (in completely unplanned ways) poised the 'net (which might have taken off a decade earlier with lower taxes instead of higher spending) to take off." WooHoo -- A Democrat votes for more domestic spending! Next hot news item: a Republican votes to increase the military budget! Let's face it, members of both parties are unlikely to read what they vote for so they tend to vote on autopilot frequently, and chances are that Gore was fortunate to have an aide who was into technology at the time.
Anyway, what I'm trying to get across in my little screed is that I'll bet it takes very little research to find cases where AlGore voted for wasteful programs like the United States Helium Repository (yes, there was one...) during that period, and we don't hear that Al somehow "took the initiative in creating the Goodyear blimp" because he voted for that bit of pork! Face it, if the US government throws money around enough, eventually some of it is bound to hit a useful target (case in point: NASA in the '60s and '70s) but that doesn't mean that the US government should be the only way to do things (case in point: space exploration today). IMO.
JMR