It's a useful precedent: if the convictions under CAN-SPAM do hold up, then it will be easier to go after those whose crimes are purely spamming.
At least, it used to be the case that there were people whose sole crime was sending out absurd amounts of clearly unwanted email. ("Clearly unwanted" in the sense that they deliberately provided false information in headers and refused to honor opt-out requests. Providing false information in headers was not in and of itself fraudulent.)
These days, given how much spam goes through bot-nets, there may not be any spammers left who are not guilty of crimes other than sending spam. But it may also be the case that it's hard to convict them on, say, hacking charges, but you could get them on the spam charges.
And conversely, if the appeals court throws out the CAN-SPAM convictions, even if it keeps the other convictions, we'll know that we have to either rewrite the law or depend on the existing fraud laws.
A friend of mine went through the same PR in reverse: an allergy medication he favored was "discovered" by the manufacturer to have bad side effects at the same time as (a) the medication was about to go off-patent, and (b) a new medication from the same company without the bad side effects was introduced. That new medication didn't work nearly as well for him, but he can't get the old one because the FDA banned it. Fortunately for him, the Canadian government isn't so terrified of those side effects.
I was not aware that the drug is already in use. If it is, you don't actually have to do anything: you can just get doctors to prescribe it off-label. (That's in the US; given that this is Alberta I can't say what the rules are.) You'd end up doing a Phase IV trial, which can be a lot cheaper if you can just get doctors to send in data.
It's not just their lack of expertise. Getting a drug through level 3 trials is expensive: it takes a lot of (often paid) subjects, and doctors and nurses to spend time with those subjects, and a battery of tests to be done on those subjects. This money is spent over years to ensure that the pill is safe and effective before you have even a single paying patient. Paying the subjects is actually the cheap part.
And there's the possibility that once they've spent all that money, it could fail. Maybe the pill just doesn't work. Maybe there are side effects: look at the way Merck is getting hammered for producing a highly effective pill (Vioxx) that just happened, to, well, kill a few people.
Barr makes their money by letting somebody else pay for all that, and then coming in a few years later and charging a lot less. It's the usual problem: the second pill costs $.49, but the first pill costs $75,000,000.
I'd be hard pressed to call it "terrorism" in either case. Most definitions of "terrorism" that I'm aware of describe attacks against civilian rather than military targets, whose goal is to cause more harm than the actual physical damage by provoking fear.
In this case it could conceivably be that a terrorist organization also sabotaged a military target, but that would not be an act of terrorism in and of itself. That's more like conventional espionage. The military knows that it is a target and is capable of responding, and so it's generally considered a valid target. The world gives a kind of grudging acceptance of your right to do it.
The third general requirement of terrorism, as compared to a valid military attack, is that the enemy hides itself. If the US takes out somebody's spy satellite, you know where the US is if you want to engage in a military response. Al Qaeda doesn't have such a place. This isn't just a playing semantics; it goes back to the civilian/military distinction. When a true terrorist organization attacks the US, civilians nominally on their own side die when the US counterattacks. By contrast, to attack the US there are valid targets.
(This gets a bit murky in espionage, where you do hide among the civilians, and that's the closest the US comes to true terrorism, at least for its avowed activities. We can discuss the various covert CIA activities later, but there's so much misinformation that it's hard to know what's real and what's paranoia.)
Terrorism comes much closer to Clausewitz's "total war". Why should any opponent restrict itself to "valid" military targets and make itself known to counterattacks? No reason, except that the end of "total war" is always the complete destruction of one side: if you engage in it you're putting lives at risk out of proportion to your goals. That will earn the world's opprobrium, and perhaps that opprobrium will increase the chance of your defeat, but beyond that it's your choice.
There are ways that graphic designers are used to working, and CSS doesn't support that. I'm not referring to fancy menus and other such fripperies (which we're all better off without) but the basic design grid, which is actually supported by HTML tables better than by CSS divs.
That's not design bloat; that's creating a language that works the way the designers are used to working rather than forcing them to do it your way. What's left is an ungainly and unreliable combination of floats and explicit offsets that render badly on different screens and browsers.
I find it interesting that there are no radical changes even on the drawing board, and that IE and FF have reached essentially the same state. We'll have vicious flame wars about how Opera users cannot imagine how FF users live without Feature X, and vice versa, but in general the web browser appears to have reached the end of their iterated approximation to the Right Web Browser.
And it's not as good as you'd hoped. Ajax applications aren't quite good enough for prime time, but there doesn't appear to be any way forward without sitting the IE/FF/Opera/etc developers in a room and getting them to agree. And even if they did, the violation of the basic web browsing contract with respect to the "back" button isn't going to have a pretty resolution.
Similarly, basic CSS pages look pretty good, but advanced ones aren't reliable. That's as much to do with CSS's failures as the browsers: designers are forced into contortions which push the edges of the implementations.
It appears to me that the next advance will have to be a step backwards before it goes forwards. For years the browser advanced because programmers added incompatible features which the other browsers gradually took up. That was easy when it was Netscape running the show, and IE was quick to follow. Now IE runs the show, and isn't willing to follow FF, at least not quickly.
Perhaps stasis on the browser side is a Good Thing. Make the existing feature sets more bullet proof, and the innovation will come from the web sites themselves.
TFA is a regular newspaper citing a New Scientist article, whose author may have read the original paper or perhaps just the press release.
All that gets reported is what is old news, as you point out. The original work is by Baker and Bellis, and dates back to the 80s. but isn't cited in this article. Baker and Bellis' work has been criticized as being poorly controlled and subject to sample bias.
This study has a stronger statistical basis, and that's news. But most of the actual articles won't talk about that, because it's boring, and would rather discuss the original hypothesis, which as you point out has a long history.
And this story isn't exactly timely, either. The original scientific paper is now over a year old, and was published six months ago.
Theoretically, he could open the parts that he owns and leave it to other developers to replace the bits that he can't give away. Or ask you to download them yourself, the way you have to download lame separately from Audacity due to licensing issues.
Nobody ever guaranteed that any particular piece of open source would compile.
Re:Guns are the assembly code of politics.
on
Sealand Put Up For Sale
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And if Luxembourg became a thorn in the side of any of those countries, I suspect they'd find themselves invaded right quick. If Luxembourg were to start hosting child pornography or harboring criminals, its 450-strong army would be little comfort.
Whenever Sealand comes up on Slashdot, people talk about what a great off-site data center it would make. And it would, as long as its illegal activities didn't piss off the US too much. If the US decided that there was some truly crucial piece of evidence there that it needed that outweighed the international outrage, it would be there.
I'm pretty sure they'd end up getting permission from the Brits first, or more likely asking the Brits to do it themselves. In the end I suspect the attitude taken by both governments would be, "Look, your little play country was fun, but you've always been part of Britain and your independence was more a matter of being ignored."
They are propaganda. But Greenpeace and Sierra Club don't account for all of the global-warming reports. Many come from university professors, whose funding comes from a variety of sources (state grants, federal science grants, private endowments to universities rather than grants to the scientists themselves).
By contrast, essentially all of the reverse positions trace fairly immediately back to oil money, as the article shows.
That doesn't necessarily make them wrong: they could simply be a minority that the oil industry is sufficiently well funded to fully endow, without any quid pro quo. It is, however, reason to cast a very skeptical eye on their results compared to the more independent researchers.
"Volume discounts" mean that Dell is taking some of the work load from Microsoft. Microsoft does less support because they don't get phone calls from Dell employees who are wondering whether they need a new driver (or if they do, they get it from only one employee). Dell sells the customer a box with Windows already installed and ready to go, perfectly compatible with the hardware, and that's valuable to Microsoft.
But pricing is always a complicated thing. The question is never, "Why can't they...?" but "Why don't they...?". The price on the box of Windows XP is whatever Microsoft thinks they can get out of you before you switch to some alternative. That price has nothing to do with the price of the physical CD, or even how many programming hours went into it (except to the degree that if they didn't charge enough to make that back, they'd go out of business.)
That price is less to Dell than it is to you because Dell has power over Microsoft: "sell us the OS at a discount or we'll switch to something else". Or even just "We'll OFFER something else", which would seriously cut into Microsoft's dominant position. Microsoft's position as THE OS to have for many companies is why the retail price is so high; it's not necessarily the best but its compatibility with the rest of the installed base makes it valuable, and that's partly due to the OEMs. The OEMs in turn want MS to have a higher price for retail copies, because that makes it cheaper for you to buy a Dell off the shelf than to build your own.
There's a huge feedback loop here, and in fact the ultimate price is the result of a lot of guesswork by marketers. But the upshot is that the marketers never ask themselves, "What's the cheapest price we could sell it at?" They only ask, "What price will make us the most money?"
To conclude, remember what Robert Heinlein said: the answer to any question beginning with "Why don't they...?" is "money".
"Web" wasn't just HTTP; it was HTTP+HTML. There existed no web which was just pure HTTP. I suspect whatever technology replaces HTTP won't be called Web anything-point-oh; it'll be an entirely different technology with radically different capabilities.
In addition, it's hardly the same version of HTTP. In protocol terms it's 1.1; you can't implement Ajax on top of HTTP 1.0. The streaming, back-and-forth, hold-open HTTP is a very different use. It's the same only to the degree that it's a very general way of connecting to a port and getting a socket, which is now asynchronously two-way rather than simply request-response.
I'd consider Ajax a whole new protocol, compared to the original intention of the Web. Many really great 2.0 web pages are hardly recognizable as "Web" at all. Here I'm thinking of Google Maps in particular, though to a lesser degree with the Ajax-y webmail clients and threading pages like Digg.
The user-contributed part of Web 2.0, on the other hand, is largely orthogonal to that. It does seem more evolutionary than revolutionary, though Wikipedia has accomplished some things that I wouldn't have imagined possible under the original intent of the Web, despite being built exclusively with the old protocols.
So I'd say there's a bigger difference between "Web 2.0" and 1.0 than between Firefox 2.0 and 1.0.
If you're looking for incremental steps between 1.0 and 2.0 to call 1.1, they certainly exist: the upgrades in HTML, CSS, cookies, the addition of plugins. I'd call forms+PHP the real 1.1, since the original Web was essentially a static concept. (I suppose you might call the stuff prior to that "Web Beta", since it really wasn't ready for prime time, and the first great generation of web companies couldn't have done without it.)
It's an interesting theory, and it goes even one step further. The USPS is now an independent agency, affiliated with neither the executive nor the legislative branch. It was part of the executive branch until 35 years ago, but was spun off.
The Postmaster himself is chosen by a committee, and the committee is chosen by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
Where that leaves mail inspections... I have no idea.
The administration's line would be that he's not altering the law or violating it, or even intending to violate it. He's merely clarifying what the words mean to him, in a kind of "2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2" sense.
They've discovered that when you get to write the dictionary, the words can mean anything you want them to mean.
I think that legally you're on stronger ground waiting until he actually violates the law. Intent to violate the law is not in general a crime, unless you want to get your article on Slashdot tagged "thoughtcrime" and "orwell" before first post.
At least this one is relatively easy to catch him at. The ones where his signing statements mean keeping people out of court are the real pain.
I've found that cable TV series, like HBO or Showtime, often put only two or three episodes on a disc. They have shorter seasons (often 12 episodes compared to the 22-24 of a broadcast TV series). I suspect they want to charge as much for those as for a regular TV series without looking cheap (at least until you open the box).
No skin off my nose; I get 'em via Netflix anyway.
Well, service on the debt is pretty immovable; you can try defaulting but that chucks the whole chart out the window. Social Security and Medicare (75% of HHS) have separate allocations (which is why SS is in it's own little chart).
That leaves Defense as the 800 lb gorilla. Touch that and you're Soft on Terror.
Those are particularly hard to fix because they're safety-net programs, that exist for compassionate reasons. They have good reason to exist: we don't want to see people suffer. But because people have an enormous ability to suffer, it's difficult to find the point where we say, "It's too expensive to keep you alive any longer."
Those programs are paid for by separate taxes, though, which is allocated specifically to them. In the case of Social Security, the program is more than pay-as-you-go; the program actually spends less than it takes in. Unfortunately, an aging population changes all that, and since that money is "saved" by giving it to the rest of the government (which promptly spends in on roads to nowhere and corn subsidies), there's big trouble ahead.
The longest-term trouble is that eventually it won't be able to keep up itself, and has spent its saved surplus; that's 2040 or so. Medium-term, though, the real problem is that it will eventually need to start spending its saved surplus, and that causes problems for the general budget, which can't pay that back. That's around 2017.
And short term, even before it's actually spending the saved surplus, as the current SS surplus nears zero, the government will have to go elsewhere to fund its deficit spending, which raises the interest rates it will have to pay. That happens in about five years, maybe less.
Since the signing statements have no legal force, I can't see how they're unconstitutional. However, if they President actually acts on the signing statement in a way that's counter to the law, that's certainly illegal.
Deficit spending isn't as obviously evil as you might think. As long as you're borrowing money cheaply and putting it into something that appreciates more quickly, it's actually in your interest to borrow as much money as possible.
A mortgage is considered an excellent investment, and it's deficit spending. In fact, many financial advisors will tell you to buy the biggest house you can afford, and pay it off slowly. That's because real estate is a good investment in general, what with the population continually rising. (Confusing matters a bit is that the tax breaks on mortgage interest make it an even better deal, though that's artificial.)
Similarly, a wise company will always have a debt: it borrows money to invest in itself and make new stuff to be even more profitable.
Mind you, all of this assumes you're investing in something valuable. Money borrowed and then wasted is the real evil. Blame the waste, not the borrowing. Cutting the borrowing is one way to limit waste, but Congress is particularly adept at finding ways to waste money. A favorite is to put the pork on the budget, deliberately under-funding something critical. Then when that runs out of money, they pass an "emergency appropriation", which doesn't count on the budget. (It shows up in the debt, though.)
Eliminating earmarks will help, but at $24 billion they're a drop in the bucket of a multi-trillion dollar budget. The real waste is in things like farm subsidies to agribusinesses and weapons programs the Pentagon doesn't want. Try cutting those, though, and watch people scream. Everybody wants the budget cut, except for the bits that come in to their state. Those are necessary.
I can't imagine what they'd do about it. They can complain, but the separation of powers means that the executive branch has essentially infinite power to execute the laws according to its own interpretation. Ultimately, the Supreme Court itself can issue its rulings but depends on the good will of the executive branch to actually do it.
Congress' main check on that power is the ability to impeach. If the President violates the laws or court decisions, then it's a "high crime and misdemeanor", and they can remove him. That's the nuclear option, but the Constitution forbids any other control. It's a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction.
In practice the President has always had to execute the laws more or less in line with what Congress said when they passed them, precisely because the nuclear option is sitting there. But Bush is discovering that really he can do whatever he wants, no matter what the law actually says. He likes to think he's doing it to preserve the security of the country, but I've got a terrible feeling he's destroying that village in order to save it.
I can't find a copy of the quote, but I recall hearing that after Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan Spielberg had sworn off using Nazis as generic semi-comic villains.
A twenty-years-aged Indy will probably be fighting cartoon Commies rather than cartoon Nazis. Perhaps Chinese ones.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a useful precedent: if the convictions under CAN-SPAM do hold up, then it will be easier to go after those whose crimes are purely spamming.
At least, it used to be the case that there were people whose sole crime was sending out absurd amounts of clearly unwanted email. ("Clearly unwanted" in the sense that they deliberately provided false information in headers and refused to honor opt-out requests. Providing false information in headers was not in and of itself fraudulent.)
These days, given how much spam goes through bot-nets, there may not be any spammers left who are not guilty of crimes other than sending spam. But it may also be the case that it's hard to convict them on, say, hacking charges, but you could get them on the spam charges.
And conversely, if the appeals court throws out the CAN-SPAM convictions, even if it keeps the other convictions, we'll know that we have to either rewrite the law or depend on the existing fraud laws.
A friend of mine went through the same PR in reverse: an allergy medication he favored was "discovered" by the manufacturer to have bad side effects at the same time as (a) the medication was about to go off-patent, and (b) a new medication from the same company without the bad side effects was introduced. That new medication didn't work nearly as well for him, but he can't get the old one because the FDA banned it. Fortunately for him, the Canadian government isn't so terrified of those side effects.
I was not aware that the drug is already in use. If it is, you don't actually have to do anything: you can just get doctors to prescribe it off-label. (That's in the US; given that this is Alberta I can't say what the rules are.) You'd end up doing a Phase IV trial, which can be a lot cheaper if you can just get doctors to send in data.
It's not just their lack of expertise. Getting a drug through level 3 trials is expensive: it takes a lot of (often paid) subjects, and doctors and nurses to spend time with those subjects, and a battery of tests to be done on those subjects. This money is spent over years to ensure that the pill is safe and effective before you have even a single paying patient. Paying the subjects is actually the cheap part.
And there's the possibility that once they've spent all that money, it could fail. Maybe the pill just doesn't work. Maybe there are side effects: look at the way Merck is getting hammered for producing a highly effective pill (Vioxx) that just happened, to, well, kill a few people.
Barr makes their money by letting somebody else pay for all that, and then coming in a few years later and charging a lot less. It's the usual problem: the second pill costs $.49, but the first pill costs $75,000,000.
I'd be hard pressed to call it "terrorism" in either case. Most definitions of "terrorism" that I'm aware of describe attacks against civilian rather than military targets, whose goal is to cause more harm than the actual physical damage by provoking fear.
In this case it could conceivably be that a terrorist organization also sabotaged a military target, but that would not be an act of terrorism in and of itself. That's more like conventional espionage. The military knows that it is a target and is capable of responding, and so it's generally considered a valid target. The world gives a kind of grudging acceptance of your right to do it.
The third general requirement of terrorism, as compared to a valid military attack, is that the enemy hides itself. If the US takes out somebody's spy satellite, you know where the US is if you want to engage in a military response. Al Qaeda doesn't have such a place. This isn't just a playing semantics; it goes back to the civilian/military distinction. When a true terrorist organization attacks the US, civilians nominally on their own side die when the US counterattacks. By contrast, to attack the US there are valid targets.
(This gets a bit murky in espionage, where you do hide among the civilians, and that's the closest the US comes to true terrorism, at least for its avowed activities. We can discuss the various covert CIA activities later, but there's so much misinformation that it's hard to know what's real and what's paranoia.)
Terrorism comes much closer to Clausewitz's "total war". Why should any opponent restrict itself to "valid" military targets and make itself known to counterattacks? No reason, except that the end of "total war" is always the complete destruction of one side: if you engage in it you're putting lives at risk out of proportion to your goals. That will earn the world's opprobrium, and perhaps that opprobrium will increase the chance of your defeat, but beyond that it's your choice.
There are ways that graphic designers are used to working, and CSS doesn't support that. I'm not referring to fancy menus and other such fripperies (which we're all better off without) but the basic design grid, which is actually supported by HTML tables better than by CSS divs.
That's not design bloat; that's creating a language that works the way the designers are used to working rather than forcing them to do it your way. What's left is an ungainly and unreliable combination of floats and explicit offsets that render badly on different screens and browsers.
I find it interesting that there are no radical changes even on the drawing board, and that IE and FF have reached essentially the same state. We'll have vicious flame wars about how Opera users cannot imagine how FF users live without Feature X, and vice versa, but in general the web browser appears to have reached the end of their iterated approximation to the Right Web Browser.
And it's not as good as you'd hoped. Ajax applications aren't quite good enough for prime time, but there doesn't appear to be any way forward without sitting the IE/FF/Opera/etc developers in a room and getting them to agree. And even if they did, the violation of the basic web browsing contract with respect to the "back" button isn't going to have a pretty resolution.
Similarly, basic CSS pages look pretty good, but advanced ones aren't reliable. That's as much to do with CSS's failures as the browsers: designers are forced into contortions which push the edges of the implementations.
It appears to me that the next advance will have to be a step backwards before it goes forwards. For years the browser advanced because programmers added incompatible features which the other browsers gradually took up. That was easy when it was Netscape running the show, and IE was quick to follow. Now IE runs the show, and isn't willing to follow FF, at least not quickly.
Perhaps stasis on the browser side is a Good Thing. Make the existing feature sets more bullet proof, and the innovation will come from the web sites themselves.
TFA is a regular newspaper citing a New Scientist article, whose author may have read the original paper or perhaps just the press release.
All that gets reported is what is old news, as you point out. The original work is by Baker and Bellis, and dates back to the 80s. but isn't cited in this article. Baker and Bellis' work has been criticized as being poorly controlled and subject to sample bias.
This study has a stronger statistical basis, and that's news. But most of the actual articles won't talk about that, because it's boring, and would rather discuss the original hypothesis, which as you point out has a long history.
And this story isn't exactly timely, either. The original scientific paper is now over a year old, and was published six months ago.
Theoretically, he could open the parts that he owns and leave it to other developers to replace the bits that he can't give away. Or ask you to download them yourself, the way you have to download lame separately from Audacity due to licensing issues.
Nobody ever guaranteed that any particular piece of open source would compile.
And if Luxembourg became a thorn in the side of any of those countries, I suspect they'd find themselves invaded right quick. If Luxembourg were to start hosting child pornography or harboring criminals, its 450-strong army would be little comfort.
Whenever Sealand comes up on Slashdot, people talk about what a great off-site data center it would make. And it would, as long as its illegal activities didn't piss off the US too much. If the US decided that there was some truly crucial piece of evidence there that it needed that outweighed the international outrage, it would be there.
I'm pretty sure they'd end up getting permission from the Brits first, or more likely asking the Brits to do it themselves. In the end I suspect the attitude taken by both governments would be, "Look, your little play country was fun, but you've always been part of Britain and your independence was more a matter of being ignored."
They are propaganda. But Greenpeace and Sierra Club don't account for all of the global-warming reports. Many come from university professors, whose funding comes from a variety of sources (state grants, federal science grants, private endowments to universities rather than grants to the scientists themselves).
By contrast, essentially all of the reverse positions trace fairly immediately back to oil money, as the article shows.
That doesn't necessarily make them wrong: they could simply be a minority that the oil industry is sufficiently well funded to fully endow, without any quid pro quo. It is, however, reason to cast a very skeptical eye on their results compared to the more independent researchers.
"Volume discounts" mean that Dell is taking some of the work load from Microsoft. Microsoft does less support because they don't get phone calls from Dell employees who are wondering whether they need a new driver (or if they do, they get it from only one employee). Dell sells the customer a box with Windows already installed and ready to go, perfectly compatible with the hardware, and that's valuable to Microsoft.
But pricing is always a complicated thing. The question is never, "Why can't they...?" but "Why don't they...?". The price on the box of Windows XP is whatever Microsoft thinks they can get out of you before you switch to some alternative. That price has nothing to do with the price of the physical CD, or even how many programming hours went into it (except to the degree that if they didn't charge enough to make that back, they'd go out of business.)
That price is less to Dell than it is to you because Dell has power over Microsoft: "sell us the OS at a discount or we'll switch to something else". Or even just "We'll OFFER something else", which would seriously cut into Microsoft's dominant position. Microsoft's position as THE OS to have for many companies is why the retail price is so high; it's not necessarily the best but its compatibility with the rest of the installed base makes it valuable, and that's partly due to the OEMs. The OEMs in turn want MS to have a higher price for retail copies, because that makes it cheaper for you to buy a Dell off the shelf than to build your own.
There's a huge feedback loop here, and in fact the ultimate price is the result of a lot of guesswork by marketers. But the upshot is that the marketers never ask themselves, "What's the cheapest price we could sell it at?" They only ask, "What price will make us the most money?"
To conclude, remember what Robert Heinlein said: the answer to any question beginning with "Why don't they...?" is "money".
"Web" wasn't just HTTP; it was HTTP+HTML. There existed no web which was just pure HTTP. I suspect whatever technology replaces HTTP won't be called Web anything-point-oh; it'll be an entirely different technology with radically different capabilities.
In addition, it's hardly the same version of HTTP. In protocol terms it's 1.1; you can't implement Ajax on top of HTTP 1.0. The streaming, back-and-forth, hold-open HTTP is a very different use. It's the same only to the degree that it's a very general way of connecting to a port and getting a socket, which is now asynchronously two-way rather than simply request-response.
I'd consider Ajax a whole new protocol, compared to the original intention of the Web. Many really great 2.0 web pages are hardly recognizable as "Web" at all. Here I'm thinking of Google Maps in particular, though to a lesser degree with the Ajax-y webmail clients and threading pages like Digg.
The user-contributed part of Web 2.0, on the other hand, is largely orthogonal to that. It does seem more evolutionary than revolutionary, though Wikipedia has accomplished some things that I wouldn't have imagined possible under the original intent of the Web, despite being built exclusively with the old protocols.
So I'd say there's a bigger difference between "Web 2.0" and 1.0 than between Firefox 2.0 and 1.0.
If you're looking for incremental steps between 1.0 and 2.0 to call 1.1, they certainly exist: the upgrades in HTML, CSS, cookies, the addition of plugins. I'd call forms+PHP the real 1.1, since the original Web was essentially a static concept. (I suppose you might call the stuff prior to that "Web Beta", since it really wasn't ready for prime time, and the first great generation of web companies couldn't have done without it.)
It's an interesting theory, and it goes even one step further. The USPS is now an independent agency, affiliated with neither the executive nor the legislative branch. It was part of the executive branch until 35 years ago, but was spun off.
The Postmaster himself is chosen by a committee, and the committee is chosen by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
Where that leaves mail inspections... I have no idea.
Not that I'd expect allOfMP3.com to cough up $.70 per download, either. It would put them out of business just as fast.
The administration's line would be that he's not altering the law or violating it, or even intending to violate it. He's merely clarifying what the words mean to him, in a kind of "2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2" sense.
They've discovered that when you get to write the dictionary, the words can mean anything you want them to mean.
I think that legally you're on stronger ground waiting until he actually violates the law. Intent to violate the law is not in general a crime, unless you want to get your article on Slashdot tagged "thoughtcrime" and "orwell" before first post.
At least this one is relatively easy to catch him at. The ones where his signing statements mean keeping people out of court are the real pain.
I've found that cable TV series, like HBO or Showtime, often put only two or three episodes on a disc. They have shorter seasons (often 12 episodes compared to the 22-24 of a broadcast TV series). I suspect they want to charge as much for those as for a regular TV series without looking cheap (at least until you open the box).
No skin off my nose; I get 'em via Netflix anyway.
Nice chart. I need to remember that.
Well, service on the debt is pretty immovable; you can try defaulting but that chucks the whole chart out the window. Social Security and Medicare (75% of HHS) have separate allocations (which is why SS is in it's own little chart).
That leaves Defense as the 800 lb gorilla. Touch that and you're Soft on Terror.
Those are particularly hard to fix because they're safety-net programs, that exist for compassionate reasons. They have good reason to exist: we don't want to see people suffer. But because people have an enormous ability to suffer, it's difficult to find the point where we say, "It's too expensive to keep you alive any longer."
Those programs are paid for by separate taxes, though, which is allocated specifically to them. In the case of Social Security, the program is more than pay-as-you-go; the program actually spends less than it takes in. Unfortunately, an aging population changes all that, and since that money is "saved" by giving it to the rest of the government (which promptly spends in on roads to nowhere and corn subsidies), there's big trouble ahead.
The longest-term trouble is that eventually it won't be able to keep up itself, and has spent its saved surplus; that's 2040 or so. Medium-term, though, the real problem is that it will eventually need to start spending its saved surplus, and that causes problems for the general budget, which can't pay that back. That's around 2017.
And short term, even before it's actually spending the saved surplus, as the current SS surplus nears zero, the government will have to go elsewhere to fund its deficit spending, which raises the interest rates it will have to pay. That happens in about five years, maybe less.
Since the signing statements have no legal force, I can't see how they're unconstitutional. However, if they President actually acts on the signing statement in a way that's counter to the law, that's certainly illegal.
Deficit spending isn't as obviously evil as you might think. As long as you're borrowing money cheaply and putting it into something that appreciates more quickly, it's actually in your interest to borrow as much money as possible.
A mortgage is considered an excellent investment, and it's deficit spending. In fact, many financial advisors will tell you to buy the biggest house you can afford, and pay it off slowly. That's because real estate is a good investment in general, what with the population continually rising. (Confusing matters a bit is that the tax breaks on mortgage interest make it an even better deal, though that's artificial.)
Similarly, a wise company will always have a debt: it borrows money to invest in itself and make new stuff to be even more profitable.
Mind you, all of this assumes you're investing in something valuable. Money borrowed and then wasted is the real evil. Blame the waste, not the borrowing. Cutting the borrowing is one way to limit waste, but Congress is particularly adept at finding ways to waste money. A favorite is to put the pork on the budget, deliberately under-funding something critical. Then when that runs out of money, they pass an "emergency appropriation", which doesn't count on the budget. (It shows up in the debt, though.)
Eliminating earmarks will help, but at $24 billion they're a drop in the bucket of a multi-trillion dollar budget. The real waste is in things like farm subsidies to agribusinesses and weapons programs the Pentagon doesn't want. Try cutting those, though, and watch people scream. Everybody wants the budget cut, except for the bits that come in to their state. Those are necessary.
I can't imagine what they'd do about it. They can complain, but the separation of powers means that the executive branch has essentially infinite power to execute the laws according to its own interpretation. Ultimately, the Supreme Court itself can issue its rulings but depends on the good will of the executive branch to actually do it.
Congress' main check on that power is the ability to impeach. If the President violates the laws or court decisions, then it's a "high crime and misdemeanor", and they can remove him. That's the nuclear option, but the Constitution forbids any other control. It's a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction.
In practice the President has always had to execute the laws more or less in line with what Congress said when they passed them, precisely because the nuclear option is sitting there. But Bush is discovering that really he can do whatever he wants, no matter what the law actually says. He likes to think he's doing it to preserve the security of the country, but I've got a terrible feeling he's destroying that village in order to save it.
Oh, man, you got my hopes up. It's not a song, it's just an article, by Arlan Andrews, Sr. Still, it's a great phrase, and I'm gonna use it.
I can't find a copy of the quote, but I recall hearing that after Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan Spielberg had sworn off using Nazis as generic semi-comic villains.
A twenty-years-aged Indy will probably be fighting cartoon Commies rather than cartoon Nazis. Perhaps Chinese ones.