I am a researcher (biologist).
Since I work in a university, all my experiments have been funded by the tax-payer - hell, even my salary is paid by the tax-payer! [I am a basically honest person and don't let greed run roughshod over my sense of what is right]
So I believe publicly funded research data must be public.
Of course, it's possible to deduce what the missing step was from context.
I think we are witnessing a rant by Marc Morano which received disproportionate attention by it's referral on slashdot. In case this referral was deliberate, we are witnessing a political smear campaign. Live and in colour
Requiring registration with the government in order to be allowed to publish is a restriction on free speech.
It would be, but that has nothing to do with the case at hand, which requires registration for charging people money to advocate a position.
You don't need to register with the government to publish other kinds of material.
You might consider testing this idea by setting yourself up as an online doctor or lawyer. But I wouldn't try it.
An eligible person who fails to register under this law is subject to penalties, and those penalties would be incurred because of the person's speech. That's a restriction on free speech.
No, the penalty would be for engaging in a regulated commercial activity without abiding by the applicable regulations. It has nothing to do with free speech.
There's no comparison to something like dentists, since there's no constitutional right to operate on someone else's teeth.
Ok, then replace it with setting up as a lawyer and the parallel is exact. I have the right to lawyer and I have a right to free speech. If I want to go into the business of giving legal advise or speaking on behalf of my clients, I have to fulfill certain requirements.
Another problem with this law is that the definitions seem quite vague, and there's plenty of precedent for laws like this being applied far beyond their initial ostensible intent.
It may be to vague, but as I said, I'm not seeing it. What, specifically, seems to vague to you? Or is it just sort of vaguely vague?
If you get paid money to support your activities in publicizing something, you're arguably a hired agent, and that's where my Al Gore example was coming from.
If you are going to worry about this you are going to have a hard time functioning in society. If you order a pizza and the delivery guy runs over your neighbor, you could "arguably" by guilty of hiring a hit man. But no one is seriously worried about that happening.
It's quite fascinating that all it takes to get support here for a law which imposes legal restrictions on speech on the Internet, on blogs, is to ostensibly target an unpopular group.
What's the "unpopular group" in this case? So far as I can see, it isn't targeting any group but only a specific type of activity. Unless you are taking the tact that traffic laws discriminate against people who like to drive recklessly, I don't see how you could say this is aimed at a group.
My bet is that this is all moot anyway. Even if this becomes law, someone'll challenge it and courts will throw it out. I don't see how it can be constitution
The straw man version certainly would be. The actual bill, I'm not so sure.
I guess I'm just not seeing what you are seeing here. Most of your comments seem to be aimed at something unrelated to the bill in question.
For instance, where do you see anything about anybody's free speech being restricted? And where do you see anything about people like Al Gore being included?
The section 220 that the article's author objects to only applies to people who are going into a specific business, to wit, acting as a hired agent to create the appearance of a "grass roots" movement for one or more clients. It doesn't say they can't do it, only that they have to be honest about it (for a rather loose definition of "honest"). The barrier is much, much lower than for most other professions (you can't just decide you want to be a dentist by filling out some forms within 45 days after you start pulling people's teeth), and the only people I see objecting to it seem to be (like the author of the article) astroturfers.
And they seem to be objecting to it by spreading FUD, rather than arguing the case on it's merits.
If I'm missing something, please point it out--but try to be specific, and base it on the law as written, not on some astroturf scare campaign's interpretation of the law.
I dunno, I hate astroturfing as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure that laws like this are the way to solve the problem.
Why not? From what I'm reading, the only restriction it puts on astrotruffers is that they have to register, in a way that means people who want to know if they are legit can find out that they are paid shills. It doesn't stop them from shilling, or even prevent people from believing every word they say. All it does is prevent them from lying about who they are.
You do realize that many blogs have some kind of advertising to help pay for the costs of running the website, right?
You bet. I also realize that many of them like doughnuts, have siblings, and read books. Further, I concede that they often have heartfelt opinions about matters of punctuation and some (but not all) of them did well in algebra.
But most importantly, I can recognize a straw man from a kilometer away. Bloggers taking advertising doesn't mean that their advertisers are paying them to influence public opinion, anymore than the lawyer whose face is plastered all over the city buses around here is paying people to use public transportation.
I suppose a link to a wikipedia article with a "disputed neutrality" tag might be better than a link to a video of the event in question under some circumstances, but I'm not sure what those circumstances would be.
It is odd that he claims to have written fraud software long before the machines were in use.
Not really. I have been involved in quite a few development projects of various sorts, and in every one of them the software was written before the machines were put in use. With the possible exception of some Bricklin demos I would venture to guess that it is always done that way. I would find it hard to believe that the machines were put into use before the software (crooked or not) was written, but I see nothing odd about writing the software first.
The article is rather misleading. The section in question applies to astroturf operations, not bloggers:
Lobbying activities include paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying, but do not include grassroots lobbying.
(17) GRASSROOTS LOBBYING- The term `grassroots lobbying' means the voluntary efforts of members of the general public to communicate their own views on an issue to Federal officials or to encourage other members of the general public to do the same.
(18) PAID EFFORTS TO STIMULATE GRASSROOTS LOBBYING-
(A) IN GENERAL- The term `paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying' means any paid attempt in support of lobbying contacts on behalf of a client to influence the general public or segments thereof to contact one or more covered legislative or executive branch officials (or Congress as a whole) to urge such officials (or Congress) to take specific action with respect to a matter described in section 3(8)(A), except that such term does not include any communications by an entity directed to its members, employees, officers, or shareholders.
(B) PAID ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE THE GENERAL PUBLIC OR SEGMENTS THEREOF- The term `paid attempt to influence the general public or segments thereof' does not include an attempt to influence directed at less than 500 members of the general public.
...so it explicitly does not apply to what we normally think of as bloggers.
--MarkusQ
And after they step forward...?
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
Until someone steps forward and says "I did X & Y at the direction of Mr Z," I'm going to lump it along side of "The CIA killed Kennedy." Possible, but lacking solid evidence.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by incidents. While one system intrusion may net thousands of identities, it's still only one incident in terms of the password being compromised (if that is in fact how they get the data--insiders often have easier ways to get things than cracking passwords). While I would agree that attacks by insiders typically compromise more data, I would dispute that they are more frequent. Numerically, the majority of all computer security incidences are most probably bot-net abductions, which are almost always done remotely.
"Good" passwords (which, as you note, are more likely to get written down) are much better against remote attacks but often no better or even worse (because they get written down) against local attacks. It all comes down to what you are trying to protect against. If the majority of the people you are worried about have access to the sticky notes on your monitor, long passwords that need to be written down are not going to help much (unless you make a habit of writing them down incorrectly).
But for most net-connected resources these days, strong passwords are probably better simply because there are more bad guys "out there" than "in here."
If this is not the case for you--if, in other words, there are more bad guys within your office than outside it--you may want to change jobs and report your present employer to the authorities. (Unless of course your present employer is "the authorities", in which case you should probably also start carrying a Geiger counter as soon as you quit.)
I'm not sure about the 180 day limit but I doubt Congress has the authority to do that
The President is sworn to see that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed. And Congress, if it can get a veto-proof majority, has sole say on what is the law and what isn't. There's nothing in the constitution requiring a standing military--they could shut it down if they wished, and send everyone home. In addition to having sole, non-delegable authority to declare war (which they have not done for the conflict in Iraq) they are (to quote the Constitution) "To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States..."
Despite their present whining (and Bush's posturing) to the contrary, they have more than enough authority to call the whole thing off.
They could rule that the UN resolutions had been satisfied, and end the authorization for use of force.
...and so forth.
But I, like many other, doubt that they have the balls to do it.
Which brings us back to the question: if they are unwilling to take steps (or even admit that they have the power to take steps) to do something as popular and visable as ending the war in Iraq, what does the article summary comment about "giving some countries a bye" possibly mean.
Maybe s/he meant "Bye" as it is meant in Cricket - it's when you score a run even when you don't hit the ball, similar to passed ball in baseball.
I thought of that, but it still makes no sense. Are visitors from Denmark supposed to have their fingerprints filed even though they weren't taken, because of the new congress? Or maybe because of the new congress, visitors from Borneo will be allowed to provide additional fingerprints, even though they won't be filed? Or that visitors from Argentina will be allowed to miss the paper with their thumb and it will still be counted as good and filled anyway, thanks to the new congress?
Of course, it is worth pointing out that given the recent change in Congress, I suspect that a number of countries will get a "bye" on this round,
What the heck is that supposed to mean? What countries? And why? And, for that matter, how is congress going to get involved at that level of detail...especially since they're already claiming they can't even do anything to stop Bush from escalating the war, despite the fact that by most accounts they were elected to do just that?
Was part of this remark clipped off (note the trailing comma) or am I missing some interpretation that is less senseless than the obvious?
But wait--wasn't the decision to link to libkvm made by the authors of the start-stop-daemon? And aren't they the same ones who decided to release it under the GPL? It would seem to me that people are looking at things the wrong way 'round. Instead of getting wavers for libkvm they should be looking at the start-stop-daemon which has either effectively been dual licensed or has been misused by whoever decided to use libkvm (idf it wasn't the original author(s)).
It appears that Spocko had clips that ran as long as five minutes. That's beyond fair use in most circumstances.
Nuts. No particular instance is "most circumstances" so your claim, in addition to being unfounded, is meaningless. It's like arguing that there was no avalanche in Colorado this past week because there isn't that much snow on the road in most circumstances.
Fine, if that was your intention. However, if you meant that it made you question your goals you may want to be more careful how you word things. After all, the whole point of being a writer is to communicate your ideas with words.
You keep misstating the situation. It isn't about ISPs just deciding to deliver "Google's traffic" slowly they are threatening not to deliver it at all. And the packets they are holding hostage aren't Google's, they're mine. I requested them, using a service I paid for under a contract that I expect my ISP to honor.
The ISP's are charging me a rate far above what they would be able to get in a free market (without the government enforced monopolies they bought with their lobbying dollars) for access to a system the construction of which was heavily subsidized with my tax dollars. They are also charging Google for it's access (at a rate much higher than I pay). And then they are trying to change the rules and use their position to extort even more money, and you want to somehow defend this as a free and fair market?
Simply chanting "Corporate = Good, Government = Bad" doesn't make you a libertarian. But if you persist in doing it when the sainted "free market" corporation is using the government to charge four times for the same service, it does make you a chump.
It just follows that someone, like Google, who has the money to pay for extra bandwidth, would be charged for using it and then get faster access, just as I pay more for Internet and have a faster connection than my friend who has dialup from AOL... and that's why Google is for net neutrality.
You are badly misrepresenting the issue here. It isn't a question of Google paying for their bandwidth (they already do), but rather my ISP (who I am already paying for my bandwidth as well) wanting to charge Google extra simply because (as you note) they've got money. This is extortion on the one hand and fraud on the other (fraud because I'm paying them for a connection to the internet, not a connection to their filtered version of it). Google is for net neutrality for the same reason I'm for laws against mugging.
And yes, I do claim that anyone who shares the first property must hold the third, or they're not really libertarian at all, and that anyone who shares the first two shares the third.
You are wrong then.
My point is quite relevant, thanks. Libertarians do not believe that the government should step in to solve problems, even in the case of the Internet.
You are confusing libertarianism (belief that government should only step in to solve a narrow class of problems) with anarchism (belief that the government should never step in--and thus has no reason to exist). Specifically, one of the legitimate uses of government power generally accepted by libertarians is the use of government power to prevent coercive use of force, monopolies, etc. by players in the market place; another is the enforcement of contracts. Both of these apply here.
I'm a libertarian, I'm against net neutrality, and I'm not a chump.
I'm happy for you. But unless you are claiming that any pair people who share two of these properties must logically share the third, the point is completely irrelevant.
How, exactly, did the government pay to build the Internet?
Initially, through the Advanced Research Projects Agency, but later though a host of channels such as creating easements through the use of immanent domain, targeted tax breaks (which represent a cost to all other tax payers), etc.
If companies have no way to make money, they won't provide the products. It's pretty simple.
Agreed. That's why no one is calling for network communism. But there is a big difference between saying they "have no way to make money" and saying that they can't charge twice for the same service. I pay to be connected to the internet, and exchange packets with others. So does Google. The carriers are already making piles of money of of the service as it stands. Trying to slip an additional charge in there with an implied threat of failing to provide the service that we have both contracted (and paid) for is fraud, plain and simple.
So many of you are libertarian "marketplace will solve anything" types, so I'd think that you'd be philosophically against the government stepping in to prevent what companies do with their own infrastructure.
Just because we tend towards libertarianism doesn't mean we're chumps. Many of us have also been around long enough to remember that at the core it isn't the company's infrastructure, it's the public's, developed and paid for with our tax dollars. We willingly pay every month to use an ISP's infrastructure to access this shared asset, but we aren't dumb enough to think that they own it, any more than we think the airlines own the sky.
Furthermore, there is a very real argument that breaking net neutrality will break the internet, and real net neutrality legislation makes as much sense as the laws against destroying roads or jamming radio waves.
And finally, libertarians don't (or shouldn't) intrinsically trust corporations (or, for that matter, their neighbors) any more than they trust the government. Having some corporation decide when and if my packets get through isn't somehow more acceptable than having China of the NSA do it. I pay to access the internet, and I expect exactly that.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you left out a step in your argument:
Of course, it's possible to deduce what the missing step was from context.
--MarkusQ
His former jobs include producing the Rush Limbaugh show and writing fan fiction for the oil industry. Taking that with his complete misrepresentation of the original statements and you have at least a strong circumstantial case for an intentional smear campaign.
--MarkusQ
It would be, but that has nothing to do with the case at hand, which requires registration for charging people money to advocate a position.
You might consider testing this idea by setting yourself up as an online doctor or lawyer. But I wouldn't try it.
No, the penalty would be for engaging in a regulated commercial activity without abiding by the applicable regulations. It has nothing to do with free speech.
Ok, then replace it with setting up as a lawyer and the parallel is exact. I have the right to lawyer and I have a right to free speech. If I want to go into the business of giving legal advise or speaking on behalf of my clients, I have to fulfill certain requirements.
It may be to vague, but as I said, I'm not seeing it. What, specifically, seems to vague to you? Or is it just sort of vaguely vague?
If you are going to worry about this you are going to have a hard time functioning in society. If you order a pizza and the delivery guy runs over your neighbor, you could "arguably" by guilty of hiring a hit man. But no one is seriously worried about that happening.
What's the "unpopular group" in this case? So far as I can see, it isn't targeting any group but only a specific type of activity. Unless you are taking the tact that traffic laws discriminate against people who like to drive recklessly, I don't see how you could say this is aimed at a group.
The straw man version certainly would be. The actual bill, I'm not so sure.
--MarkusQ
I guess I'm just not seeing what you are seeing here. Most of your comments seem to be aimed at something unrelated to the bill in question.
For instance, where do you see anything about anybody's free speech being restricted? And where do you see anything about people like Al Gore being included?
The section 220 that the article's author objects to only applies to people who are going into a specific business, to wit, acting as a hired agent to create the appearance of a "grass roots" movement for one or more clients. It doesn't say they can't do it, only that they have to be honest about it (for a rather loose definition of "honest"). The barrier is much, much lower than for most other professions (you can't just decide you want to be a dentist by filling out some forms within 45 days after you start pulling people's teeth), and the only people I see objecting to it seem to be (like the author of the article) astroturfers.
And they seem to be objecting to it by spreading FUD, rather than arguing the case on it's merits.
If I'm missing something, please point it out--but try to be specific, and base it on the law as written, not on some astroturf scare campaign's interpretation of the law.
--MarkusQ
Why not? From what I'm reading, the only restriction it puts on astrotruffers is that they have to register, in a way that means people who want to know if they are legit can find out that they are paid shills. It doesn't stop them from shilling, or even prevent people from believing every word they say. All it does is prevent them from lying about who they are.
--MarkusQ
You bet. I also realize that many of them like doughnuts, have siblings, and read books. Further, I concede that they often have heartfelt opinions about matters of punctuation and some (but not all) of them did well in algebra.
But most importantly, I can recognize a straw man from a kilometer away. Bloggers taking advertising doesn't mean that their advertisers are paying them to influence public opinion, anymore than the lawyer whose face is plastered all over the city buses around here is paying people to use public transportation.
Nice try though.
--MarkusQ
I suppose a link to a wikipedia article with a "disputed neutrality" tag might be better than a link to a video of the event in question under some circumstances, but I'm not sure what those circumstances would be.
Not really. I have been involved in quite a few development projects of various sorts, and in every one of them the software was written before the machines were put in use. With the possible exception of some Bricklin demos I would venture to guess that it is always done that way. I would find it hard to believe that the machines were put into use before the software (crooked or not) was written, but I see nothing odd about writing the software first.
--MarkusQ
The article is rather misleading. The section in question applies to astroturf operations, not bloggers:
...so it explicitly does not apply to what we normally think of as bloggers.
--MarkusQ
As others have pointed out, it wouldn't take many people. But even so, were you aware that people have already come forward?
--MarkusQ
I suppose it depends on what you mean by incidents. While one system intrusion may net thousands of identities, it's still only one incident in terms of the password being compromised (if that is in fact how they get the data--insiders often have easier ways to get things than cracking passwords). While I would agree that attacks by insiders typically compromise more data, I would dispute that they are more frequent. Numerically, the majority of all computer security incidences are most probably bot-net abductions, which are almost always done remotely.
--MarkusQ
It's a little more complex than that.
"Good" passwords (which, as you note, are more likely to get written down) are much better against remote attacks but often no better or even worse (because they get written down) against local attacks. It all comes down to what you are trying to protect against. If the majority of the people you are worried about have access to the sticky notes on your monitor, long passwords that need to be written down are not going to help much (unless you make a habit of writing them down incorrectly).
But for most net-connected resources these days, strong passwords are probably better simply because there are more bad guys "out there" than "in here."
If this is not the case for you--if, in other words, there are more bad guys within your office than outside it--you may want to change jobs and report your present employer to the authorities. (Unless of course your present employer is "the authorities", in which case you should probably also start carrying a Geiger counter as soon as you quit.)
--MarkusQ
The President is sworn to see that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed. And Congress, if it can get a veto-proof majority, has sole say on what is the law and what isn't. There's nothing in the constitution requiring a standing military--they could shut it down if they wished, and send everyone home. In addition to having sole, non-delegable authority to declare war (which they have not done for the conflict in Iraq) they are (to quote the Constitution) "To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States..."
Despite their present whining (and Bush's posturing) to the contrary, they have more than enough authority to call the whole thing off.
--MarkusQ
Coax for light?
Why?
Did they also discover some new physics that replaces Maxwell's equations with some bazaaro world version where light causes inductance?
--MarkusQ
There's a lot that congress could do to stop the war.
But I, like many other, doubt that they have the balls to do it.
Which brings us back to the question: if they are unwilling to take steps (or even admit that they have the power to take steps) to do something as popular and visable as ending the war in Iraq, what does the article summary comment about "giving some countries a bye" possibly mean.
--MarkusQ
I thought of that, but it still makes no sense. Are visitors from Denmark supposed to have their fingerprints filed even though they weren't taken, because of the new congress? Or maybe because of the new congress, visitors from Borneo will be allowed to provide additional fingerprints, even though they won't be filed? Or that visitors from Argentina will be allowed to miss the paper with their thumb and it will still be counted as good and filled anyway, thanks to the new congress?
--MarkusQ
What the heck is that supposed to mean? What countries? And why? And, for that matter, how is congress going to get involved at that level of detail...especially since they're already claiming they can't even do anything to stop Bush from escalating the war, despite the fact that by most accounts they were elected to do just that?
Was part of this remark clipped off (note the trailing comma) or am I missing some interpretation that is less senseless than the obvious?
--MarkusQ
But wait--wasn't the decision to link to libkvm made by the authors of the start-stop-daemon? And aren't they the same ones who decided to release it under the GPL? It would seem to me that people are looking at things the wrong way 'round. Instead of getting wavers for libkvm they should be looking at the start-stop-daemon which has either effectively been dual licensed or has been misused by whoever decided to use libkvm (idf it wasn't the original author(s)).
--MarkusQ
Nuts. No particular instance is "most circumstances" so your claim, in addition to being unfounded, is meaningless. It's like arguing that there was no avalanche in Colorado this past week because there isn't that much snow on the road in most circumstances.
Or, if you prefer a more formal version, you committed a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid.
--MarkusQ
Fine, if that was your intention. However, if you meant that it made you question your goals you may want to be more careful how you word things. After all, the whole point of being a writer is to communicate your ideas with words.
--MarkusQ
Why does it make you question your motives? Are you suspecting yourself of harboring self-destructive tendencies?
--MarkusQ
You keep misstating the situation. It isn't about ISPs just deciding to deliver "Google's traffic" slowly they are threatening not to deliver it at all. And the packets they are holding hostage aren't Google's, they're mine. I requested them, using a service I paid for under a contract that I expect my ISP to honor.
The ISP's are charging me a rate far above what they would be able to get in a free market (without the government enforced monopolies they bought with their lobbying dollars) for access to a system the construction of which was heavily subsidized with my tax dollars. They are also charging Google for it's access (at a rate much higher than I pay). And then they are trying to change the rules and use their position to extort even more money, and you want to somehow defend this as a free and fair market?
Simply chanting "Corporate = Good, Government = Bad" doesn't make you a libertarian. But if you persist in doing it when the sainted "free market" corporation is using the government to charge four times for the same service, it does make you a chump.
--MarkusQ
You are badly misrepresenting the issue here. It isn't a question of Google paying for their bandwidth (they already do), but rather my ISP (who I am already paying for my bandwidth as well) wanting to charge Google extra simply because (as you note) they've got money. This is extortion on the one hand and fraud on the other (fraud because I'm paying them for a connection to the internet, not a connection to their filtered version of it). Google is for net neutrality for the same reason I'm for laws against mugging.
You are wrong then.
You are confusing libertarianism (belief that government should only step in to solve a narrow class of problems) with anarchism (belief that the government should never step in--and thus has no reason to exist). Specifically, one of the legitimate uses of government power generally accepted by libertarians is the use of government power to prevent coercive use of force, monopolies, etc. by players in the market place; another is the enforcement of contracts. Both of these apply here.
--MarkusQ
I'm happy for you. But unless you are claiming that any pair people who share two of these properties must logically share the third, the point is completely irrelevant.
Initially, through the Advanced Research Projects Agency, but later though a host of channels such as creating easements through the use of immanent domain, targeted tax breaks (which represent a cost to all other tax payers), etc.
Agreed. That's why no one is calling for network communism. But there is a big difference between saying they "have no way to make money" and saying that they can't charge twice for the same service. I pay to be connected to the internet, and exchange packets with others. So does Google. The carriers are already making piles of money of of the service as it stands. Trying to slip an additional charge in there with an implied threat of failing to provide the service that we have both contracted (and paid) for is fraud, plain and simple.
--MarkusQ
Just because we tend towards libertarianism doesn't mean we're chumps. Many of us have also been around long enough to remember that at the core it isn't the company's infrastructure, it's the public's, developed and paid for with our tax dollars. We willingly pay every month to use an ISP's infrastructure to access this shared asset, but we aren't dumb enough to think that they own it, any more than we think the airlines own the sky.
Furthermore, there is a very real argument that breaking net neutrality will break the internet, and real net neutrality legislation makes as much sense as the laws against destroying roads or jamming radio waves.
And finally, libertarians don't (or shouldn't) intrinsically trust corporations (or, for that matter, their neighbors) any more than they trust the government. Having some corporation decide when and if my packets get through isn't somehow more acceptable than having China of the NSA do it. I pay to access the internet, and I expect exactly that.
--MarkusQ
2007-1974 = 33, not 20.
--MarkusQ