A citizen's insurrection to correct the misdeeds of our government cannot stand up to our professional military.
Oh, I wouldn't say it's impossible. Not bloody likely, I'll grant.
As Napoleon said, "the moral is to the physical as three is to one." The question is not one of weapons and numbers, ultimately, but one of will. If one-quarter of the US population (75 million or so) were to rise in mass revolt, the million personnel in the US armed forces would have a heck of a time putting it down. If the revolutionary cause was good enough to attract even 10% of the citizen-soldiers, it'd be a walkover for the revolutionaries.
However, I don't see there's any cause that could bring a quarter of the population into the streets at once willing to fight and die, and also break the military chain of command. Except maybe for an overt grab for dictatorship like, say, a suspended presidential election.
But no president would be crazy enough to try that... right?
If the RFID is used for inventory management, then a killable (or removable) RFID is entirely sufficient for industry needs, and limits the privacy threat dramatically.
(If it's intended to prevent shoplifting, or for various after-purchase marketing purposes, then any RFID that can be reliably killed or removed is obviously not sufficient for industry needs.)
Personally, I won't mind RFID tags if they can be reliably killed. Or at least, I don't think it's a big privacy issue...
It exacerbates some economic issues, though. The benefits of RFID inventory control would mostly come from reduced overhead (read: employment) at the stores that could afford to deploy it. Sadly, RFID is more likely to be deployed at Wal-Mart than at Joe's Hardware. Wide deployment of RFID will probably put local retailers in an even worse competitive position than they have now.
I imagine that they have gone public now because they're ready to go public. It sounds like they've done everything they can reasonably do in private.
Probably they have reached the stage of testing where the tests can't be hidden anymore. When they send piggyback aircraft up and start separation tests, it's going to be pretty obvious what they're working on.
He also makes it clear in the space.com article that he is not looking for funding.
As a consultant, are you hired for your expertise, or your obedience?
If the former, then I think you have a clear duty to inform the customer when they make a decision that runs counter to your expert opinion. The force with which you should make this objection will vary substantially based on your relationship with the customer and the severity of the potential consequences to your customer and to you. Maybe you should go to the mat to stop them from hurting themselves, or maybe you don't really want them as a client anymore. [shrug]
On the other hand, if you hire yourself out for your blind obedience, well... I hope you won't ever be working for me.:)
If Mr. Hawash is innocent, I will be the first to say this is miserable and disgusting treatment.
Given that US criminal prosecutions are founded on the principle that defendants are innocent until proven guilty, it logically follow that we should presume that this "is miserable and disgusting treatment" of a US citizen until proven otherwise.
Here's some further reading for you: Amendment IV.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment V.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment VI.
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
The US military has called up some 150,000 reservists in the last several months. Presumably most of these people had civilian jobs before being called up, and most of their employers would need to fill their shoes with temporary workers. I'm just guessing, but I'd think that every ten reservists pulled out of the economy would open up at least five temporary jobs.
These overall job losses are happening despite a probable 75,000 job openings. Eeek.
In a previous job, I found that my most outlandish sarcastic suggestions were the ones most likely to be seized upon by my managers as an innovative product idea. I learned to be careful about saying such things.
"A US journalist has reportedly been contacted by lawyers representing a former Rolling Stones member Bill Wyman over use of his name, which happens to be the same as the guitarist."
How about the '77 Datsun pickup I totalled and kept driving for six years? Now that sucker could take a beating!
(I T-boned a Honda that ran a red light in front of me. It went out on a flatbed, but I just tossed my front bumper in the bed, pried the fender off the front tire, saw that all my lights still worked, and drove it for another fifty thousand miles.)
I've just skimmed the article (which seems quite good) and read the letter. I can think of a number of reasons the author wouldn't want an e-mail to slip out, but now that it has, I have to say:
That was a damn fine read.
Sure, it could use some editing, but it's not that bad. It's easy to find worse in the print press, let alone on the internet. Besides, that's just form and style... content is what really matters.
And in content, it is actually very interesting and eye-opening. I would be delighted if the author were to write a more lengthy and involved piece on WEF in Davos that actually *is* intended for publication. After this little debacle, it's sure to get a lot of exposure, and I bet she's got a lot more she could say on the subject.
(And sure, the fuss may have all been a marketing gimmick for a forthcoming article. I don't really care, because if so it was really well done!:)
I'm not especially worried about RFID tags in stores. Yes, it could be a serious privacy problem if a store tracked everything you picked up looked at in horror and disbelief, and set back down again hastily. (Like the Teddy Grahams bedsheets I saw the other week in a surplus store... a kiddie marketing tie-in gone horribly too far.) They might conclude that people were actually interested in such things.
But I digress.
What would bother me is the tracking products by RFID once I was out of the store. If stores are going to use RFID tags, I want them to expire, permanently, the moment I walk out of the place of purchase. And somehow I'm doubting that I can really trust the stores, the government, or the RFID manufacturers to take care of this little detail for me.
So if there's any EE's out there who can tell us, what does it take to reliably kill an RFID tag? (A microwave oven?) If there's no easy way, would it be feasable to make a device that would reliably burn them out?
The UI should be appropriate to the task. Some tasks will benefit greatly from flexibility, some will not.
AutoCAD, for example, provides a pretty busy interface that regularly overwhelms beginners. However, it is also a highly configurable combination of command line, toolbars, menus, and context menus, with both scripting and programming facilities built in. When a moderately advanced user starts tinkering with it, the interface can be customized to provide enormous productivity gains for that user. (On the other hand, woe to the drafter who sits down in front of someone else's custom set-up.) It's very complex, and when I was a drafter I learned to love it.
However, as a drafter I was doing very repetitive tasks... I had small tools that saved me a few keystrokes and big ones that saved me hours. If I hadn't been doing highly repetitive tasks which were subject to some optimization, all that interface customizability would have been for naught.
Does an MP3 player need much beyond simple controls and playlists? I don't think so. Much of the customization in a program that performs a simple task will amount to eye candy... useless, but fun.
Simple tasks generally call for simple interfaces, while complex (and especially repetitive) tasks call for major customizability.
As everyone knows, the point of AI is for the computer to learn by experience. As it makes its judgements, the human trainers have to tell it how well it did, so it has a baseline to learn from. Eventually, it's trained well enough to do its work autonomously.
Now, considering that the human trainers are Scottish... will it find sheep attractive?
I'd be inclined to ask "What evidence do you have that a correlation exists between credit-worthiness and employability?" If there is a study showing such a correlation, ask to see a copy before you decide whether to sign on or not. If not, then ask "Why does your policy spend so much corporate money on an unproven theory?"
I doubt such a study exists. (If they find one, post a link, eh?)
Ultimately, you've got to ask yourself if this job is worth the invasion of privacy. (I don't think there's any grounds to argue that it's *not* an unwarranted invasion of privacy, barring the aforementioned study.) If the employer is willing to spend the resources for this dubious purpose, what else might they be willing to do? Is it sompleace you really want to work, in light of this? Do the benefits still outweigh the drawbacks?
And, of course, do you have other options for paying the rent?:-/
CompUSA pulls the same shit when your walking out of the store, I get pretty irate and being stopped and having my purchases searched at the door, especially when I took only TEN STEPS from the register.
I haven't been to a CompUSA, but Fry's does the same thing. A while back, I saw a post by a person who said he just ignored the receipt-checkers and calmly kept walking out, and they gave him no trouble.
So I tried it at my local Fry's... and I got no hassle.
My advice? Ignore them and just walk out. If they stop you, ask if you are under arrest, and if so on what charge.:) Resist this tyrrany before it becomes any more common.
I think I see a loophole in the proposed bill. There does not (yet) seem to be a prohibition against intermediate mail relays stripping the "ADV:" (or "ADULTADV:") tag from the subject line. The unscrupulous initiator could route it through some equally unscrupulous server that strips such tags and forwards the mail. "Gee, it had the tag when it left MY server..."
Better get that closed, guys... wouldn't want Larry to lose his job.:)
Willis isn't a new author, but this discussion seems to have left that point well behind, so what the heck.:)
If you want a serious piece of fiction, try her "Doomsday Book" which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
If you would prefer something lighthearted, then I can't recommend "Bellwether" and "...To Say Nothing of the Dog" (which also won the Hugo for best novel) highly enough.
[...]there is another old saying, "those who are not against us are for us".
Actually, I think that's a pretty *new* saying, but it beats the hell out of the old one: "Those who are not with us are against us." The world would be a much better place if your version were the dominant one. But I digress.:)
Is he a true liberatior, or just a pacifier to keep me and everyone else from the good we really deserve?
To answer your question I need to clarify some background. Please forgive me while I state the obvious.
In the US, the law is built upon the Constitution, and the Constitution is based upon, for lack of a better term, the objective moral reality. Or, more accurately, upon the founders' vision of objective moral reality. (There is ample evidence that, if such an objective moral reality even exists, then perceptions of it have varied widely enough to allow both Gandhi and Stalin to think they were on the right track. Suffice it to say that the effect is one of moral choices, regardless of the existance of a moral reality.)
You believe that you know a piece of the moral reality, specifically that "information is meant to be free". From this, your ideas about what the constitution means and what should be the law flow quite naturally.
Sadly for you and your cause, the Founders made other choices. Specifically, in Article 1, Section 8, Congress is charged:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries[.]
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong, only that you have made a different moral choice than the Founders did. Lessig, being a lawyer, is pretty much obliged to battle on the ground the Constitution gives him, whether or not he agrees with the Founders' moral choice. He knows that he has a better chance of winning within the existing framework than he does of achieving a change in the frame.
As for you, you're not satisfied with the frame. You would like to see the Constitution changed to strike out the clause I quoted, and count all information as protected speech.
The simple answer to your question, therefore, is "No, he's not a true liberator." But the simplicity of this answer hides an essential truth.
You and Lessig are not fighting on the same front, although you *are* fighting the same war. Lessig's success or failure is not in itself relevant to your cause, because no matter what he's not going to achieve the total victory you want. However, by fighting his battle, he influences the opinions of people on a large scale, moving the body politic somewhat farther from the idea that information is inherently restricted. He's not working for your victory, but he *is* weakening your enemy.
To achieve the victory you want, you'll need to move the body politic to the point where the Constitution can be amended to reflect a different moral choice. That's a helluva long way from where it is. If I were in your shoes, I'd take all the help I could get.:)
I don't agree with you, but I certainly hope you're not modded out of existence. Yours is an interesting point of view; I'm going to have to think about your "slave-vs-free state" analogy.
However, I think Lessig's immediate resignation, as you suggest, would be a serious setback to the "freedom" of information. (And it's obvious you don't mean "as in beer".:)
If he is right that the middle way is viable in the long term, and he acieves it, then life will be pretty good. Information will be less free than in your ideal, but it will be much more free than it is now.
If he is wrong as you suggest, and the middle way is not viable in the long term, then his work does not harm your cause. In this case, it will be chiefly relevant for having moved people away from the belief that complete control is viable. Perhaps he will win a non-viable middle way, perhaps he won't... but either result improves the cause of freedom of information. (Keep in mind that this contest will take decades to win; the only close end is defeat.)
Information freedom doesn't have enough prestigious voices, speaking in places that matter, for any of them to be lightly cast aside. Whether you agree with him or not, Lessig is, at the moment, the most viable opponent to the idea of total information control*... and that idea must be defeated before we'll have the chance to quibble over the system that takes its place.
You may have valid reasons for spurning the middle way and its supporters. You should have a care, though, that in spurning the middle you don't end up on the side that you like least, for lack of allies.
*: This is a matter of opinion, of course... there are other candidates. But I haven't heard of anyone else arguing this before the US Supreme Court or other institution of similar importance. And no,/. doesn't count.:)
I'm only a minor-league math geek, likewise only a minor-league history nut. But even though I have only a dim understanding of what they are claiming, the phrase:
The derivation involves replacing operators on complex (or real) numbers with corresponding operators on hypercomplex numbers similar to the way in which steel replaced bronze as the ingredient for making swords during the Renaissance.
looks like bullshit to me.
For starters, the change from bronze to steel was so huge, in terms of technological consequences, that any analogy in mathematics has to be something as novel, powerful, and versatile as "calculus". Furthermore, any bronze sword in the Renaissance would have been centuries out of date; iron and steel had been available in those parts for a long time.
Did they invent anything nearly as important as calculus? Not likely. Did they understand history well enough to properly state their analogy even if their invention is that important? No.
I guess nothing livens up a press release like a heaping helping of hubris. Credibility, meet toilet.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I wouldn't say it's impossible. Not bloody likely, I'll grant.
As Napoleon said, "the moral is to the physical as three is to one." The question is not one of weapons and numbers, ultimately, but one of will. If one-quarter of the US population (75 million or so) were to rise in mass revolt, the million personnel in the US armed forces would have a heck of a time putting it down. If the revolutionary cause was good enough to attract even 10% of the citizen-soldiers, it'd be a walkover for the revolutionaries.
However, I don't see there's any cause that could bring a quarter of the population into the streets at once willing to fight and die, and also break the military chain of command. Except maybe for an overt grab for dictatorship like, say, a suspended presidential election.
But no president would be crazy enough to try that... right?
Apparently not. :)
If the RFID is used for inventory management, then a killable (or removable) RFID is entirely sufficient for industry needs, and limits the privacy threat dramatically.
(If it's intended to prevent shoplifting, or for various after-purchase marketing purposes, then any RFID that can be reliably killed or removed is obviously not sufficient for industry needs.)
Personally, I won't mind RFID tags if they can be reliably killed. Or at least, I don't think it's a big privacy issue...
It exacerbates some economic issues, though. The benefits of RFID inventory control would mostly come from reduced overhead (read: employment) at the stores that could afford to deploy it. Sadly, RFID is more likely to be deployed at Wal-Mart than at Joe's Hardware. Wide deployment of RFID will probably put local retailers in an even worse competitive position than they have now.
I imagine that they have gone public now because they're ready to go public. It sounds like they've done everything they can reasonably do in private.
Probably they have reached the stage of testing where the tests can't be hidden anymore. When they send piggyback aircraft up and start separation tests, it's going to be pretty obvious what they're working on.
He also makes it clear in the space.com article that he is not looking for funding.
If this program captures the x-prize, I think that Burt Rutan will securely surpass "Kelly" Johnson as the cleverest engineer in aviation history. :)
Good work and good luck!
As a consultant, are you hired for your expertise, or your obedience?
:)
If the former, then I think you have a clear duty to inform the customer when they make a decision that runs counter to your expert opinion. The force with which you should make this objection will vary substantially based on your relationship with the customer and the severity of the potential consequences to your customer and to you. Maybe you should go to the mat to stop them from hurting themselves, or maybe you don't really want them as a client anymore. [shrug]
On the other hand, if you hire yourself out for your blind obedience, well... I hope you won't ever be working for me.
If Mr. Hawash is innocent, I will be the first to say this is miserable and disgusting treatment.
Given that US criminal prosecutions are founded on the principle that defendants are innocent until proven guilty, it logically follow that we should presume that this "is miserable and disgusting treatment" of a US citizen until proven otherwise.
Here's some further reading for you:
Amendment IV.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment V.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment VI.
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Does it look familiar?
Who'd have thought there were so many luddites on slashdot?
At long last, we know for certain that Taco does hear our plea: "Stop with the duplicate stories already!"
:)
He just doesn't care.
Now THAT is comedy.
The US military has called up some 150,000 reservists in the last several months. Presumably most of these people had civilian jobs before being called up, and most of their employers would need to fill their shoes with temporary workers. I'm just guessing, but I'd think that every ten reservists pulled out of the economy would open up at least five temporary jobs.
These overall job losses are happening despite a probable 75,000 job openings. Eeek.
1) Hook the R/C motor to a generator
2) Mount it to a Segway
3) Watch Dean Kamen recoil in horror!
In a previous job, I found that my most outlandish sarcastic suggestions were the ones most likely to be seized upon by my managers as an innovative product idea. I learned to be careful about saying such things.
Why is this little anecdote relevant? Read it and weep.
"A US journalist has reportedly been contacted by lawyers representing a former Rolling Stones member Bill Wyman over use of his name, which happens to be the same as the guitarist."
How about the '77 Datsun pickup I totalled and kept driving for six years? Now that sucker could take a beating!
(I T-boned a Honda that ran a red light in front of me. It went out on a flatbed, but I just tossed my front bumper in the bed, pried the fender off the front tire, saw that all my lights still worked, and drove it for another fifty thousand miles.)
I've just skimmed the article (which seems quite good) and read the letter. I can think of a number of reasons the author wouldn't want an e-mail to slip out, but now that it has, I have to say:
:)
That was a damn fine read.
Sure, it could use some editing, but it's not that bad. It's easy to find worse in the print press, let alone on the internet. Besides, that's just form and style... content is what really matters.
And in content, it is actually very interesting and eye-opening. I would be delighted if the author were to write a more lengthy and involved piece on WEF in Davos that actually *is* intended for publication. After this little debacle, it's sure to get a lot of exposure, and I bet she's got a lot more she could say on the subject.
(And sure, the fuss may have all been a marketing gimmick for a forthcoming article. I don't really care, because if so it was really well done!
I'm not especially worried about RFID tags in stores. Yes, it could be a serious privacy problem if a store tracked everything you picked up looked at in horror and disbelief, and set back down again hastily. (Like the Teddy Grahams bedsheets I saw the other week in a surplus store... a kiddie marketing tie-in gone horribly too far.) They might conclude that people were actually interested in such things.
But I digress.
What would bother me is the tracking products by RFID once I was out of the store. If stores are going to use RFID tags, I want them to expire, permanently, the moment I walk out of the place of purchase. And somehow I'm doubting that I can really trust the stores, the government, or the RFID manufacturers to take care of this little detail for me.
So if there's any EE's out there who can tell us, what does it take to reliably kill an RFID tag? (A microwave oven?) If there's no easy way, would it be feasable to make a device that would reliably burn them out?
The UI should be appropriate to the task. Some tasks will benefit greatly from flexibility, some will not.
AutoCAD, for example, provides a pretty busy interface that regularly overwhelms beginners. However, it is also a highly configurable combination of command line, toolbars, menus, and context menus, with both scripting and programming facilities built in. When a moderately advanced user starts tinkering with it, the interface can be customized to provide enormous productivity gains for that user. (On the other hand, woe to the drafter who sits down in front of someone else's custom set-up.) It's very complex, and when I was a drafter I learned to love it.
However, as a drafter I was doing very repetitive tasks... I had small tools that saved me a few keystrokes and big ones that saved me hours. If I hadn't been doing highly repetitive tasks which were subject to some optimization, all that interface customizability would have been for naught.
Does an MP3 player need much beyond simple controls and playlists? I don't think so. Much of the customization in a program that performs a simple task will amount to eye candy... useless, but fun.
Simple tasks generally call for simple interfaces, while complex (and especially repetitive) tasks call for major customizability.
As everyone knows, the point of AI is for the computer to learn by experience. As it makes its judgements, the human trainers have to tell it how well it did, so it has a baseline to learn from. Eventually, it's trained well enough to do its work autonomously.
Now, considering that the human trainers are Scottish... will it find sheep attractive?
[puts on flame-resistant kilt]
I'd be inclined to ask "What evidence do you have that a correlation exists between credit-worthiness and employability?" If there is a study showing such a correlation, ask to see a copy before you decide whether to sign on or not. If not, then ask "Why does your policy spend so much corporate money on an unproven theory?"
:-/
I doubt such a study exists. (If they find one, post a link, eh?)
Ultimately, you've got to ask yourself if this job is worth the invasion of privacy. (I don't think there's any grounds to argue that it's *not* an unwarranted invasion of privacy, barring the aforementioned study.) If the employer is willing to spend the resources for this dubious purpose, what else might they be willing to do? Is it sompleace you really want to work, in light of this? Do the benefits still outweigh the drawbacks?
And, of course, do you have other options for paying the rent?
Tough position to be in, good luck.
CompUSA pulls the same shit when your walking out of the store, I get pretty irate and being stopped and having my purchases searched at the door, especially when I took only TEN STEPS from the register.
:) Resist this tyrrany before it becomes any more common.
I haven't been to a CompUSA, but Fry's does the same thing. A while back, I saw a post by a person who said he just ignored the receipt-checkers and calmly kept walking out, and they gave him no trouble.
So I tried it at my local Fry's... and I got no hassle.
My advice? Ignore them and just walk out. If they stop you, ask if you are under arrest, and if so on what charge.
Oh, wait, that's offtopic. Ummm...
BSA bad! No biscuit!
*whew* That's better.
I think I see a loophole in the proposed bill. There does not (yet) seem to be a prohibition against intermediate mail relays stripping the "ADV:" (or "ADULTADV:") tag from the subject line. The unscrupulous initiator could route it through some equally unscrupulous server that strips such tags and forwards the mail. "Gee, it had the tag when it left MY server..."
:)
Better get that closed, guys... wouldn't want Larry to lose his job.
Willis isn't a new author, but this discussion seems to have left that point well behind, so what the heck. :)
If you want a serious piece of fiction, try her "Doomsday Book" which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
If you would prefer something lighthearted, then I can't recommend "Bellwether" and "...To Say Nothing of the Dog" (which also won the Hugo for best novel) highly enough.
In the US, the law is built upon the Constitution, and the Constitution is based upon, for lack of a better term, the objective moral reality. Or, more accurately, upon the founders' vision of objective moral reality. (There is ample evidence that, if such an objective moral reality even exists, then perceptions of it have varied widely enough to allow both Gandhi and Stalin to think they were on the right track. Suffice it to say that the effect is one of moral choices, regardless of the existance of a moral reality.)
You believe that you know a piece of the moral reality, specifically that "information is meant to be free". From this, your ideas about what the constitution means and what should be the law flow quite naturally.
Sadly for you and your cause, the Founders made other choices. Specifically, in Article 1, Section 8, Congress is charged: Now, I'm not saying you're wrong, only that you have made a different moral choice than the Founders did. Lessig, being a lawyer, is pretty much obliged to battle on the ground the Constitution gives him, whether or not he agrees with the Founders' moral choice. He knows that he has a better chance of winning within the existing framework than he does of achieving a change in the frame.
As for you, you're not satisfied with the frame. You would like to see the Constitution changed to strike out the clause I quoted, and count all information as protected speech.
The simple answer to your question, therefore, is "No, he's not a true liberator." But the simplicity of this answer hides an essential truth.
You and Lessig are not fighting on the same front, although you *are* fighting the same war. Lessig's success or failure is not in itself relevant to your cause, because no matter what he's not going to achieve the total victory you want. However, by fighting his battle, he influences the opinions of people on a large scale, moving the body politic somewhat farther from the idea that information is inherently restricted. He's not working for your victory, but he *is* weakening your enemy.
To achieve the victory you want, you'll need to move the body politic to the point where the Constitution can be amended to reflect a different moral choice. That's a helluva long way from where it is. If I were in your shoes, I'd take all the help I could get.
I don't agree with you, but I certainly hope you're not modded out of existence. Yours is an interesting point of view; I'm going to have to think about your "slave-vs-free state" analogy.
:)
/. doesn't count. :)
However, I think Lessig's immediate resignation, as you suggest, would be a serious setback to the "freedom" of information. (And it's obvious you don't mean "as in beer".
If he is right that the middle way is viable in the long term, and he acieves it, then life will be pretty good. Information will be less free than in your ideal, but it will be much more free than it is now.
If he is wrong as you suggest, and the middle way is not viable in the long term, then his work does not harm your cause. In this case, it will be chiefly relevant for having moved people away from the belief that complete control is viable. Perhaps he will win a non-viable middle way, perhaps he won't... but either result improves the cause of freedom of information. (Keep in mind that this contest will take decades to win; the only close end is defeat.)
Information freedom doesn't have enough prestigious voices, speaking in places that matter, for any of them to be lightly cast aside. Whether you agree with him or not, Lessig is, at the moment, the most viable opponent to the idea of total information control*... and that idea must be defeated before we'll have the chance to quibble over the system that takes its place.
You may have valid reasons for spurning the middle way and its supporters. You should have a care, though, that in spurning the middle you don't end up on the side that you like least, for lack of allies.
*: This is a matter of opinion, of course... there are other candidates. But I haven't heard of anyone else arguing this before the US Supreme Court or other institution of similar importance. And no,
looks like bullshit to me.
For starters, the change from bronze to steel was so huge, in terms of technological consequences, that any analogy in mathematics has to be something as novel, powerful, and versatile as "calculus". Furthermore, any bronze sword in the Renaissance would have been centuries out of date; iron and steel had been available in those parts for a long time.
Did they invent anything nearly as important as calculus? Not likely. Did they understand history well enough to properly state their analogy even if their invention is that important? No.
I guess nothing livens up a press release like a heaping helping of hubris. Credibility, meet toilet.
I wonder how they're gonna get 'em to breathe right?