Somehow, I'm less worried about the Government CTO (though they're still important) as I am about the new Copyright Czar. What will we do if he picks some ex-RIAA flack? I know that Lessig is close to Obama, so I can only hope that he gets good advice.
Personally, I'd ask William Patry. He's more of a moderate, but that's why his choice would be politically safe. He's also one of the world's foremost experts on copyrights, so that's another plus. But because he's no fan of the MAFIAA's expansionist view of copyright, we could at least make sure that they can't use the office for evil even while we would be able to head off any other nominees because pretty much nobody could be as qualified as him.
> I don't recall the whacky Right being that smug last election when Bush won somewhat comfortably.
Actually, I was on the other side of the fence in 2004 and there was nothing to cheer about. Nobody was happy about Bush, they were just glad he wasn't Kerry. Though damn, I wish I had that vote back. He was elected to fix his own mess, not make more of them.
Anyhow, with Obama, I'm *glad* to vote for him. I've supported him since the primaries. True, I've gone from thinking that McCain would be an okay president to being eager to campaign against McCain in 2010 (I live in AZ), but that's not why I support Obama.
Look, I voted for Bush. Twice. It was a mistake. But I've never once been so eager to see my own party lose. And I want to see them lose in the worst possible way. So yeah. Maybe I'll watch Fox. Because I know the Republican party is out of control and needs to be put out of its misery.
I may be a Republican, but after what they've done to this country, I'm going to be first in line to dance on the Republican party's grave.
I'd release my stuff as freeware with a EULA that said that politicians weren't allowed to use it, then go after only them. Nobody reads EULAs if they can help it.
The reason they have so many versions is that people tend to buy the most expensive version they can afford, so they want to squeeze the maximum number of dollars out of people. In other words, they won't give them up just because customers dislike them.
In the mean time, I'm tagging this story "yeahright" because I really doubt that a feature like this will make it into the final version unless it's hobbled somehow. They promised to put all kinds of stuff into Vista, then cut most of it at the last second.
> Ye would feel differently if, after you finish writing a beautiful program, your employer said "thanks" and took it without paying you.
No, I'd just make sure to get my payment up front.
Laws can't make unsustainable businesses sustainable. I would have thought that the recent meltdown would drive home that point, but alas, it seems like people believe otherwise...
In my mind, "unauthorized access" should require a material deception. That is, but for the deception, he would not have been able to access the material.
Otherwise, people set up open access where you can (but shouldn't) do all kinds of things and that laziness is used as an excuse to scapegoat anyone who does something to embarrass them. If people aren't authorized, they shouldn't have access. (But note that people might still have a duty of confidentiality, not to spread information they're authorized to access.)
Alas, the law doesn't make much sense in several regards. And this guy WAS smart enough to send the note anonymously. Just not anonymously enough, I guess. God knows, when I reported a security flaw to my university long ago, I made sure to take better precautions...
Right you are. The only part about fair use in the DMCA is that it (allegedly) doesn't change it any.
Thought it does leave abuse-prone Notice & Takedown problems. Granted, the Safe Harbor in the law _is_ a huge help and I wouldn't want to give that up. But that doesn't mean that the Takedown procedures shouldn't be reformed (or removed).
So there's really only one good part of it: the Safe Harbor. If you ditched the rest of the bill tomorrow, I doubt anyone but the MAFIAA would miss it.
Which must be why they're singing its praises right now. I mean, it is an election season and they have clueless people to manipulate so that they'll think it's something wonderful.
But they always do stuff like that. They want us to see only the fava beans and chianti and ignore the rest of the bill they ordered...
What polls are you reading!? It's not even kinda close right now, unless you look at that one outlier poll with an unrepresentative sample of younger voters.
Even the mainstream news outlets, which only call it for a candidate when they're 10% ahead, show Obama winning. The most likely EV total is 375 (and you need 270 to win).
That said, you're right that both candidates and the news would rather we treat it as if it's close. After all, if people don't bother to vote, the election could swing big time.
But I expect that people actually will vote and that it won't even be kinda sorta close. Rather, there will be lots of recriminations in the Republican party and McCain will come off as the next Goldwater (at least in terms of EVs).
> and they should behave like an ISP and stop filtering crap for unrelated corporate interests.
The RIAA then sponsored a bill trying to get their federal funding cut off if they didn't do something about P2P. That provision was watered down, but they've still been told to, in effect, "do something" about the RIAA's problems.
Well, we're still missing some of the ACORN story. For one thing, the problem is because they pay people per registration. So some people like to add a bunch of phony registrations to get paid more.
ACORN knows this, so they look for it and fire those people. They also separate the probably fraudulent registrations. But they are required by law to give ALL of the registrations to the elections officials, so they also include a note saying, "These are probably fraudulent, please check. And here are the details of the guy who came up with these probably fraudulent registrations so you can prosecute them."
They've done this for a long time now. Remember that scandal over the illegal firing of US Attorneys? That was because they refused to prosecute ACORN for this years ago because they did not believe that they were doing anything illegal. But Bush's people fired all the people who said it was legal and stacked the deck with hardcore Republicans. So now they're prosecuting.
Even though ACORN is being defrauded by bad workers. Even though ACORN is obeying the law. Even though ACORN verifies the registrations and separates the bad ones in spite of having no legal obligation to do so.
This is just politically motivated nonsense. Yes, there will probably be convictions, but they'll be of people ACORN turned in and recommended for prosecution.
> I mean, really, do you think for a second that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are going to appoint someone like Lessig?
Bush, Cheney & Rove vanish next January. Even if they have time to appoint someone, that person would get replaced by the next administration. There's a virtual guarantee that the next President will be Obama and he's thinking about how to put together his cabinet right now.
So this would be a good time to suggest reasonable people to head this thing. It's going to pump out all sorts of piracy studies. The industry wants it to create more BS economic damage numbers that it can spin. That's why it's VERY important that it have an honest and competent leader, whoever it might be.
> There was nothing in them that any sane person would construe as state business. Talking about election plans and partisan coverage is emphatically not state business; it's a party political matter. Sending family photos is, again, not state business.
According to the Guardian, who has looked at the Wikileaks data, among the emails in Palin's account were several from addresses belonging to her aides, including a draft letter to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a discussion of nominations to the state court of appeals, and several bearing "DPS", the acronym for the Alaska Department of Public Safety.
There's also an image with an email saying "Fw: veep talking points" It's hard to see that as a personal email, given that this was before the Tina Fey jokes.
No one is saying that the family emails were government business. That's absurd. I will even agree that most of the email was personal, but it's clear that not all of it was and the two shouldn't be mixed in the first place! I personally keep my work email on a separate account from my personal email and I don't mix the two in general, particularly if dealing with outside customers.
How is a draft of a letter to Gen. Schwarzenegger concerning government business "personal", anyhow? This becomes even more relevant when you consider that her tax returns are a bit odd. She's been getting a per diem (along with her family!) for being "away from the office" (and at home). At least some of this should clearly be reported as income. I know it's a side issue, but my point is that having one of her emails hacked by some dumbass who declared her innocent doesn't actually exonerate her. Also, we're told that the gov.sarah account was more widely used for government business and it was NOT hacked, if you recall. You can read the tax analysis here, BTW.
And the information I put up on the Alaska Public Records Act, for that matter, specifically says "There is no exception in the law for records of the governor." Yes, there are other exceptions, but it's hard to see Gov. Schwarzenegger as one of her personal advisers. And one ought NOT to be using Yahoo for government business at all.
Can you imagine if she was VP and sent Top Secret information there? I will grant that it's more shady and sloppy than anything. But I'd rather have careful leaders than careless ones.
That said, you're right that she's not hiding some major crime, just violating a few minor laws. So what I'm saying is that I don't trust her because of this.
And I will maintain again (lest someone read this and not grandparent), that the hacker here deserves punishment. I do NOT think he deserves any sympathy. He's a dumbass (which is why I don't believe that he knew anything about Alaska's Public Records laws).
To summarize: * Palin is secretive and I don't trust her. I think her privacy should be respected, but I wish she wouldn't mix government and private business. * She clearly breaks many minor laws, but apparently few major ones (I reserve judgment about Troopergate. That investigation was open long before she ran for VP and the guy who said it could be an "October Surprise" was just stating the obvious.) * The hacker is an idiot who deserves punishment.
> I really wanted to get something incriminating which I was sure there would be, just like all of you anon out there that you think there was some missed opportunity of glory, well there WAS NOTHING
Spouting that as proof is like taking Slashdot's advice on a legal matter. But I'm fairly sure this idiot didn't know about the Alaska Public Records Act, and it's hard to miss that there were several emails marked "CONFIDENTIAL" and discussing government matters.
That said, you're right that this guy deserves to be prosecuted. He broke the law and he'll get his due. But the fact that he was wrong does not make Palin right.
Damn, I didn't realize he was that high up. But you're right; there's no way Congress would impeach. Still, in general, that's how you remove a judge, though it doesn't happen very often.
That said, I think it's perfectly legitimate to advocate for the removal of judges who are careless in following the law if they cross a certain threshold. I'm not saying what this guy did rises to that standard (I personally think he just doesn't know the RIAA very well yet, and he may never get the chance), but if there's a pattern of decisions like this, he should definitely be removed.
While it's true that the framers wanted to insulate judges from politics, if any considerable portion of the electorate sees a judge as corrupt (rightly or wrongly), it's not unreasonable to remove them. Even if they're not actually corrupt, they can undermine people's faith in the justice system, which is harmful in and of itself.
Well, the nice thing is that even if they're sincere, they'll still be hacking & DoSing their competitors.
Oh, and I read those emails too, but I didn't see much about MiiVi at all, except when they were talking about the bestiality and child porn filters (apparently they have samples of that stuff!?!).
Unfortunately, MediaDefender-Defenders.com seems to have vanished a while back (it forwards to TPB instead of having browsable emails), so I can't really check any more. Yeah, there are torrents that are still around, but they don't seem well-seeded any more.
I was just going to make a quick post in which I would say something like "this seriously makes me wonder just how difficult it is to impeach a judge," then I saw your comment.
It's funny you should ask that, because Oregon has early voting, and if they're anything like my state, they should have ballots in hand soon. I already voted this morning, in fact, even though the election isn't until November. You know how after you vote for the presidential election, senators, representatives, propositions & whatnot, there's that HUGE list of judges that you vote "yes" or "no" on? That's a vote to recall them.
So if you see one Michael R. Hogan, mark your ballot "no" and you're voting not to retain this guy (in other words, you're voting to fire his ass). If you don't have an early ballot, you can also do it at the polls in November, assuming you remember that long.
If a majority of voters vote this guy out, he's fired, but it rarely happens unless a judge ticks off enough people.
> Senator Obama, you claim to want to give the "middle class" a tax cut, but at the same time you propose to raise capital gains taxes, the death tax and corporate taxes, among others.
For starters, that tax cut refers specifically to his income tax plan. Here, read this comparison.
You have a very strange idea of what "small businesses and small investors" are if you think we're affected much by those taxes. All of those taxes affect primarily the rich. I have some decent investments but those taxes are nothing compared to income tax.
But that's probably because I work, rather than living off investments...
It's just an obvious attempt on their part to weasel out of their liability for attorneys fees, after torturing this innocent woman for the past 3 years.
Is that what they're after? I'd have guessed that they were looking for a way to force you to stop commenting on their litigation campaign?
I'm not sure they can do that, but I'm sure they'd like to. I remember reading on Groklaw that attorneys can sometimes be prevented from talking about cases during litigation.
And you're clearly hurting their PR. I'm sure they hate that, because that costs them money (though probably not as much as if the labels themselves were getting the bad PR).
Then why did he vote against so many bills that would've provided money for medical care? And seriously, there's got to be some kind of limit to how many things you can use the POW excuse for. Can you name even one fault of his that isn't allegedly due to his POW injuries? I'm happy to honor the man's service. But I think he cheapens the service of others by using it as a flimsy catch-all excuse. The other veterans don't deserve that.
I'm disgusted that McCain would cheapen the service of America's POWs by playing politics with their service.
> In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate's savviest technologist
Ahh, Forbes. The place that trumpeted SCO's technology claims. But let's counter that claim with facts, not implication.
For one, Ted "The Internet is not a Big Truck" Stevens is in charge of the Internet in Congress in case you've forgotten. Is that supposed to inspire confidence!? Being in charge of something in Congress doesn't prove you know anything. It proves that you have seniority.
McCain is also against Net Neutrality and other "prescriptive regulation," thinks Ballmer would make good tech policy, etc. That's NOT what I'd call a "savvy technologist."
I note that you're trying to make your case by implication (because of X, he SHOULD know about Y), rather than citing anything specific that he knows. This is a common rhetorical trick, but it won't work on me. The more you rely on inference than direct evidence, the weaker I know your claims are.
A) "Bias" is the wrong thing to talk about. Which part of it wasn't factual? You said it "distorts the facts" but which facts does it distort?
B) You call her wealth irrelevant. This proves your ignorance. Please read the four-factor copyright test for fair use. How it affects the market for works is one of the factors. But you wouldn't know that, not being a lawyer, would you?
C) Some of us do RTFA. That's how we know about things like the four-factor test.
D) KDawson is the editor, but NYCL is the submitter. You're talking to him, but you don't seem to even realize that NYCL wrote the phrase you're complaining about. There's a firehose link to the unedited summary. Read it sometime?
E) The partisanship of a source is irrelevant; their accuracy is relevant. You can't claim that someone is wrong merely because they're a "liberal" or "conservative" or a "lawyer" or whatever other label you might wish to use. You have to rebut facts with facts.
You have ignored all the facts. You have shown no evidence of having read the decision. You merely pronounced NYCL as "biased" because you did not understand his reasoning. But you made no attempt to understand it whatsoever.
Please, before you go off about "bias" whenever something doesn't agree with you, examine the facts. It's true that cherry picking facts can be misleading, but then it's up to you to supply the missing facts. You can't just say "it's biased" and wash your hands of the matter.
So please, do you have any facts at all? I have already rebutted your claim that wealth is irrelevant; the only claim in your entire post. Why don't you tell us why you still think it's meaningless while taking the four-factor copyright test into account?
Of course, you'd have to read the decision and find out what that is, first...
> Should we not seek to elect those that generally tell us what they are actually thinking?
Yes.
But the problem with raising your standards is that eventually, no one will be able to legitimately meet your standards. At that point, you will get nothing but those who are best able to pretend to meet your standards.
Though this happens most often in business, where they release some business metric. Then they keep raising it when they see profits slip. After that, it becomes a contest of who is best able to cheat.
She hired a lobbyist to get earmarks for a tiny town (reports list it anywhere from 5 to 9 thousand people). You want to blame Ted Stevens for all the earmarks, but she ran his PAC. He endorsed her.
I think she's "libertarian" in marketing only.
I don't think that government jobs should be "for life" but how did you get that out of that story? She was using a political test on people, rather than hiring people according to competence.
Isn't that how we got "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!" from Bush to the guy who helped screw up the Hurricane Katrina response? And how we got all these government "scientists" who aren't?
Please read that email I keep linking to if you haven't yet. It's balanced on the whole and it was written by someone who knows Palin very well.
I can see a few things to like about her, but overall, I see a woman who is a very good politician in terms of getting people to see her the way she wants them to.
I think you'll end up opposing a department for volunteers (who might take over for paid government in running community projects) and end up with a vastly expanded Department of Homeland Security and more increases in the federal government. I believe Bush increased the government more than anyone for the past 50 years or more.
And 8 years ago, I might have agreed with you. In fact, I probably would have. But McCain is my senator, and I've lost all respect for him in the past 3 years seeing him become a phony who is now against whatever he once stood for, though I had always supported him until now. Palin is no help, either; she runs the Ultimate Welfare State up in Alaska, which takes more of our tax money to spend on giveaway programs in Alaska than any other.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, I'm less worried about the Government CTO (though they're still important) as I am about the new Copyright Czar. What will we do if he picks some ex-RIAA flack? I know that Lessig is close to Obama, so I can only hope that he gets good advice.
Personally, I'd ask William Patry. He's more of a moderate, but that's why his choice would be politically safe. He's also one of the world's foremost experts on copyrights, so that's another plus. But because he's no fan of the MAFIAA's expansionist view of copyright, we could at least make sure that they can't use the office for evil even while we would be able to head off any other nominees because pretty much nobody could be as qualified as him.
At least, that's my thinking.
> I don't recall the whacky Right being that smug last election when Bush won somewhat comfortably.
Actually, I was on the other side of the fence in 2004 and there was nothing to cheer about. Nobody was happy about Bush, they were just glad he wasn't Kerry. Though damn, I wish I had that vote back. He was elected to fix his own mess, not make more of them.
Anyhow, with Obama, I'm *glad* to vote for him. I've supported him since the primaries. True, I've gone from thinking that McCain would be an okay president to being eager to campaign against McCain in 2010 (I live in AZ), but that's not why I support Obama.
Look, I voted for Bush. Twice. It was a mistake. But I've never once been so eager to see my own party lose. And I want to see them lose in the worst possible way. So yeah. Maybe I'll watch Fox. Because I know the Republican party is out of control and needs to be put out of its misery.
I may be a Republican, but after what they've done to this country, I'm going to be first in line to dance on the Republican party's grave.
I'd release my stuff as freeware with a EULA that said that politicians weren't allowed to use it, then go after only them. Nobody reads EULAs if they can help it.
The reason they have so many versions is that people tend to buy the most expensive version they can afford, so they want to squeeze the maximum number of dollars out of people. In other words, they won't give them up just because customers dislike them.
In the mean time, I'm tagging this story "yeahright" because I really doubt that a feature like this will make it into the final version unless it's hobbled somehow. They promised to put all kinds of stuff into Vista, then cut most of it at the last second.
> (a) this is Slashdot, and (b) this is Halloween. How on Earth do you expect to find a sensible summary given a juxtaposition like that?
(c) That headline is too long.
It's (c) that kills a lot of good headlines, honestly, but there's only so much space on the front page for those headlines to fit.
> Ye would feel differently if, after you finish writing a beautiful program, your employer said "thanks" and took it without paying you.
No, I'd just make sure to get my payment up front.
Laws can't make unsustainable businesses sustainable. I would have thought that the recent meltdown would drive home that point, but alas, it seems like people believe otherwise ...
In my mind, "unauthorized access" should require a material deception. That is, but for the deception, he would not have been able to access the material.
Otherwise, people set up open access where you can (but shouldn't) do all kinds of things and that laziness is used as an excuse to scapegoat anyone who does something to embarrass them. If people aren't authorized, they shouldn't have access. (But note that people might still have a duty of confidentiality, not to spread information they're authorized to access.)
Alas, the law doesn't make much sense in several regards. And this guy WAS smart enough to send the note anonymously. Just not anonymously enough, I guess. God knows, when I reported a security flaw to my university long ago, I made sure to take better precautions...
Right you are. The only part about fair use in the DMCA is that it (allegedly) doesn't change it any.
Thought it does leave abuse-prone Notice & Takedown problems. Granted, the Safe Harbor in the law _is_ a huge help and I wouldn't want to give that up. But that doesn't mean that the Takedown procedures shouldn't be reformed (or removed).
So there's really only one good part of it: the Safe Harbor. If you ditched the rest of the bill tomorrow, I doubt anyone but the MAFIAA would miss it.
Which must be why they're singing its praises right now. I mean, it is an election season and they have clueless people to manipulate so that they'll think it's something wonderful.
But they always do stuff like that. They want us to see only the fava beans and chianti and ignore the rest of the bill they ordered...
What polls are you reading!? It's not even kinda close right now, unless you look at that one outlier poll with an unrepresentative sample of younger voters.
Even the mainstream news outlets, which only call it for a candidate when they're 10% ahead, show Obama winning. The most likely EV total is 375 (and you need 270 to win).
That said, you're right that both candidates and the news would rather we treat it as if it's close. After all, if people don't bother to vote, the election could swing big time.
But I expect that people actually will vote and that it won't even be kinda sorta close. Rather, there will be lots of recriminations in the Republican party and McCain will come off as the next Goldwater (at least in terms of EVs).
> and they should behave like an ISP and stop filtering crap for unrelated corporate interests.
The RIAA then sponsored a bill trying to get their federal funding cut off if they didn't do something about P2P. That provision was watered down, but they've still been told to, in effect, "do something" about the RIAA's problems.
Whether they want to or not.
Well, we're still missing some of the ACORN story. For one thing, the problem is because they pay people per registration. So some people like to add a bunch of phony registrations to get paid more.
ACORN knows this, so they look for it and fire those people. They also separate the probably fraudulent registrations. But they are required by law to give ALL of the registrations to the elections officials, so they also include a note saying, "These are probably fraudulent, please check. And here are the details of the guy who came up with these probably fraudulent registrations so you can prosecute them."
They've done this for a long time now. Remember that scandal over the illegal firing of US Attorneys? That was because they refused to prosecute ACORN for this years ago because they did not believe that they were doing anything illegal. But Bush's people fired all the people who said it was legal and stacked the deck with hardcore Republicans. So now they're prosecuting.
Even though ACORN is being defrauded by bad workers. Even though ACORN is obeying the law. Even though ACORN verifies the registrations and separates the bad ones in spite of having no legal obligation to do so.
This is just politically motivated nonsense. Yes, there will probably be convictions, but they'll be of people ACORN turned in and recommended for prosecution.
Personally, I look for the transcript. It's a LOT smaller and I can read a lot faster than they can talk.
And frankly, you don't miss anything worthwhile. Who wants to see McCain on a green screen again?
(Yes, I know that was at a speech, not at one of the debates.)
> I mean, really, do you think for a second that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are going to appoint someone like Lessig?
Bush, Cheney & Rove vanish next January. Even if they have time to appoint someone, that person would get replaced by the next administration. There's a virtual guarantee that the next President will be Obama and he's thinking about how to put together his cabinet right now.
So this would be a good time to suggest reasonable people to head this thing. It's going to pump out all sorts of piracy studies. The industry wants it to create more BS economic damage numbers that it can spin. That's why it's VERY important that it have an honest and competent leader, whoever it might be.
> There was nothing in them that any sane person would construe as state business. Talking about election plans and partisan coverage is emphatically not state business; it's a party political matter. Sending family photos is, again, not state business.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_Yahoo_inbox_2008
There's also an image with an email saying "Fw: veep talking points" It's hard to see that as a personal email, given that this was before the Tina Fey jokes.
No one is saying that the family emails were government business. That's absurd. I will even agree that most of the email was personal, but it's clear that not all of it was and the two shouldn't be mixed in the first place! I personally keep my work email on a separate account from my personal email and I don't mix the two in general, particularly if dealing with outside customers.
How is a draft of a letter to Gen. Schwarzenegger concerning government business "personal", anyhow? This becomes even more relevant when you consider that her tax returns are a bit odd. She's been getting a per diem (along with her family!) for being "away from the office" (and at home). At least some of this should clearly be reported as income. I know it's a side issue, but my point is that having one of her emails hacked by some dumbass who declared her innocent doesn't actually exonerate her. Also, we're told that the gov.sarah account was more widely used for government business and it was NOT hacked, if you recall. You can read the tax analysis here, BTW.
And the information I put up on the Alaska Public Records Act, for that matter, specifically says "There is no exception in the law for records of the governor." Yes, there are other exceptions, but it's hard to see Gov. Schwarzenegger as one of her personal advisers. And one ought NOT to be using Yahoo for government business at all.
Can you imagine if she was VP and sent Top Secret information there? I will grant that it's more shady and sloppy than anything. But I'd rather have careful leaders than careless ones.
That said, you're right that she's not hiding some major crime, just violating a few minor laws. So what I'm saying is that I don't trust her because of this.
And I will maintain again (lest someone read this and not grandparent), that the hacker here deserves punishment. I do NOT think he deserves any sympathy. He's a dumbass (which is why I don't believe that he knew anything about Alaska's Public Records laws).
To summarize:
* Palin is secretive and I don't trust her. I think her privacy should be respected, but I wish she wouldn't mix government and private business.
* She clearly breaks many minor laws, but apparently few major ones (I reserve judgment about Troopergate. That investigation was open long before she ran for VP and the guy who said it could be an "October Surprise" was just stating the obvious.)
* The hacker is an idiot who deserves punishment.
> I really wanted to get something incriminating which I was sure there would be, just like all of you anon out there that you think there was some missed opportunity of glory, well there WAS NOTHING
Spouting that as proof is like taking Slashdot's advice on a legal matter. But I'm fairly sure this idiot didn't know about the Alaska Public Records Act, and it's hard to miss that there were several emails marked "CONFIDENTIAL" and discussing government matters.
That said, you're right that this guy deserves to be prosecuted. He broke the law and he'll get his due. But the fact that he was wrong does not make Palin right.
Damn, I didn't realize he was that high up. But you're right; there's no way Congress would impeach. Still, in general, that's how you remove a judge, though it doesn't happen very often.
That said, I think it's perfectly legitimate to advocate for the removal of judges who are careless in following the law if they cross a certain threshold. I'm not saying what this guy did rises to that standard (I personally think he just doesn't know the RIAA very well yet, and he may never get the chance), but if there's a pattern of decisions like this, he should definitely be removed.
While it's true that the framers wanted to insulate judges from politics, if any considerable portion of the electorate sees a judge as corrupt (rightly or wrongly), it's not unreasonable to remove them. Even if they're not actually corrupt, they can undermine people's faith in the justice system, which is harmful in and of itself.
Well, the nice thing is that even if they're sincere, they'll still be hacking & DoSing their competitors.
Oh, and I read those emails too, but I didn't see much about MiiVi at all, except when they were talking about the bestiality and child porn filters (apparently they have samples of that stuff!?!).
Unfortunately, MediaDefender-Defenders.com seems to have vanished a while back (it forwards to TPB instead of having browsable emails), so I can't really check any more. Yeah, there are torrents that are still around, but they don't seem well-seeded any more.
It's funny you should ask that, because Oregon has early voting, and if they're anything like my state, they should have ballots in hand soon. I already voted this morning, in fact, even though the election isn't until November. You know how after you vote for the presidential election, senators, representatives, propositions & whatnot, there's that HUGE list of judges that you vote "yes" or "no" on? That's a vote to recall them.
So if you see one Michael R. Hogan, mark your ballot "no" and you're voting not to retain this guy (in other words, you're voting to fire his ass). If you don't have an early ballot, you can also do it at the polls in November, assuming you remember that long.
If a majority of voters vote this guy out, he's fired, but it rarely happens unless a judge ticks off enough people.
> Senator Obama, you claim to want to give the "middle class" a tax cut, but at the same time you propose to raise capital gains taxes, the death tax and corporate taxes, among others.
For starters, that tax cut refers specifically to his income tax plan. Here, read this comparison.
You have a very strange idea of what "small businesses and small investors" are if you think we're affected much by those taxes. All of those taxes affect primarily the rich. I have some decent investments but those taxes are nothing compared to income tax.
But that's probably because I work, rather than living off investments...
Is that what they're after? I'd have guessed that they were looking for a way to force you to stop commenting on their litigation campaign?
I'm not sure they can do that, but I'm sure they'd like to. I remember reading on Groklaw that attorneys can sometimes be prevented from talking about cases during litigation.
And you're clearly hurting their PR. I'm sure they hate that, because that costs them money (though probably not as much as if the labels themselves were getting the bad PR).
I know you're joking, but for anyone who doesn't get the joke, Microsoft is a BSA member.
They only terrorize small businesses.
> McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200806040002
Then why did he vote against so many bills that would've provided money for medical care? And seriously, there's got to be some kind of limit to how many things you can use the POW excuse for. Can you name even one fault of his that isn't allegedly due to his POW injuries? I'm happy to honor the man's service. But I think he cheapens the service of others by using it as a flimsy catch-all excuse. The other veterans don't deserve that.
I'm disgusted that McCain would cheapen the service of America's POWs by playing politics with their service.
> In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate's savviest technologist
Ahh, Forbes. The place that trumpeted SCO's technology claims. But let's counter that claim with facts, not implication.
For one, Ted "The Internet is not a Big Truck" Stevens is in charge of the Internet in Congress in case you've forgotten. Is that supposed to inspire confidence!? Being in charge of something in Congress doesn't prove you know anything. It proves that you have seniority.
McCain is also against Net Neutrality and other "prescriptive regulation," thinks Ballmer would make good tech policy, etc. That's NOT what I'd call a "savvy technologist."
I note that you're trying to make your case by implication (because of X, he SHOULD know about Y), rather than citing anything specific that he knows. This is a common rhetorical trick, but it won't work on me. The more you rely on inference than direct evidence, the weaker I know your claims are.
A) "Bias" is the wrong thing to talk about. Which part of it wasn't factual? You said it "distorts the facts" but which facts does it distort?
B) You call her wealth irrelevant. This proves your ignorance. Please read the four-factor copyright test for fair use. How it affects the market for works is one of the factors. But you wouldn't know that, not being a lawyer, would you?
C) Some of us do RTFA. That's how we know about things like the four-factor test.
D) KDawson is the editor, but NYCL is the submitter. You're talking to him, but you don't seem to even realize that NYCL wrote the phrase you're complaining about. There's a firehose link to the unedited summary. Read it sometime?
E) The partisanship of a source is irrelevant; their accuracy is relevant. You can't claim that someone is wrong merely because they're a "liberal" or "conservative" or a "lawyer" or whatever other label you might wish to use. You have to rebut facts with facts.
You have ignored all the facts. You have shown no evidence of having read the decision. You merely pronounced NYCL as "biased" because you did not understand his reasoning. But you made no attempt to understand it whatsoever.
Please, before you go off about "bias" whenever something doesn't agree with you, examine the facts. It's true that cherry picking facts can be misleading, but then it's up to you to supply the missing facts. You can't just say "it's biased" and wash your hands of the matter.
So please, do you have any facts at all? I have already rebutted your claim that wealth is irrelevant; the only claim in your entire post. Why don't you tell us why you still think it's meaningless while taking the four-factor copyright test into account?
Of course, you'd have to read the decision and find out what that is, first...
> Should we not seek to elect those that generally tell us what they are actually thinking?
Yes.
But the problem with raising your standards is that eventually, no one will be able to legitimately meet your standards. At that point, you will get nothing but those who are best able to pretend to meet your standards.
Though this happens most often in business, where they release some business metric. Then they keep raising it when they see profits slip. After that, it becomes a contest of who is best able to cheat.
She hired a lobbyist to get earmarks for a tiny town (reports list it anywhere from 5 to 9 thousand people). You want to blame Ted Stevens for all the earmarks, but she ran his PAC. He endorsed her.
I think she's "libertarian" in marketing only.
I don't think that government jobs should be "for life" but how did you get that out of that story? She was using a political test on people, rather than hiring people according to competence.
Isn't that how we got "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!" from Bush to the guy who helped screw up the Hurricane Katrina response? And how we got all these government "scientists" who aren't?
Please read that email I keep linking to if you haven't yet. It's balanced on the whole and it was written by someone who knows Palin very well.
I can see a few things to like about her, but overall, I see a woman who is a very good politician in terms of getting people to see her the way she wants them to.
I think you'll end up opposing a department for volunteers (who might take over for paid government in running community projects) and end up with a vastly expanded Department of Homeland Security and more increases in the federal government. I believe Bush increased the government more than anyone for the past 50 years or more.
And 8 years ago, I might have agreed with you. In fact, I probably would have. But McCain is my senator, and I've lost all respect for him in the past 3 years seeing him become a phony who is now against whatever he once stood for, though I had always supported him until now. Palin is no help, either; she runs the Ultimate Welfare State up in Alaska, which takes more of our tax money to spend on giveaway programs in Alaska than any other.