I'm going to use mine to escape earth when the RIAA cracks down on me...
Hey! In space, copyright laws don't apply (yet). You can set up a rogue state for file traders.
History is bound to repeat itself. Apparently, many of the Europeans who came to the US way back when did so to escape opressive taxes. Of course, others did it for wealth or land. Who knows, if cheap affordable spaceflight becomes a reality, the chance to create a new state from scratch will be upon us.
However, the *IAA are probably ahead of you, or will do their best to be. I had Entertainment Law this semester (had the final today) - we learned that one of the record company executives saw a shot of astronauts in space with music playing. Apparently it was MCI. Well, believe it or not, while artist contracts previously required assignment of all rights for the whole Earth, now they say for the Universe. (Can't have artists suing and reclaiming that lucrative interplanetary market!)
That's funny. Sounds professional. I guess it should be included in the definitions sections of business / international business legislation - the UCC, INCOTERMS, etc.
You know, so businesses would know to identify the consignee on a Bill of Lading as John Public, a jithead...
FedEx can't just lose a few packages there and there.
Yes they can. They did for me, anyway. When I went through their claim procedure it was denied. It took a lawsuit, a couple of court visits, and a year later to get my money.
Apparently, they claim it was a communication problem - apparently there are 4 Fed Ex companies, and somehow, my complaint got to the wrong one. I don't know how that was my fault (as they insinuated), though, as they have only 1 claim reporting number.
Wasn't there a version of this in a DS9 episode? Worf explained that, in some parts, you get a thigh bone of meat from some largish animal (forget the name), walk up to the girl, smash everything off of the table with it, then throw it down saying you'll provide for her for life?
Ah, found it...
WORF
Grilka is from the Mekro'vak
region. It is customary among her
people for the man to bring the
leg of a Lingta to the first
courtship dinner. Bring it fresh,
as if you had just killed it.
[And as Worf talks, he stands and forgets about Quark
for a moment... he's envisioning himself doing this
with Grilka... savoring the mental image of courting
her.]
Then use the leg to sweep aside
everything on the table... and
declare in a loud voice, "I have
brought you this. From this day,
I wish to provide food for you and
your House, and all I ask is to
share your company... and do honor
to your name."
How can we generate all this material? By forcing any or every researcher/professor at a publically funded university, or on a publically funded research project to spend *one week* writing a chapter for one of these texts. With a review/editing board managing the overall project, you could get this all together in a year.
Will it really take this much work? Let's see, start with 5 classes x 12 years = 60 texts. I'm willing to bet we have many times 60 teachers as/. readers. Why don't we do it ourselves? Get a website started, draft the appropriate license(s), select the initial 'standard' set of texts chosen to appeal to the majority of schools, and get going. Branches could come later - such as language books, etc. which might have lesser total amount of potential demand.
Europe has all but outlawed transgenic crops, prompting a global trade war that's costing US farmers billions in lost exports.
I hate such arguments. Sounds like M$ FUD. Well, if you don't produce what the EU wants, you can't complain that they won't buy it. And before you say that the whole point is that the EU isn't letting it's people have the choice - the actual point is that the people of the EU have spoken through their representative, and apparently they don't want GM foodstuffs.
And I though America was all about the free market (as in if a product is not wanted...)...
For myself, I do think choice is best, but I think people have the right to know everything. Thus products should be labeled if they contain GM foodstuffs. Similar to the BST situation with milk, where I believe Monsanto got it into a law that labels cannot mention BST content. There are people who want to know, so why shouldn't labeling laws enforce this?
This treaty, among other items, would require the U.S. to "cooperate with foreign authorities" in conducting surveillance on American citizens who have committed no crime under U.S. law, but may have broken another country's law (selling historic Nazi posters on Ebay? Germany might have you wiretapped)
No time to read the article (I'm becomming a good/.er) or most of the comments - finals and such - so I apologize if another has said this. One of the cases I read today is the one Yahoo! filed in response to the French ruling [Yahoo!, Inc. v. La Ligue Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme, et al. (CA, 2001)]. It was only a Cal. case, but the court said something very basic which the feds will have trouble with: even if a person in the US does something on the internet which violates laws in another country, so long as that action is protected in the US (such as under the first amendment), US courts cannot enforce any foreign judgement.
Since treaties are subservient to the Constitution, I think selling Nazi posters is gonna remain a US right.
Reminds me of a story set in NYC. I think it was either a movie being shot or a study to test how people would volunteer to help. What they did is fake a bus crash.
The unexpected result was that quite a few people got on the bus and faked being injured in an attempt to have a claim.
In America, you pay for the privelege to be spied on, infiltrated, and abused? wtf?
There is a concept in law called unjust enrichment. It is actually a very old form of action, but it is kindof not used as a lead claim usually. The idea under unjust enrichment is that the defendant received a benefit which is unjust for him/her to keep. The cool thing about unjust enrichment, if the court buys it, is the plaintiff can get disgorgement of profits.
I am writing a paper this semester on a theory to sue the spyware companies. I even talked to one of the leading attorneys in the US in class actions - involved in such suits as the one against DoubleClick.
All the cases for online profiling have failed so far under federal causes of action - the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the so called Wiretap Act. I'm thinking a better route might be with state level actions such as trespass to chattels and unjust enrichment.
That DoubleClick case was interesting. The judge accepted a settlement agreement. One thing stipulated is that it covered all people in the US who had a DoubleClick cookie on their computers before some date in 2002. The other, get this, is that the attorneys got $1.8 million for "reasonable fees".
Now, who wants to pick an online spyware company and try again? I'm damn serious. If a case succeeded, it could make a career.
Actually, I think the government can take what it wants to pretty much whenever it wants to. It is called the right of eminent domain. My dad had property taken this way.
In the US the catch is that it becomes a taking and 'just compensation' must be paid. This doesn't adequately remedy the victims, of course. Think of businesses that have built up good will over decades, being forced to move to different neighborhoods.
I know you said "just as a matter of money". That may not be a good enough reason, but then the government doesn't have to confiscate anything for money really. It can just confiscate the money directly by raising taxes.
Guantanamo is U.S. soil the same way that all miltary bases and embassies are U.S. soil.
True, I would guess, but not the same as the soil actually part of the U.S. You were remarking on which law applies in U.S. controlled territories outside the U.S.
In immigration law, a discussion started about that citizenship thing - if born on U.S. soil, you are a citizen - so what about babies born in embassies or military bases? The Immigration Law Professor didn't have an authoritative answer so I asked my International Law Professor this. He responded that the land of U.S. embassies is not considered U.S. territory, so babies born there would not be automatically U.S. citizens without more.
I believe, with respect to embassies and such, it is not so much that the occupying country's law applies but that the host country is restrained from acting due to International Laws relating to diplomacy and such. There was a bomb that went off in the Russian embassy at one time (or a threat). The FBI wanted to go in, but the Russians denied entry for a while. Without permission, the US couldn't send in any law enforcement - this was due to diplomatic law.
As a consequence of this, the government cannot enact any law or enter into any treaty which goes against the Constitution. How can it?
It's very easy, and the U.S. does it all the time. It just makes a RUD - a Reservation, Understanding, or Declaration. Unless a treaty explicitly forbids it (and some do), countries can become parties without accepting the entire treaty. They do this by limiting their acceptance by a reservation (E.g.: we do not accept Article II). I think the U.S. even has a reservation in one of the Human Rights treaties disclaiming acceptance of a prohibition against capitol punishment of children. (I apologize if I am a little off on the details, but the general idea is right IIRC) Makes the US look bad, right? But this was done to ensure the states and commonwealths in the US can punish criminals to the extent they are allowed under the Constitution. (I will check my Int'l law book for the treaty if I can find it) Understandings and declarations can be used in less objectionable situations to express a country's interpretation of language in the treaty.
So long as a RUD is put forth at time of ratification, the U.S. is not bound by whichever clause is in the RUD, to the extent that the RUD says so. And the U.S. regularly does this. Treaties must be passed to the Senate for advice and consent, and they do put on RUDs when a conflict with the Constitution is forseeable.
And if a treaty gets ratified with clause in conflict with the Constitution? As per the Constitution, treaties, along with federal statutes, are the Supreme law of the land. But they come after the Constitution. In cases where a treaty calls for something that the Constitution denies (or vice versa), the Constitution wins. I seem to recall a case where the US entered into a treaty with the UK over jurisidiction over civilian dependents of military personnel. I think there were three wives involved who murdered their husbands. I forget the specifics, but they were tried without jury, following UK law as per the treaty. Upon appeal to Scotus, the treaty lost (right to jury trial for citizen prevailed).
Oh, and by the way, one thing I reacted violently to (figuratively of course) when I learned about it (being adverse to the ever-increasingly widening exertion of the power of Congress) is that while the Constitution restricts Congress'es power, there is a loophole. In many cases, things which Congress cannot do by direct legislation (or it would be unconstitutional), the federal goverment can do by treaty. So, the Congress cannot do it by federal legislation, but the federal goverment can do it by treaty or other international agreement, and rob the states and commonwealths of the power (since treaties are on the same level as federal leglisation). I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of this loophole, as I called it, but I wonder if they realized that a time would come where so many treaties would be negotiated as there are now.
"I wish I could bill Alan Ralsky for all the time I've wasted deleting his deluge."
You could try, if you really want to. File a lawsuit, class action if you feel like it. You could use trespass to chattels as one claim - see eBay v. Bidder's Edge for one example (only granting an injunction, but indicating that trespass would likely succeed at trial).
Maybe you could also try unjust enrichment. This generally requires a showing that the defendant recieved a benefit provided by you and that the defendant was unjustly enriched thereby - i.e. to let the defendant remain enriched without compensating you would be improper under the law. Courts in such cases can decide a contract was formed (a fiction) - called a quasi-contract, or they might use another legal construction, but this allows them to order restitution.
I'm currently researching unjust enrichment, unfortunately, it seems a difficult cause of action to prove sufficiently. My guess, though, is that with the bad public view of spamming, courts might be willing to go your way.
Absolutely no offense intended, but your local site, while garish and obnoxious, isn't so bad in my estimation as the present Macom County Sheriff's one. At least it has a table of contents which provides links to pretty much what most users might be looking for. And presumably, they get something from the advertisements on the page. If not, they certainly went out of their way to be obnoxious. Garish, yes, but at least somewhat useful once the table of contents is found.
The Macon County page, on the other hand, is ridiculous. The two most prevalent links are to itself! That's probably confusing to some older/clueless web users. No centralized sitemap or set of links means to me that users might overlook the link they are looking for, not that there are many links anyway - content seems pretty lacking. Wouldn't an address for the sheriff, a telephone number, or someway to report crimes in progress be more important than a link to the local weather?
I'm curious why there is no stairway to the first/lower platform. You can see where it goes, by the break in the railing. Was the place never finished, or was there a movable stair used?
As there appears to be some swimming equipment there, I'm guessing the pool was in use and that there was a movable stair.
I guess your right. I guess most people have never really heard silence. What an odd thought. Next to no one has ever heard nothing.
What about Spelunkers? As a kid, I remember going into the Indian Echo caves near Harrisburg in PA. At one point, the guide turned off the light, to show people what was likely the most blackest they ever experienced. I recall it being very quiet as well (since everyone stopped moving and talking).
I'm attempting to write a paper just now tangentially related to privacy issues, so it is on my mind. Let me raise a few ideas on the contention that we never had anonymity.
What you say is correct. But also, in times past, there wasn't the ability to store information as there is today. Sure, records were kept (and I'm grateful, I've used store records several hundreds of years old in genealogy research - it is fun to see what your ancestors bought), but they were handwritten, on paper likely a little more dear in value than paper is today. So not everything got written down. Which is why genealogical research can't go back beyond several hundred years geneally, maybe to 1066 for English ancestors. It was simply too expensive, too unimportant, or too troublesome, for records to be kept on daily activities, unless you descend from somebody famous or wealthy. So my first point is
(1) The cost of keeping records, not only financially, but in busywork, meant that much less was tracked.
Additionally, as you point out, customers likely knew the shopkeeper personally, and very well at that. It was the nature of the infrastructure of the day. For most people, it is likely that noone knew about them outside of a radius of 10 miles or so (except family/freinds from places they migrated from, naturally) - there simply was no reason to benefit to knowing this. Thus,
(2) any use made of a person's personal information would be likely known to the person, or at least, the person would be local to the perpetrator and could more easily see the results of the use. There simply was not the chance of long-distance identity theft such as is so well documented with our present infrastructure.
Additionally,
(3) With surveillance cameras and recording of their signals, etc., there is alot of records being made of aspects of our life which, while publically available in the past, were not recorded. Thus our actions, while public, had a certain nonpermanence about them which is rapidly eroding away.
I have a freind who is very concerned about this last point. He has come up with a doctrine he thinks should be incorporated into our jurisprudence - the doctrine of forgettability. He argues that while our actions in public have no legal "expectation of privacy", we did have a de facto situation where our actions were forgotten as they were not permanently recorded. Surveillance cameras, ATM and credit card transaction recordings, and on and on mean that our behavior is recorded whereas it would have been 'forgotten' in times past.
As a last point, (4) increased permanence of records
The last point is debatable, perhaps, as computer records are more easily deleted, too. There is likely a ton of information recorded and later deleted. But with backups, redundency, etc. I bet many of our records last longer than records of the past.
Overall, our records are more detailed than at any point in history, more accessible to 3rd parties than at any time in history, more accessible from long distances, and, likely, more permanent than ever before.
We may have not had anonymity before, but the lack of anonymity was localized. Localized in time, localized in space, and what information did last through time or was available to 3rd parties or parties at long distances away was much, much less than what is available to such parties today.
The week after 911, we had a discussion in a class, one of my colleagues/costudents stated he thought we are now in an era where privacy will have to be thrown out for the public good, an age of non-privacy, if you will.
Is he right? Seems we are well on the road in that direction.
I know the parent thinks writing/emailing congressional representatives/senators is not worth it. I agree that we don't have as much input as we should have, but contacting them is one of the few tools we have.
Previously on/. I've seen discussions on what method is best - email, snail mail, telephone calls, in person interviews.
Common sense says in person would likely be the best, provided you are really up on a subject.
[pipedream]
Maybe/.ers should try and form a concerned citizens group of some kind. Then one/.er from each state could approach his/her congress critters with the consensus views. Being from such and such citizens group might have more weight than just being a solo citizen.
Geeks for rational use of technology or somesuch.
[/pipedream]
As far as writing/emailing/telephoning goes. I am in a Legislative Drafting class which happens to have a few students from the hill (i.e. who work in congress as staffers). Due to the past/. discussions debating which was the better way to contact congressional members, I did raise the question. I was told that it didn't matter - your 'vote' would get tallied with the other 1000s that come in.
While they didn't say it. I suppose it would be more worthwhile to keep letters to your congress critters short and to the point. Polite and respectful, of course, but I would guess there is no need to research or put lengthy reasoning behind your views. Just set forth that you live in their jurisdiction, what issue you are writing about, and your position on it. Only if you are passionate about the issue, have your reasons at hand, have the time to spare, etc. would writing a lengthy treatise on why your position is the best be worth it.
This way, you can afford to write several letters stating your position on a variety of issues instead of one really detailed letter that probably will not do anything more than be a tick on some tally sheet. More letters = more ticks on more tally sheets.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey! In space, copyright laws don't apply (yet). You can set up a rogue state for file traders.
History is bound to repeat itself. Apparently, many of the Europeans who came to the US way back when did so to escape opressive taxes. Of course, others did it for wealth or land. Who knows, if cheap affordable spaceflight becomes a reality, the chance to create a new state from scratch will be upon us.
However, the *IAA are probably ahead of you, or will do their best to be. I had Entertainment Law this semester (had the final today) - we learned that one of the record company executives saw a shot of astronauts in space with music playing. Apparently it was MCI. Well, believe it or not, while artist contracts previously required assignment of all rights for the whole Earth, now they say for the Universe. (Can't have artists suing and reclaiming that lucrative interplanetary market!)
That's funny. Sounds professional. I guess it should be included in the definitions sections of business / international business legislation - the UCC, INCOTERMS, etc.
You know, so businesses would know to identify the consignee on a Bill of Lading as John Public, a jithead ...
FedEx can't just lose a few packages there and there.
Yes they can. They did for me, anyway. When I went through their claim procedure it was denied. It took a lawsuit, a couple of court visits, and a year later to get my money.
Apparently, they claim it was a communication problem - apparently there are 4 Fed Ex companies, and somehow, my complaint got to the wrong one. I don't know how that was my fault (as they insinuated), though, as they have only 1 claim reporting number.
Wasn't there a version of this in a DS9 episode? Worf explained that, in some parts, you get a thigh bone of meat from some largish animal (forget the name), walk up to the girl, smash everything off of the table with it, then throw it down saying you'll provide for her for life?
Ah, found it ...
WORF
Grilka is from the Mekro'vak region. It is customary among her people for the man to bring the leg of a Lingta to the first courtship dinner. Bring it fresh, as if you had just killed it.
[And as Worf talks, he stands and forgets about Quark for a moment... he's envisioning himself doing this with Grilka... savoring the mental image of courting her.]
Then use the leg to sweep aside everything on the table... and declare in a loud voice, "I have brought you this. From this day, I wish to provide food for you and your House, and all I ask is to share your company... and do honor to your name."
and here's some pictures of the girl he was pining after.
Will it really take this much work? Let's see, start with 5 classes x 12 years = 60 texts. I'm willing to bet we have many times 60 teachers as /. readers. Why don't we do it ourselves? Get a website started, draft the appropriate license(s), select the initial 'standard' set of texts chosen to appeal to the majority of schools, and get going. Branches could come later - such as language books, etc. which might have lesser total amount of potential demand.
I hate such arguments. Sounds like M$ FUD. Well, if you don't produce what the EU wants, you can't complain that they won't buy it. And before you say that the whole point is that the EU isn't letting it's people have the choice - the actual point is that the people of the EU have spoken through their representative, and apparently they don't want GM foodstuffs.
And I though America was all about the free market (as in if a product is not wanted ...) ...
For myself, I do think choice is best, but I think people have the right to know everything. Thus products should be labeled if they contain GM foodstuffs. Similar to the BST situation with milk, where I believe Monsanto got it into a law that labels cannot mention BST content. There are people who want to know, so why shouldn't labeling laws enforce this?
Did a search, for those who don't know, here's an apparently large coprolite with accompanying analysis.
No time to read the article (I'm becomming a good /.er) or most of the comments - finals and such - so I apologize if another has said this. One of the cases I read today is the one Yahoo! filed in response to the French ruling [Yahoo!, Inc. v. La Ligue Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme, et al. (CA, 2001)]. It was only a Cal. case, but the court said something very basic which the feds will have trouble with: even if a person in the US does something on the internet which violates laws in another country, so long as that action is protected in the US (such as under the first amendment), US courts cannot enforce any foreign judgement.
Since treaties are subservient to the Constitution, I think selling Nazi posters is gonna remain a US right.
coke parody - this is a parody of the MPAA actions in schools. Rather funny, once you read it all.
The unexpected result was that quite a few people got on the bus and faked being injured in an attempt to have a claim.
There is a concept in law called unjust enrichment. It is actually a very old form of action, but it is kindof not used as a lead claim usually. The idea under unjust enrichment is that the defendant received a benefit which is unjust for him/her to keep. The cool thing about unjust enrichment, if the court buys it, is the plaintiff can get disgorgement of profits.
I am writing a paper this semester on a theory to sue the spyware companies. I even talked to one of the leading attorneys in the US in class actions - involved in such suits as the one against DoubleClick.
All the cases for online profiling have failed so far under federal causes of action - the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the so called Wiretap Act. I'm thinking a better route might be with state level actions such as trespass to chattels and unjust enrichment.
That DoubleClick case was interesting. The judge accepted a settlement agreement. One thing stipulated is that it covered all people in the US who had a DoubleClick cookie on their computers before some date in 2002. The other, get this, is that the attorneys got $1.8 million for "reasonable fees".
Now, who wants to pick an online spyware company and try again? I'm damn serious. If a case succeeded, it could make a career.
Torvalds Silent Supersonic Planes
... While I knew this wasn't right, a parallel thought existed for a second: "damn! where did he get the time to design a plane?"
if illegal, my vehicle will have the RFID tag of the local cops/feds undercover cars.
Some agressive prosecutor will probably try to charge you with impersonating an officer.
I'm with you on that, but tell that to the state when there's a war on and they start up the draft.
In the US the catch is that it becomes a taking and 'just compensation' must be paid. This doesn't adequately remedy the victims, of course. Think of businesses that have built up good will over decades, being forced to move to different neighborhoods.
I know you said "just as a matter of money". That may not be a good enough reason, but then the government doesn't have to confiscate anything for money really. It can just confiscate the money directly by raising taxes.
True, I would guess, but not the same as the soil actually part of the U.S. You were remarking on which law applies in U.S. controlled territories outside the U.S.
In immigration law, a discussion started about that citizenship thing - if born on U.S. soil, you are a citizen - so what about babies born in embassies or military bases? The Immigration Law Professor didn't have an authoritative answer so I asked my International Law Professor this. He responded that the land of U.S. embassies is not considered U.S. territory, so babies born there would not be automatically U.S. citizens without more.
I believe, with respect to embassies and such, it is not so much that the occupying country's law applies but that the host country is restrained from acting due to International Laws relating to diplomacy and such. There was a bomb that went off in the Russian embassy at one time (or a threat). The FBI wanted to go in, but the Russians denied entry for a while. Without permission, the US couldn't send in any law enforcement - this was due to diplomatic law.
It's very easy, and the U.S. does it all the time. It just makes a RUD - a Reservation, Understanding, or Declaration. Unless a treaty explicitly forbids it (and some do), countries can become parties without accepting the entire treaty. They do this by limiting their acceptance by a reservation (E.g.: we do not accept Article II). I think the U.S. even has a reservation in one of the Human Rights treaties disclaiming acceptance of a prohibition against capitol punishment of children. (I apologize if I am a little off on the details, but the general idea is right IIRC) Makes the US look bad, right? But this was done to ensure the states and commonwealths in the US can punish criminals to the extent they are allowed under the Constitution. (I will check my Int'l law book for the treaty if I can find it) Understandings and declarations can be used in less objectionable situations to express a country's interpretation of language in the treaty.
So long as a RUD is put forth at time of ratification, the U.S. is not bound by whichever clause is in the RUD, to the extent that the RUD says so. And the U.S. regularly does this. Treaties must be passed to the Senate for advice and consent, and they do put on RUDs when a conflict with the Constitution is forseeable.
And if a treaty gets ratified with clause in conflict with the Constitution? As per the Constitution, treaties, along with federal statutes, are the Supreme law of the land. But they come after the Constitution. In cases where a treaty calls for something that the Constitution denies (or vice versa), the Constitution wins. I seem to recall a case where the US entered into a treaty with the UK over jurisidiction over civilian dependents of military personnel. I think there were three wives involved who murdered their husbands. I forget the specifics, but they were tried without jury, following UK law as per the treaty. Upon appeal to Scotus, the treaty lost (right to jury trial for citizen prevailed).
Oh, and by the way, one thing I reacted violently to (figuratively of course) when I learned about it (being adverse to the ever-increasingly widening exertion of the power of Congress) is that while the Constitution restricts Congress'es power, there is a loophole. In many cases, things which Congress cannot do by direct legislation (or it would be unconstitutional), the federal goverment can do by treaty. So, the Congress cannot do it by federal legislation, but the federal goverment can do it by treaty or other international agreement, and rob the states and commonwealths of the power (since treaties are on the same level as federal leglisation). I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of this loophole, as I called it, but I wonder if they realized that a time would come where so many treaties would be negotiated as there are now.
Maybe he's Scooby Doo: Raffing out roud (Engrish for "laughing out loud")
You could try, if you really want to. File a lawsuit, class action if you feel like it. You could use trespass to chattels as one claim - see eBay v. Bidder's Edge for one example (only granting an injunction, but indicating that trespass would likely succeed at trial).
Maybe you could also try unjust enrichment. This generally requires a showing that the defendant recieved a benefit provided by you and that the defendant was unjustly enriched thereby - i.e. to let the defendant remain enriched without compensating you would be improper under the law. Courts in such cases can decide a contract was formed (a fiction) - called a quasi-contract, or they might use another legal construction, but this allows them to order restitution.
I'm currently researching unjust enrichment, unfortunately, it seems a difficult cause of action to prove sufficiently. My guess, though, is that with the bad public view of spamming, courts might be willing to go your way.
The Macon County page, on the other hand, is ridiculous. The two most prevalent links are to itself! That's probably confusing to some older/clueless web users. No centralized sitemap or set of links means to me that users might overlook the link they are looking for, not that there are many links anyway - content seems pretty lacking. Wouldn't an address for the sheriff, a telephone number, or someway to report crimes in progress be more important than a link to the local weather?
I'm curious why there is no stairway to the first/lower platform. You can see where it goes, by the break in the railing. Was the place never finished, or was there a movable stair used?
As there appears to be some swimming equipment there, I'm guessing the pool was in use and that there was a movable stair.
What about Spelunkers? As a kid, I remember going into the Indian Echo caves near Harrisburg in PA. At one point, the guide turned off the light, to show people what was likely the most blackest they ever experienced. I recall it being very quiet as well (since everyone stopped moving and talking).
Now if someone would only build a Borg house. That'd be amazing.
What you say is correct. But also, in times past, there wasn't the ability to store information as there is today. Sure, records were kept (and I'm grateful, I've used store records several hundreds of years old in genealogy research - it is fun to see what your ancestors bought), but they were handwritten, on paper likely a little more dear in value than paper is today. So not everything got written down. Which is why genealogical research can't go back beyond several hundred years geneally, maybe to 1066 for English ancestors. It was simply too expensive, too unimportant, or too troublesome, for records to be kept on daily activities, unless you descend from somebody famous or wealthy. So my first point is
(1) The cost of keeping records, not only financially, but in busywork, meant that much less was tracked.
Additionally, as you point out, customers likely knew the shopkeeper personally, and very well at that. It was the nature of the infrastructure of the day. For most people, it is likely that noone knew about them outside of a radius of 10 miles or so (except family/freinds from places they migrated from, naturally) - there simply was no reason to benefit to knowing this. Thus,
(2) any use made of a person's personal information would be likely known to the person, or at least, the person would be local to the perpetrator and could more easily see the results of the use. There simply was not the chance of long-distance identity theft such as is so well documented with our present infrastructure.
Additionally,
(3) With surveillance cameras and recording of their signals, etc., there is alot of records being made of aspects of our life which, while publically available in the past, were not recorded. Thus our actions, while public, had a certain nonpermanence about them which is rapidly eroding away.
I have a freind who is very concerned about this last point. He has come up with a doctrine he thinks should be incorporated into our jurisprudence - the doctrine of forgettability. He argues that while our actions in public have no legal "expectation of privacy", we did have a de facto situation where our actions were forgotten as they were not permanently recorded. Surveillance cameras, ATM and credit card transaction recordings, and on and on mean that our behavior is recorded whereas it would have been 'forgotten' in times past.
As a last point, (4) increased permanence of records
The last point is debatable, perhaps, as computer records are more easily deleted, too. There is likely a ton of information recorded and later deleted. But with backups, redundency, etc. I bet many of our records last longer than records of the past.
Overall, our records are more detailed than at any point in history, more accessible to 3rd parties than at any time in history, more accessible from long distances, and, likely, more permanent than ever before.
We may have not had anonymity before, but the lack of anonymity was localized. Localized in time, localized in space, and what information did last through time or was available to 3rd parties or parties at long distances away was much, much less than what is available to such parties today.
The week after 911, we had a discussion in a class, one of my colleagues/costudents stated he thought we are now in an era where privacy will have to be thrown out for the public good, an age of non-privacy, if you will.
Is he right? Seems we are well on the road in that direction.
Previously on /. I've seen discussions on what method is best - email, snail mail, telephone calls, in person interviews.
Common sense says in person would likely be the best, provided you are really up on a subject.
[pipedream] /.ers should try and form a concerned citizens group of some kind. Then one /.er from each state could approach his/her congress critters with the consensus views. Being from such and such citizens group might have more weight than just being a solo citizen.
Maybe
Geeks for rational use of technology or somesuch.
[/pipedream]
As far as writing/emailing/telephoning goes. I am in a Legislative Drafting class which happens to have a few students from the hill (i.e. who work in congress as staffers). Due to the past /. discussions debating which was the better way to contact congressional members, I did raise the question. I was told that it didn't matter - your 'vote' would get tallied with the other 1000s that come in.
While they didn't say it. I suppose it would be more worthwhile to keep letters to your congress critters short and to the point. Polite and respectful, of course, but I would guess there is no need to research or put lengthy reasoning behind your views. Just set forth that you live in their jurisdiction, what issue you are writing about, and your position on it. Only if you are passionate about the issue, have your reasons at hand, have the time to spare, etc. would writing a lengthy treatise on why your position is the best be worth it.
This way, you can afford to write several letters stating your position on a variety of issues instead of one really detailed letter that probably will not do anything more than be a tick on some tally sheet. More letters = more ticks on more tally sheets.
Just my 2 cents.