Everyone knows that no one person created the internet, which is why it came across as so comical when Gore claimed he "took the initiative in creating the internet".
Again, if Gore had said he made "significant contributions to promoting the Internet before it was popular" there wouldn't have been the controversy. But he didn't. He said he "took the initiative in creating" it, which is false.
If he had said, as you suggest, "I helped write a push through a bill that set the ground work for the internet", there would have been no joke, because it would've been a believable claim. "I took the initiative in creating the internet" is making a much stronger, and unsupportable, claim to have had a larger role in it than he actually did.
In particular, he didn't even sponsor a bill that created the internet. The strongest statement that he could legitimately make is that he sponsored a bill (the 1991 "Gore Bill") that significantly sped up the development of the internet, which had in fact already been created. Still a quite useful role, but I guess it wouldn't have sounded as cool for him to just say something like "I sponsored a bill that helped accelerate development of the internet" or something.
It'd be one thing if, despite not personally creating the internet, he sponsored the Internet Creation Act of 1975 or something. But he didn't do anything nearly that direct to even legislatively create the internet. Rather, he simply supported a bunch of generic programs that arguably had a role in the creation of the internet.
Granted, he never said "I invented the internet", but it's not hard to get that from "I took the initiative in creating the internet". What he presumably meant was something like "I took the initiative in starting programs that ultimately led to the creation of the internet", which is sort of what the following sentence more vaguely tries to say. But just the flat-out "I took the initiative in creating the internet" does read like a claim that he, well, created the internet.
You can thank the "liberal" justices of the Supreme Court (plus Scalia) for ruling in Gonzales v. Raich that growing marijuana on your personal property for personal consumption falls within the scope of the enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce.
Though this bit of caselaw was basically set some decades ago for different reasons, in more of an ends-versus-means gamble that turned out badly. In the civil rights era, "interstate commerce" was interpreted in kind of unlikely ways in order to give federal civil-rights laws effect, to e.g. consider a restaurant owner who has a single location in a single state to be engaged in "interstate commerce", using the somewhat dubious argument that some of his suppliers might buy things from out of state, making him transitively engaged in interstate commerce.
Given that precedent, liberal jurists now basically have to, and did, say that federal drug laws are okay.
Craig might not "monetize" his site to hell to squeeze billions out of it, but he certainly does squeeze millions out of it: their net profits are upwards of $100 million. This is certainly enough to pay a lawyer to show up to court a few times without even making a dent in the balance sheet.
This is a bit of a pedantic response, but "prior art" means something different. Prior art is evidence of the patented invention, or something substantially similar, having already been invented by someone else, earlier than the patent holder's earliest evidence of invention. Prior art usually invalidates a patent, since only the first inventor can patent something.
What you're asking about is the case of someone sitting on a patent for a while, not enforcing it despite being aware of the violation, and then enforcing it later. There is no automatic statutory ban on this, unlike with trademarks, where you can lose the trademark after a period of not enforcing it. There is a general legal doctrine of "estoppel", which prohibits you from inducing someone else into doing something and then suing them; for example, if you told someone you forgave their debt (even if you didn't legally sign documents to discharge the debt), and they relied on your statement to that effect and bought a house, and now you want the money back and they don't have it because they bought a house with it, they could invoke estoppel since you misled them to their detriment about the status of the debt. In cases like this it's a bit harder to invoke---it's not like the patent trolls actively say "hey anyone can use our patent!" and then later "ha ha just kidding, see you in court!" Instead, they keep quiet for a while, and then sue later, so you'd have to argue their silence was acquiescing to or encouraging the use implicitly, and that it was done intentionally for the purpose of getting the defendant to rely on the patented technology before suing. This has worked on occasion.
Very soon after the Constitution was passed, in 1798, the Supreme Court ruled in Calder v. Bull that the prohibition on ex post facto laws applies only to criminal cases, not to civil suits. The government remains entirely free to retroactively change civil liability. Since this has been solid precedent for over 200 years, and referred to repeatedly, it's quite unlikely to be interpreted differently now.
He voted for all three amendments that would have stripped or at least delayed consideration of immunity. Granted, he should have voted against the final bill as unacceptable when those amendments did not pass, but he did at least vote for the amendments, the closest of which failed only 42-56. Had any Republicans except Arlen Specter bothered to stand up for the Constitution and rule of law, immunity might well have been removed.
The main reason to pass this immunity legislation is not to protect the phone companies, but to protect the government. If these cases went forward, there would be discovery and subpoenas, and whoever authorized and knew about the illegal wiretapping would stand a decent chance of being discovered.
I'd wager that there are high-ranking Democratic Senators and Congressmen who at least knew that this was taking place, and so it's in their interests, as well as the Bush administration's, that no subpoenas get issued.
It's only been 19 years since Ceausescu died. And Berlusconi is apparently still not dead. Neither is Joerg Haider, though it's been 6 years since his party was in power.
The immunity provision is aimed primarily at keeping the investigation from happening at all, not mainly at protecting the phone companies. By making it not subject to trial, there will be no discovery, no embarrassing evidentiary discovery, and no embarrassing rulings against the government.
If the only purpose of the provision were to protect the companies who were arguably coerced into this, a more limited provision could suffice, like putting stringent monetary limits on any liability, or even guaranteeing that the government rather than the companies will take responsibility for any monetary damages.
But that's not the purpose: Bush doesn't want the trial to happen at all, because it's effectively him that's on trial.
I'm in academia, where just about the opposite prevails: you can use whatever you damn well please, and generally PhD students don't even get that much in the way of hard-and-fast rules from their advisors, so they use what they please too, as do half the research scientists and post-docs. The results of that are why companies consider standardization.
The main problem is that, while experimenting with lots of languages and using languages perfectly suited to a particular task is nice, doing it too freely makes for a nightmare if you ever want to combine things, have a programmer of one system help out on another project, etc.---just the sorts of issues that prompted this question.
My current research project's codebase, partly inherited, partly pasted together from components that were lying around the lab, and partly of my own doing, using nine languages, as a result of everyone using whatever seems like the right tool for each job. There's a C backend for one part and a C++ backend for another part; an AI component in Lisp; some GUI and glue-y stuff in Python; other GUI stuff and some other AI stuff in Java; some text-munging scripts in Perl; some number-crunching in Ocaml; some parsing and god knows what else in Haskell; and some other AI in an in-house language that compiles to Java.
Now some of those tools were indeed exactly the right tool for the job. But this is not ideal to maintain, and it's nearly impossible to ship to anyone who isn't me in a way that a mere mortal could get the code built and running.
Oh, and there's some other projects in the group that use C#, and one that uses Scheme, if I want to go for double-digits...
Apart from certain areas (possibly medical records) there aren't statutory fines, but companies can be held liable if through their negligence something bad actually happens. To reduce the chance of that happening, many spend money on pro-active measures immediately after a leak, which is in some ways a "fine", in that it costs them money, and so they rationally would like to avoid it happening. For example, after a former university of mine misplaced a bunch of records, they paid for two years of identity-theft and credit-monitoring through some service for everyone who was affected.
It would be one thing if it were just Mr Bush promoting this: he can't actually pass laws. Or even just Mr Bush and his Republican allies: they control neither house of Congress. The actual situation seems to be much worse: the Democratic-led Congress is going to bring this to a vote and pass it, despite the fact that they could easily block it (or not have brought it up at all) if they wished to.
Again in the "depends what they're for" vein, we do have a set of general-purpose servers with identical mounted filesystems/home-dirs that do have different, non-numerical names (still the short, hard-to-misspell variety). These are mainly compute servers for people who leave long-running jobs in screen, because it's easier to remember "I set some stuff up on knuth" than "I set some stuff up on foo32". The load-balancing can be sub-optimal in this approach (people tend to pick a machine they use as "their" compute server, and some names seem more popular than others), but it mostly works.
We use different naming schemes for different subsets of servers depending on what they're used for.
For general-use clusters that people are going to ssh in to do work on, need to remember the names of, and are actually different (i.e. we don't have five servers just for load-balancing, but for five different things), we tend to use theme-based names that are short and hard to misspell. E.g. the old standby of computer scientists: turing, knuth, etc.
For servers that are going to be used as part of a cluster, or identical machines with identical mounted filesystems/home-dirs, we pick a name and append numbers. E.g. foo01 through foo99. There's really no reason to give them names, and it makes simple bash/perl/etc. scripts easier to write than walking a list of names kept in a file. Round-robin DNS then resolves foo to one of the foo## randomly for a user who just wants any machine in the cluster. (If you want to get fancy you can preferentially direct them to an unloaded machine.)
In addition to being sanctioned by judges, a particularly egregious pattern of abuse by specific lawyers could be raised as an ethics complaint in the relevant state bar association, couldn't it? I suppose how likely that is to succeed depends on the particular state, and just how well you can pin something specific on a specific lawyer.
If the purpose was really just to let people stay in their homes without being priced out, that'd be one thing. But this proposition was written by a far-right anti-tax group funded largely by business, and the results show. If they wanted just that one effect, they could've made Prop 13 only apply to owner-occupied residences. But it doesn't.
It applies also, for example, to second homes and beach condos (which is why Buffet benefits), and even to commercial property. So landlords in areas without rent control get to pocket the profits from increased land values, without having to pay their fair share in increased property taxes. How is that a noble goal?
One way is deferring property taxes until sale. That way, as long as you live in the house, you get pay the old tax rate, but if you sell out into the market at the now-much-higher valuations, you have to pay the back taxes out of the capital gains (up to the gains).
The current system lets people not only live in their very-valuable houses without paying the fully valued taxes on them, but also lets them keep those increases when they sell out. People who benefited from 20+ years of lower taxes intended to let them remain in their homes should not get to keep the gains also; those gains should go to reimburse the state for the lost taxes once the person has decided that they no longer in fact wish to live there.
During the late-70s/early-80s anti-tax crusade (during which Reagan was ascendant), Proposition 13 put quite stringent limits on property taxes that in effect mandated that they would always decrease in real terms, even if the property increased in value.
Under Prop 13, a property is valued when it's purchased. Thereafter, its taxable value can only go up by 1% per year. Since this is generally less than inflation, and much less than property-price appreciation, in effect the longer you own a property, the lower taxes you pay on it. This leads to people like Warren Buffet owning million-dollar houses that they pay taxes on as if they were worth $100,000 (Buffet himself admits this is ridiculous).
So where does the money come from? From new construction and new entrants to the state, who have to pay taxes at current assessments (since they just bought in). But many of these people are recent college graduates and new immigrants, neither of whom are particularly wealthy or good sources of reliably large tax revenues.
Quite apart from bankrupting the state, it also has the effect of being a hugely regressive tax, where the rich generally pay much lower property taxes than the less-rich. In addition, it's created a landed aristocracy---the privilege of paying lower property taxes than new immigrants is, inexplicably, inheritable.
A lot of consulting firms want people with a technical background, but will not have you doing much actual technical work---primarily you'll be using some familiarity with the field and ability to research it to fill in stuff for powerpoint presentations.
If you're willing to go on for other degrees, having a technical background is quite interesting to, for example, law schools.
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Everyone knows that no one person created the internet, which is why it came across as so comical when Gore claimed he "took the initiative in creating the internet".
Again, if Gore had said he made "significant contributions to promoting the Internet before it was popular" there wouldn't have been the controversy. But he didn't. He said he "took the initiative in creating" it, which is false.
If he had said, as you suggest, "I helped write a push through a bill that set the ground work for the internet", there would have been no joke, because it would've been a believable claim. "I took the initiative in creating the internet" is making a much stronger, and unsupportable, claim to have had a larger role in it than he actually did.
In particular, he didn't even sponsor a bill that created the internet. The strongest statement that he could legitimately make is that he sponsored a bill (the 1991 "Gore Bill") that significantly sped up the development of the internet, which had in fact already been created. Still a quite useful role, but I guess it wouldn't have sounded as cool for him to just say something like "I sponsored a bill that helped accelerate development of the internet" or something.
It'd be one thing if, despite not personally creating the internet, he sponsored the Internet Creation Act of 1975 or something. But he didn't do anything nearly that direct to even legislatively create the internet. Rather, he simply supported a bunch of generic programs that arguably had a role in the creation of the internet.
Granted, he never said "I invented the internet", but it's not hard to get that from "I took the initiative in creating the internet". What he presumably meant was something like "I took the initiative in starting programs that ultimately led to the creation of the internet", which is sort of what the following sentence more vaguely tries to say. But just the flat-out "I took the initiative in creating the internet" does read like a claim that he, well, created the internet.
You can thank the "liberal" justices of the Supreme Court (plus Scalia) for ruling in Gonzales v. Raich that growing marijuana on your personal property for personal consumption falls within the scope of the enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce.
Though this bit of caselaw was basically set some decades ago for different reasons, in more of an ends-versus-means gamble that turned out badly. In the civil rights era, "interstate commerce" was interpreted in kind of unlikely ways in order to give federal civil-rights laws effect, to e.g. consider a restaurant owner who has a single location in a single state to be engaged in "interstate commerce", using the somewhat dubious argument that some of his suppliers might buy things from out of state, making him transitively engaged in interstate commerce.
Given that precedent, liberal jurists now basically have to, and did, say that federal drug laws are okay.
Craig might not "monetize" his site to hell to squeeze billions out of it, but he certainly does squeeze millions out of it: their net profits are upwards of $100 million. This is certainly enough to pay a lawyer to show up to court a few times without even making a dent in the balance sheet.
This is a bit of a pedantic response, but "prior art" means something different. Prior art is evidence of the patented invention, or something substantially similar, having already been invented by someone else, earlier than the patent holder's earliest evidence of invention. Prior art usually invalidates a patent, since only the first inventor can patent something.
What you're asking about is the case of someone sitting on a patent for a while, not enforcing it despite being aware of the violation, and then enforcing it later. There is no automatic statutory ban on this, unlike with trademarks, where you can lose the trademark after a period of not enforcing it. There is a general legal doctrine of "estoppel", which prohibits you from inducing someone else into doing something and then suing them; for example, if you told someone you forgave their debt (even if you didn't legally sign documents to discharge the debt), and they relied on your statement to that effect and bought a house, and now you want the money back and they don't have it because they bought a house with it, they could invoke estoppel since you misled them to their detriment about the status of the debt. In cases like this it's a bit harder to invoke---it's not like the patent trolls actively say "hey anyone can use our patent!" and then later "ha ha just kidding, see you in court!" Instead, they keep quiet for a while, and then sue later, so you'd have to argue their silence was acquiescing to or encouraging the use implicitly, and that it was done intentionally for the purpose of getting the defendant to rely on the patented technology before suing. This has worked on occasion.
Very soon after the Constitution was passed, in 1798, the Supreme Court ruled in Calder v. Bull that the prohibition on ex post facto laws applies only to criminal cases, not to civil suits. The government remains entirely free to retroactively change civil liability. Since this has been solid precedent for over 200 years, and referred to repeatedly, it's quite unlikely to be interpreted differently now.
He voted for all three amendments that would have stripped or at least delayed consideration of immunity. Granted, he should have voted against the final bill as unacceptable when those amendments did not pass, but he did at least vote for the amendments, the closest of which failed only 42-56. Had any Republicans except Arlen Specter bothered to stand up for the Constitution and rule of law, immunity might well have been removed.
The main reason to pass this immunity legislation is not to protect the phone companies, but to protect the government. If these cases went forward, there would be discovery and subpoenas, and whoever authorized and knew about the illegal wiretapping would stand a decent chance of being discovered.
I'd wager that there are high-ranking Democratic Senators and Congressmen who at least knew that this was taking place, and so it's in their interests, as well as the Bush administration's, that no subpoenas get issued.
It's only been 19 years since Ceausescu died. And Berlusconi is apparently still not dead. Neither is Joerg Haider, though it's been 6 years since his party was in power.
The immunity provision is aimed primarily at keeping the investigation from happening at all, not mainly at protecting the phone companies. By making it not subject to trial, there will be no discovery, no embarrassing evidentiary discovery, and no embarrassing rulings against the government.
If the only purpose of the provision were to protect the companies who were arguably coerced into this, a more limited provision could suffice, like putting stringent monetary limits on any liability, or even guaranteeing that the government rather than the companies will take responsibility for any monetary damages.
But that's not the purpose: Bush doesn't want the trial to happen at all, because it's effectively him that's on trial.
And it has plenty of experience with being dead and buried, too.
I'm in academia, where just about the opposite prevails: you can use whatever you damn well please, and generally PhD students don't even get that much in the way of hard-and-fast rules from their advisors, so they use what they please too, as do half the research scientists and post-docs. The results of that are why companies consider standardization.
The main problem is that, while experimenting with lots of languages and using languages perfectly suited to a particular task is nice, doing it too freely makes for a nightmare if you ever want to combine things, have a programmer of one system help out on another project, etc.---just the sorts of issues that prompted this question.
My current research project's codebase, partly inherited, partly pasted together from components that were lying around the lab, and partly of my own doing, using nine languages, as a result of everyone using whatever seems like the right tool for each job. There's a C backend for one part and a C++ backend for another part; an AI component in Lisp; some GUI and glue-y stuff in Python; other GUI stuff and some other AI stuff in Java; some text-munging scripts in Perl; some number-crunching in Ocaml; some parsing and god knows what else in Haskell; and some other AI in an in-house language that compiles to Java.
Now some of those tools were indeed exactly the right tool for the job. But this is not ideal to maintain, and it's nearly impossible to ship to anyone who isn't me in a way that a mere mortal could get the code built and running.
Oh, and there's some other projects in the group that use C#, and one that uses Scheme, if I want to go for double-digits...
Apart from certain areas (possibly medical records) there aren't statutory fines, but companies can be held liable if through their negligence something bad actually happens. To reduce the chance of that happening, many spend money on pro-active measures immediately after a leak, which is in some ways a "fine", in that it costs them money, and so they rationally would like to avoid it happening. For example, after a former university of mine misplaced a bunch of records, they paid for two years of identity-theft and credit-monitoring through some service for everyone who was affected.
It would be one thing if it were just Mr Bush promoting this: he can't actually pass laws. Or even just Mr Bush and his Republican allies: they control neither house of Congress. The actual situation seems to be much worse: the Democratic-led Congress is going to bring this to a vote and pass it, despite the fact that they could easily block it (or not have brought it up at all) if they wished to.
Again in the "depends what they're for" vein, we do have a set of general-purpose servers with identical mounted filesystems/home-dirs that do have different, non-numerical names (still the short, hard-to-misspell variety). These are mainly compute servers for people who leave long-running jobs in screen, because it's easier to remember "I set some stuff up on knuth" than "I set some stuff up on foo32". The load-balancing can be sub-optimal in this approach (people tend to pick a machine they use as "their" compute server, and some names seem more popular than others), but it mostly works.
We use different naming schemes for different subsets of servers depending on what they're used for.
For general-use clusters that people are going to ssh in to do work on, need to remember the names of, and are actually different (i.e. we don't have five servers just for load-balancing, but for five different things), we tend to use theme-based names that are short and hard to misspell. E.g. the old standby of computer scientists: turing, knuth, etc.
For servers that are going to be used as part of a cluster, or identical machines with identical mounted filesystems/home-dirs, we pick a name and append numbers. E.g. foo01 through foo99. There's really no reason to give them names, and it makes simple bash/perl/etc. scripts easier to write than walking a list of names kept in a file. Round-robin DNS then resolves foo to one of the foo## randomly for a user who just wants any machine in the cluster. (If you want to get fancy you can preferentially direct them to an unloaded machine.)
In addition to being sanctioned by judges, a particularly egregious pattern of abuse by specific lawyers could be raised as an ethics complaint in the relevant state bar association, couldn't it? I suppose how likely that is to succeed depends on the particular state, and just how well you can pin something specific on a specific lawyer.
If the purpose was really just to let people stay in their homes without being priced out, that'd be one thing. But this proposition was written by a far-right anti-tax group funded largely by business, and the results show. If they wanted just that one effect, they could've made Prop 13 only apply to owner-occupied residences. But it doesn't.
It applies also, for example, to second homes and beach condos (which is why Buffet benefits), and even to commercial property. So landlords in areas without rent control get to pocket the profits from increased land values, without having to pay their fair share in increased property taxes. How is that a noble goal?
One way is deferring property taxes until sale. That way, as long as you live in the house, you get pay the old tax rate, but if you sell out into the market at the now-much-higher valuations, you have to pay the back taxes out of the capital gains (up to the gains).
The current system lets people not only live in their very-valuable houses without paying the fully valued taxes on them, but also lets them keep those increases when they sell out. People who benefited from 20+ years of lower taxes intended to let them remain in their homes should not get to keep the gains also; those gains should go to reimburse the state for the lost taxes once the person has decided that they no longer in fact wish to live there.
During the late-70s/early-80s anti-tax crusade (during which Reagan was ascendant), Proposition 13 put quite stringent limits on property taxes that in effect mandated that they would always decrease in real terms, even if the property increased in value.
Under Prop 13, a property is valued when it's purchased. Thereafter, its taxable value can only go up by 1% per year. Since this is generally less than inflation, and much less than property-price appreciation, in effect the longer you own a property, the lower taxes you pay on it. This leads to people like Warren Buffet owning million-dollar houses that they pay taxes on as if they were worth $100,000 (Buffet himself admits this is ridiculous).
So where does the money come from? From new construction and new entrants to the state, who have to pay taxes at current assessments (since they just bought in). But many of these people are recent college graduates and new immigrants, neither of whom are particularly wealthy or good sources of reliably large tax revenues.
Quite apart from bankrupting the state, it also has the effect of being a hugely regressive tax, where the rich generally pay much lower property taxes than the less-rich. In addition, it's created a landed aristocracy---the privilege of paying lower property taxes than new immigrants is, inexplicably, inheritable.
A lot of consulting firms want people with a technical background, but will not have you doing much actual technical work---primarily you'll be using some familiarity with the field and ability to research it to fill in stuff for powerpoint presentations.
If you're willing to go on for other degrees, having a technical background is quite interesting to, for example, law schools.
Resurrected Hitler has in fact made clear that he is now "down" with the Jews