Just remember, it's infringement, not theft. Theft is a violation of property, which our legal system views as a natural right. Infringement is a violation of copyright protection, which is the result of Congressional legislation and thus subject to change or annulment. In the US legal system, if everybody thought it was okay to steal it would still be theft. But if enough people think copyright is out the window, it's out the window, bribed Congressmen not withstanding.
That said, I agree with you. I used to use P2P and other file trading systems, but I've stopped that and bought the CDs of stuff i actaully listen to (a surprisingly small amount of what I downloaded really). The only thing I still download is unlicensed anime (ie no English translation available for sale to begin with) and I buy the ones I like when/if they get around to licensing it here.
Very true. I'm all for fighting piracy. But the media outlets don't really seem interested in fighting piracy. They support a wide range of DRM measures, which will have no effect on pirates who will just download hacks. But they will prevent, or at least make it a huge and possibly felonious pain for me to watch DVDs I've paid for without buying a new protection-schemed disc and player every couple years, listen to CDs I bought on my computer, remix those CDs I bought as I'm legally entitled to do, record TV shows I'm going to miss, convert media formats for portability between locations/devices even when I own the underlying media, download songs that local artists have put out on the web for free, or use my computer to edit home movies because I don't have some MPAA-licensed watermarking system.
The problem with the DRM campaign is that it isn't about piracy at all, it's about the **AA mobs getting their hands a bit deeper into our pockets by charging us for things we have the legal right to do for free, based on the idea that our legitimate property rights are the reason people are stealing things. The new TVs and stereos and computers and portable audio systems they're going to have legally mandated will cost the public billions, and will do no good since the same mandate won't be in place in Canada or Mexico or many a country served by FedEx. DRM is a debacle, and it needs to be stopped now. Set up licit systems that give people access to the things they want, make money off it legitimately rather than by influence peddling with our public officials, break up the illegal trusts and drop the price of CDs and DVDs to what they'd be without criminal inflation, bring in IRS auditors to get all the taxes these jerks aren't paying and find all the profits they're stealing from artists, then go after the holdouts who still want everything for free.
Does anyone know if this is the same bug that was fixed in grc.com's XPdite program? That's described as an XP bug, whereas this is desribed as an IE bug, but there's not enough info to be sure.
1. Many, if not most games never get ported to Linux/Mac, or get poorly ported, or you have to use an emulator which makes them suck.
2. I take my work home a lot (that way the boss only keeps my in the office for double overtime instead of locking me in there all night). I need to use specific software packages, and most of them are Windows only. Also, I had to buy the licenses for them, often at not inconsiderable price, so I don't feel like converting.
3. It's good enough. No matter how much I might dislike Microsoft or Windows, it does the job. It has its flaws, but I've yet to see one I can't deal with (albeit usually by installing third-party software). If there was a real impetus to not use Windows I would. But as it is, it's just an inferior product in some respects. And those shortcomings don't make up for the first two points.
Good god how many clueless redundant threads does it take for you guys to read the bloody article? The lawsuit happened because the filters DO NO JUST FILTER PORN. They filter anything with naughty keywords like gay, or breast, or flat income tax. They filtered a variety of advocacy groups having nothing to do with porn, such as Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. Got that now? Not just porn. Other things. Read article, not look dumb. Goooood.
Nobody's bawling for the right to view porn here either. They're complaining about mandatory filters that can't discern between porn and normal sites because they're simply keyword based (ie, if you run a site on breast cancer it sees breast and you're blacklisted) and because these filters are often intentionally used to block web sites that have been deemed governmentally unsanctioned for your viewing, such as the Planned Parenthood website or the ACLU site. If there were an effective way of just filtering out the porn sites that would be great. But what this law mandated wasn't that, it was broad incompetent and/or malicious filtering which blocked legitimate sites.
The problem with the glass citizen model though is that it assumes the transgressions are rare. Look at the mp3 issue. They can easily track the people who are doing it, at least on a meaningful scale. In fact, they do track them already. They have detailed information on the people doing it and they can nab them at any time. So why don't you see Kazaa users going to jail by the ISP-load?
Numbers. Knowing who's doing something you dissaprove of is useless when it's half the population, or when it's an especially powerful subgroup like rich white college students. So they'll use this system the same way they use all the other crimes they know everyone does. They'll use it to arrest poor black kids, political enemies, and the occasional celebrity when they want some press. And the fact is, the justice system here is so warped that this system is irrelevant, those people were going to be arrested anyways, it was just a matter of finding an excuse.
Hey, huzzah for an anime channel and all, but what percentage of those 24 hours do you figure is going to be devoted to DBZ and Pokemon? I seriously doubt they'll put anything on that hasn't been edited down to a G rating, and they'll pass on anything involving sex, drugs, violence, or fart jokes for fear of letter bombing by soccer moms off their valium, so how much can they really program?
Plus, I just know my darn dirty cable company won't carry it, and my apartment complex doesn't allow dishes. It's all part of some nefarious plot to allow other people to outnerd me after all my years of effort at being King Dork of the universe.
What bothers me most about this is not the moves ICANN has made. It's not that they've booted the sources of public oversight off.
What bothers me most is, since it's been pretty clear all along they have no concern for integrity of the net or public good online, and they never felt the need to keep us from knowing that, what the heck is it they're getting ready to do that they don't want us o know about? Paranoid, yes, but I really don't see why they would have gone to so much trouble over this unless they have something up their sleeve.
1. Ignorance. Most people don't know that there are people in Congress being payed to take those rights away from them. That would involve complex actions like searching out information (hey, it's not like the major media outlet owned papers are covering this issue in depth). It might even require the average American to read at a high school level, and we all know that's a pipe dream. And thus they won't find it out till it's too late. Which leads into..
2. Apathy. Nobody stands up for their rights any more. Especially when it's a little thing like copying a CD. Then having chips implanted into their TVs to prevent them from deviously recording the show they'll be missing while working the second job to pay for all their new compliant electronics. Then having to pony up tax money for the much needed "Buy Jack Valenti a gold plated limo every six months" fund when even those measures don't save the entertainment industry from the greed, idiocy, and fraud of those running it. Then having the FBI wiretap all communications, open all mail, and sneak hidden cameras into every home to make sure no piracy is occuring. Well, that's the ones who don't get drafted for our wars to fight terrorism in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Western Europe, China, Mexico, Canada, and New York.
Imagine if, instead of creating a P2P network of a given virus, somebody simply constructed a viral "protocol" and distributed it over the net. Then, a given virus writer wouldn't necessarily have to have his virus communicate with other infected units, which can be caught via firewall and packet sniffing. He might be able to have his virus get update information about what anti-virus systems were doing or how to evade the latest firewalls whenever a new viral file pops up on the machine, because he would know his virus is "0wnz0r3d 2.0 compliant" or some such.
I mean, we've all seen computing clusters and corporate nets that are just swimming in virii because of lax security procedures, and some of us have the unfortunate experience of having to try to get data from one of them to our virus scanned, firewalled, packet sniffed pristine unit on another network, or worse to our home PCs. Imagine if that cluster was evolving every few hours while one of its clueless users was trying to figure out why that.exe file from his email didn't really show him pics of Anna Kournikova, so that the virii on it would know the latest virus definitions on our sniffers and be smart enough to change to account for them, all without easily filterable upstream communication.
Sure, but that's grid computing. I'm just talking about using basic distributed computing programs like the SETI search screensaver to solve straightforward but computationally expensive problems. Sure, it won't let somebody do a real time FEA for heat stress on the Space Station, but for anything that can be broken down into non-interdependant units or which simply requires a large number of trials it would be great. The only real difference between my system and what they're already doing would be that mine would have the actual math as a seperate object, and would have to include a bit more functionality for web updates.
I do imagine that someone is going to discover a way to crossbreed standard distributed computing and P2P networks to generate a workable pseudo-grid at some point though. After all, the reason distributed is so easy and grids are so hard is mostly the scheduling and control, as you pointed out. By inserting propagation and communication into the system you could get better results, more akin to grid computing, but without the need for one central brain managing the whole process. Mostly it's a matter of search algorithm though, and that's problem dependant.
Let's try this instead
on
ECCp-109 Solved
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
So now we know distributed efforts can solve great big math problems. Don't get me wrong, that's good to know and all, but.. aren't there any math problems that would be of more use than giving people with 210 IQs something else to bicker over during Star Trek conventions? Really, I'm an engineer, and sometimes I actually have to use math to do things like MAKE A FRIGGIN CAR OR SOMETHING.
There are plenty of nontrivial engineering problems out there, especially when you take a trip into thermodynamics and fluid flow. Let's solve those. Or sequence the human genome to grow an extra arm or something. Or better yet, let's put the computing power of mankind to work to randomly generate a script for Episode 3 that won't make us want to beat Lucas senseless with our plastic lightsabers. Why can people scrape together all these prizes for pointless pseudo-intellectual drivel but nobody can get some money behind something worthwhile, or at least interesting?
Here's an idea: Instead of using distributed computing for all this junk science, let's start a central distributed network. This network would have a basic interface element for all the major OS configurations, and would be able to update from the web with whatever mathematic formula and trial space it was supposed to run at a given time. Everyone everywhere could download the client, and set it up to run with whatever processor load they wanted, update on a schedule, maybe vary processor load on a schedule so it works extra hard when you're not using the system. Not much of an interface really. Then some organization, say the NSF or better yet an international science conglomerate, could alot portions of the system load to projects they deemed worthy, depending on complexity and value. The cost is basically nothing, in fact since you could get somebody on the planet to write the code for free one weekend, and the bandwidth would likely be rather low, you would most likely not be talking about the cost of funding a minor research project. Users could still run other distributed clients if they wanted, and the system would be completely voluntary. But it would attract a lot of attention and users, do some good for mankind, and direct our computing power in positive directions.
Well, the real problem we have in this matter is that the latter half of the 20th century gave people the idea that musicians and other artists are supposed to be swimming in solid platinum swimming pools filled with diamond crusted dubloons. People saw all these bands getting insanely rich, and they forgot that the rock star phenomenon is an aberration, and an unsustainable one at that. Artists are, have been, and will continue to be generally under-rewarded for their efforts. Most of them will never be famous, and many of the ones that get famous will become so only after their careers have long since ended, or even after their death. Musicians and other artists have an idea that they are entitled to wealth and success. They're not, even if they're great at what they do. Wealth and success are always and will always be for an extremely small group, and most of them will get it by doing things that would make any decent person's stomach turn.
Art is a wonderful, enriching thing that the human race needs. But it is not something people are willing to devote large portions of the economy to. There will always be a few huge superstars every now and then, and there will always be a moron who inherited a small continent and wants every artiste he meets at a party to build a cathedral for him, but the industry as a whole will always be a vast majority of nobodies with a scattering of one-hit wonders.
P2P file sharing has not degraded the market for music. The simple truth is there wasn't as much of a market as people want to make out. Let's take an example. The figment to my left is Bobby. Bobby is a college student. He has 500 gigs of mp3s, comprising the complete works of every band he's ever heard of, and several he simply downloaded by accident and doesn't even know he has. He also owns about 20 cds he actually bought, about half of them used. Music is a big part of his daily life.
Now, through the magic of the internet, we'll take a look at Bobby mk 2, a version of Bobby in a world in which the internet never existed. In this world, Bobby owns about 20 cds he actually bought, about half of them used. He just doesn't have nearly as much music. Music isn't really all that important to him.
Is IP theft via mp3 trade wrong? Sure. Just as wrong as jaywalking, rushing the tail end of the yellow light, or driving 5 over the limit on the highway. It is a minor issue that the public is willing to accept because they know the damage it does is of much less value than the rewards to be gained. If you wanted to make money in music, well, tough. Sorry, that's how economics works. If everyone decides tomorrow that it's okay to eat a few grapes at the grocery store, you just aren't going to make as much in the grape trade. Either stick to your guns and try to keep making money regardless, or take your efforts elsewhere.
No, habeus corpus means that adequate evidence must be presented that a crime was committed in order to hold someone for it. Actually, it's more like evidence must be presented on request by someone of appropriate legal standing to the proper court using the proper paperwork in triplicate, assuming there are no special circumstances that would prohibit showing such evidence, or if the judge in question can't be reached at the golf course, etc. Just ask the 500-5000 people currently being held incommunicado in the US without access to legal counsel, and not accused of any crime other than picking the wrong religion. Ah, the land of the free.
What you're referring to is ex post facto, which we also "have" in America, in the sense that if the judge likes you he might let you out on it, and if not you're screwed.
In short, never believe it when the government tells you what it can and can't do. They made the rules, they pick when they apply, and they have the guns and manpower to make it stick. The only difference between the China and the US, or Britain, or any "representative" government is that around here the government doesn't care what brand of toilet paper you use. At the moment. But rest assured, when they do, the nice constable with the machine gun will make sure to let you know.
Slashdot Mirror
Just remember, it's infringement, not theft. Theft is a violation of property, which our legal system views as a natural right. Infringement is a violation of copyright protection, which is the result of Congressional legislation and thus subject to change or annulment. In the US legal system, if everybody thought it was okay to steal it would still be theft. But if enough people think copyright is out the window, it's out the window, bribed Congressmen not withstanding.
That said, I agree with you. I used to use P2P and other file trading systems, but I've stopped that and bought the CDs of stuff i actaully listen to (a surprisingly small amount of what I downloaded really). The only thing I still download is unlicensed anime (ie no English translation available for sale to begin with) and I buy the ones I like when/if they get around to licensing it here.
Very true. I'm all for fighting piracy. But the media outlets don't really seem interested in fighting piracy. They support a wide range of DRM measures, which will have no effect on pirates who will just download hacks. But they will prevent, or at least make it a huge and possibly felonious pain for me to watch DVDs I've paid for without buying a new protection-schemed disc and player every couple years, listen to CDs I bought on my computer, remix those CDs I bought as I'm legally entitled to do, record TV shows I'm going to miss, convert media formats for portability between locations/devices even when I own the underlying media, download songs that local artists have put out on the web for free, or use my computer to edit home movies because I don't have some MPAA-licensed watermarking system.
The problem with the DRM campaign is that it isn't about piracy at all, it's about the **AA mobs getting their hands a bit deeper into our pockets by charging us for things we have the legal right to do for free, based on the idea that our legitimate property rights are the reason people are stealing things. The new TVs and stereos and computers and portable audio systems they're going to have legally mandated will cost the public billions, and will do no good since the same mandate won't be in place in Canada or Mexico or many a country served by FedEx. DRM is a debacle, and it needs to be stopped now. Set up licit systems that give people access to the things they want, make money off it legitimately rather than by influence peddling with our public officials, break up the illegal trusts and drop the price of CDs and DVDs to what they'd be without criminal inflation, bring in IRS auditors to get all the taxes these jerks aren't paying and find all the profits they're stealing from artists, then go after the holdouts who still want everything for free.
Does anyone know if this is the same bug that was fixed in grc.com's XPdite program? That's described as an XP bug, whereas this is desribed as an IE bug, but there's not enough info to be sure.
1. Many, if not most games never get ported to Linux/Mac, or get poorly ported, or you have to use an emulator which makes them suck. 2. I take my work home a lot (that way the boss only keeps my in the office for double overtime instead of locking me in there all night). I need to use specific software packages, and most of them are Windows only. Also, I had to buy the licenses for them, often at not inconsiderable price, so I don't feel like converting. 3. It's good enough. No matter how much I might dislike Microsoft or Windows, it does the job. It has its flaws, but I've yet to see one I can't deal with (albeit usually by installing third-party software). If there was a real impetus to not use Windows I would. But as it is, it's just an inferior product in some respects. And those shortcomings don't make up for the first two points.
Good god how many clueless redundant threads does it take for you guys to read the bloody article? The lawsuit happened because the filters DO NO JUST FILTER PORN. They filter anything with naughty keywords like gay, or breast, or flat income tax. They filtered a variety of advocacy groups having nothing to do with porn, such as Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. Got that now? Not just porn. Other things. Read article, not look dumb. Goooood.
Nobody's bawling for the right to view porn here either. They're complaining about mandatory filters that can't discern between porn and normal sites because they're simply keyword based (ie, if you run a site on breast cancer it sees breast and you're blacklisted) and because these filters are often intentionally used to block web sites that have been deemed governmentally unsanctioned for your viewing, such as the Planned Parenthood website or the ACLU site. If there were an effective way of just filtering out the porn sites that would be great. But what this law mandated wasn't that, it was broad incompetent and/or malicious filtering which blocked legitimate sites.
The problem with the glass citizen model though is that it assumes the transgressions are rare. Look at the mp3 issue. They can easily track the people who are doing it, at least on a meaningful scale. In fact, they do track them already. They have detailed information on the people doing it and they can nab them at any time. So why don't you see Kazaa users going to jail by the ISP-load?
Numbers. Knowing who's doing something you dissaprove of is useless when it's half the population, or when it's an especially powerful subgroup like rich white college students. So they'll use this system the same way they use all the other crimes they know everyone does. They'll use it to arrest poor black kids, political enemies, and the occasional celebrity when they want some press. And the fact is, the justice system here is so warped that this system is irrelevant, those people were going to be arrested anyways, it was just a matter of finding an excuse.
Hey, huzzah for an anime channel and all, but what percentage of those 24 hours do you figure is going to be devoted to DBZ and Pokemon? I seriously doubt they'll put anything on that hasn't been edited down to a G rating, and they'll pass on anything involving sex, drugs, violence, or fart jokes for fear of letter bombing by soccer moms off their valium, so how much can they really program? Plus, I just know my darn dirty cable company won't carry it, and my apartment complex doesn't allow dishes. It's all part of some nefarious plot to allow other people to outnerd me after all my years of effort at being King Dork of the universe.
What bothers me most about this is not the moves ICANN has made. It's not that they've booted the sources of public oversight off.
What bothers me most is, since it's been pretty clear all along they have no concern for integrity of the net or public good online, and they never felt the need to keep us from knowing that, what the heck is it they're getting ready to do that they don't want us o know about? Paranoid, yes, but I really don't see why they would have gone to so much trouble over this unless they have something up their sleeve.
There's still two major problems.
1. Ignorance. Most people don't know that there are people in Congress being payed to take those rights away from them. That would involve complex actions like searching out information (hey, it's not like the major media outlet owned papers are covering this issue in depth). It might even require the average American to read at a high school level, and we all know that's a pipe dream. And thus they won't find it out till it's too late. Which leads into..
2. Apathy. Nobody stands up for their rights any more. Especially when it's a little thing like copying a CD. Then having chips implanted into their TVs to prevent them from deviously recording the show they'll be missing while working the second job to pay for all their new compliant electronics. Then having to pony up tax money for the much needed "Buy Jack Valenti a gold plated limo every six months" fund when even those measures don't save the entertainment industry from the greed, idiocy, and fraud of those running it. Then having the FBI wiretap all communications, open all mail, and sneak hidden cameras into every home to make sure no piracy is occuring. Well, that's the ones who don't get drafted for our wars to fight terrorism in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Western Europe, China, Mexico, Canada, and New York.
Imagine if, instead of creating a P2P network of a given virus, somebody simply constructed a viral "protocol" and distributed it over the net. Then, a given virus writer wouldn't necessarily have to have his virus communicate with other infected units, which can be caught via firewall and packet sniffing. He might be able to have his virus get update information about what anti-virus systems were doing or how to evade the latest firewalls whenever a new viral file pops up on the machine, because he would know his virus is "0wnz0r3d 2.0 compliant" or some such.
I mean, we've all seen computing clusters and corporate nets that are just swimming in virii because of lax security procedures, and some of us have the unfortunate experience of having to try to get data from one of them to our virus scanned, firewalled, packet sniffed pristine unit on another network, or worse to our home PCs. Imagine if that cluster was evolving every few hours while one of its clueless users was trying to figure out why that .exe file from his email didn't really show him pics of Anna Kournikova, so that the virii on it would know the latest virus definitions on our sniffers and be smart enough to change to account for them, all without easily filterable upstream communication.
Sure, but that's grid computing. I'm just talking about using basic distributed computing programs like the SETI search screensaver to solve straightforward but computationally expensive problems. Sure, it won't let somebody do a real time FEA for heat stress on the Space Station, but for anything that can be broken down into non-interdependant units or which simply requires a large number of trials it would be great. The only real difference between my system and what they're already doing would be that mine would have the actual math as a seperate object, and would have to include a bit more functionality for web updates.
I do imagine that someone is going to discover a way to crossbreed standard distributed computing and P2P networks to generate a workable pseudo-grid at some point though. After all, the reason distributed is so easy and grids are so hard is mostly the scheduling and control, as you pointed out. By inserting propagation and communication into the system you could get better results, more akin to grid computing, but without the need for one central brain managing the whole process. Mostly it's a matter of search algorithm though, and that's problem dependant.
So now we know distributed efforts can solve great big math problems. Don't get me wrong, that's good to know and all, but.. aren't there any math problems that would be of more use than giving people with 210 IQs something else to bicker over during Star Trek conventions? Really, I'm an engineer, and sometimes I actually have to use math to do things like MAKE A FRIGGIN CAR OR SOMETHING.
There are plenty of nontrivial engineering problems out there, especially when you take a trip into thermodynamics and fluid flow. Let's solve those. Or sequence the human genome to grow an extra arm or something. Or better yet, let's put the computing power of mankind to work to randomly generate a script for Episode 3 that won't make us want to beat Lucas senseless with our plastic lightsabers. Why can people scrape together all these prizes for pointless pseudo-intellectual drivel but nobody can get some money behind something worthwhile, or at least interesting?
Here's an idea: Instead of using distributed computing for all this junk science, let's start a central distributed network. This network would have a basic interface element for all the major OS configurations, and would be able to update from the web with whatever mathematic formula and trial space it was supposed to run at a given time. Everyone everywhere could download the client, and set it up to run with whatever processor load they wanted, update on a schedule, maybe vary processor load on a schedule so it works extra hard when you're not using the system. Not much of an interface really. Then some organization, say the NSF or better yet an international science conglomerate, could alot portions of the system load to projects they deemed worthy, depending on complexity and value. The cost is basically nothing, in fact since you could get somebody on the planet to write the code for free one weekend, and the bandwidth would likely be rather low, you would most likely not be talking about the cost of funding a minor research project. Users could still run other distributed clients if they wanted, and the system would be completely voluntary. But it would attract a lot of attention and users, do some good for mankind, and direct our computing power in positive directions.
Well, the real problem we have in this matter is that the latter half of the 20th century gave people the idea that musicians and other artists are supposed to be swimming in solid platinum swimming pools filled with diamond crusted dubloons. People saw all these bands getting insanely rich, and they forgot that the rock star phenomenon is an aberration, and an unsustainable one at that. Artists are, have been, and will continue to be generally under-rewarded for their efforts. Most of them will never be famous, and many of the ones that get famous will become so only after their careers have long since ended, or even after their death. Musicians and other artists have an idea that they are entitled to wealth and success. They're not, even if they're great at what they do. Wealth and success are always and will always be for an extremely small group, and most of them will get it by doing things that would make any decent person's stomach turn. Art is a wonderful, enriching thing that the human race needs. But it is not something people are willing to devote large portions of the economy to. There will always be a few huge superstars every now and then, and there will always be a moron who inherited a small continent and wants every artiste he meets at a party to build a cathedral for him, but the industry as a whole will always be a vast majority of nobodies with a scattering of one-hit wonders. P2P file sharing has not degraded the market for music. The simple truth is there wasn't as much of a market as people want to make out. Let's take an example. The figment to my left is Bobby. Bobby is a college student. He has 500 gigs of mp3s, comprising the complete works of every band he's ever heard of, and several he simply downloaded by accident and doesn't even know he has. He also owns about 20 cds he actually bought, about half of them used. Music is a big part of his daily life. Now, through the magic of the internet, we'll take a look at Bobby mk 2, a version of Bobby in a world in which the internet never existed. In this world, Bobby owns about 20 cds he actually bought, about half of them used. He just doesn't have nearly as much music. Music isn't really all that important to him. Is IP theft via mp3 trade wrong? Sure. Just as wrong as jaywalking, rushing the tail end of the yellow light, or driving 5 over the limit on the highway. It is a minor issue that the public is willing to accept because they know the damage it does is of much less value than the rewards to be gained. If you wanted to make money in music, well, tough. Sorry, that's how economics works. If everyone decides tomorrow that it's okay to eat a few grapes at the grocery store, you just aren't going to make as much in the grape trade. Either stick to your guns and try to keep making money regardless, or take your efforts elsewhere.
No, habeus corpus means that adequate evidence must be presented that a crime was committed in order to hold someone for it. Actually, it's more like evidence must be presented on request by someone of appropriate legal standing to the proper court using the proper paperwork in triplicate, assuming there are no special circumstances that would prohibit showing such evidence, or if the judge in question can't be reached at the golf course, etc. Just ask the 500-5000 people currently being held incommunicado in the US without access to legal counsel, and not accused of any crime other than picking the wrong religion. Ah, the land of the free. What you're referring to is ex post facto, which we also "have" in America, in the sense that if the judge likes you he might let you out on it, and if not you're screwed. In short, never believe it when the government tells you what it can and can't do. They made the rules, they pick when they apply, and they have the guns and manpower to make it stick. The only difference between the China and the US, or Britain, or any "representative" government is that around here the government doesn't care what brand of toilet paper you use. At the moment. But rest assured, when they do, the nice constable with the machine gun will make sure to let you know.