Isolationism all but gurantees that your country will be either involved in a war, or subject to an invasion. The US, for example, pursured an isolationist policy prior to WWI. However, when it was clear that a developing European (German-dominated) world hegemony would eventually imperil the nation, the US chose to enter the war.
...you have a conviction but have not acted on it to its fullest extent. What we have to ask ourselves is, "How far am I willing to go for my convictions"? It's a scary question, because you have to then ask, "If I'm not willing to act on my convictions, are they any good? Why have them at all then?"
Actually, no, you don't have to ask yourself that second question if you're not an extremist, an absolutist. How far is he willing to go for his convictions? One step further than the people who will work for the DOD and subsidiaries. And if the vast majority of others were willing to go that far, it would have a huge impact and (arguably, depending on how you feel about the current uses of "defense" technology) make the world a better place. Should you refuse to make the world a better place just because you can't make it perfect? I don't think so.
He wants to try to save the world also on topics where he is no genius. Look at the lengths he goes on about outsourcing in this interview, even as it is quite unrelated to Free Software.
You state that he is "no genius" on other topics, and suggest that he is "no genius" on the subject of outsourcing, but you don't give any reason. Because you say so? And, what were your credentials again? You don't even bother to refute what he says -- which sounded reasonable to me, by the way -- so this leaves you sounding like the one talking about something he knows nothing about.
You have a right to classify all three statements as asinine if you wish, but please be clear that, while the first two statements are Stallman expressing his own views, the third statement is Stallman paraphrasing the effect of effect of trade treaties on workers' wages. He is thus speaking as if he represents one of the corporations benefitting from labor-hostile trade treaties, telling countries that they'd better keep their wages low if they don't want said corporation relocating to a lower-wage country.
The fact that he hasn't had a job for some time now and is given money shows, his views have very little practicality.
I call bullshit. There is no logical connection between your two statements.
First, what is a job besides being given money for doing something? You say that he is "given money." What for? His good looks? Or is it because he is doing something that has value, something that deserves compensation, something that is worth supporting? If you are criticizing him for not holding a 40-hour-per-week, salaried position, I think that's unfair. For every significant leader or philosopher in history you can name who supported themselves through "normal" employment, I bet I can name at least two who didn't. Iconoclasts and geniuses seldom have steady jobs, but are instead supported either by private (family) wealth, when available, or by some sort of patronage.
Second, whether one makes money directly from one's ideas is no proof for or against the practicality of those ideas, as any review of the history of invention and great ideas will show.
And if you think Ghandi was great think of salt well how just much salt do they put in things now, enough to kill us. Thanks Ghandi for helping to make millions of people ill.
I hesitate to respond to this, but because the rest of your post looks basically serious, I'm afraid that this ludicrous comment might not be a joke.
A human being will die without salt: It is a requirement for life. If your staple foods do not provide enough salt, you must supplement your diet with more salt. When a foreign power is occupying your country and enriching itself through taxes on a life-sustaining nutrient like salt, it makes sense to defy the occupier and encourage your people to take their own salt, for free, from the sea.
I'm sure you could find legitimate grounds on which to criticize Gandhi (or any other great leader), but don't be silly. It undermines everything else you say.
I once had a similar, although much simpler idea, to attach a small dynamo to a kite and use excess airflow to generate electricity. The system could be used by campers, backpackers, people in similar remote situations to run small electrical devices.
But then I thought, and I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong, that resistance in a wire increases directly proportional to the length and inversely proportional to the diameter of the wire. I supposed the result would be that a long, thin wire used to carry the kite-generated current back to the ground would lose so much to resistance that it woulnd't be worth it. Obviously, I never did the math to know for sure: I assumed that it hadn't been done because it wasn't that easy.
The laddermill seems to get around this by transfering the harvested power as mechanical, instead of electrical, energy back to the ground.
it would be hella difficult to globally impact the weather system.
Wow, your technical explanation is compelling! Would you care to back up your wild assertion with anything more than a wild assertion?
Based on what very little I know about fluid dynamics, I believe that it is very difficult to know what effects any given actions will produce. So, unless you've run some very sophisticated weather models, you're probably not in a position to say whether whether it would be "easy" or "difficult" to globally impact the weather system.
I wonder. With larger and larger plasma/LCD displays, home-theater sound systems, DVD quality and ever-dropping prices on such consumer electronics, I can see cinemas taking a beating, too. I personally love going to the movies, both for the film itself and for the social aspect of getting out. I also don't want a giant plasma screen in my living room, so I'll be a customer for years to come. But it wouldn't surprise me to see fewer cinemas in the future.
Maybe the activity shouldn't be illegal when the half of the population is doing it and doesn't even consider it wrong.
I think the fact that half the population is doing it indicates that something is off-balance and needs to be addressed. However, Americans as a whole don't think things through very well and take the logical consequences into consideration. (Witness the current epidemics of pathological obesity and crushing credit-card debt used to purchase non-essential, well, junk.) I don't think the population at large has had a good, long meditation on the economics at work in the content-creation industries. I think that many people fail to see that you don't get something for nothing, that something's gotta give.
On the other hand, I might say: Maybe the activity shouldn't be illegal when there's no way to enforce the law without the asphyxiating our inventive and free society. If the government decides that there's nothing it can (or at least should) do, it will be up to artists, technologists and business people to route around the problem.
One possibility is some iteration of the Ransom Model: An artist creates a work, makes excerpts of it available to the public, then demands a certain, fair, one-time payment. Once the payment is made, the work will be released to the public domain. This rewards the artist, although it will mean many fewer jobs for distribution and marketing middlemen. It also feeds the public domain, currently starved by ever-expanding US copyright law, keeping our creative culture vibrant. There are kinks to be worked out, to be sure (this is not a complete business model), but it's an idea.
If the DEA, et al, framed their purpose as keeping problem X in check, it would lead logically to the conclusion that education and treatment, not criminalization and military aid abroad, would be the correct path to pursue. Prohibition is a kind of extremism: It has nothing to do with finding a healthy balance.
That's just your opinion, not a fact. And it's such a sweeping statement that it ignores the significant differences between different types of "drugs", as well as the differences between individual people and their uses of them. Ludicrous.
I don't believe that P2P and fair use are compatible concepts, I've seen nothing that suggests that giving copies to other people is legal fair use.
I suspect you mean that you consider P2P and "fair use" incompatible in the context of the article, which might make some sense.
But if you are making a more general statement, I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with the ongoing discourse about copyright. Good starting places might be Creative Commons or the writings of Lawrence Lessig.
P2P is only a distribution technology. Fair use, copyright, licensing, etc. are legal concepts, and other issues entirely. They can be as compatible or incompatible as we (society) want them to be.
Hmmm, that's strange. I only read your post just now. I thought I was replying to the same parent you replied to, in which context my post makes better sense.
In any case, Merriam-Webster's definition indicates that an acronym may be either pronouncable or not. Personally, I would personaly consider Merriam-Webster to be the second most authoritative English dictionary, after the OED, which even bills itself (probably rightly) as the "definitive record of the English language". Unfortunately, OED doesn't allow free online lookups and, again unfortunately but not surprisingly, "acronym" does not happen to be their free word of the day.
Other online dictionaries disagree about pronouncability as a requirement. I like what another poster said about the "nym" suffix meaning "word", but I don't know if I agree that a "word" must be pronouncable. I haven't really thought about it. Lots of words don't agree 100% with their etymology (the chairman might be female, for example.)
I agree with you that an abbreviation should be the shortening of a single word, but some dicionaries seem to indicate that an acronym is a special form of an abbreviation, which disagrees with our point of view.
If I could get OED's verdict I would submit to whatever it happens to be. Failing that, I'll cite Merriam-Webster, which happens to accord with my own opinion.
An acronym does not have to be pronouncable, it only has to be formed from the initial letters of the original words. The examples you all give are, indeed, acronyms. But so are RSVP, NRA, SMB and WTF.
If it were true, it might be ironic. But it isn't. Or, at least, I don't think it is and you haven't given a shred of evidence to support your assetion. Are you calling this Black Hat Hackers Bloc "liberals"? Why? Because they're anti-Bush? Is that your definition of "liberal"? And even if they called themselves "liberal", they'd only constitute a single instance. Bad logic.
You mention Iraq, then go on to say that tanks, helicopters, jets, etc. are "completely pointless in a civil uprising." Well, the Americans haven't won in Iraq yet, but those tools are exactly what they're using. Maybe that's why the fighting is still going on. I also seem to remember the Chinese rolling tanks into Tiananmen Square to put down the demonstrations, and every other day Israel is using their "helicopter gunships" against militants (and others) in Palestine. It would seem that these "completely pointless" weapons you mention are the tools-of-the-trade in putting down civil uprisings.
You make a good point, though. The Vietnamese succeeded, as did the North Koreans. Of course, they were being supplied by the Soviet Union, and that's not likely to happen again. Plus, they were able to organize with comparatively little internal interference, which will never be the case in the US. This fact is the core of the "tinfoil-hat" gripes of the Slashdot community: Freedom to communicate, to encrypt, to travel anonymously, etc. represent the last glimmer of hope that people might actually be able to organize against an out-of-control government.
If planes didn't have to land, you'd have a point. But airports are all about scare resources: location, gates, landing slots, ticket desks, etc. Witness any proposal to build a new airport, and you'll see that the barriers to entry are high indeed in this market. And, as far as I know, no airline can afford to build an airport with private funds anyway: The taxpayers' money -- and land, and air quality and noise levels -- are always involved. So, I don't see it as a stretch at all. The radio spectrum might be a somewhat different discussion, but I still think phone cables and coax runs are good analogies: legally regulated shared use of a finite, public resource.
What's more, although I don't know enough about it to say for sure, I suspect that there are limitations involving sky use, too. For example, I do know that the airspace around cities and airports is tightly controlled. I'm guessing that running a viable airline as a business, something of a scale that could make any inpact in the market, would require cooperation with various entities about landing slots, approaches, schedules, etc.
So, to run an "airline", maybe not. But to run an airline, probably so.
You know, you might be happier out west... I hear Ted's cabin is open.
Me happy? You're the one who's just figured out he'll have to walk to travel anonymously. But do try to avoid being picked up for vagrancy, and stay off the big roads: It's illegal to walk along Interstate highways, AFAIK. And since nearly everything in the US is private property, your options are further limited. The local sheriff will be all to happy to help you "Get off my goddamn property!"
The Scandinavian countries have a wonderful legal concept called Every Man's Right, which gives everyone limited but definite rights to travel on foot, and even camp for short periods.
like you, the airline as a corporation has rights to protect their property
I would point out, as I have done in other posts, that airlines -- like telcos, cable companies, radio broadcasters, etc. who are profiting through regulated use of a publically-owned resource -- have less freedoms as to what they do with their property than do other companies or organizations. In return for a license to profit from use of a public resource, they agree to certain restrictions. For example, you might have the right to deny someone access to your house (your private property) for whatever reasons you like, while United Airlines does not necessarily have the same right. There are differences between the rights of corporations (especially heavily regulated ones) and individuals.
If you want to travel anyomously you can, just not on regulated travel systems that are trying to be safe.
I generally agree, and a free market would probably provide options to all potential consumers. However, it is not a free market.
So, who is distorting the market? According to Gilmore's site, the airlines are claiming (but have been unable or unwilling to document) that the government has mandated the ID check. If this is the case, then there is no chance for a competitor to offer anonymous travel. Furthermore, airlines are hardly a free market to begin with, given their heavily regulated nature. (Also, I assume -- but am too lazy to research for this post -- that they have been bailed out by taxpayers and have been given various tax-breaks and incentives that have allowed them to thrive unnaturally, at least during some periods.)
So, for long-distance travel (which is often a necessity in the US), what are your anonymous choices? Think about it, and check Gilmore's FAQ. Choices are few, and if you want practical choices, there are even less.
An airline is not simply "a private entity who's letting them use their aircraft." It is a player in a heavily regulated industry that derives certain priveleges and benefits from The People in return for adhering to certain rules. Gilmore says in his FAQ that the courts have forced airlines to behave with a level of responsibility similar to that of the government, since they have been given special license by The People. The situation is somewhat similar with the telcos. So, people have special rights in this matter that they might not have with a more traditional "private entity".
with the American litigious climate, people have to cover their asses
Well, at least by Gilmore's reckoning, the airlines are blaming all this on the government, saying that the ID requirement was mandated to them. If that's the case, then it is not a matter of their liability, as they have no choice. The question is not (yet) whether airlines may or may not require ID of their own accord, but whether the government can compel this is possible defiance of the Constitution. At least as far as I understand this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Isolationism all but gurantees that your country will be either involved in a war, or subject to an invasion. The US, for example, pursured an isolationist policy prior to WWI. However, when it was clear that a developing European (German-dominated) world hegemony would eventually imperil the nation, the US chose to enter the war.
...you have a conviction but have not acted on it to its fullest extent. What we have to ask ourselves is, "How far am I willing to go for my convictions"? It's a scary question, because you have to then ask, "If I'm not willing to act on my convictions, are they any good? Why have them at all then?"
Actually, no, you don't have to ask yourself that second question if you're not an extremist, an absolutist. How far is he willing to go for his convictions? One step further than the people who will work for the DOD and subsidiaries. And if the vast majority of others were willing to go that far, it would have a huge impact and (arguably, depending on how you feel about the current uses of "defense" technology) make the world a better place. Should you refuse to make the world a better place just because you can't make it perfect? I don't think so.
He wants to try to save the world also on topics where he is no genius. Look at the lengths he goes on about outsourcing in this interview, even as it is quite unrelated to Free Software.
You state that he is "no genius" on other topics, and suggest that he is "no genius" on the subject of outsourcing, but you don't give any reason. Because you say so? And, what were your credentials again? You don't even bother to refute what he says -- which sounded reasonable to me, by the way -- so this leaves you sounding like the one talking about something he knows nothing about.
You have a right to classify all three statements as asinine if you wish, but please be clear that, while the first two statements are Stallman expressing his own views, the third statement is Stallman paraphrasing the effect of effect of trade treaties on workers' wages. He is thus speaking as if he represents one of the corporations benefitting from labor-hostile trade treaties, telling countries that they'd better keep their wages low if they don't want said corporation relocating to a lower-wage country.
The fact that he hasn't had a job for some time now and is given money shows, his views have very little practicality.
I call bullshit. There is no logical connection between your two statements.
First, what is a job besides being given money for doing something? You say that he is "given money." What for? His good looks? Or is it because he is doing something that has value, something that deserves compensation, something that is worth supporting? If you are criticizing him for not holding a 40-hour-per-week, salaried position, I think that's unfair. For every significant leader or philosopher in history you can name who supported themselves through "normal" employment, I bet I can name at least two who didn't. Iconoclasts and geniuses seldom have steady jobs, but are instead supported either by private (family) wealth, when available, or by some sort of patronage.
Second, whether one makes money directly from one's ideas is no proof for or against the practicality of those ideas, as any review of the history of invention and great ideas will show.
And if you think Ghandi was great think of salt well how just much salt do they put in things now, enough to kill us. Thanks Ghandi for helping to make millions of people ill.
I hesitate to respond to this, but because the rest of your post looks basically serious, I'm afraid that this ludicrous comment might not be a joke.
A human being will die without salt: It is a requirement for life. If your staple foods do not provide enough salt, you must supplement your diet with more salt. When a foreign power is occupying your country and enriching itself through taxes on a life-sustaining nutrient like salt, it makes sense to defy the occupier and encourage your people to take their own salt, for free, from the sea.
I'm sure you could find legitimate grounds on which to criticize Gandhi (or any other great leader), but don't be silly. It undermines everything else you say.
why not use the kites to collect solar energy?
I once had a similar, although much simpler idea, to attach a small dynamo to a kite and use excess airflow to generate electricity. The system could be used by campers, backpackers, people in similar remote situations to run small electrical devices.
But then I thought, and I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong, that resistance in a wire increases directly proportional to the length and inversely proportional to the diameter of the wire. I supposed the result would be that a long, thin wire used to carry the kite-generated current back to the ground would lose so much to resistance that it woulnd't be worth it. Obviously, I never did the math to know for sure: I assumed that it hadn't been done because it wasn't that easy.
The laddermill seems to get around this by transfering the harvested power as mechanical, instead of electrical, energy back to the ground.
it would be hella difficult to globally impact the weather system.
Wow, your technical explanation is compelling! Would you care to back up your wild assertion with anything more than a wild assertion?
Based on what very little I know about fluid dynamics, I believe that it is very difficult to know what effects any given actions will produce. So, unless you've run some very sophisticated weather models, you're probably not in a position to say whether whether it would be "easy" or "difficult" to globally impact the weather system.
Good point. And we criminalize natural, organic substances with thousands of years of human-use history behind them...
Cinemas will continue to flourish.
I wonder. With larger and larger plasma/LCD displays, home-theater sound systems, DVD quality and ever-dropping prices on such consumer electronics, I can see cinemas taking a beating, too. I personally love going to the movies, both for the film itself and for the social aspect of getting out. I also don't want a giant plasma screen in my living room, so I'll be a customer for years to come. But it wouldn't surprise me to see fewer cinemas in the future.
Maybe the activity shouldn't be illegal when the half of the population is doing it and doesn't even consider it wrong.
I think the fact that half the population is doing it indicates that something is off-balance and needs to be addressed. However, Americans as a whole don't think things through very well and take the logical consequences into consideration. (Witness the current epidemics of pathological obesity and crushing credit-card debt used to purchase non-essential, well, junk.) I don't think the population at large has had a good, long meditation on the economics at work in the content-creation industries. I think that many people fail to see that you don't get something for nothing, that something's gotta give.
On the other hand, I might say: Maybe the activity shouldn't be illegal when there's no way to enforce the law without the asphyxiating our inventive and free society. If the government decides that there's nothing it can (or at least should) do, it will be up to artists, technologists and business people to route around the problem.
One possibility is some iteration of the Ransom Model: An artist creates a work, makes excerpts of it available to the public, then demands a certain, fair, one-time payment. Once the payment is made, the work will be released to the public domain. This rewards the artist, although it will mean many fewer jobs for distribution and marketing middlemen. It also feeds the public domain, currently starved by ever-expanding US copyright law, keeping our creative culture vibrant. There are kinks to be worked out, to be sure (this is not a complete business model), but it's an idea.
If the DEA, et al, framed their purpose as keeping problem X in check, it would lead logically to the conclusion that education and treatment, not criminalization and military aid abroad, would be the correct path to pursue. Prohibition is a kind of extremism: It has nothing to do with finding a healthy balance.
Drugs are something inheretly bad.
That's just your opinion, not a fact. And it's such a sweeping statement that it ignores the significant differences between different types of "drugs", as well as the differences between individual people and their uses of them. Ludicrous.
I don't believe that P2P and fair use are compatible concepts, I've seen nothing that suggests that giving copies to other people is legal fair use.
I suspect you mean that you consider P2P and "fair use" incompatible in the context of the article, which might make some sense.
But if you are making a more general statement, I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with the ongoing discourse about copyright. Good starting places might be Creative Commons or the writings of Lawrence Lessig.
P2P is only a distribution technology. Fair use, copyright, licensing, etc. are legal concepts, and other issues entirely. They can be as compatible or incompatible as we (society) want them to be.
Hmmm, that's strange. I only read your post just now. I thought I was replying to the same parent you replied to, in which context my post makes better sense.
In any case, Merriam-Webster's definition indicates that an acronym may be either pronouncable or not. Personally, I would personaly consider Merriam-Webster to be the second most authoritative English dictionary, after the OED, which even bills itself (probably rightly) as the "definitive record of the English language". Unfortunately, OED doesn't allow free online lookups and, again unfortunately but not surprisingly, "acronym" does not happen to be their free word of the day.
Other online dictionaries disagree about pronouncability as a requirement. I like what another poster said about the "nym" suffix meaning "word", but I don't know if I agree that a "word" must be pronouncable. I haven't really thought about it. Lots of words don't agree 100% with their etymology (the chairman might be female, for example.)
I agree with you that an abbreviation should be the shortening of a single word, but some dicionaries seem to indicate that an acronym is a special form of an abbreviation, which disagrees with our point of view.
If I could get OED's verdict I would submit to whatever it happens to be. Failing that, I'll cite Merriam-Webster, which happens to accord with my own opinion.
An acronym does not have to be pronouncable, it only has to be formed from the initial letters of the original words. The examples you all give are, indeed, acronyms. But so are RSVP, NRA, SMB and WTF.
You're fighting a loosing battle..
It's a %$#@ losing battle.
But at least you wrote you're instead of your, so perhaps the battle isn't hopeless after all.
If it were true, it might be ironic. But it isn't. Or, at least, I don't think it is and you haven't given a shred of evidence to support your assetion. Are you calling this Black Hat Hackers Bloc "liberals"? Why? Because they're anti-Bush? Is that your definition of "liberal"? And even if they called themselves "liberal", they'd only constitute a single instance. Bad logic.
much of a loser do you need to be to get 0wn3d by the World Bank
Ask Argentina
You mention Iraq, then go on to say that tanks, helicopters, jets, etc. are "completely pointless in a civil uprising." Well, the Americans haven't won in Iraq yet, but those tools are exactly what they're using. Maybe that's why the fighting is still going on. I also seem to remember the Chinese rolling tanks into Tiananmen Square to put down the demonstrations, and every other day Israel is using their "helicopter gunships" against militants (and others) in Palestine. It would seem that these "completely pointless" weapons you mention are the tools-of-the-trade in putting down civil uprisings.
You make a good point, though. The Vietnamese succeeded, as did the North Koreans. Of course, they were being supplied by the Soviet Union, and that's not likely to happen again. Plus, they were able to organize with comparatively little internal interference, which will never be the case in the US. This fact is the core of the "tinfoil-hat" gripes of the Slashdot community: Freedom to communicate, to encrypt, to travel anonymously, etc. represent the last glimmer of hope that people might actually be able to organize against an out-of-control government.
Anyone can use the sky
If planes didn't have to land, you'd have a point. But airports are all about scare resources: location, gates, landing slots, ticket desks, etc. Witness any proposal to build a new airport, and you'll see that the barriers to entry are high indeed in this market. And, as far as I know, no airline can afford to build an airport with private funds anyway: The taxpayers' money -- and land, and air quality and noise levels -- are always involved. So, I don't see it as a stretch at all. The radio spectrum might be a somewhat different discussion, but I still think phone cables and coax runs are good analogies: legally regulated shared use of a finite, public resource.
What's more, although I don't know enough about it to say for sure, I suspect that there are limitations involving sky use, too. For example, I do know that the airspace around cities and airports is tightly controlled. I'm guessing that running a viable airline as a business, something of a scale that could make any inpact in the market, would require cooperation with various entities about landing slots, approaches, schedules, etc.
So, to run an "airline", maybe not. But to run an airline, probably so.
You know, you might be happier out west... I hear Ted's cabin is open.
Me happy? You're the one who's just figured out he'll have to walk to travel anonymously. But do try to avoid being picked up for vagrancy, and stay off the big roads: It's illegal to walk along Interstate highways, AFAIK. And since nearly everything in the US is private property, your options are further limited. The local sheriff will be all to happy to help you "Get off my goddamn property!"
The Scandinavian countries have a wonderful legal concept called Every Man's Right, which gives everyone limited but definite rights to travel on foot, and even camp for short periods.
like you, the airline as a corporation has rights to protect their property
I would point out, as I have done in other posts, that airlines -- like telcos, cable companies, radio broadcasters, etc. who are profiting through regulated use of a publically-owned resource -- have less freedoms as to what they do with their property than do other companies or organizations. In return for a license to profit from use of a public resource, they agree to certain restrictions. For example, you might have the right to deny someone access to your house (your private property) for whatever reasons you like, while United Airlines does not necessarily have the same right. There are differences between the rights of corporations (especially heavily regulated ones) and individuals.
If you want to travel anyomously you can, just not on regulated travel systems that are trying to be safe.
I generally agree, and a free market would probably provide options to all potential consumers. However, it is not a free market.
So, who is distorting the market? According to Gilmore's site, the airlines are claiming (but have been unable or unwilling to document) that the government has mandated the ID check. If this is the case, then there is no chance for a competitor to offer anonymous travel. Furthermore, airlines are hardly a free market to begin with, given their heavily regulated nature. (Also, I assume -- but am too lazy to research for this post -- that they have been bailed out by taxpayers and have been given various tax-breaks and incentives that have allowed them to thrive unnaturally, at least during some periods.)
So, for long-distance travel (which is often a necessity in the US), what are your anonymous choices? Think about it, and check Gilmore's FAQ. Choices are few, and if you want practical choices, there are even less.
An airline is not simply "a private entity who's letting them use their aircraft." It is a player in a heavily regulated industry that derives certain priveleges and benefits from The People in return for adhering to certain rules. Gilmore says in his FAQ that the courts have forced airlines to behave with a level of responsibility similar to that of the government, since they have been given special license by The People. The situation is somewhat similar with the telcos. So, people have special rights in this matter that they might not have with a more traditional "private entity".
with the American litigious climate, people have to cover their asses
Well, at least by Gilmore's reckoning, the airlines are blaming all this on the government, saying that the ID requirement was mandated to them. If that's the case, then it is not a matter of their liability, as they have no choice. The question is not (yet) whether airlines may or may not require ID of their own accord, but whether the government can compel this is possible defiance of the Constitution. At least as far as I understand this issue.