Why did you have to inject a little bit of information into a perfectly good group rant?
It is pretty well established that border searches are exceptions to the 4th amendment search and seizure rules but that won't prevent BDS sufferers from blaming it all on the current administration.
I doubt that free creation of top-level domains will solve anything. In that scenario, you still need a way to avoid name-clashes between registrars which means some sort of international resolution mechanism (i.e. a "treaty"). It also requires that name servers have a globally consistent view of the name space.
It seems to me that the basic conflict has been created by thinking that a global namespace to be be utilized by a multitude of sovereign states could be divided up on some basis other than national sovereignty. There are no *international* disputes regarding names within.us,.uk,.jp, and so on because the two-letter country code partition coincides with the reality of international boundaries (territorial and legal).
Is it any surprise that.com,.net,.org,.info, and so on are the center of all this confusion? That sort of partitioning of the name space pretends that sovereign states don't exist and a bunch of network engineers can form a committee whose decisions have the magic ability to squash the desires of modern nation states.
The solution is to get rid of *ALL* top-level domains *except* the country code domains. This will force all domain disputes to occur within the legal structure of a particular country and for the only international disputes to be regarding which political entities should be considered countries--but that dispute is nothing new and is properly handled in a forum such as the UN.
This type of division would also solve the root name server problem. Any country could maintain their own root-servers and announce or not announce the various country-codes and matching name servers that they want under whatever public policy suites them. In this scenario the policy of a particular country would only affect their own citizens.
I wasn't very clear in my original post.
There may not be a legal requirement to cooperate with someone investigating a crime but there might be a moral/ethical one.
If just after I was assaulted I stopped a witness and asked them if they knew the person who just beat me up I would be pretty pissed if they said "Yes, but they have a right to their privacy so I'm not going to tell you who they are". That may be their legal right but it seems like there are some ethical considerations to that approach. Alternatively they could say, "Yes, I'll make a statement to the police".
> "We would never condone music piracy," attorney Michael > Kornbluth said. "What we're interested in is the rights of the > individual -- privacy rights being protected."
This seems like a pretty weak legal argument to me. If the crime had been assault or theft of a laptop or breaking and entering would anyone with material evidence of the crime be justified in not cooperating with the investigation in order to protect the privacy of the alleged perpetrators?
Interesting comments re: rational-basis analysis. I'll admit to being in deeper-legal water that I'm used to. It is a bit disturbing, if accurate, that the "rational-basis" analysis doesn't have to be logical. Seems like "rational-basis" is a bit of a misnomer in that case.
Looking back at your original post I see you were commenting on federal courts re: the federal Constitution. I made, perhaps the incorrect assumption, that you were also directing your critique at the MA and VT state courts but your most recent comment seems to say that you aren't leveling that same critique at the state courts in this case.
Much of the debate against "activist judges" has been with respect to the VT and MA court rulings. The original posting was about gay rights/marriage. Perhaps I connected the dots a bit too aggressively in your case.
In any case I think the phrase "activist judge" has pretty much lost its usefulness because it is thrown about by everyone regardless of the strength or weakness of the particular judicial argument in question.
Actually I think the question is does the Federal Constitution permit states to allocate statutory rights based on gender and/or sexual orientation? Marriage, from a legal point of view, is really a collection of lots (over 500 in Connecticut) of statutes. Each one could be individually challenged using the "rational basis" approach.
Even if the Federal Constitution permits such allocation. The court rulings in VT and MA were based on the state constitutions, which they concluded did not permit such restrictions. So in those cases there would have to be a Federal finding that the Federal Constitution prohibited the state courts interpretation of their own state constitutions in order for those rulings to be overturned on Constitutional grounds.
Your argument, using the federal "rational basis" analysis, is an reasonable argument, but since the same criteria you suggested (child socialization, responsible childbirth and so on) isn't even used as a rational basis for handing out marriage certificates to straight couples, it is hard to see how it could be used as rational basis against same-sex couples. There might be an argument to be made that there are parenting-rights that could be subject to such restrictions but that would be a subset of the existing marriage-rights and it seems to me would have to apply equally to straight couples to have any logical consistency. So your approach (at least for the rational-basis motivations you suggested) would argue for a "partnership license" and then should you decide to have kids, a separate "parenting license" under different terms. Sounds like a good way to really redefine "marriage".
I was assuming we were talking about "equal application of the laws" and so your comment seemed out of place. Sorry for the Constitution 101 but it seems like lots of people here can understand kernel vs. library but not Constitution vs. Statute.
To clarify my point, the legal questions aren't about the myriad of state laws associated with a marriage certificate. If the legislature had simply gotten rid of marriage all together there would be no raison detre for the lawsuits.
The legal analysis hinges on the interpretation of "equal application of the laws" which is one of those really big issues that probably shouldn't be subject to simple legislative action.
And by the way, slavery was a pretty damn controversial issue at the time yet it was ultimately addressed at the Constitutional level. I understand your point, but "controversy" isn't a very useful indicator of how to interpret our laws or whether a statutory or constitutional approach is appropriate. Logical reasoning is (a little) more helpful.
A constitutional representative democracy is not the same thing as a plebiscite democracy. Thus the US has a hierarchy in our legal system:
federal Constitution
federal statutes
state constitutions
state statutes
local/country statues
Really important, core believes are up at the top such as what rights are "inalienable" (not subject to majority vote!) or how should our federal government be organized or what is the relationship between the federal and state governments.
The structure is designed to make it harder to change the foundation of our system but not impossible.
Ultimately there is the possibility of tossing out the entire thing:
...That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...
Declaration of Independence
OK but what is your opinion on judicial review and the concept that state statutes can't conflict with state constitutions and the state laws, state constitutions, and federal laws can't conflict with the federal constitution?
Judges aren't having monthly meetings and creating a top-10 evil law list. They are responding to citizens who are claiming that some statutes are in conflict with state and/or federal constitutions. They are then ruling on whether there is indeed a conflict, this is judicial review.
It fair criticism to pick apart a specific judicial argument and thus identify a logical failure in the argument but it is just grandstanding to jump up and down and say judges are "arbitrarily reading their own values into the Constitution". If you want someone other than a lemming to agree with you, you need to fill in a few missing steps in that argument.
With respect to the marriage laws the "value" that is being championed is the concept of equal applicability of the laws as specified in many (all?) state constitutions and the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. The judges aren't making up this "value" it is right there in black and white.
Maybe you don't believe in equal application of the laws or maybe you don't believe that marriage laws are in violation of the concept of equal application of the laws or maybe you just don't believe in judicial review. Maybe it is something else. I'm listening.
The physical universe doesn't have a notion of "right to possession". That notion is pretty much a legal fiction created more or less out of thin air. While I may posses something unilaterally, ownership, as a concept, only makes sense within the context of some sort of collective agreement by everyone around me (i.e. a government) this is true as much for physical property as "intellectual" property.
Only within a legal system can I own something that is physically within the possession of someone else--like when my friend borrows my car.
My point was that both private property and intellectual property are intellectual concepts that may or may not be enforced by a government. Intellectual property isn't unique in this aspect.
> "Intellectual property" only exists because the government > allows it.
Private property only exists in the presence of a government that recognizes it. Without the coercive nature of the government there is no such thing as ownership, only possession.
The solution is that the chips should be sold "as is, untested" for the lower cost. Buyer beware and all that. You get to do the testing in exchange for a lower price.
Otherwise it sounds like fraud and should be prosecuted as such.
Yes, yes it should indeed be free. Information is the essential ingredient to the advancement of society. This is why public libraries, schools, and lectures were created...
Um.. Who is paying for all these "free" institutions? (Hint: They aren't "free")
There has to be a revenue model somewhere. It could be use fees, it could be a progressive tax system, it could be a regressive tax system, but it is not free. To ignore that fact and claim that charging money to access information
is evil is disingenuous. Is it good or evil when my town raises property taxes to pay for the new library that you want to be "free"? How about if my taxes go up to pay for the new metropolitan city-owned Wi-Fi network that some private corporation could probably build and operate at a lower cost per user?
Asking if "public" information should be "free" starts the discussion off on the wrong foot. A more useful question is: "Who should pay for it and how should they pay?"
Public information is paid for by income tax, sales tax, property tax, use fees, and so on. It isn't free.
In the U.S. you can have email delivered to "General Delivery" at any
post office.
As in:
Joe Smith
General Delivery
New York, NY 10001
You then walk up to the counter at the post office, show your ID, and
they hand over anything that was sent to your name.
You must use the US Postal Service for delivery to "General Delivery".
You can not use FedEx or UPS or any other private shipping company to send
something to General Delivery.
It sounds like this book is going to be about crackers and cracking and not hackers and hacking.
Common usage tends to blur the meaning between the two concepts but I thought here on slashdot at least there was some instance that the two not get confused.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did you have to inject a little bit of information into a perfectly good group rant? It is pretty well established that border searches are exceptions to the 4th amendment search and seizure rules but that won't prevent BDS sufferers from blaming it all on the current administration.
I doubt that free creation of top-level domains will solve anything. In that scenario, you still need a way to avoid name-clashes between registrars which means some sort of international resolution mechanism (i.e. a "treaty"). It also requires that name servers have a globally consistent view of the name space.
.us, .uk, .jp, and
.com, .net, .org, .info, and so on are the center of all this confusion? That sort of partitioning of the name space pretends that sovereign states don't exist and a bunch of network engineers can form a committee whose decisions have the magic ability to squash the desires of
It seems to me that the basic conflict has been created by thinking that a global namespace to be be utilized by a multitude of sovereign states could be divided up on some basis other than national sovereignty. There are no *international* disputes regarding names within
so on because the two-letter country code partition coincides with the reality of international boundaries (territorial and legal).
Is it any surprise that
modern nation states.
The solution is to get rid of *ALL* top-level domains *except* the country code domains. This will force all domain disputes to occur within the
legal structure of a particular country and for the only international disputes to be regarding which political entities should be considered countries--but that dispute is nothing new and is properly handled in a forum such as the UN.
This type of division would also solve the root name server problem. Any country could maintain their own root-servers and announce or not announce the various country-codes and matching name servers that they want under whatever public policy suites them. In this scenario the policy of a particular country would only affect their own citizens.
I wasn't very clear in my original post. There may not be a legal requirement to cooperate with someone investigating a crime but there might be a moral/ethical one. If just after I was assaulted I stopped a witness and asked them if they knew the person who just beat me up I would be pretty pissed if they said "Yes, but they have a right to their privacy so I'm not going to tell you who they are". That may be their legal right but it seems like there are some ethical considerations to that approach. Alternatively they could say, "Yes, I'll make a statement to the police".
> "We would never condone music piracy," attorney Michael
> Kornbluth said. "What we're interested in is the rights of the
> individual -- privacy rights being protected."
This seems like a pretty weak legal argument to me. If the crime had been assault or theft of a laptop or breaking and entering would anyone with material evidence of the crime be justified in not cooperating with the investigation in order to protect the privacy of the alleged perpetrators?
Interesting comments re: rational-basis analysis. I'll admit to being in deeper-legal water that I'm used to. It is a bit disturbing, if accurate, that the "rational-basis" analysis doesn't have to be logical. Seems like "rational-basis" is a bit of a misnomer in that case.
Looking back at your original post I see you were commenting on federal courts re: the federal Constitution. I made, perhaps the incorrect assumption, that you were also directing your critique at the MA and VT state courts but your most recent comment seems to say that you aren't leveling that same critique at the state courts in this case.
Much of the debate against "activist judges" has been with respect to the VT and MA court rulings. The original posting was about gay rights/marriage. Perhaps I connected the dots a bit too aggressively in your case.
In any case I think the phrase "activist judge" has pretty much lost its usefulness because it is thrown about by everyone regardless of the strength or weakness of the particular judicial argument in question.
Actually I think the question is does the Federal Constitution permit states to allocate statutory rights based on gender and/or sexual orientation? Marriage, from a legal point of view, is really a collection of lots (over 500 in Connecticut) of statutes.
Each one could be individually challenged using the "rational basis" approach.
Even if the Federal Constitution permits such allocation. The court rulings in VT and MA were based on the state constitutions, which they concluded did not permit such restrictions. So in those cases there would have to be a Federal finding that the Federal Constitution prohibited the state courts interpretation of their own state constitutions in order for those rulings to be overturned on Constitutional grounds.
Your argument, using the federal "rational basis" analysis, is an reasonable argument, but since the same criteria you suggested (child socialization, responsible childbirth and so on) isn't even used as a rational basis for handing out marriage certificates to straight couples, it is hard to see how it could be used as rational basis against same-sex couples. There might be an argument to be made that there are parenting-rights that could be subject to such restrictions but that would be a subset of the existing marriage-rights and it seems to me would have to apply equally to straight couples to have any logical consistency. So your approach (at least for the rational-basis motivations you suggested) would argue for a "partnership license" and then should you decide to have kids, a separate "parenting license" under different terms. Sounds like a good way to really redefine "marriage".
I was assuming we were talking about "equal application of the laws" and so your comment seemed out of place. Sorry for the Constitution 101 but it seems like lots of people here can understand kernel vs. library but not Constitution vs. Statute.
To clarify my point, the legal questions aren't about the myriad of state laws associated with a marriage certificate. If the legislature had simply gotten rid of marriage all together there would be no raison detre for the lawsuits.
The legal analysis hinges on the interpretation of "equal application of the laws" which is one of those really big issues that probably shouldn't be subject to simple legislative action.
And by the way, slavery was a pretty damn controversial issue at the time yet it was ultimately addressed at the Constitutional level. I understand your point, but "controversy" isn't a very useful indicator of how to interpret our laws or whether a statutory or constitutional approach is appropriate. Logical reasoning is (a little) more helpful.
- federal Constitution
- federal statutes
- state constitutions
- state statutes
- local/country statues
Really important, core believes are up at the top such as what rights are "inalienable" (not subject to majority vote!) or how should our federal government be organized or what is the relationship between the federal and state governments. The structure is designed to make it harder to change the foundation of our system but not impossible. Ultimately there is the possibility of tossing out the entire thing:OK but what is your opinion on judicial review and the concept
that state statutes can't conflict with state constitutions and the
state laws, state constitutions, and federal laws can't conflict
with the federal constitution?
Judges aren't having monthly meetings and creating a top-10
evil law list. They are responding to citizens who are claiming
that some statutes are in conflict with state and/or federal
constitutions. They are then ruling on whether there is indeed a
conflict, this is judicial review.
It fair criticism to pick apart a specific judicial argument and
thus identify a logical failure in the argument but it is just
grandstanding to jump up and down and say judges are
"arbitrarily reading their own values into the Constitution".
If you want someone other than a lemming to agree with you,
you need to fill in a few missing steps in that argument.
With respect to the marriage laws the "value" that is being
championed is the concept of equal applicability of the laws
as specified in many (all?) state constitutions and the 14th
Amendment of the US Constitution. The judges aren't making
up this "value" it is right there in black and white.
Maybe you don't believe in equal application of the laws or
maybe you don't believe that marriage laws are in violation of
the concept of equal application of the laws or maybe you just
don't believe in judicial review. Maybe it is something else.
I'm listening.
The physical universe doesn't have a notion of "right to possession". That notion is pretty much a legal fiction created more or less out of thin air. While I may posses something unilaterally, ownership, as a concept, only makes sense within the context of some sort of collective agreement by everyone around me (i.e. a government) this is true as much for physical property as "intellectual" property.
Only within a legal system can I own something that is physically within the possession of someone else--like when
my friend borrows my car.
My point was that both private property and intellectual property are intellectual concepts that may or may not be enforced by a government. Intellectual property isn't unique in this aspect.
> "Intellectual property" only exists because the government
> allows it.
Private property only exists in the presence of a government that recognizes it. Without the coercive nature of the government there is no such thing as ownership, only possession.
The solution is that the chips should be sold "as is, untested" for the lower cost. Buyer beware and all that. You get to do the testing in exchange for a lower price.
Otherwise it sounds like fraud and should be prosecuted as such.
Asking if "public" information should be "free" starts the discussion off on the wrong foot. A more useful question is: "Who should pay for it and how should they pay?"
Public information is paid for by income tax, sales tax, property tax, use fees, and so on. It isn't free.
It took me all of 5 seconds to find this article which pretty much debunks the entire project:m
http://www.skepticreport.com/print/radin2002-p.ht
In the U.S. you can have email delivered to "General Delivery" at any post office. As in: Joe Smith General Delivery New York, NY 10001 You then walk up to the counter at the post office, show your ID, and they hand over anything that was sent to your name. You must use the US Postal Service for delivery to "General Delivery". You can not use FedEx or UPS or any other private shipping company to send something to General Delivery.
That should be insistence not "instance". My bad.
It sounds like this book is going to be about crackers and cracking and not hackers and hacking.
Common usage tends to blur the meaning between the two concepts but I thought here on slashdot at least there was some instance that the two not get confused.
Get a grip. The 1st ammendment is about the freedom of expression, not the unalienable right to have an interested audience.