My eyes! That has to be the most horribly laid-out webzine I've seen in awhile! The fontsize seems chosen for the massively aged, e.g., and the leading is awful. (Well, OK, the internet is a race to the bottom when it comes to layout, of course, although I thought things were changing.) Also, what is up with megalomaniac SF names? Who is Jim Baen? He ain't Asimov, that's for sure! (And I believe Asimov had to be cajoled into letting his name be used as the magazine's title.)
Interesting to see that they charge for access, which has never been a successful business plan on the web (I get 90% of my periodical reading online and have never paid for content; even the New York Times couldn't make it work, TimesSelect is on the outs. I sometimes get free online access as part of a print subscription deal, though, so call me a hypocrite.) They do seem to be generous with payments to authors (on the order of thousands), which is terrific.
Curious to see that the print journals (and Asimov's in particular) still rule. I don't read SF as much as I used to, but I would assume that there is a lot of work online and probably a lot of good online magazines for it to appear in. At least, that's how it is in my own niche, poetry, where online journals these days publish a non-negligible fraction of the work that wins contemporary awards in the "industry."
Are the Hugo readers still a little too snobby for the web?
I am confused. The problem is not paying for a bigger pipe, the problem is that speeds will be determined in part by content. In other words, some sites will load faster than others on the same connection. I have no problem kicking speakeasy extra bucks for a faster connection; I do have a problem if they get to choose which of my packets is speedier.
Speakeasy is of course the google of ISPs, but don't be surprised if you start to see abuse of this system. AT&T has a deal with myMusic? Wow, my iTunes Store downloads are taking quite a bit longer...
One of the most bizarre and Orwellian things is that the Patriot act is not the "Patriot act". Its official name is (no joke!) the "USA PATRIOT" act. All caps, it stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act".
The Belgian government has been involved in religious discrimination for a while. For example (from the same article):
A percentage of the Belgian income tax is used to finance the "full" enjoyment of rights of the six recognized religious denominations, but in particular of the majority Catholic Church. These rights include (partial list): (1) Legal protection of their ministers and liturgical objects against offenders; (2) Payment of the salaries and pensions of ministers by the state; (3) Access to state subsidies for the construction or renovation of buildings; (4) exemption from land tax on the properties used for the purpose of public worship; (5) access to the national radio and TV stations.
I'm not saying the Belgian government conducting (and then it seems retracting -- you're right) one witch-hunt against religious minorities is the only reason to treat them with suspicion.
It's been a long time since "cult" was not a pejorative term. I mean maybe in Ancient Greece? "Let's all join a cult!" I assume you're posting anon to avoid damaging your karma with a troll-rating, but in case you care, the essential problem is not the label "cult" but its uneven application.
I'm not sure if you're winding me up, but the problem is not the registration of religious groups (which makes sense, e.g., in the United States where there are tax reasons.) It's the fact that the Belgian government is now making distinctions between groups.
The Quaker Oats company, Quaker State, and a bunch of other companies have nothing to do with the Quakers, the religious group, whose technical name is "The Religious Society of Friends." You are boycotting the wrong people! Instead, you should boycott anything connected to Cornell University (that includes Basketball), John Hopkins, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford. I suggest immediately determining if any of these organizations have been involved in the creation of technology or culture that you currently use, because they're all started by Quakers.
In addition, you might want to rethink your support (if you have any) for women's rights and civil rights in general, because Quakers have been involved in these movements far out of proportion to their demographics!
Of course. I just think it's not the government's business to get into the classification industry. Government should remain entirely neutral on religious matters and make no judgements on whether the lawful activities of a group are, or are not, "cultish", "reasonable", "tolerable." I appear to be getting troll-rated because the slashdot community, usually super-cautious about the preservation of individual rights, doesn't care when governments crack down on religious groups. I assume that's because most/.ers are not religious, or if they are, are members of a very mainstream group they don't take very seriously anyway. I think/.ers need to realize that you have a right to all sorts of strange opinions, and a right to hang out with all sorts of strange people, and that in fact they themselves make use of this right all the time.
I didn't know/see that, but are you disputing the article's claims? They seem pretty verifiable, I mean either the Belgian parliment did or did not do this.
And indeed, a quick google pulls up that that there is indeed a "Belgian Parliamentary Commission on Cults". Here's a story that's neither Scientology-published nor a simple reprint of their article: 21 Evangelical Denominations Labeled as Cults in Belgium. The article comes from Compass Direct, which seems to be a religious organization as well. I mean, you can refuse to care, but as they say "they came for the random relgious groups, and I did not object, because I was not a member of a random religious group.".
Here's a full list of religious groups considered "cults" by the Belgian government. It includes Quakers (I am one), the Amish, 7th Day Adventists, Hasidic Jews, and others. Before you cheer their attitude to the Scientologists, consider the collateral damage.
I'm certaintly not a fan of the CoS (please don't kill me), but Belgium is known for its heavy-handed treatment of religious minorities. Opus Dei, a Catholic sect, for example, has had continuous run-ins with the "cult" classification. I don't have much of an opinion on Opus Dei (a friend of mine in Belgium roomed with an Opus Dei member though, and thought they were fine.) But this kind of religious censorship and persecution wouldn't fly in the United States, and I'm glad.
Of course one reason it wouldn't fly in the States is that Scalia is a member of Opus Dei! But that's another story...
I'm going to call BS on this article. Every single story I can google takes this as the original source for the claim that PZEVs are illegal under the Clean Air Act, and there's no link to any government or advocacy website (you would assume environmental groups would be up in arms.)
One possible reason this is BS: the Clean Air Act is a Federal act, so can not vary from state to state?
One possible reason for the confusion: modifying the emissions control on your own car is illegal under the CAA, but that's covering people who I don't know, remove the catalytic converter or something -- not car makers who introduce new emissions-control facilities.
I'm going to call BS unless someone can provide a statement of this fact that does not originate with the autos.msn site.
(1) Jane Austen's works are in public domain. You can do anything you like with them (including release them with the author's name changed to your own!) This man holds copyright to his own work and can severely restrict its distribution.
(2) Some journals have more "juice" than others, and the oldest ones have the most (usually.) I was told by a colleague in my field that, for example, Physical Review D (lots of pay-per-view / access restrictions) is a better place to publish than JCAP. I am small-fry, so I go where I'm told. (Although JCAP is now advertising a very high impact factor, not sure if things are already changing.)
(3) Not sure what this means. My scientific production is unconnected to my holding IP rights over it, but then, I'm a cosmologist. Many universities take control over your IP if it makes them money, or at least demand some profit sharing.
(4) Not sure, but as far as I can tell from posts below, they allow you to use CC licensing if you pay an additional fee?
I don't know why I'm posting so much today, but anyway.
This is very useful. As far as I can tell, it only means that you won't get a billion copies of the same AP, Reuters, etc. press release that many papers, because they have cut their staff, print in lieu of actually doing their own research. This is fantastic news, and will hopefully be another reward for smaller newspapers who do actually do something instead of print ads for car dealerships. If the Sasquatch Press has a Middle Eastern correspondent, their journalist's work will not be lost in the spam flood of AP articles. Of course, the Sasquatch Press won't have such a correspondent, but they may indeed have one for Sasquatch City -- who probably knows a hell of a lot more than the AP reporter airlifted in when the Sasquatch Robots gain consciousness.
I certaintly don't advocate Ayn Rand as a philosopher! But she is the distillation of a very powerful idea/fanatasy. It's also important to have some idea of what she's saying becaus so many people -- including people in government (e.g., Greenspan was an acolyte -- believe very deeply in her parables. Friedman, by the way, was a Rand fan to a certain extent. By and large, the academic philosophical community has ignored Rand but I remember a famous old prof (was it Nozick?) did finally get sick of hearing about her and wrote a long debunking of the reasoning.
Depends which founding fathers they cite, as well! If they go with Proudhon ("property is theft"), well, there's definitely something up. In many cases, the intellectual history of contemporary "Libertarian Party" libertarianism goes back to "liberalism" in the Enlightenment sense -- again, well before we really had the contemporary notions of the free market.
Adam Smith, by the way, was definitely not a free market ideologue, and "the invisible hand" as we currently understand it is very different from his version. His use of the term (only once) actually is sort of backwards from how we would understand it today. He uses it to explain why we shouldn't worry about domestic merchants going overseas for goods. Smith believes that this would be detrimental to society, but according to him, we don't have to worry about this happening because the invisible hand will lead the merchant to use local goods. He never addresses what would happen if the merchant's self interest led him, as happens today, to go overseas! A bit nitpicky, but interesting nonetheless.
I think one of the reasons we (and the courts) talk about bodily sovreignty in terms of privacy is because of Griswold v. Connecticut, the contraception ruling that preceeded Roe v. Wade. There it was asserted that there's a "right to privacy" sort of hidden in the other rights. Anyway, since that strain of the law has ended up influencing lots of "hands of my body" laws, not only Roe, the "right to privacy" gets trotted out quite a bit when something similar shows up. I agree that it's a euphemism and not particularly clear, but we don't actually have a right to bodily integrity -- at least not one the courts have recognized? -- that's there for all to see and in that particular language.
I know you're playing Devil's Advocate, but that's a strange notion of "election". Most "elections" that distributed significantly different voting powers to people would not be considered such!
The idol of the free market is relatively new in libertarian thought (modulo the terminology battles again, of course.) Libertarians you can historically connect with the strands today were around well before robust theories of the free market. I think if you time-translated some of the "founding fathers" you'd find they considered the free market a powerful tool, not a good in itself.
Hee hee, yes. I wouldn't call it a "distinction" exactly, because the terminology itself is in a bit of a battle. The "Libertarian Party" I'm sure is in the former category. Because of the Ayn Randian image of libertarianism in the world at large, the latter category has different words (e.g., "Xian anarchist" -- but of course, anarchism is not the most public friendly term either!) Not to resurrect that "nerds are libertarian" story, but I think nerds often fall towards the latter category in spirit if not word.
I often find myself in a minority in a random political conversation, but I'm actually happy to talk with a libertarian of the former type even if I disagree. One thing common to both strains is a focus on reason, rationality, and fair debate. You can learn a lot from a libertarian of any type, often, because they have thought through a lot of things and are interested in uncovering "inconvenient" facts. Hell, the bible of the former group is even called Reason. I used to be a subscriber in high school.
There are two kinds of libertarians: the ones who recognize only "the government" as a source of oppressive force, and those who realize that any group may become sufficiently powerful as to be able to prevent free exercise of one's natural rights. (The wikipedia article splits libertarians into different subsets, but I believe that my basis here is complete, if not orthogonal.)
Unfortunately, the former group gets much more press than the latter, and has largely gotten the terminology to refer only to them even among liberty dorks like us. The former group (among many other bizarre positions) would object strongly to a national credit rating system that dictated where and how you could live if it was run by the government, but have no objection against the credit system we have today simply because its officials are unelected. At the risk of igniting a flame war, Noam Chomsky's writings on anarchism should be read by libertarians or simply "people interested in freedom" just as much as Ayn Rand's.
If by "the guy" you mean "the cop", I agree. But not an employee of Circuit City -- this is perhaps where the "nut" in "privacy nut" kicks in, of course. Circuit City is not a government agency, I do not elect the administration of Circuit City, and thus I am far more willing to contest their "authority". You know what? My bag is private. Circuit City does not have the right to look inside. Furthermore, the "calculus" is very different; Circuit City does not have the authority to destroy my life and is actually going to be more responsive to a slight bit of bad publicity.
It's not to say that shoplifting is not a problem (although I am more sympathetic to local stores.) Grolier's back when Louisa owned it, required you to leave all bags at the counter. I'm fine with that, even if I think it's extreme, and they had to do it because shoplifting was out of control (as it apparently is in many bookstores.) The nice thing about that policy is that it applies to everyone: people like me who clearly are not going to shoplift, and kids who clearly might. Racial/social profiling is uniformly a bad thing.
By the way, the EFF is fantastic. That social-security number thing -- it was in Princeton, New Jersey. I initially refused, until it was clear I was "going down to the station" otherwise. I e-mailed the EFF the same day because I had been told that there was lots of legislation in place to prevent the social security number being used as an identification number by law enforcement. They got right back to me and explained that this became true only in the late 1970s, and that laws were "grandfathered". The likely explanation was that this Princeton law was exactly that (the ticket itself definitely had graphic-design features from the 1970s!)
So kudos to the EFF for being right on the ball and responsive. And a lesson for me: if I had gone to the station, not only would I have been in trouble, but I also would have been legally in the wrong. Another reason to be very careful in these things, and to prefer political advocacy against individual stands.
Britain has an interesting privacy culture. They are more strongly in favor of (roughly speaking) the right to just be left alone don't bug me. On the other hand, Britain has a massive, utterly massive, system of closed circuit TV cameras that are constantly monitored. I believe this really kicked in in the late 1980s with the IRA terrorist attacks, but it is bizarre for an American (even a dual national like myself.) Cambridge, England, for example -- it is impossible to walk down any of the major or minor streets without being able to quickly locate an unblinking eye, and once I noticed this it made me distinctly uncomfortable. Contrast with Cambridge, Massachusetts, where such cameras are rarer and mostly private (I am not sure about the massive CCTV sphere in the center of Harvard Square by the Au Bon Pain.)
By and large, the British public are supportive of CCTVs and it is not a political issue.
All praise and kudos to this man. I am not surprised by the outcome w/r/t not showing identification. While there are laws and court rulings that mean that most any situation a law-abiding/.er finds him or herself in will not be legally required to show identification, these are largely ignored. Furthermore, they are very often "judgment call" laws: in other words, courts can later rule that the officer may have been justified (in defiance of reason, not something the courts are unfamiliar with.) Finally, laws vary from state to state. Last time I checked, for example, I was in New York State, and the police were allowed to ask you where you were going, for example, with no justification needed -- you will find yourself in trouble, and actual real non-martyr trouble, for refusing this based on your feeling about what actually is reasonable.
I am a "privacy nut", but I have long stopped refusing to show identification (or in one case, provide a social security number for a bicycling-on-the-sidewalk ticket) to police officers. It is not worth the hassle. You will get caught up in a massive legal system. The only effective means to prevent this kind of completely illigitmate search/detention is to get involved at the political level. The bare facts of the Constitution in this case will not help you. This is in contrast to first-amendment type things, which the courts remain pretty firmly in favor on, and also tend to attract a great deal more press attention and public sympathy beyond/. YRO.
Circuit City, on the other hand: obviously, no kind of political action will change that. If I had "ubersmarts" in a stressful moment, I would have done exactly as this man did, but then showed my ID to the police officer. The problem, and/.ers who don't already know need to know this, is that when you are in the middle of a confrontation with authorit[y/ies] the situation is incredibly stressful. You need to make a "game plan" ahead of time: figure out exactly what you are and are not willing to do after researching the consequences. Look not only at the laws, but at the actual enforcement of them, and ask yourself if $X is better spent, not on lawyers, but on political advocacy. Our nation, great as it is in many ways, has ceased to follow crucial portions of its mandate -- people need to be more strategic.
Again, just to be clear: I fully support this man's decisions. They are not the decisions I would have made, but they are legitimate, noble and American.
I think people who are bashing the article because "hey, they're obeying GPL, what's the problem, companies are ruthless profit-making machines" are right in one sense, but I think are missing the point. The point is that GPL was originally intended to be a rather utopian project. Richard Stallman had ideological and moral goals in creating the GPL, and I think that people are correct in saying that the ruthlessness of the market has figured out ways to subvert that (see, e.g., the TiVo issue discussed above.)
I think it's an important lesson for programmers and activists in the years to come. Look, the basic point of GPL was a rather radical one: the intellectuals and programmers who held the skills necessary to build the software wanted to wrest some sort of control over their work from the bosses and use it to promote rather radical anti-capitalist ideas such as freedom-to-hack, etc. etc.. I think in many ways that goal has not been realized, and I think people who try such things in the future have to realize that you can't achieve such goals by clever licensing alone. The market will find a way.
This was a technology that appeared in KSR's Mars Trilogy. Wonder where he got it from? (It's not an unobvious idea -- we've had piezoelectric buzzers for many years, and running them in reverse can't be too crazy an idea.)
Slashdot Mirror
My eyes! That has to be the most horribly laid-out webzine I've seen in awhile! The fontsize seems chosen for the massively aged, e.g., and the leading is awful. (Well, OK, the internet is a race to the bottom when it comes to layout, of course, although I thought things were changing.) Also, what is up with megalomaniac SF names? Who is Jim Baen? He ain't Asimov, that's for sure! (And I believe Asimov had to be cajoled into letting his name be used as the magazine's title.)
Interesting to see that they charge for access, which has never been a successful business plan on the web (I get 90% of my periodical reading online and have never paid for content; even the New York Times couldn't make it work, TimesSelect is on the outs. I sometimes get free online access as part of a print subscription deal, though, so call me a hypocrite.) They do seem to be generous with payments to authors (on the order of thousands), which is terrific.
Curious to see that the print journals (and Asimov's in particular) still rule. I don't read SF as much as I used to, but I would assume that there is a lot of work online and probably a lot of good online magazines for it to appear in. At least, that's how it is in my own niche, poetry, where online journals these days publish a non-negligible fraction of the work that wins contemporary awards in the "industry."
Are the Hugo readers still a little too snobby for the web?
I am confused. The problem is not paying for a bigger pipe, the problem is that speeds will be determined in part by content. In other words, some sites will load faster than others on the same connection. I have no problem kicking speakeasy extra bucks for a faster connection; I do have a problem if they get to choose which of my packets is speedier.
Speakeasy is of course the google of ISPs, but don't be surprised if you start to see abuse of this system. AT&T has a deal with myMusic? Wow, my iTunes Store downloads are taking quite a bit longer...
One of the most bizarre and Orwellian things is that the Patriot act is not the "Patriot act". Its official name is (no joke!) the "USA PATRIOT" act. All caps, it stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act".
The Belgian government has been involved in religious discrimination for a while. For example (from the same article):
A percentage of the Belgian income tax is used to finance the "full" enjoyment of rights of the six recognized religious denominations, but in particular of the majority Catholic Church. These rights include (partial list): (1) Legal protection of their ministers and liturgical objects against offenders; (2) Payment of the salaries and pensions of ministers by the state; (3) Access to state subsidies for the construction or renovation of buildings; (4) exemption from land tax on the properties used for the purpose of public worship; (5) access to the national radio and TV stations.
I'm not saying the Belgian government conducting (and then it seems retracting -- you're right) one witch-hunt against religious minorities is the only reason to treat them with suspicion.
It's been a long time since "cult" was not a pejorative term. I mean maybe in Ancient Greece? "Let's all join a cult!" I assume you're posting anon to avoid damaging your karma with a troll-rating, but in case you care, the essential problem is not the label "cult" but its uneven application.
I'm not sure if you're winding me up, but the problem is not the registration of religious groups (which makes sense, e.g., in the United States where there are tax reasons.) It's the fact that the Belgian government is now making distinctions between groups.
The Quaker Oats company, Quaker State, and a bunch of other companies have nothing to do with the Quakers, the religious group, whose technical name is "The Religious Society of Friends." You are boycotting the wrong people! Instead, you should boycott anything connected to Cornell University (that includes Basketball), John Hopkins, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford. I suggest immediately determining if any of these organizations have been involved in the creation of technology or culture that you currently use, because they're all started by Quakers.
In addition, you might want to rethink your support (if you have any) for women's rights and civil rights in general, because Quakers have been involved in these movements far out of proportion to their demographics!
Of course. I just think it's not the government's business to get into the classification industry. Government should remain entirely neutral on religious matters and make no judgements on whether the lawful activities of a group are, or are not, "cultish", "reasonable", "tolerable." I appear to be getting troll-rated because the slashdot community, usually super-cautious about the preservation of individual rights, doesn't care when governments crack down on religious groups. I assume that's because most /.ers are not religious, or if they are, are members of a very mainstream group they don't take very seriously anyway. I think /.ers need to realize that you have a right to all sorts of strange opinions, and a right to hang out with all sorts of strange people, and that in fact they themselves make use of this right all the time.
I didn't know/see that, but are you disputing the article's claims? They seem pretty verifiable, I mean either the Belgian parliment did or did not do this.
And indeed, a quick google pulls up that that there is indeed a "Belgian Parliamentary Commission on Cults". Here's a story that's neither Scientology-published nor a simple reprint of their article: 21 Evangelical Denominations Labeled as Cults in Belgium. The article comes from Compass Direct, which seems to be a religious organization as well. I mean, you can refuse to care, but as they say "they came for the random relgious groups, and I did not object, because I was not a member of a random religious group.".
Here's a full list of religious groups considered "cults" by the Belgian government. It includes Quakers (I am one), the Amish, 7th Day Adventists, Hasidic Jews, and others. Before you cheer their attitude to the Scientologists, consider the collateral damage.
I'm certaintly not a fan of the CoS (please don't kill me), but Belgium is known for its heavy-handed treatment of religious minorities. Opus Dei, a Catholic sect, for example, has had continuous run-ins with the "cult" classification. I don't have much of an opinion on Opus Dei (a friend of mine in Belgium roomed with an Opus Dei member though, and thought they were fine.) But this kind of religious censorship and persecution wouldn't fly in the United States, and I'm glad.
Of course one reason it wouldn't fly in the States is that Scalia is a member of Opus Dei! But that's another story...
I'm going to call BS on this article. Every single story I can google takes this as the original source for the claim that PZEVs are illegal under the Clean Air Act, and there's no link to any government or advocacy website (you would assume environmental groups would be up in arms.)
One possible reason this is BS: the Clean Air Act is a Federal act, so can not vary from state to state?
One possible reason for the confusion: modifying the emissions control on your own car is illegal under the CAA, but that's covering people who I don't know, remove the catalytic converter or something -- not car makers who introduce new emissions-control facilities.
I'm going to call BS unless someone can provide a statement of this fact that does not originate with the autos.msn site.
(1) Jane Austen's works are in public domain. You can do anything you like with them (including release them with the author's name changed to your own!) This man holds copyright to his own work and can severely restrict its distribution.
(2) Some journals have more "juice" than others, and the oldest ones have the most (usually.) I was told by a colleague in my field that, for example, Physical Review D (lots of pay-per-view / access restrictions) is a better place to publish than JCAP. I am small-fry, so I go where I'm told. (Although JCAP is now advertising a very high impact factor, not sure if things are already changing.)
(3) Not sure what this means. My scientific production is unconnected to my holding IP rights over it, but then, I'm a cosmologist. Many universities take control over your IP if it makes them money, or at least demand some profit sharing.
(4) Not sure, but as far as I can tell from posts below, they allow you to use CC licensing if you pay an additional fee?
I don't know why I'm posting so much today, but anyway.
This is very useful. As far as I can tell, it only means that you won't get a billion copies of the same AP, Reuters, etc. press release that many papers, because they have cut their staff, print in lieu of actually doing their own research. This is fantastic news, and will hopefully be another reward for smaller newspapers who do actually do something instead of print ads for car dealerships. If the Sasquatch Press has a Middle Eastern correspondent, their journalist's work will not be lost in the spam flood of AP articles. Of course, the Sasquatch Press won't have such a correspondent, but they may indeed have one for Sasquatch City -- who probably knows a hell of a lot more than the AP reporter airlifted in when the Sasquatch Robots gain consciousness.
I certaintly don't advocate Ayn Rand as a philosopher! But she is the distillation of a very powerful idea/fanatasy. It's also important to have some idea of what she's saying becaus so many people -- including people in government (e.g., Greenspan was an acolyte -- believe very deeply in her parables. Friedman, by the way, was a Rand fan to a certain extent. By and large, the academic philosophical community has ignored Rand but I remember a famous old prof (was it Nozick?) did finally get sick of hearing about her and wrote a long debunking of the reasoning.
Depends which founding fathers they cite, as well! If they go with Proudhon ("property is theft"), well, there's definitely something up. In many cases, the intellectual history of contemporary "Libertarian Party" libertarianism goes back to "liberalism" in the Enlightenment sense -- again, well before we really had the contemporary notions of the free market.
Adam Smith, by the way, was definitely not a free market ideologue, and "the invisible hand" as we currently understand it is very different from his version. His use of the term (only once) actually is sort of backwards from how we would understand it today. He uses it to explain why we shouldn't worry about domestic merchants going overseas for goods. Smith believes that this would be detrimental to society, but according to him, we don't have to worry about this happening because the invisible hand will lead the merchant to use local goods. He never addresses what would happen if the merchant's self interest led him, as happens today, to go overseas! A bit nitpicky, but interesting nonetheless.
I think one of the reasons we (and the courts) talk about bodily sovreignty in terms of privacy is because of Griswold v. Connecticut, the contraception ruling that preceeded Roe v. Wade. There it was asserted that there's a "right to privacy" sort of hidden in the other rights. Anyway, since that strain of the law has ended up influencing lots of "hands of my body" laws, not only Roe, the "right to privacy" gets trotted out quite a bit when something similar shows up. I agree that it's a euphemism and not particularly clear, but we don't actually have a right to bodily integrity -- at least not one the courts have recognized? -- that's there for all to see and in that particular language.
Anyway, if I rewrote the thing, I'd put it in!
I know you're playing Devil's Advocate, but that's a strange notion of "election". Most "elections" that distributed significantly different voting powers to people would not be considered such!
The idol of the free market is relatively new in libertarian thought (modulo the terminology battles again, of course.) Libertarians you can historically connect with the strands today were around well before robust theories of the free market. I think if you time-translated some of the "founding fathers" you'd find they considered the free market a powerful tool, not a good in itself.
Hee hee, yes. I wouldn't call it a "distinction" exactly, because the terminology itself is in a bit of a battle. The "Libertarian Party" I'm sure is in the former category. Because of the Ayn Randian image of libertarianism in the world at large, the latter category has different words (e.g., "Xian anarchist" -- but of course, anarchism is not the most public friendly term either!) Not to resurrect that "nerds are libertarian" story, but I think nerds often fall towards the latter category in spirit if not word.
I often find myself in a minority in a random political conversation, but I'm actually happy to talk with a libertarian of the former type even if I disagree. One thing common to both strains is a focus on reason, rationality, and fair debate. You can learn a lot from a libertarian of any type, often, because they have thought through a lot of things and are interested in uncovering "inconvenient" facts. Hell, the bible of the former group is even called Reason. I used to be a subscriber in high school.
There are two kinds of libertarians: the ones who recognize only "the government" as a source of oppressive force, and those who realize that any group may become sufficiently powerful as to be able to prevent free exercise of one's natural rights. (The wikipedia article splits libertarians into different subsets, but I believe that my basis here is complete, if not orthogonal.)
Unfortunately, the former group gets much more press than the latter, and has largely gotten the terminology to refer only to them even among liberty dorks like us. The former group (among many other bizarre positions) would object strongly to a national credit rating system that dictated where and how you could live if it was run by the government, but have no objection against the credit system we have today simply because its officials are unelected. At the risk of igniting a flame war, Noam Chomsky's writings on anarchism should be read by libertarians or simply "people interested in freedom" just as much as Ayn Rand's.
If by "the guy" you mean "the cop", I agree. But not an employee of Circuit City -- this is perhaps where the "nut" in "privacy nut" kicks in, of course. Circuit City is not a government agency, I do not elect the administration of Circuit City, and thus I am far more willing to contest their "authority". You know what? My bag is private. Circuit City does not have the right to look inside. Furthermore, the "calculus" is very different; Circuit City does not have the authority to destroy my life and is actually going to be more responsive to a slight bit of bad publicity.
It's not to say that shoplifting is not a problem (although I am more sympathetic to local stores.) Grolier's back when Louisa owned it, required you to leave all bags at the counter. I'm fine with that, even if I think it's extreme, and they had to do it because shoplifting was out of control (as it apparently is in many bookstores.) The nice thing about that policy is that it applies to everyone: people like me who clearly are not going to shoplift, and kids who clearly might. Racial/social profiling is uniformly a bad thing.
By the way, the EFF is fantastic. That social-security number thing -- it was in Princeton, New Jersey. I initially refused, until it was clear I was "going down to the station" otherwise. I e-mailed the EFF the same day because I had been told that there was lots of legislation in place to prevent the social security number being used as an identification number by law enforcement. They got right back to me and explained that this became true only in the late 1970s, and that laws were "grandfathered". The likely explanation was that this Princeton law was exactly that (the ticket itself definitely had graphic-design features from the 1970s!)
So kudos to the EFF for being right on the ball and responsive. And a lesson for me: if I had gone to the station, not only would I have been in trouble, but I also would have been legally in the wrong. Another reason to be very careful in these things, and to prefer political advocacy against individual stands.
Britain has an interesting privacy culture. They are more strongly in favor of (roughly speaking) the right to just be left alone don't bug me. On the other hand, Britain has a massive, utterly massive, system of closed circuit TV cameras that are constantly monitored. I believe this really kicked in in the late 1980s with the IRA terrorist attacks, but it is bizarre for an American (even a dual national like myself.) Cambridge, England, for example -- it is impossible to walk down any of the major or minor streets without being able to quickly locate an unblinking eye, and once I noticed this it made me distinctly uncomfortable. Contrast with Cambridge, Massachusetts, where such cameras are rarer and mostly private (I am not sure about the massive CCTV sphere in the center of Harvard Square by the Au Bon Pain.)
By and large, the British public are supportive of CCTVs and it is not a political issue.
All praise and kudos to this man. I am not surprised by the outcome w/r/t not showing identification. While there are laws and court rulings that mean that most any situation a law-abiding /.er finds him or herself in will not be legally required to show identification, these are largely ignored. Furthermore, they are very often "judgment call" laws: in other words, courts can later rule that the officer may have been justified (in defiance of reason, not something the courts are unfamiliar with.) Finally, laws vary from state to state. Last time I checked, for example, I was in New York State, and the police were allowed to ask you where you were going, for example, with no justification needed -- you will find yourself in trouble, and actual real non-martyr trouble, for refusing this based on your feeling about what actually is reasonable.
/. YRO.
/.ers who don't already know need to know this, is that when you are in the middle of a confrontation with authorit[y/ies] the situation is incredibly stressful. You need to make a "game plan" ahead of time: figure out exactly what you are and are not willing to do after researching the consequences. Look not only at the laws, but at the actual enforcement of them, and ask yourself if $X is better spent, not on lawyers, but on political advocacy. Our nation, great as it is in many ways, has ceased to follow crucial portions of its mandate -- people need to be more strategic.
I am a "privacy nut", but I have long stopped refusing to show identification (or in one case, provide a social security number for a bicycling-on-the-sidewalk ticket) to police officers. It is not worth the hassle. You will get caught up in a massive legal system. The only effective means to prevent this kind of completely illigitmate search/detention is to get involved at the political level. The bare facts of the Constitution in this case will not help you. This is in contrast to first-amendment type things, which the courts remain pretty firmly in favor on, and also tend to attract a great deal more press attention and public sympathy beyond
Circuit City, on the other hand: obviously, no kind of political action will change that. If I had "ubersmarts" in a stressful moment, I would have done exactly as this man did, but then showed my ID to the police officer. The problem, and
Again, just to be clear: I fully support this man's decisions. They are not the decisions I would have made, but they are legitimate, noble and American.
I think people who are bashing the article because "hey, they're obeying GPL, what's the problem, companies are ruthless profit-making machines" are right in one sense, but I think are missing the point. The point is that GPL was originally intended to be a rather utopian project. Richard Stallman had ideological and moral goals in creating the GPL, and I think that people are correct in saying that the ruthlessness of the market has figured out ways to subvert that (see, e.g., the TiVo issue discussed above.)
I think it's an important lesson for programmers and activists in the years to come. Look, the basic point of GPL was a rather radical one: the intellectuals and programmers who held the skills necessary to build the software wanted to wrest some sort of control over their work from the bosses and use it to promote rather radical anti-capitalist ideas such as freedom-to-hack, etc. etc.. I think in many ways that goal has not been realized, and I think people who try such things in the future have to realize that you can't achieve such goals by clever licensing alone. The market will find a way.
This was a technology that appeared in KSR's Mars Trilogy . Wonder where he got it from? (It's not an unobvious idea -- we've had piezoelectric buzzers for many years, and running them in reverse can't be too crazy an idea.)